Hi there!

This postmortem is quite long so... If you don't want to read it then no problem! But here we go.

You know, it's very hard to make a platformer game that just hits right. Where the player can intuitively feel the movements with minor adjustments to the controls. A platformer game where you can just feel the movements, can tell where the character will land or attack, understand visually the responsive feedback of your decisions, yada yada.

What makes a good platformer anyways?

I wouldn't say I'm pretty qualified in this subject, since this in itself is a whole rabbit hole to talk about, and given that I have only researched and played few articles and games on platformer games, then yeah, I am not qualified but I'm here to talk about the processes that my team did, what struggles that we faced, and the things that just went right.

Let's address first the elephant on the room.

What Went Wrong?

Deadline

As this game is a game project for an assignment AND a submission for one of the events held at my college, CIIT. Which was called Animatrix. This event is in part of the Festival of Learning 2024. I won't bore you the details but to summarize it, we were given at most a week and a half to conceptualize, prototype, and build either a 30 seconds to 2 minutes animation or game. Of course we chose game, I wouldn't be able to make this postmortem if our group did an animation haha. 

The time constraint for the game is quite tight due to the deadline, it's not comparable to a game jam definitely but given the case where our artists have little to no experience in creating assets for games, us programmers have to guide them in using which art softwares, canvas sizes, and technical details to fit the assets to the game we had in mind. Here, it is a pixel art platformer game. But our artists did such a phenomenal job that I have to brag about it later down the post!

The deadline also got in the way of All Saint's and All Souls day, which in a normal class, would not give a deadline on a holiday break to pay respects to the dead.  I don't know how it got approved so here we are. Me and some friends were not able to go the the graves of our relatives to pay respect because of this project.

Management

As the development starts, the project manager should know what each member is doing, what they will do, and what roles do they have to do. Me being the project manager (at least what I think I did) have to my standards failed but a success in disguise? The reason why I say it's a fail but a success in disguise is that I left our team to their own devices aside from the initial briefing of their tasks. That sounds like a bad take but the members are very much responsive and active, so much so that I would recommend being in a group with them again and again.

Though I would have preferred if we used Trello for organizing current tasks because later down the road the things to keep track off will get confusing. That's what happened to me hahaha. On the day of the submission before the deadline got moved 2 days, I got so out of touch on the tasks our members are doing that I forgot what I was supposed to do.

Now that's out of the bag, let's go to a more lighthearted topic and talk about what went right!

What Went Right?

Player Mechanics

What makes a good platformer? Honestly I don't know. I did talk about it on the first few paragraphs of this postmortem but there's no single one true answer on what makes a good platformer. It really depends on the concept of the game, the environment and level design, the atmosphere, and many other variables that I may not be able to count for.  

This blog post by Anchit Sharma covers a pretty good example for 2D Platformer game feel tips. That's where I mostly reference mechanics for the platformer, since Sharma covers the most commonly used mechanics for platformer movements. Aside from the mechanics, you really have to just play with magic numbers to make the movement just feel right, as well as letting your team members play test for more feedback.

The one specific mechanic that I really like when I implemented it is the wall jump. This is a combination of sticking to the wall and jumping. It just feels right when you press the keyboard combinations. Since this is not a tech discussion, I will not divulge further, however, if you are curious then feel free to message me for talks!

Level and Environment Design

I did not handle the level and platform design, but I really liked the current level design. It is simple and leads you intuitively without guessing where to go. You just know the game wants you to go in that direction. Though there is some areas that are pretty challenging but still doable with some skill (I'm looking at you triple layered platform).

One of the sections I like is where you have to wall jump to reach to the next platform. It feels fun doing it again and again. Another is the background. If you observe the background, you can see particles falling down. They are made using shader code and not particle system, using noise and other implementations to mimic falling particles. It's pretty fun creating shaders especially if it's used for the final product!

To Our Beloved Artists

I hecking love you all! The art assets are so good! The assets are uniform and in line with pixel art for the entire game. I highly recommend working with them given the chance! They made the game look so good and well done. The animation also rocks! Thank you very much artists! Kurt (the player) pops out of the background, platforms, and enemies in a good way. You won't get lost which is which. ALSO, the enemies are cute as heck! Really loved the bat animation.

Speedrun?

Well we implemented a speedrun timer just for the fun of it so feel free to use it hahaha. I just thought, "Hey let's do speedrun timer!" And that's how speedrun was born for Fright Night. It wasn't even planned! It's just a spurt out of moment when I decided to add the speedrun timer. You can brag it to us developers by posting it in the comments or other social media platforms!

Woah... That's a lot of talking hahaha. Although there are some struggles, especially the deadline and us complaining about it, overall I had fun in working in this project as the lead programmer and technical artist. The game is a working prototype so there are bugs out there that are unaccounted for as well as known bugs but us programmers have no time to fix it but we hope that you enjoy the game overall! 

It's a precision platformer that takes practice and skill to reach the end! 

Plans for future development? 

Probably not. Though I'm not sure since we haven't talked about what we will do about the game after we submitted it for the Animatrix event. We might if one of the team members really want to further develop the game.

Thank you for playing the game and reading this postmortem.

Feel free to contact me if you are curious about something!

-HehNiceArt