Stepping Stones - Postmortem

Stepping Stones is a puzzle dungeon crawler where you must escape a room jumping over a set of disappearing stepping stones/tiles/pressure plates/whatever before you run out of safe spots.

Play it and rate it here!

The theme turned out to be quite fruitful in terms of ideas, and I went to bed juggling three main candidates:

• Home decor meets Blackjack. This game would task you to refurbish a room maximising a certain score (gains? quality?) one item at a time, with a strong risk-reward component. This was pretty similar to an idea I’d discarded back in LD37, and I sadly had to can it again fearing that it could easily grow out of scope.

- A digital adaptation of a game I used to play at uni with friends, where players take turns on a piece of grid paper to mark edges and close squares until they run ouf of edges. I feel this can be a good game, but wasn’t confident enough that it could be a good LD choice...

• And what ended up becoming Stepping stones. The inspiration for this came from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade's Name of God trial and, more importantly, one of the challenges in Takeshi's Castle, although at first I had considered a radial layout.

The Good

• Preparations. The days before the jam kicked off I spent some time trying to keep software up to date. That helped me spot and solve a couple of issues that could have been problematic had they arrived to the compo.

• Early start. This could be subjective, but the 3-hour difference really changed the way I organised. The theme is normally announced at 3am in my timezone, so even if I'm a night owl I prefer to rest decently that night and then wake up to brainstorm. By starting at midnight I could move the brainstorming + design stage to Friday night. In practice, the impact of was lessened by the fact that I couldn’t settle on an idea fast enough (more on this later), but still... THANK YOU, PLEASE LET'S KEEP IT!

• Small scope. Since the core mechanic is really simple, by the end of the first day I had a working prototype together with a bunch of levels that has remained relatively stable. This allowed me to do some concept art to have an idea on how the main character should look like and spend day 2 on graphics, sound and (theoretically) polish.

• Gained confidence with animation. As a non artist, I dread character animation because I lack practice and it generally takes a lot of time. This time, while the sprites are still a bit rough, I found myself faster and more confident, a clear improvement from past editions.
• Ideas for more games.

The Bad

• Once again, I had issues deciding on an idea and got delayed because of that. Thankfully this time it wasn’t so frustrating as others, when I don’t really start developing until Saturday afternoon, but it is annoying nonetheless.

• Ran out of time for polish.I spent a lot on the tiles’ graphics, and had to move to other tasks before properly finishing the safe platforms or the walls on the sides.

• Related to the former, I had to drop music after 1 hour trying to come up with something, but went completely blank (I still am)

• Rushed UI screens. I’m not really satisfied with the cover and the rest of the screens, but I got them done on the last hour before submitting, which seems to have become a habit. They fulfill the role, I guess, but I can't help but thinking that they could be better..

The Ugly

• Selective tech amnesia. I haven’t touched Haxeflixel for a while (probably since LD38), so I found myself frequently checking documentation and older projects to freshen my mind with relatively basic stuff. To add some challenge, some of of the APIs have changed, so whatever I could have implemented a few jams ago would no longer work in the same way now, although I didn't really run into this issue often.
• Too much caffeine.

To summarize, my experience this time was relatively positive thanks to a smaller scope and a more efficient usage of jam hours, even if the final audiovisual quality is not so final because time eventually caught up with me.

As for next steps, I really want to finish the background graphics, improve the animations and add some music (this last bit is becoming personal)

If you’ve reached the end, thanks for reading and good luck! I'll start rating now, so feel free to leave your games in the comments if you want :)