Fillmore's Island postmortem --- and an ad

First of all...

My "real" game comes out May 28!

If you like:
- Roguelikes
- Deckbuilding games, or
- Fitting shapes inside of other shapes

...then I'd really appreciate if you checked out Moonsigil Atlas. It's come a long ways since the LD52 game it was based on and we're super excited to be releasing soon! There's a free demo you can play if you're interested!

Now for the post-mortem!

Fillmore's Island

Overview

Fillmore's Island is a game about a little rabbit and his drone exploring an island and picking up batteries. You control Fillmore with WASD, the drone with the arrow keys, and you must be within range of the drone to operate it --- but you can expand the range by picking up batteries.

I will say that I was not particularly inspired by the theme Signal. Of course, like always, there were many fantastic games this event, so that is entirely on me. So, I stuck with a fairly simple concept and hoped I could make it worthwhile with graphics and audio polish.

The Good

• Fillmore. Just look at the little guy!
• Trying something new. Between my 20 previous LD games, I had never made a "walk around and explore things" game. Almost all of them happen on a single screen. This was a fun exercise in making that kind of game, but still on a tiny scale.
• Level design, for the most part. I think I did an okay job of making different areas to explore, and hinting at the location of future batteries that you could pick up as your range expanded.
• Doing the jam at all! With Moonsigil Atlas releasing at the end of May, it was far from a sure thing that I would be able to participate, but I'm glad I managed to make it work.

The Bad

• Content authoring. It's becoming increasingly clear that making games without an engine has efficiency problems for certain kinds of games, the most obvious being UI-heavy games and "walk around and explore" type games like this. Every object in the environment had to be manually placed in code via an X/Y coordinate, and I had to do some awkward workarounds to make the land and water reasonable to author (if you're curious, the source of truth for water location is an image that we sample pixel values from). There's a reason most of my previous games have been more puzzle-y or arcade-y!
• Taking too long to find the fun. I spend a lot of time sidetracked on relatively unimportant things (like getting accurate interactions between the drone, its shadow, and obstacles) and locked myself into a design that I think ultimately is not all that fun. As a puzzle game, it doesn't quite have enough mechanics and twists to be interesting, and the nature of the "growing range" mechanic means you're usually working at the frustrating boundary of your range instead of using it fully. Game jams are always hit and miss, but I think I could have shifted to a more interesting use for the signal range mechanic if I had been more on top of things.
• Protecting the player from tedium. It was very easy to accidentally knock the drone out of range with its own momentum, and have to wait several seconds to recall it. However, the momentum was barely enough to be useful for any puzzles. A better design would probably have leaned more into the momentum mechanic and designed puzzles with it in mind, or to prevent the drone from being able to go out of range to make it harder to mess up the puzzles. The current behavior is an awkward middle ground.
• Play and rate. I was not able to play nearly enough games this time around. I always feel guilty when I get more ratings than I receive, and the gap was particularly big this event.

The Results

Not bad! I actually did better than I expected in a few categories like Fun and Innovation, and much better than expected Overall for this event. As expected, Graphics was my best score, landing just shy of another bronze trophy.

Thanks everybody who played and left feedback! Reading the comments and seeing people play the game in videos and streams is always the best part of the event for me.

I did also score the coveted Rained Out and Perfectly Timed Anti-Softlock Measure Award awards, despite the steep competition this event, and I'm honored. (thanks @mathstr0fficial and @100th-coin for the custom awards!)

That's all for now, I'll see you for Ludum Dare 60!