SUPER DRILL DIVER! - Post-Mortem
Here's a bit of insight into the development of the game, and where I think I fell short. Overall, I think I bit off just slightly more than I could chew, and this resulted in a game I think is pretty neat in a lot of ways but definitely has a few rough edges.
⋆ ★☆ THE CONCEPT ☆★⋆
The idea was simple from the beginning, have a platformer with procedural levels. I went with a super cute (and easy to implement!) style to get people pumped about exploring. The "Going Deeper" theme inspired the drill mechanics. The way I did this from a gameplay perspective was also as simple. There are four kinds of level chunks in the game:
-Starting Platform
-Ending Platform
-Keyless Platforming Block
-Key Challenge Block
The latter two have two different difficulty sets it draws from as waves increase. At higher floors, Meteors have a chance of falling from the sky as well depending on the floor count. The player has a weapon that defeat enemies from a range and also aid in collecting items and platforming.
⋆ ★☆ THE PROCESS ☆★⋆
Creating assets for the game was a simple process. You might be surprised to hear that Zbrush was a part of the pipeline for a Jam game. One of the things that's sort of a taboo in 3D art is using ZRemeshed (auto retopologized) models for realtime rendering I think. But since it's a jam game we can just go ahead and do it! In this example, I spent 10 minutes making a vaguely bat-shaped blob then manually adding the finer details by hand.
Every 3D asset in the game (save for special effects) gets its colors from a singular texture! This was actually one of the first things I made for the game. I think I picked some pretty good colors, but there are some missing.
The game itself is obviously made in Unity, but there is one store asset I started with that forms the basis for collisions with every character. It's a popular asset, but I recommend checking it out: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/physics/kinematic-character-controller-99131
As for the music, it wasn't made by me... but by: https://twitter.com/CFY98 !
Check him out! He's great.
★Missing Mechanics★
There's a number of things I would like to have added but didn't have the time for. Here are some of the more important ones I didn't have time for: (and full disclosure, I have no idea if these would actually make the game any better without testing)
-Speed Increase while drilling if the button is held for more than a half second or so
-Alternate, more powerful attack made from finite, but collectable resources
-More level chunks
-Different floor objectives like a time limit or a little guy who flies around and harasses you
-Power-ups
-A "Hard Landing" state for the character that lets them shave off unneeded momentum as they platform.
and most importantly...
-Options Menu
Overall, I think I succeeded at most of the things I was going for at the time, but there are some exceptions we'll get into...
⋆ ★☆ PITFALLS AND FAILURES ☆★⋆
Now for the fun section. Here goes.
★Bad decisions/ implementation★
Here are some mechanics I would have had second thoughts about provided I had more than the three days of development time:
-Killing the player upon falling into bottomless pits is totally unfair and messes with the risk/ reward value proposition of deciding to take on certain level chunks
-Putting so much effort in presentation took away from development time needed to craft more interesting levels and mechanics
-The camera sensitivity is way too high and without an options menu it can be debilitating for certain players
-Not doing semi-frequent builds led to me fixing bugs during the submission hour and I even missed a couple that didn't exist in the editor
-The aiming/ moving mechanics should probably have been a more traditional strafing/ mouselook system, as moving and shooting can be overly difficult
-Some Level chunks cannot be completed as designed, but are doable with jank.
⋆ ★☆ LESSONS ☆★⋆
A good takeaway from this is I should do more frequent builds. This is the first Web Build I've done for anything I've released and some things just break when porting to certain platforms...
Also, allowing the players to have a small options menu is important, even if its just like three sliders or so.
All things considered I think we did a good job here and I hope you'll check it out!
Source: ldjam.com archive