Introduction

Hey all! It's been a hot minute since I did one of these. Why is that? Well, 3 years ago I graduated college and got a game industry job of my own, woo! But that also means I didn't exactly have the creative energy to do a lot of game dev in my free time. But now I'm back, baby! And with all the experience I've gotten from my job to boot. Did these lessons guide me to game jam greatness? Let's find out!

What went well

The Grapple & Wall Cling

While the game starts out fun, it really shines once you get into the cool movement options provided by the whip later in the game. The grapple points are just super fun to launch off of, making for some daring setups. But the wall cling is what really turns the game on its head. I especially love the room with the moving blocks, since the grapple interacts with the collision in so many cool ways. It also lets you take some creative shortcuts, if you can spot them. I'd actually be kinda interested to see what a speed run of this game would look like 👀

Art & Animation

I've definitely improved on my pixel art ever since I started Ludum Dare back in high school. I'm really proud of just how expressive and bouncy the characters are in this. I mean, just look at my boy move:

Even a simple enemy like this arrow trap got a nice little arm pump:

One aspect I'm particularly proud of is all the little details in the HUD. My favorite has to be the effects on the health bar when taking damage:

Enemy Behaviors

One of the major skills I've learned from my job is how to polish an enemy, and I think I did a fairly good job here. Even a simple enemy like the snake has this nice ease in/out to its movement. This is not only visually appealing, but helps test the player on their knowledge of the whip's range:

This bat enemy has to be my favorite though, the way it moves around is just so fun (even if I did phone the art in a little, lol)

Room for Improvement

Engine Troubles

One big thing I learned from this job is that my old custom engine... sucked! Like, really sucked. So one of my goals this jam was to use a new custom engine created with all the lessons I've learned over the years. So, in preparation for this jam I spent some time laying the ground work for this engine, getting sprites animating, physics working. But I wound up having to spend a lot of time during the jam both adding new features to the engine, like hitboxes and easing, while also fixing major issues with the physics system. My original intention was to participate in the Compo, but I was nowhere near done and wound up having to take an extra day to finish as part of the Jam, making this my first Jam entry. I actually didn't take Monday off work since I foolishly believed I wouldn't need it, so I had to pull an all nighter on Sunday to finish, which was... not great 😬

Bugs

As you might expect, new engine means new bugs, and I wasn't able to fix all of them in time. Notably, there were some bugs with the grapple near the end of the game which let the player clip through walls in some places. This didn't make the game unplayable, but was annoying enough that I decided to make a post Jam version to fix it Monday night.

However, some players reported that the game wouldn't start at all, or the sprites would all be missing. Eventually I got in touch with a player who had this issue and was able to get an error log from them. Turns out it was a system language setting issues. It was easy to fix at that point, but a frustrating issue to run into. Let this be a lesson not to rely on system string functions working the same in all languages!

Not Enough Grappling!

You may be surprised to learn that the grappling mechanics, which are the best part of the game, were actually added on the last day! I always intended this to be a metroidvania, but now I'm not sure if that was such a bright idea. By the time you get the grapple, the game is almost over. There're barely any setups that combine the grapple points with the wall cling before the game just abruptly ends. This also means there's not much time to really learn the grapple before putting it through its paces, so some players had a lot of trouble on the final section. Maybe it would have been better if you got the grapple really early and the whole game was built around it.

Control Concerns

Some players reported frustration with the controls. Some of this is normal for a castlevania-esque game like this, but some I think could be improved. In particular, a lot of players were frustrated you couldn't change facing direction in mid air. This was done so you couldn't re-grab the same wall with the grapple (maybe this would have been more apparent if you got it earlier, lol). But I could have just made this a limitation only when jumping from a wall cling, and let you change dir when jumping from the ground. Or, at the very least, I could give you like 10 frames or so at the start of a jump where you can change facing dir to make it a bit more lenient.

The results

I'll be honest, I'm a bit disappointed with my final results. My usual goal is to get top 100 in at least 1 category, which I missed out on this time (although I came close with Fun). This was somewhat expected since it was my first time doing the Jam, which is a more competitive category. But my raw scores were also about on par with my past entries, which felt a bit discouraging. I really felt this game was an improvement.

Part of me wonders if some people who couldn't start the game due to that crash just rated it poorly without playing; one player did comment that they couldn't play but left a review "based on the gifs". But I doubt many people did that, and I'm probably just coping here, lol.

Conclusion

So, was Depth Delver a success? Well, if the point of this game was to take all the experience I've gained over the years and pour it into something that would blow my past entries out of the water, then no, by the numbers it didn't achieve that. BUT if my goal was to gain new experience and improve my skills even further, then I do think it was a success! I was able to make significant progress on my engine, and I'm confident now that I could make a game of a similar scope within the Compo deadline next time (and without the bugs).

So, thanks to everyone who played and rated my game, I value each and every one of your comments more than you know. And, until next time, see yah!

PS: here's the game if you wanna try it yourself: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/depth-delver