Postmortem: Monsterhythm

(Original post at Ludum Dare website blog here)

Things that went wrong

• Working with a tool and a language without any previous experience. So far, my knowledge is limited to iOS (Objective-C and SpriteKit), but since a game developed on that platform is not shareable, I had to choose between the new Pico-8 (Lua) or Unity (C#).
  
  I chose the former because it looked pretty easy (and it is), but there were two downsides: first, there is almost no documentation about how to work with it (except the superb Pico-8 fanzine); and second, I had zero experience with anything different than SpriteKit (or Cocos2D for that matter).
  
  The result: I used the whole Saturday only to get a shallow understanding of how Pico-8 and Lua works. No progress whatsoever. By the end of the day, I was resolved to stop, because what I learned so far wasn’t enough to program the game I had in mind. Basically, I knew how to deploy a sprite, but not how to destroy it (yes, yes, I know).
  
  After getting a good sleep, I decided that instead of deploying the magic fireballs and destroying them once out of the screen, I will move them normally and then put them back to the starting point once is needed. That decision made the game possible, in the end: it was ugly, and the game was not exactly what I had in mind (several slower fireballs VS only one fast fireball), but it worked.
• Sound didn’t feel right: This is quite bad, because it goes against the name and the theme of the game. My idea was to assign a different drumbox sound for each magician (the upper magician is a kick, the second a snare, and so on), and a musical sound the monster. I was expecting that deploying an interesting attack pattern for the enemies, plus the movement of the monster would produce automatically something nice to hear. I was wrong. It (somehow) works, but it doesn’t feel right, and the problem is I can’t imagine how to make it work. Again, my lack of experience (with sound design, in this case) played against myself.
• Not leaving enough time for polishing the experience: although my idea was to prepare a nice pattern (after that, that pattern is what define this game), I didn’t had enough time left. The result: a game too hard from the very beginning. The entry barrier is too high for almost any player (even the more skilled ones), and that made a lot of people leave the game too early. A slower start and a crescendo would have been much, much better.

What went right

• Choosing a known game design. Monsterhythm is very similar to my other game, Phobos Children: a pattern of orbs move through the screen, and you have to do something with them (clear them by groups of three on Phobos Children, in Monsterhythm just avoid them). I knew how to program that (because I did it before), and it allowed me to guess how the gameplay will feel once finished (in the end it’s very similar to a Game&Watch, so it’s easy to grasp by anyone).
• Choosing Pico-8 for the development. Very easy, very fast to work with, powerful in its own way and shareable, I just can say: go and buy it.
• The theme itself. I tried to make something visually similar to a Japanese RPG with some twists, and I think that connected with the players. The dancing monster got a lot of good words in the comments. The game looks nice, but this, more than anything, is a merit from Pico-8 palette and their limitations. Almost anything looks cute there.
• The stamina counter for the enemies. It gives a final goal to the player, and a idea of how much time is left to the end. Also, showing the time after dying gives the player a reference to surpass for the next play.
• I limited the scope to the very minimum. No intro, no ending (but a “You Win” banner), nothing out from the game itself. That allowed me to reach the next bullet point:
• I finished the game! Really proud of this one. It works giving a complete experience to the player. Although too hard, It’s easy to understand and easy to play, and with enough practice is beatable.

How to continue the game