Summary

This game has been in the works for the past couple of years now, although I only joined the team back in August as part of my college capstone project. I was predominantly a gameplay programmer for the team, which was a great experience. I worked a lot on crystals in the game, which are your main tools for attacking, defending, healing, etc. For example, one crystal that I implemented is called Fire Strike, which spawns a fire at the crystal's location, and then spreads it out in a plus shape. It applies burn to enemies as well.

Development

I'll sort of divide the development into first and second semester, because they were pretty distinct in terms of what I worked on.

In the first semester, I pretty much tried to pump out a new crystal implementation every week (their design and basic numbers had already been established, so I just had to write code to match the design). This wasn't too bad, sometimes crystals would take an extra week or two if they got really full of bugs to fix, but we made it a priority to get as many implemented as possible. We ended up getting around 17 or 18 done by the end of the semester with the help of another programmer, which the team was satisfied with. We started with a total of 30 in the design document, but along the way decided that some either weren't necessary or just wouldn't be fun.

In the second semester, I pivoted to a bit of a flex role for a little while. I did some bug fixing, enemy spawning additions and adjustments, new enemy implementations, object pooling, and so on. The biggest thing I worked on, though, was an extension of crystals, called synergies. Like it sounds, having two crystals created a synergy that had a certain effect, like duplicating a projectile, spawning a laser, etc. It was nice to branch out to some different tasks during this semester, but synergy implementation ended up feeling a lot like crystal implementation, since actually activating the synergies was implemented by someone else. I also would have liked to experiment with something a little more unfamiliar, like tech art or shaders. Most of the things I did were relatively within my comfort zone, and a lot can be boiled down to instantiating prefabs in some form or another:

Time Crunch

I think around the last month or so of development, we started to panic and try to implement as many features as possible, because we still had a lot of ideas that we wanted to add and we felt like the game needed it. Supercharging, for example, was added within the last month or two, and I think the code itself works well, but we had very little time at the end to tweak it and make it feel like a core part of the gameplay. This also happened with the projectile-spawning enemies that I implemented, which we never got a chance to really playtest or get a feel for how strong they were. There were some things during this period that I think were good, though, like adding more enemy animations. It was more of a polishing/juiciness addition that I think we could have done even more of:

Design

This leads to one of the biggest downfalls of the game, which was the gameplay design direction (or maybe lack thereof). We didn't have a dedicated designer on the team, so we all sort of relied on our pre-established design documents. I think this ran into problems because 1. Our documents probably weren't detailed or explicit enough to make all of our design decisions for us, and 2. We didn't really know if our game design was good, and didn't stop to re-analyze because we were mostly all programmers or artists.

As for specific design issues I might change if I could do it again, I would probably extend the length of a run by quite a bit, make it significantly easier to gain new crystals, and maybe increase the amount of crystals you can have at one time. I think what makes this game fun is getting a bunch of different crystals and seeing them synergize (both directly with the synergy system, and indirectly through gameplay), and there was a lot standing between the players and this experience.

Looking at the game now, it feels easy to notice these things, but in the moment, it's difficult, especially when you're constantly adding new features. I think we made a mistake of looking at player feedback and just assuming “this won't be an issue once we implement xyz”, rather than looking at this feedback and analyzing the overall state of the gameplay.

Release

Releasing on Steam was mostly out of my hands, and was handled by our team leader. I think we did some things well, like having achievements, trailers, screenshots, and good art on the page. But I think we probably made a mistake by not doing much testing before release (both balance testing and bug testing). Finding game-breaking bugs after release was rough because we had to disrupt our schedule to fix it ASAP, and balance testing might've helped us catch some design issues before release.

I think we definitely could have done more marketing as well. I wasn't involved with this at all, so I don't know how much our team did, but I know we could've found some roguelite discords or subreddits that allow promotion in order to reach our target audience better.

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed working with this team on this project. This was the first full-fledged game I've worked on, as my other projects were solo and meant to be classroom exercises more than anything. Working with a team was definitely more difficult than I expected, due to the occasional disagreements and arguments that paused our progress and created awkward situations, but I think our team did a good job all things considered.

Am I more likely to pursue a career in the game industry after this? I'm still not completely sure. Like I mentioned, I did like the team environment, and working on games is a very cool experience. But my skillset might not be best-suited for gameplay programming. I would like to try to work on something like tools or testing in the future, if given the opportunity. I think this experience definitely taught me that there are a ton of very skilled game devs out there, and that everyone should be playing to their strengths to make a game work well.