Jam results postmortem

Results

I’m happy people enjoyed the game. Thanks to everyone who played, rated, and commented on BATTLESC4RS. I really appreciate you all.

From here, I have a bunch of uncategorized ramblings I wrote down throughout the jam.

Issues with the ‘swap’ mechanic

Lots of people mentioned that the ‘swap’ mechanic didn’t really work too well, and I definitely agree. My original ideas were:

• I knew the game would have moments where you wouldn’t be able to hit the boss with your sword
• I knew that waiting around for a boss to stop attacking, or get in range of your sword, would be frustrating
• So: what if the player could swap to a ranged attack to hit the boss at any range?

So far, the above just requires that the player have a ranged attack. It would have been reasonably easy to add some kind of ‘magic/energy gauge’ that filled as you slashed the boss, and was consumed by magic attacks. Boom, simple design, problem solved. This is basically what most games in this genre do (Death’s Door and Hyper Light Drifter use this exact design).

But I wanted to play around with the rhythm of combat a little more. What if you were forced to swap between melee and magic every N attacks? This means that a skilled speedrunner would then have to maximize their sword slashes on the boss (which deal 50% more damage than magic) while also ensuring that they always have magic ready when the boss runs/jumps/teleports away. What an interesting design, I wonder how it turned out…

In practice, this comment captures how the game really feels:

lmao ‘gandalf simulator’ is so hilariously honest, and also shows the issues with the combat: The player isn’t really incentivized to use sword slashes on the boss. The ‘speedrunner min/max’ scenario that I described above doesn’t really apply.

More importantly, the player isn’t punished for ‘slashing thin air’ for most of the game, making the gandalf strat the optimal effort-to-reward strat. Only the final boss does an okay job of punishing this behavior: Watching my friends try the ‘gandalf strat’ against the final boss, only to get hit by a jump slam due to their bad positioning, was a good confirmation that the idea is there, it’s just not applied that well.

Some people suggested requiring a hit on the boss to ‘consume’ a slash. I think this design would have been fine, and I actually tried it in my initial testing. It’s a simple change that I might go back and reimplement post-jam.

Speaking of post-jam stuff: I’m thinking of adding some new loadouts in a post-jam update, one of which will be a much simpler application of the idea: Slash to gain energy, use energy to cast magic, or something like that. I also want to add a Knight loadout with a greatsword that’s melee only, since the game is heavily balanced around melee.

Music is hard

Up until the last week of development, music was actually the least-polished part of the game. The first and final boss tracks simply did not work in their original iterations. I was really discouraged, and considered dropping out of the jam. I knew the game needed music, but I wasn’t going to release a game with bad music.

I was genuinely stressed by this. I felt like I lost my music ability. Or worse, what if I’d just tricked myself into thinking I was okay at music by getting lucky over and over again? What if I could never ‘get lucky’ again?

I’m glad I didn’t give up. I grinded on the first track for a few more days and found the right sound. For the final boss, I felt like a chiptune just didn’t work for the vibe I wanted, so I switched to live piano. At this point, I’d already gone through all the anxiety and stress of getting the first two music tracks done. By the time I switched to piano for the last track, I felt really calm. Like, I was able to conquer the first track through sheer grind and willpower, so of course I can make this final track work on piano.

It felt like a neat little microcosm of the game’s message. Those battlescars from the 1st track gave me the confidence to perform the final track.

The ‘roll to dodge’ design space

I feel like this design space has been explored pretty thoroughly by games in the last 15 years, especially since Dark Souls / the soulslike genre. As a result, I don’t think my game is particularly interesting from a design perspective. In general, ‘roll-to-dodge’ games have started to bore me since Dark Souls 3. Sekiro and Lies of P feel like the next step for the evolution of this genre.

“Pattern-recognition-as-defense” (which I will refer to as PRAD) is a lot more fun if you have multiple ways to respond to a pattern. For example, in sekiro or lies of p, you can dodge, block, parry, jump (sekiro), or space attacks. In my game (and other soulslikes), you can really only roll or space.

I also think that PRAD as a concept is a little stale, even with the innovations that Sekiro and Lies of P introduce. I think games need to start making the offensive phase more interesting. “Pattern-recognition-as-offense” (or PRAO) feels like a less-explored design space in this genre. Once the player has an opening to attack, you usually just mash the attack button. Whether you’re slashing with a tiny sword, firing little bolts of magic, or swinging a katana, it doesn’t really make any difference unless your offensive tool choice matters. In this way, if my game instead had a ‘magic gauge’ that filled when you slashed the boss, then your offensive choices would be more interesting. My game in its current iteration sort of crystallizes the problems with this genre when you have no PRAO.

I’ll probably make a separate post someday about games that use PRAO really well, and how I think it could be used in the future.

Being obsessed with a game is fun

I’ll miss working on this game. I got completely sucked in by this jam. Even though it led to some nasty self-imposed crunch, I do feel a little empty now. I miss having something to crunch on, but I’m also exhausted.

It’s a frustrating spot to be in. I don’t have the energy to work on a game right now, but I also don’t like having nothing to work on. Maybe the post-jam updates will fill this void for a little.

I do think game jams are hard for me in general. My best gamedev experiences come from stretching a short dev time over a long period of months. Most of my best ideas come to me when I’m not working on a game.

Art is poison

I think the youtuber Thought Slime is the one who introduced me to this idea, but: Art is poison. The best way to cure yourself of poison is to get it out of your body. Once you’re clear of the poison, you can move onto new things.

The metaphor kind of breaks down when other people consume your art (please consume my POISON lol), but bear with me: I’d had fantasies of making a cool 3D melee-combat game for a while. I’d had daydreams of some kind of orthographic deaths-door-like game with cute bosses and cool music in the past. I thought it would remain a daydream forever because I was using Love2D, so this poison sat with me for a while. I felt like I couldn’t make the game I wanted to make. I was also hesitant to start this type of game because I thought it could turn into some multi-year ordeal.

Now that I’ve made this game, I feel free. Now, I’m daydreaming about new ideas. I jump out of my shower and jot down ideas for some kind of Sekirolike (or P-like, if you will), or a new 3D roguelike idea. Now that I’m free from that poison, my brain is free to explore new ideas.

Maybe poison is the wrong word. Anyway, every time I make a game, I feel like I’ve unshackled piece of myself .

Battlescars

I’ve given up on lots of things in the past. I’ve failed a lot. There are tons of skills, musical ideas, pieces of art, and entire games that I’ve basically thrown in the trash. In the past, these failures have sat with me, like little anxieties to be avoided. “I’ll ship this time, I won’t repeat those mistakes” I’ll tell myself. “I won’t fall prey to sunk cost, I won’t waste a year like I did for that game” I assure myself. It’s a little dramatic, but hey that’s me.

Nowadays, I’ve started to notice how all these failures, all these scars, bleed into my new games in really cool ways. Feels like there are still pieces of me that I’ve lost through these failures, but that’s okay. I know that all these pieces will eventually find their way home.

Thanks for listening,

Abhi