Snowberry Update Post-Mortem

The Fun

Sliding in Style
Sliding is something I love to have in my games since it introduces a lot of potential emergent gameplay. Sliding I used a bit in the levels often used in risky alternative routes the player could take that were riskier; but more rewarding and faster. Sliding also made me think about how other game objects would interact with these sliding tiles. Moveable blocks will slide along them or they can be used to traverse slippery tiles without sliding (depends on the block type), enemies currently don't; I have to update enemies quite a  bit down the line. Sliding was a fun mechanic that took a little bit of time to get up and running smoothly but was well worth it.

Falling in Fun
I was a bit worried about the falling mechanic and how hard it would be to implement. Thankfully it turned out really well really quick! There really wasn't any bugs, it was something I put together in around 10 minutes.

The Bugs

You Little Switch!
I created switches that you could hit with your sword and they acted as the buttons that made it in the game and didn't damage your sword. However, not only was there a weird bug where no matter what I did over 5+ hours collisions of the sword were not being detected. I concluded this was probably an engine bug since I'm using a beta for the Godot engine and just kept buttons. Upon further thinking about switches I realized if the player had already used their sword before reaching the switch they wouldn't have been able to solve the puzzle using the switch. So, overall they just didn't work and they wouldn't have been fun either.

Bad Slime Slurp
Unfortunately this wasn't a friendly slime from Dragon Quest; but rather a game breaking little slime; literally little slime and that was the issue. So, I made normal slimes one size, then fast slimes were a little smaller; and strong slimes were a bit bigger than the normal slimes. I only had one floor possibility that had fast slimes at this point that this bug kept occuring. The first couple times I couldn't tell if it was from something in another level when it was transitioning or if it was something in the core code; so I kept replaying to figure it out. I started to notice these little slimes were moving into the walls which made me think "What the hell are you doing?! And how?". I spent about a few minutes thinking of what could be causing the crash and found the solution. The slimes were scaled down but the wall raycasts they use to detect walls were also scaled down and weren't reaching one tile away from them. So I had to go and make sure all the slimes had raycasts that were reaching a tile away and it fixed the critical bug. And that's how a bad slime became a less bad slime!

The Ugly

Graphic Overhaul
I wanted to do an entire overhaul of the graphics in the game and stopped after making a staircase and sword with breaking graphics. This in itself would make for a heavy update since I'm not the most graphically talented person, so this was definitely far more than I could do along with the other things in the update. And gameplay was the main target since there's no point in better graphics without fun gameplay.

Operation VOX
I wanted to have a bunch of voice lines for every character and have this really lore rich world that's teased through the characters. Once again taking the time to write good dialogue would've taken too much time away from gameplay development. So tons of new voice lines and story elements will come in a future update!

Personal Emergencies  
Due to some unforeseen complications a lot of time was taken away from the development of this update and is a big reason why things didn't pan out exactly as expected.

The Verdict

The Snowberry update is an overhaul to the game and does bring a bit of fresh pixels to the game since it's jam release. While it may not be everything I wanted it to be; there's time to fix everything up in the proper updates.

There were a two big reasons that this update didn't turn out exactly as planned. Emergencies in which I could not control; and the scope vs the amount of time I gave myself for this update.

In the future updates will be more finished before announcement to give them proper treatment. This will allow for better updates and a better practice for the future of this project.

I'll be posting a proper roadmap of this project later today!