Hello there ! An other update, an other game ?
Yes, the Doom clone is here!
Well, more like Quake. Kinda...
This halloween, I entered the Itch 2024 Scream Jam and challenged myself to make our 3rd game on the list - the Doom clone.
After an intensive week of sleepless work, it was finally here:
Dungeon Sugar, a halloween wave based retro shooter !
This time around, to save time, I started from the Unreal engine fps base template. I also tried replicating the PS1 style but with UE5's added global illumination:
You can check the game if you are curious:
https://mariannes-itch-games.itch.io/dungeon-sugar
It was so much fun participating in this jam (even solo). Over 500 games were submitted!! I tried to play as many as I could, there was a lot of good stuff.
Turns out, making a game during a jam seems to be a very good way to get ''free'' eyeballs on a project. Lots of people played Dungeon Sugar - it's my most successfull game so far, by a lot!
Don't get me wrong, it's not good. But we're slowly getting there.
My takeaways from this project:
-The first release is the launch of your game.
The game launched in a bit of a rough shape (it was working alright but had some bugs and balancing issues). After all, I only had a week to make it. I thought, it's fine, I'll just fix it all in the coming days. But then people started playing it, and some people even made videos about it! It was really cool, but all the bugs and weird moments were now immortalized in time for all to see...no matter how much it's fixed later.
So yeah, make sure you release in a good shape, because as soon as it's out, that's what people will see and remember.
-Yes, players are gonna do that.
When something isn’t 100% implemented or doesn’t quite work as intended and you tell yourself ‘’so what, no one is gonna do that.’’
Yes. Yes, they’re gonna do that.
In my game, the sword was a bit buggy. When swinging multiple times really fast, it would sometimes re-equip the gun while swinging, looking really weird and doing no damage. I knew about the bug, but thought, no one is going to spam it that fast anyways. Boy I was wrong. Some people really, really wanted to use only the sword, and because it sometimes didn’t work, they had to spam it even faster, making the bug worse.
If you know about a bug in your game, assume right away your players are going to find it (they’ll find some you don’t even know about too).
-Balancing is really hard, and a lot of work.
I’m not sure why, I assumed that using values that sounded right would just work. It didn’t.
There wasn’t that much to balance: Size, damage and speed for two ennemies, ammo, health, the amount of damage my two different weapons make and how long they take to shoot. On top of that, the difficulty needs to go up wave after wave.
Sounds simple enough. Turns out, it was a lot of work to balance all of this and I underestimated how much I would have to play, replay, tweak and replay again.
I remember hearing in a gdc talk that if you have to tweak something, tweak it by at least 20%. Lower than that, you won’t notice the difference enough and you’ll be tweaking and testing forever. That is very true and one of the best tips I could give.
-Playtest your stuff asap – and playtest LIVE (and shut up).
Pretty self-explanatory. Don't wait. Your mechanics are in with basic UI ? Start playtesting! Even if it's just 2 or 3 people, they'll find a bunch of general issues already.
Also, live testing in Discord is the way to go.
For this game, I got a few friends to playtest before the end of the jam. Some playtested on their side and sent written feedback via discord. I’ll be honest, that wasn’t super helpful. I think they were trying to be nice and it wasn't useful feedback.
I got 4 people to playtest live on Discord and that was really, really insightful!
I could see every single little pain point, every thing that didn’t quite work. I could also see how the game felt to play in general. Are they having fun ? Are they bored ? Are they annoyed ? Are they laughing? You can only know that through a live call.
Ok, next up, we are getting serious. An Elder Scrolls Arena clone !