about-face : a post-mortem

It’s weird to go back to writing about smaller games, but refreshing. As small as about-face was, it is a “finished” game (in quotations because I still have a patch that isn’t live yet). Finishing things is pretty important – I don’t think it’s actually the most important thing, but it’s really high up there. And every time you finish something, you usually learn some stuff, because it is one of the primary ways of getting feedback. So, what have I learned this time around?

What went right

It’s always nice to start with the positive. I think some things went well with about-face that are worth mentioning.

1. Scope was controlled

about-face never expanded in scope – there were some things that weren’t part of the original idea that made it in, but they didn’t lengthen the game’s development significantly. There were huge delays in the game’s development, but more due to personal interruptions, losing focus and switching to different projects.

2. The mechanic worked

General feedback has been that people have had fun with the game and often play it to completion. It isn’t a long game, but the mechanic was interesting enough to hold peoples’ attention and was a strong motivator for people to finish it.

The idea was to take a very simple mechanic that still had a lot of space to explore, and that didn’t require lots of other sub-mechanics to make it interesting. This made the game very fun to design as well, because I was able to be laser-focused on that one concept and make everything around it.

3. The art/sound/motif worked

about-face palette — The game’s entire palette.

I wasn’t sure how people would receive the style of the game. From a production standpoint, this game definitely isn’t my most ambitious work. The game mechanics, art, and sound are all very minimal, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was counted against it. Luckily though, people have appreciated it for what it is.

What went not right

1. The ending

I think this is a weakness of mine, because for pretty much every game I’ve made the ending has not been received as anticipated, for better or for worse. In this case, some people were not even sure if the ending of about-face was actually the ending or not. Granted some people liked what I did, but when something creates unintentional confusion that’s always a failure in design. There are parts of the game that I had envisioned as cues for the game’s ending – the final areas of the game take a step back from the mechanics earlier in the game, and serve more as spectacles than anything else – to me, this was the game gearing up for an ending, but none of this was backed up by any other cues in the game.

I think ultimately, I made a lot of assumptions regarding what people would be thinking as they were completing the game, which turned out to be wrong! I need to spend as much time with narrative cues as I do with the rest of the game’s design.

2. The resolution

This is a weird one. The game was meant to be a pretty small resolution to complement the simple visuals, but what I ended up with was uncomfortably small and kind of a pain to look at. The weird thing is that part of this is because my IDE was actually displaying the game at a larger resolution than I had configured and applying AA (despite my attempts to hard-code no-AA settings), so 99% of the time I spent playing/testing the game was with a larger resolution than it would be in reality. This is particularly annoying, because without using AA, the only way to make the game larger is to just scale everything up 2X, which is unfortunately a bit too large. So, the only real fix is to change the game’s aspect ratio, without messing up the gameplay by making the player’s vision too small.

I guess the take-away here would be to try the game out more on the actual platform it’s being played on, and not just in the dev environment.

3. The controls

Some of the feedback was on the game being too slippery, and the gravity being way too high. The former was easy to fix, but the latter is tricky because all of the levels are designed around the player having a specific jump height/speed. So obviously, changing the player’s physics can have consequences on level design.

These are pretty big deals, because moving left/right/jumping encompass all of the player’s controls. If those aren’t on point, there’s a problem with the core of the game. Ideally, I would identify any dependencies the game has – in this case, how the level design is very closely tied to the way the player controls – and get early feedback on those elements before they’ve become fleshed out. In this case, the problem wouldn’t have been a problem at all if I had identified that gravity was too high before I designed and iterated through all of the levels.

Back, forth, back, forth

Yesterday morning I did the seemingly impossible – I finished one of those games I mentioned earlier! In fact, it was largely because of the “Odds and Ends” posts I made a little while back, that I was reminded of how close I was to completion on some of those projects. It made it harder to justify leaving them alone.

I added a bit more content to about-face, polished some issues around the edges, added some extra sound and tweaked the levels, and now it’s live on Newgrounds!

GameImage — The game’s logo, one place where I break resolution. The horror!

And there it will stay for a while. I guess it’s sort of an unofficial limited-time exclusivity for Newgrounds, because I like the site…well, a flash game can never be truly exclusive, even when site-locked…but the point is I like uploading stuff there first, okay? It also gives me time to gather user-feedback and adjust the game accordingly before I put it in other places. After all, it’s easier to make 10 small changes in one place than 10 small changes in 10 places.

My plans for the game are extremely small, as it was a game I made for fun (and anyway I don’t have faith in how much traffic a flash game can pull these days). I’ll make some changes to the game as needed, and then move on. It’s not my most ambitious project, and as my previous posts have indicated, I have a couple other things that I’d like to continue working on!

