Sakura Shrine Post Mortem

PLAY THE GAME HERE!

I know it's a huge to complain about the theme, but for me personally this was kind of a tough one. There are plenty of genres (tower defense, wave shooters, even puzzlers like Tetris and Bejeweled) and mechanics that fit right in to the 'delay the inevitable' mold, but they are all ones that I don't care much about. I've never been a competitive or achievement gamer, so racking up high scores while delaying the inevitable demise hold little glamour for me. In retrospect, having played a bunch of games by others, it's clear that many others didn't want to take that easy route either, and I'm seeing a wider variety of genres and approaches than usual. I think normally there are a few main routes people take in regards to the genre and a a lot of games are similar in that sense, but with Delay the Inevitable, at least so far, I'm not seeing that.

There's obviously a bunch of similar ideas floating around and one we took - flipping the assumption of the "inevitable" being a negative thing on its head - had been in some other games too (like this very crabby procrastination game). We started off with a mechanic that was traditionally pretty fitting to the theme, tower defense, mixed with having a controllable main character exploring the area.

The first day was spent mostly making the essentials and putting stuff together, but on Saturday evening I felt like what we had was a pretty bad tower defense game, mechanically. For a TD game, having to do stuff with the character felt clunky and the menu I had built felt way too unwieldy to use, and just distracted from the action of managing the towers. In art and music we were definitely going to the right direction, with the game already looking and sounding pretty great. I also realised that since I don't really play TD games, I have little previous knowledge on how to design a good one, especially in such a short time! Around Saturday evening, I added a more narrative mechanic: short "prayers" to the petals we were using as a resource for building the towers. The idea was that you'd need to balance between fulfilling and sacrificing the prayers, depending on their contents. However, this just added to the overall hectic feeling.

So on Sunday ~~morning~~ afternoon, I backpedaled a bit and added the unlit towers, so instead of using the menu and cursor to to build them, you'd just light the ones already in the map. I also wrote a short intro to add to a more fairytale-like feel and a dialogue with the Demon Lord. This made the game a lot less about tower defense and more about exploration and story, which I think was ultimately the right choice, though one we maybe should have taken much earlier.

Monday was used mostly for fixing things, finalising the map and balancing it more towards a slower story-driven game and the earlier fight against the inevitable horde of demons. I think, in the end, we did manage to get it quite right, though of course there's plenty that could still be improved. One thing is having better indication about the demons whereabouts, such as a minimap, or at least a bit more warning when they are approaching the Sakura tree. The feedback has been very positive however, so I'm ultimately happy with the result.

For me, this was a very learning experience in a couple of ways. One, I think in the future I need to put what I feel comfortable making above the theme, especially design-wise. We jumped into production a bit too quickly, not properly considering if the ideas we had were actually fun. That is, of course, how prototyping often works, but with LD that might mean a bit pivot one third or even halfway into the jam, when you finally start to actually feel the game.

Secondly, we went with Unity's 2D and Tilemap and though I have some previous experience on them, there was a lot of new stuff I was not even aware of. Especially the Sprite Masks a very useful tool I'll certainly make use of in future 2D projects. There are limitations, of course (e.g. you can determine from script if a point is inside a mask or not), but overall it was quite exciting to get to use the new 2D features.

I had a lot of fun working with @cheezegami and @danae and I think we had a good shared understanding on what kind of a game we'd like, even if getting there took a bit of time for me.