#postmorterm

In this platformer project, I learned how to use GDevelop systematically and gained a deeper understanding of the importance of designing games with players in mind. I'm really satisfied with the overall design concept because I successfully combined real-life elements with the game to offer players a completely new experience. Through the game, players can explore experiences they might rarely encounter in their daily lives, providing them with fresh feelings.

However, there were some shortcomings in the project. I found that I need to improve my control over game details, and I hope to enhance my design process in future learning. As a designer, I realized how challenging it is to create a game that truly captivates players. Achieving the ultimate gaming experience requires a lot of time and effort.

Technically, I faced some challenges. I overlooked the use of different layers, which made it difficult to display the score properly. Despite trying various methods like fixing the text position and limiting the distance between text and characters, I couldn't solve the problem. Eventually, I found relevant tutorials on GDevelop's website, which helped me resolve the issue. This showed my ability to solve problems and my willingness to learn.

Additionally, regarding user feedback, although I had my girlfriend playtest the game, I missed the playtesting session in the tutorial, resulting in insufficient feedback. This was regrettable because user feedback is crucial for improving the game and enhancing the user experience. In future projects, I'll explore more ways to collect user feedback, such as releasing test versions on social media or organizing small-scale game testing events, to gather valuable insights and suggestions.

Being the second game of the unit, the asteroids like game, I found that the assigned readings (chapters 6 and 10) from The Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton to not have inspired and helped with the game design process as much as the readings for the first game, whilst I still found some interesting ideas such as this quote from chapter 10 of the game design workshop book “But perhaps something of that original spark got lost in the process. Now is the time to focus all your energy on making sure the experience you envisioned from the start is there in spades.” – Tracy Fullerton (2018) still rained true it was more expanding on already founded ideas rather than completely adding a new way of approaching play-centric design. As well as using the newly expanded upon knowledge I also adhered to the previously gained experience from designing the first game of the unit the platformer and chose to add a score and life system to the game to create a more involving player experience. As mentioned in the development post the movement was created to be a short burst of movement when the arrows keys were pressed that applied a constant force propelling the player-controlled object in the targeted direction until in equal or greater force cancelled out or prolled the player towards a different direction which was separated from the players attack as balancing the attack and movement controls in the same figure proved to be quiet difficult given the short amount of time to work the on the project. With the firing/attacking key separated from the movement keys I found it also created a more intuitive set of controls and an easier player experience which also better suited newer players.

If I had the opportunity to create the game again from scratch with the new knowledge I have I would have rather than straying from the original concept have liked to keep the combined attack and movement keys within the one control set and instead increased the amount of hits it would take to clean a dish as the final theme of the game was not clear which interrupted and in some cases prevented a truly immersive player experience.

See Below a picture of what the final product of the game looked like.

Sources used in this post include:

Whilst creating the first game of this unit, the platformer game I found the assigned readings (chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, 3, 4 and 5) from The Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton to have greatly assisted in the game design process. Particularly the section where Tracy (2018) remarked “Learning how to set interesting and engaging player experience goals means getting inside the heads of the players, not focusing on the features of the game as you intend to design it”. Using this thought process, I approached creating the game by playing for a bit then creating for a bit using a playtesting after creating approach. Whilst this did have the disadvantage of me being prone to creator bias and therefore missing some key fundamental new player viewpoints, I was also able to find an intuitive and easy to use control system with the arrows keys for directional movement with the space bar to jump and z key to shoot. Eventually when I got to playtesting, I found the player first tried to use the arrow keys to move horizontally, I however also noticed they tried to use the up arrow key to jump and saw they were confused when it didn’t work, although their next guess was the space bar to jump I added into the game a second option to use the up arrow key to jump also so that players could use either. Looking back on it following the teachings from Tracy I ended up able to utilise a fairly play-centric focused design approach in order create a fun and intuitive to play platformer.

If I had the opportunity to create the game again from scratch with the new knowledge I have I would have devoted more time to making custom made sprites, even if they weren’t highly detailed looking back on the project I don’t see it affecting gameplay or player experience rather it would fix the lagging sprite issue that was causing extra difficulties. Fixing this lagging sprite issue would definitely have provided a better player experience due to the easier and smoother player experience. I also would have liked to add a score of some form to the game to get a simple gameplay loop going so that the players would feel more engaged in the game experience.

See Below a picture of what the final product of the game looked like.

Sources used in this post include:

This will likely be a large post as it covers two weeks that comprised of a lot of work though I’ll try and summarize as best I can.

Update 3

After the initial playtests Tom and I got to work on an update that would finally fix the swing mechanic, the pathfinding and address some other issues brought up by playtesting.

