Hello Ludum Dare community!

I thought I would do a little post mortem on my game Dust Sorcerer developed in 48 for the compo.

Its an arcade arena shooter where the player controls a dust sorcerer.

Here’s a short youtube video if you don’t want to try the game yourself:

The Good

What I personally really liked in my game was the art. I am no artist and it is therefore pretty hard to get some decent looking game, but the last 2-3 months I had been practicing a lot of drawing and some modelling and it really paid off! Not only did my art get better, I also discovered new aspects of game development. Previously I was focused so much on gameplay mechanics, that I didn’t even notice that gameplay is only a part of a game(others are story, look and feel, even emotions). I would advise every programmer to get a basic understanding of drawing and modelling.

Another aspect I really liked how it turned out was the spellplay. The first spell, a flamethrower, was actually discovered by accident. In the first iteration I implemented a fireball that shoots continously, but I forgot a cooldown on it(e.g. only shoot it every second) so I got this weird ray of fire. I left it at that and increased the size of a fireball over lifetime and it became this amazingly satisfying effect.

The Bad

What I really didn’t do well is balancing. Many people in the comments claimed that the game is too hard for them. This is a big contrast to my gamer friends who said it was just the right difficulty. Next time I should probably think about some sort of difficulty slider so everyone can adjust the difficulty to personal preference or doing more testing with a broader audience would also be an acceptable strategy.

The Ugly

The upgrade system was the last thing I implemented. And I think that is the reason why it turned out pretty boring. I knew I didn’t have the time to implement an awesome upgrade system with spell modifiers(e.g. flamethrower now shoots in 2 directions). I should have planned this a bit more and for many people I can imagine that it got too complicated. There are 8 different upgrades in the game and to unlock all you would need to play many hours and each upgrade doesn’t give a reward worth it. They are pretty boring. They either upgrade damage of some spell by 20% or decrease the cooldown.

Resume

Although I hated the theme, I am still satisfied with the result and think that I learned much about how to design combat.

If you now think you need to play my game, here it is: Dust Sorcerer