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pdil1 year ago

Nice work! It’s crazy how much time/work everything takes! Echoing others, voice acting and cute scenes is wild to see in jam, impressive! For the gameplay, it felt like simplifying the colliders and/or taking advantage of layers would have helped, ex having large simple shapes for the environment and characters that collide but weapons and bodies on a different layer to the daggers always hit in good spots. I also really struggled with the enemies, it was really rough only being able to move slightly faster than the zombies, and their attack range was much larger than the visuals suggest, I really wanted some dodge/dash. And sometimes they took a loooot of hits, most of the time it was a few but there was one I think I hit over 20 times before it died. It was also confusing to have broken locks to get into places then have to break the lock again to leave.

I just skimmed through your post mortem, thank you for sharing! I always write these for myself, probably should clean them up and post them too. A few suggestions: it’s ONLY the game files themselves that are locked, screenshots, cover art, all the text can be changed throughout the jam (literally just added them a few minutes ago). My process for template updates is actually changing them in game and back-porting to the template, and only doing this for the first part of the jam. I find this helps with yagni and not go ivory-tower mode. When the jam ends, I then test the template and back-port anything else I noted along the way.

Again, great job, looking forward to more!

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Dragonforge Development1 year ago (1 edit)

Thanks! Yeah it is crazy and I need to make sure it stays sane. :)

I'd be interested to hear more about large simple shapes. In this jam I was using a couple packs from Craftpix just so I could focus on other aspects, and I just used what I had. But I'm still interested in more details on those thoughts.

I did think about having the characters collide, even tried it out, but I didn't like it gameplay-wise. If I had more time for tweaking, I might have changed that. I actually split the characters' collision shapes into a rectangle bottom and an oval top because I had a single oval and the character was getting stuck under ledges when sliding. Also doing that did serve double-duty by making the daggers sink deeper into the characters.

You actually can outrun the zombies if you slide. Your slide is a dash, I just didn't explain it. I wanted them to attack fast and annoyingly. That's why I had them drop potions, because I couldn't myself avoid at least one hit from them. I realize now I should have implemented knockback with the hammer. That would've solved the damage problem.

The zombie's attack collision was a rectangle, but it was pixel accurate to the weapon. However, I agree it should've been smaller, and something I was thinking about doing on the last day, but I forgot to write it down and well. . .  With their speed, they didn't need the same attack range as the player. (I used the same shape.)

The lots of hits things sound like a bug I saw occasionally but couldn't pin down that sometimes it took me an extra hit to kill the zombies. I will look into that for the next jam. I think it's my state machine doing something I'm not expecting.

Yeah someone else commented on the locks. It was an homage to Metroid and how you have to shoot the doors every damn time. But I get it was weird. Good feedback. Homage not worth it.

I wrote the post mortems for myself, but I just do them as consumable blog posts because it's a convenient place to store them for me, and a friend suggested that people like to read them, so it's also a way to build up a presence as I move towards publishing a game on Steam.

Ok, I wasn't sure. My internet connection goes from great to wonky and I didn't know if it was me or the game jam that was preventing me from updating the page for the info about the locks.

Good call on the template. I do tend to be ivory tower with my coding. But that's only because I plan on using it again, and I don't want to spend time refactoring. However, you're right some of that is going to happen. I don't even remember if I went through all the stuff I had to do with my sound system. I'd cleverly made the SFX system polyphonice and thrown away my system for spawning AudioStreamPlayer nodes to keep the memory down - only to find out that you can't push polyphonic streams through buses. Probably a bug, but still really annoying.

Oh and the nest game jam starts tonight and will be over in 7 days. Ha!

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pdil323 days ago(+1)

When things really get me thinking, I tend to fail to respond in a timely fashion, but it just sits in my brain nagging me, nearly 6 months, later, finally, here is some follow up I started and should have sent at the time in case anyone else bizarrely stumbles on this:

Regarding character collision, I didn’t mean to collide with the characters, but to utilize the different collision layers.

For example, I might have my layers like this:

ground player_body player_weapon player_hitbox enemy_body enemy_weapon enemy_hitbox

The CharacterBody2D’s will go on player_body/enemy_body and mask with ground, generally having simple shapes. Then, sensibly, the player’s weapon goes on player_weapon masking with enemy_hitbox. This way the terrain collision stays sane and isn’t affected strangely by animation but I’m free to do more complex damage shapes.

With it explained, the metroid door homage is cool but I think needs different packaging. Something like an evil eye and the door, or a creature like a spider drops in front of it.

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