Jam Retrospective and v1.1

Feedback on the game design and how they'll be addressed:

Balance is poor

• This will be probably the largest undertaking if I were to patch it in. The game is arguably way too hard at the start, and way too easy once you've picked up momentum.
  • What were my intentions? 
  • My intentions were NOT for Magh Meall to be a hard game, but I did want the game to become easier as it went on as I wanted a short experience where the player picked up power at a rapid rate.
• Why is the game so hard at first?
  • To be honest, I don't think it's hard at all. But the desired gameplay is not explained or enforced to the player at all, therefore it takes way too much effort to figure out how to progress. This resulted in a lot of players wandering around with no weapon, or not knowing how to pick up a weapon after it was dropped.
• How can I address this?
• The desired gameplay needs to be more strongly enforced, and I should not expect the player to experiment until they discover this.
• The changes:
• Rather than weapons idling at the point where they are dropped, all weapons now trail behind the player as a queue.
• When a weapon is discarded, the next weapon in the queue is equipped.
• Whenever a weapon completes it's secondary ability, it will rejoin the queue.
• If there are no weapons left in the queue and we discard our equipped weapon, we automatically equip the oldest weapon we discarded.
• These changes ensure the player is never left without a weapon, and more strongly enforces the idea that the player should be cycling through the weapons.
• Also, weapons should be re-assessed to make them equally important.
• Staff's turret needs to be improved.

Game is poorly explained

• A lot of players thought that the upgrade menu at the start was selecting a starting weapon, this was very poor UI design on my part as I simply wanted the player to get a free upgrade at the start.
• There isn't really an in game tutorial on how to play the game either, other than controls in the about section.
• How will this be addressed?
  • To be honest, the changes I made to address the balance really handle a lot of this confusion. Now that the weapons follow the player, there's a lot less I'd need to explain.
  •  Could even be a short tutorial area that the player walks through just once, but for such a short game seems overkill.
  • The combat is simple enough that I don't think I need to explain it too much. I saw other games in the jam that had floating text in the background that explained game mechanics, this is probably sufficient. The text could disappear on start.
  • This text could just explain movement, wasd to move and the dash
  • Then, I kind of like the idea of the weapons having dialogue boxes that pop up that explain their abilities. Could be right above the cooldown meter in the corner, or more centralized. Could enforce a little more that they're seperate entities too. Would be pretty easy to implement also.
    • Could have a set of maybe 3 phrases for each weapon, can randomly pick one to spit out when equipped.
  • I think the damage indicator needs to be more obvious.
  • Player needs to be knocked back when damaged, especially when hit by a boss or larger enemy.
  • Small angles disappear when they hurt the player, this is fine but:
    • This shouldn't be the behaviour for bosses or nephelim, these enemies should cause knockback to the player when hit.
  • Need to change the hearts to a different item, too confusing considering I use the heart in the UI to represent score.
  • Also need to have a barrier at the edge of the map, the bottomless put exists purely because I didn't have the time. Will put some water there, instant death if the player falls in.

Bugs discovered during the voting period

• Credits are broken, requires a restart to access the main menu again once it's pressed.
  • Small fix implemented, the visibility on the node wasn't set correct on press
• Strange sensation of colliding with another object during dashing somtimes, but there is nothing there
  • Small fix implemented, there was some leftover code from a temporary fix I did a while back to prevent the player from dashing into the floor that I forgot to remove that caused this weird behaviour. A lesson to centralize all similar code!
• Z axis can sometimes get messed up, need to enforce this more strongly in the movement code.
  • There's definitely better approaches to 2.5D than what I did, but for now I removed all collisions between the player and anything ut the floor. To be honest, no other collisions are even needed and only lead to bugs like this.
  • Small fix implemented.
• HP can go above 100, but there is no indiciation of this
  • Tough one to address, changing this could make the game much harder. Although with the generous i-frames already present I think it's fair to cap the HP at 100.
  • Small fix implemented.
• The final boss is just.. generally messed up.
  • Medium fix required to sort out this encounter.

Other general things I'd like to change, nice to haves

• Add a browser version. Actually had no idea this was the standard for jams, if its not too much hassle I'll compile a web version for sure.
• Fix the after images on enemies, if the performance impact isn't too great it would make the game look a lot nicer.
• Have an ending cutscene
• Alter the music to fit the tone better
• ... lots of other stuff

Version 1.1

Will not be putting too much effort into this, as I think my efforts as a game developer are better spent doing more game jams. However I'd like to address many of the points mentioned in this post, so I'll commit to releasing a patch that covers as much of this as possible and leave it there. Someday I'll come back and polish it up really nice, would be a cool thing to return to eventually I think.  Also I'd like to share the code but I'm ashamed to say it's absolutely atrocious, a time limit really does a number on my software design principles lol.

Should release this patch in the next day or two along with the patch notes of what I successfully got implemented.