Tiny Ice Dungeon Post-Mortem

Preface

It's been nearly a month since Kenney Jam 2021 and I thought it'd be a good idea to look back on our submission and see what went well and what went wrong. I'll try to keep it short and concise since I don't like to dwell on past projects too much.

The Good

• The core concept of the game is something we're both content with, it was a fun and interesting idea to make into an reality and it fit into the theme very well. After conceptualization of the idea, not much changed when turned into reality.
• The actual work on the project went very smoothly and was very well planned out, we've got plenty of breaks and never really had to work very late into the night to finish anything up. The dreaded "crunch" that is such a big problem in this line of work was never really a factor.

The Bad

• While the core concept is interesting, it's hard to visualize how the room will look like after a rotation. This makes it so that people aren't really thinking about the rotations they're doing and are more so just trying stuff out until something works.
• Designing levels around the concept is very hard since there are tons of ways to break the intended progression path, finding these "holes" and filling them up requires a ton of playtesting and you will most likely still miss stuff. The ice floor idea was fortunately a blessing in disguise since it reduced the number of spaces a player can stand significantly.
• - The order of levels wasn't too great at easing you into the rotation mechanic.

Conclusion

While there was some stuff that could've been handled better I am still very content with the result. I am looking forward to doing another game jam sometime.

Final Notes

• I've added 2 more levels to the game and squashed some of the bugs found in the original release.
• I've made the source-code public under the MIT license, you can find that here.