GBVU Post Mortem

GutsyBot VS The Universe was a game I created nearly single handedly for a Game Jam competition last June (Ludum Jam). It was my first game jam project and I did everything in the game except for the logo and sound. Needless to say, it was a pretty exciting weekend (the game am was 72 hours, but I was working full time!).

Along the way I faced numerous challenges in game design, programming, and making the art. This Post Mortem will focus on the design aspect. While designing GutsyBot I had a couple of successes, but also had a huge batch of missed opportunities for exciting gameplay.

The theme of the game jam was Tiny World. I had the idea of a giant fighting robot defending a planet from aliens. I designed the game play with the idea that the character would have fight enemies that continually spawn (speeding up in rate as the time goes on).

The Good

During the initial stages I decided to have dead enemies fly off the screen rather than a death animation, mostly because I felt it'd be a really small rewarding feature. During development this created a bug where dead enemies would kill enemies they collided with on their way out. I quickly realized what was causing it, but also realized that this created exciting and awesome game play. This created an entirely new set of strategies. Players could look for clumps of enemies and try to knock an enemy into them to kill the entire pack. Additionally weak enemies became an awesome mechanic, as they provide the player with an incredibly powerful weapon. Weaker enemies that die in one hit can easily clear a huge amount of enemies, providing a very rewarding and cool game play experience.  This mechanic is ultimately the part of the game I'm most proud of. Although it's a highly simplistic and straight forward design element, it seriously made the game exponentially more fun.

The Bad

There were also some design decisions I definitely regret.

The first is pretty minor, but the control scheme could have been so much more. The current controls in game are really simple: move and shoot. This means that the player shoots in the direction he is facing/currently moving. This really limits how the player can move and gun enemies down, it also makes aiming overly difficult. A superior analog control scheme would have made the playing experience superior. Simply doing analog controls (as in four buttons to shoot and four buttons to move, one for each main direction) would have given the player a much better experience. This is a lesson I won't forget, controls can seriously add a lot to game play experience while not being especially difficult to implement. I'll take more time in my future projects to work on controls.

The second design issue I should have addressed was the collision issue. The collision's look off for player bullets and enemies, but this isn't actually a programming bug. This was my first project where I really spirited almost all of the art assets (with the exception of the logo) so I'm not too surprised I had a slip up here. I realized a day or two after finishing the game that I made the outline for the player, enemies, and projectiles the same as the background color. Although this is another, rather small detail, it made the game noticeably less fun for players who were aware of it. A lot of players commented on it and it was very obvious that it really negatively affected the feel of the game.

The third and final issue I had with GBVU was the lack of any direct interaction between the player character and enemies. The PC could destroy enemies with shots, but if he collided with an enemy nothing would happen. This really felt like a lost opportunity. There were a ton of directions I could have taken this in. For example I could have added another complication to game play by having enemies damage the character on contact. This would create additional gameplay that forced the player to not only worry about defending the planet, the aliens would also be a direct threat to the player as well. This additional threat would have definitely made the game play more immersing. Another spin on this would be to reward the player for making contact with enemies. Gutsy could launch a strong melee attack. If this change were to be added, the spawns would definitely have to increase in order to compensate for the new power the player has gained, but it would create moments were the player truly felt powerful. Clearing out huge waves of enemies, knocking them into other enemies, would be an awesome engaging experience for the players. There's probably more possibilities that I haven't considered, but the point is this is something I should have put more thought into. I missed an opportunity to add a really awesome layer of complexity to the game.

GBVU is definitely rough around the edges, but ultimately it's a project I'm incredibly proud of. I definitely became a stronger programmer and designer after this game. The lessons I've learned will stick with me for a long time.

- Paul