Thankfully, people have largely enjoyed the game for what it is, and it’s sitting around 3.5+ stars at the moment which is about as much as I could ask for. It feels really nice to put a smaller game out to the public and be getting more user feedback, and I’m glad I decided to finish this game before continuing on other projects.

I definitely learned some things through development/release of this small game, which might be worth writing up in a bite-sized post-mortem.

I could also talk about the message/theme of the game, but really, the whole point is minimalism, so it would be more fitting to let the game speak for itself on that matter.

Sweating the Small Stuff #2

Today we finish our look into the projects that didn’t quite make it to the finish line. Given that some of them are pretty old and didn’t take especially long to finish, you might wonder what else I’ve been doing.

For one…life. It’s pretty intense, and this past year most of all. But I’ve also done some work patching/updating Why Am I Dead At Sea with small features and fixes, and will continue to as much as I am able. Lastly, among all the craziness I’ve started prototyping an idea that I’m really interested in. I don’t say that lightly, as the last idea I was really “interested” in turned into Why Am I Dead…and we all know how that ended up. So, hopefully, I’ll have some progress to show in the near future, and this can become a real dev blog once again!

#3: Invisible Maniac

Winter 2015 – 24 hours of development

This was another game jam submission for the Philly Game Forge, and this time we had 24 hours to complete a game from scratch! I’d done a couple of Ludum Dares in the past, but this would be my shortest jam ever, so I was pretty excited to enter it. It was 24 hours onsite, so we were able to stay overnight at the Forge and work through those magical hours where your body goes through the seven stages of grief as it slowly realizes that you aren’t going to give it any rest.

I came up with a little 2D stealth game where enemies can’t see you, and can only catch you via direct contact. But there’s a catch – you can’t see yourself either! Using only contextual audio/visual cues, you have to navigate through the game’s levels and past enemies.

IM1

As the levels become more expansive, losing track of where you are becomes more of a threat. To assist the player, there are objects that react to when the player walks over them, and sounds for when you hit a wall. There is also the ever-present sound of your foot-steps, which change based on the surface you’re walking over.

IM2 — Thick grass will help you keep track of your location, and you don’t even have to worry about running into wild Pokemon!

It gets pretty hectic later on, but using water and rock paths to “hear” your location will help!

Truth be told as much fun as I had working on this game, by the time 24 hours was up, I was quite sick of the thing, and had grown bored of the concept. I even considered not submitting it. But it’s good that I did, because people seemed to really like it! In fact they liked it so much they elected it the winner of the jam and gave me a nice wooden plaque for the occasion.

Subway — You can also pick up hoagies and use them to murder people, you’re better off not knowing why.

Despite my misgivings at the eleventh hour, I got a huge charge out of creating this little game. You can play it in-browser or download the whole thing on my site, but note that the download will let you play at a better resolution.

#4: about-face

January 2016: ??? weeks of development

This was a little platformer that I had the idea for way, waaaaay back, over a year ago. I did a tiny amount of coding for it eons ago, which I ultimately re-purposed for the other platformer I talked about in the last post, but finally picked it back up in Jan 2016. Given the haphazard way I worked on it, I really couldn’t say how long it all took me.

It’s a minimalist retro platformer – really genre-breaking, I know. I wanted to make something small and neat, so I did just that. It’s a platformer where every time you jump, the world inverts, and previous…oh, well, a GIF will explain it faster than I can.

aboutfaceintro

So, the world switches between white/black every time you jump. Platforms, spikes, and obstacles will phase in/out based on which color you’re in.

The idea was pretty simple – what is the core mechanic of platformers? Jumping. On platforms. What if I made it so that every mechanic was tied to jumping – every mechanic was tied to your decision on when and how to jump. The result was a game with very few mechanics but many interesting scenarios to design. This was probably the most fun I’ve had designing game environments by far!

Twice the jumps = twice the complexity in design!

Sentinels — Chasing enemies were added to turn the game from a slow puzzle-platformer to a faster paced action-platformer.

I’m pretty happy with this thing, and at this point it’s basically done. The only thing it lacks is an ending (as of now you’ll just run into an incomplete level that can’t be beaten), but once I pop that in there I’d love to upload it to any channels I can. Until then, you may not be surprised to find out that you can play the current version on my website!

Well, that concludes this mini-series. At some point I’d like to redesign my website and include a section for these kinds of things – it doesn’t feel right putting them up side-by-side with something as large as Why Am I Dead At Sea. But I would like for them to have a space of their own.