Whack A Slime - Postmortem

A couple of months after my last project, I saw Devtober as the perfect chance to go back to gamedev, after all, a whole month to develop a game is quite attractive (and a good challenge) to someone who doesn't have much time due to responsibilities, compared to another jams which last less. And so, after reviewing my ideas stash, I picked one which I felt confident with my current skills, a simple first person dungeon crawler.

This might not be a surprise but whack-a-slime was never the intended project. It was, mostly, different.

With the game genre in mind, and a day before devtober started, I made some simple mockups to have a foundation, of what the project was going to be. I always had a low scope in mind for it, the "store" and "overworld" were there just to test the font to use and the UI. The plan was to have a simple dungeon crawling experience with a story to give a little context.

Story wise, I already had a plot for it, and wrote the script for what would be the prologue and the first chapter intro.

"In the past, fear ruled over the world,
distrust!, paranoia! an inminent danger stalked both sides,
eventually, war broke and chaos arose from the depths the earth"

This is a little part of the prologue if I had stick to the original plan. I still got a lot to learn about writing, but though it was difficult to put my ideas in paper (or text editor in my case haha) it was definetly fun, and felt satisfied with the results.

The sprite with the sword was going to be used, but chose to use the stick instead for this new direction.

However due to reasons I'll explain below, the story got scrapped, and went for a rather simplistic approach, pretty much telling the player what was going on and what to do.

How the map looked at the beginning.

Gameplay was kept mostly the same, the player can move across the dungeon, attack the enemies, dodge their attacks. Not much here.

I consider this comparison between the intended and the final game important, just to show how much something can change during development

What went wrong

Let's start off with this:

While the most important parts were finished, such as dungeon navigation, enemies, the combat; due to poor planning and being a little too relaxed, some daysweren't as productive as they could've been. My to-do list was an disorganized amalgathion of all the features, not keeping them separated affected my decision making and I was lost on what to do next. And there were days that I'd do a little something and call it a day, when there was no reason not to do more.

If I were to list what more could've been done then it would be this:

• More enemies with different behaviours (keeping it simple of course)
• More than just one level
• More polished art, code, etc.
• A story for context instead of just text

What went right

As I mentioned earlier, I felt confident that there wouldn't be much problem developing the game, and there wasn't; there were challenges of course but nothing that got me stuck for more than a couple of hours, thanks due to keeping it simple.

I realized my mistakes and turned the tables this last week, re-planning my to do list, choosing the most important aspects while putting aside the non crucial ones, not getting distracted, it made development much easier.

I guess coming up with for a reason for the game to "happen" and using what I got was good to, as simple as it turned out. Beating
up slimes just because felt incomplete to me.

Even though it wasn't what I intended, participating and finishing the jam was the most important part, otherwise all those days would've been in vain and I wouldn't have this skeleton which will be used for the original idea.
some day. Not to mention what I learned, I can do much better now.

That's all for this postmortem.

I want to thank my everyone who followed the development progress, the folks at the pixeljoint's discord server for the art tips, the people who tried out the game and you, reader, for your time reading this. Thanks you.

Try Whack A Slime here

This is just my 3rd project and there are much more to come.