Deeper and Deeper Post Mortem

This LD I made Deeper and Deeper, which is a dynamically lit 2D platformer.

This was a great experience for me and is one of my more polished and successful jams. I had a lot of fun making it and I learned a lot through the process.

The Theme

I was fine with Deeper and Deeper as a theme. The other idea I had was a mining game similar to many of the other games that were created by others, so I'm glad that I came up with something else. The basic theme is that you are traveling ever downwards in a subterranean tower. During planning I was going to have a story that explained it (you are a thief being punished and being forced to retrieve some treasure to pay for your crimes or something) but I knew from the start that I wouldn't get there. So you are just going down because that's what the game says you do.

What went right

- The Dynamic Lighting - I was really excited about this when I saw that the recently released Phaser 3.5 included support for dynamic lighting and normal maps. The functionality was there before in previous version of the engine, but it didn't work well with tilemaps and would get screwed up when binding multiple textures. The latest version fixed most of these problems and I think is working really well.

- Scope - I was also pretty careful with my scope this time. I worked on the graphics and the dynamic lighting very early on to make sure that they would work and had a fully functional three level game working at the end of Day 1. Day 2 was all about polish and adding features one at a time. Each level takes in one new feature, so it is nice that I was able to just work on each one individually knowing that I could submit at any time.

Day 1 MVP Menu

• Music - I really like the music this time around. It fits the mood and the theme of the game well. And it was super easy to make. I just fired up LMMS, pulled in some instruments that sounded spooky and randomly placed them down. Boom, done in 15 minutes. It took longer to export it and get it to loop properly than to make it.

• Level Construction - A few days ago I started working with LDtk (Level Design Toolkit made by @deepnight, https://ldtk.io/) and I really like it. I took the time to write a generic importer for Phaser a few days ago so I just needed to write the handling of the custom objects I needed for this game into the importer. So now I can design maps entirely in the editor.

Plus, it allows for me to create auto tiling rules to skin the graphics, so I design a level like this:

and it will skin it into this:

Plus it will skin everything in real time as you create it.

What went wrong

• Content - I have 8 levels total. Each one takes maybe a minute, most much shorter than that. They are well designed and teach the mechanics of the game well (I think. The feedback seems to confirm this) but it is a 5 minute game, maybe. I'm still not fast enough to polish the game and to create content.

- Mood (Almost) - I think that I did well with the mood this time. I really like the music and atmosphere and tried to design the menu transitions to give the feel of a slow descent.

The game was almost very different. It was almost a speed running game where the time it took you to complete each level was tracked and it would display the times on the main screen. So you would run the levels multiple times trying to get the best time. Even the old win screens were high energy and keeping with this idea.

I'm embarrassed that it took within the last 4 hours of the compo for me to realize that the game works much better as a slower paced atmospheric game instead of a "mad dash through the levels" type of game. I had to redesign the victory and loss screens and the main menu around this idea and it cost me an hour an a half at the end of the jam where I should have been creating content...

What's next?

I plan to release a post compo version in the next couple days. I've had some great feedback and I'm implementing the changes into the game. @kraemahz, I changed the ghosts like you recommended and added some additional uses for the flames, including attracting the angry ghosts. Now your flame reveals the ghosts (they are practically invisible when not near it). The angry ghosts now swarm the light, so you have to throw it so they don't eat you.

Good luck everyone! Thanks for making it this far through my random thoughts! You can play the game here if you are interested.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deeper-and-deeper-6