Good morning everyone!

Sam (SpamFaux) here from Team Bad Lemur. With the judging concluded in the Pirate Software Game Jam 16, our team is very happy with the feedback we received - not just from judges but from the community that took the time to try out our game.

This year, we tried something ambitious to stretch our own abilities. We attempted to make two games that worked as one and, personally, I think it did. Overall, the feedback showed that you all got it as well.

For this game we wanted an exploration phase and an execution phase which we implemented using a metroidvania-inspired platformer where the player (a sword) collects runes to enhance the sword’s ability. During the subsequent combat phases, the collected runes are used to disrupt the evil-doings of the wielder, conveniently named Wielder.

That’s what we hoped to do and ultimately we got there! But I think jams are mostly about learning so let’s talk about what we learned and what the feedback tells us.

Game Balance

Good gods, this is an ugly truth that hit us after submission, balancing the way that the individual abilities impact the player is much harder than we originally expected. We received some offline feedback from family that “the daytime phase is kind of boring” and that was a panic feeling at least in my gut. I worked primarily on getting the turn based combat working on our end and to hear that it fell short was a bummer at first. But, it got us thinking and talking about how to improve our effort on that phase. And one of the pieces is balancing how often some abilities can be triggered, balancing how some of the abilities work together, and so forth. Our team was working to update and balance abilities up until the submission time and still we missed the mark on some of them.

Player Controls

You know what’s crazy? Trying to implement a tutorial in the nth hour without any legitimate play testing before submitting. Yeah - we did that (at 3am my time, no less -Jacob). I believe the tutorial was necessary but what we ran into was some control issues that the tutorial really called into focus. That comes from originally hoping to have a unique feel between our combat and exploration phases by having almost completely separate control schemes between the two. BUT, that caused confusion not just with the player but for us when we work on implementing different functions/features. We plan on getting this fixed on our end to make it A. more clear on controls and B. to limit the controls tripping over each other. (Control issues are the biggest issue we received from judges of the jam.)

Platformer Feel

Platformer controls are a bigger deal than we originally expected. We’ve received feedback from a few places about how our platforming controls feel during the exploration phase. It comes down to our own inexperience on that front. We want to work on making these controls feel better to use. We’ve received some good notes on how to improve that feel. I also will note that Jacob (curbsideaudio) is already looking at reworking the map to be even more interactive with more interaction or risk on the player’s side.

Jacob: Despite making concessions on my original vision of the platformer (think Hollow Knight), I wanted the mazes to feel rewarding. The result was spending more time on the design of the level and less on the player physics. That’s not to say there wasn’t consideration and some custom code there to increase the feel, but there’s a lot of room to improve. My thanks to the other jam participants that pointed me towards some great tutorials on variable jump heights and ledge detection. This area will be great improved in subsequent updates.

Other Notes

We received a lot of good notes. We are really happy with how this game came together. The art, the concept, the characters (long live Stabby), and the whole thing was fun to do. We have some fixing to do on other items like some audio weirdness and a handful of other small bugs (bonus points for those that found the infinite time glitch -Jacob). We also want to do some more custom art and use less in the realm of free assets. Also, our biggest misstep in this jam was not having enough time for play testing from folks that weren’t too deep in the weeds. Many of our identified bugs would have been highlighted early if we had made more time for that.

Jacob: We definitely went big on this one. Splitting the game up into distinct phases allowed us to do that. I can envision a more refined version of the game that would have felt less buggy, but also less compelling as a game worth continuing development. The foundation is there.

Finally let’s talk about…

Where We Go From Here

As of right now, we want to push a patch to address a handful of the bugs that have been outlined. Then after that we aren’t 100% sure of a timeline but we as a team want to rework the game a bit to flesh it out. We like our concept but we want to improve the execution of that concept. Some of that work will require full on redesigns, rebuilds, or refactors of what we currently have. But we want to keep this ball rolling and we hope that we continue to get feedback all along the way!

Thank you everyone for your time and feedback for this game. The jam was a blast and we look forward to the next one.