Tom got to work on the swing mechanic, and finally figured out the issue on why it sucked. Turns out that the swing hitbox was always spawning in the same location on the player. By that I mean that the box “center” point was at the top left which meant that when it was spawning at the players 0, 0 position it only worked if they were facing diagonally downwards. I went in and changed the swingbox points and finally it worked correctly. Well, it was still a little janky but far better than before. I decided to also the size and increase the time before the swing hit is deleted.

Tom also implemented a pathfinding system using GDevelops built in pathfinding behaviour. Unfortunately this pathfinding is extremely resource heavy on the engine and sends the game into a 5fps seizure at random points. Eventually I figured out I could improve the performance by a substantial amount by implementing a function that stopped pathfinding from working every frame, and instead only activated it every second. This was definitely playable but had occasional frame skips and lag spikes. Enemies would also behave slightly odd in the time between seconds. We decided that a smooth non-lagging experience was better than a game with pathfinding that performs badly so eventually we gave up on implementing it when we couldn’t get the performance fixed.

Based on the playtest findings I implemented a few fixes like the enemies bouncing off of the player when they hit to keep them from bunching up at the same poisition as the player. For some reason if a player stayed still they would only get hit once, and after that they weren’t able to be hit again by the same enemy until either they or the enemy moved. I also decided to give the enemies collision with each other so they wouldn’t move.

I forgot to mention in the last post that we implemented a basic score system. 20 points are given for killing a basic enemy and as far as this update was concerned, that was still the only way to increase points.

More Playtests and Update 4

I believe there was only one playtest between Update 3 and Update 4, though it didn’t have too much extra to offer that we hadn’t already heard from the original playtests. One thing I’m glad about with these playtests is that everyone seems to be happy with the game overall and find it fun. I’m also glad people have enjoyed the pixel art style. Other than that a major problem being brought up in playtests was still that you could cheese the game in many areas of the map and not have enemies reach you. I do believe that this was helped a lot in this update with the introduction of enemy 3.

Enemy 3 has the most complex behaviour out of all enemies. They’ll only follow the player up until a certain range, when the player is in that range, the enemy will hurl an empty can at the player at a high speed. Originally I decided that a well lined up swing would destroy the can but this was changed in the final update to something more fun. Enemy 3 also has a health of 30 compared to the health of 3 that the basic enemy has. After we playtested with the new enemy in place a complaint was that it wasn’t satisfying to defeat the enemy, and that they were expecting more. Though the third enemy does grant a large increase in points (200) I agreed that it was pretty unsatisfying to finally defeat him. Overall this enemy took far less time to implement than I actually expected, and despite the complaint about the reward for taking him down I’m glad it turned out well.

Another major addition in this update were powerups.

Tom implemented a simple system to spawn a powerup after a certain amount of time and also give the player an increased fire rate on their Dingle Fling ability for a certain amount of time. This was a good start but two more powerups needed to be implemented, and they also needed to have a system in place where they would spawn randomly around the map.

After literal hours of trying, I could not get a randomized time for the powerups to work, instead I had to come up with an alternate system for spawning powerups which I think ended up working well.

The system works by randomising a number between one and three every time a powerup needs to spawn. This number will determine which lane the powerup will be spawning in. The powerup is then given a random position inside that lane, and stays for a limited amount of time. I mentioned in an earlier post that a big problem with using GDevelop is the lack of good documentation and tutorials compared to what you’d find with something like Unity, Unreal or Godot. I searched for along time trying to find an answer to how to randomise time, but nothing helped.

Another big addition in this update was the difficulty system by Tom. He implemented a system where every 30 seconds each spawn point would spawn an additional enemy up to a total increase of 4. This system worked really well and I didn't feel the need to tweak it in the slightest.

After this update, the game was finally in a really good state and was generally well received by the final playtests.

Update 5 (Final)

While Tanaporn and Ahmed were busy with the report I decided to whip up a fifth and final update. This update was far smaller but had some nice final additions. I decided to quickly address the complaint about the reward after defeating the final enemy and implemented a powerup drop on his defeat. I also created one of the most fun abilities in the game which was the ability to whack enemy 3′s can right back at him. This would do 10 damage each, and was a fun but challenging way to quickly disperse of the enemy. I went and found some additional sound effects for whacking the can and picking up the fire rate powerup as well as some other additional sounds. I was going to implement a footstep sound for the player but I found this was really distracting.

There were still a few final bugs and changes that didn’t get addressed such as a complaint the shopping cart warning sound played too late. Overall I’m really happy with what we got done.

The Video

The only thing left I had to do was a video / trailer for the game. I decided to put my VFX diploma at work and get artsy with it. The idea was making it in the style of an old VHS tape advertisement with retro pop up cards explaining the game’s features. Since the game was so simple it really didn’t need to be a long video so I aimed for a nice 60 seconds. I really like how it turned out and I’m glad I was able to have fun with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdREbGeLk0k

IN CONCLUSION

I've started a series of postmortem articles for my game, "Girl with a Heart of". This is the first article about working with freelance artists as an indie developer.