Ludum Dare 41 Postmortem

We did really well! The team is super stoked about this score! It’s the best one we’ve gotten so far!

In honor of our score and all the great attention we’ve gotten, I’ve decided to write my first ever postmortem. Sorry in advance if its a little rambly.

Origin of the Ideas

Dragoon Drop came from a discarded idea we had had previously. We’d thought a bit about making a live-action card game/ 2d fighter. It was one of those ideas that was too ridiculous to explore, but when the incompatible genre theme came up, we decided that it was a good place to start.

Here’s the actual Discord message that outlined the game:

“You have a hand of cards that refreshes every turn. You’re in a situation where there’s a swordsman in front of you with a sword poised, there’s a goblin diving at you above, and a spike trap behind you. Each round is broken into 6 beats (or some number), you play 1-2 cards per beat, in the order you want to. you play a dash back, a dash back, a jump forward, a strike, and a strike. Character dashes back into the spike trap (which springs after 1 beat, so he’s safe so far), the swordsman stabs and misses, the goblin moves closer, 2nd beat you dash back again, the spike trap pops, the swordsman is still in cooldown, the goblin falls on the spike trap. 3rd beat you jump over the impaled goblin and land in front of the swordsman. 4th beat you strike the swordsman, 5th beat you strike him again.

The game is just a generated situation like this over and over again, with card rewards.

and deck customization.”

What Went Wrong

4 Beat System

By day 2 we had a little prototype together. At that point the game worked on a 4 beat system, where you would lay out up to 4 cards that would play out in order. This forced the player to think about the game in 4 step increments. This played out pretty badly, because if you made a little mistake on beat 1 or 2, then you’d take a ton of damage from spikes or the basic walker enemies (which didn’t have a cooldown at that point, so they’d just keep running into you).

The 4 beat system also required the player to select which direction the cards were going to be played in by selecting little arrows to the right or left of them, which got really tedious really quickly.

Card potency and Movement

I’m pretty sure the first cards we made were “Step: Move 1”, and “Strike: Attack.” With those as baselines, you can imagine that the other cards were pretty unimpressive. Sure, moving was precise, but it took forever and it wasn’t very dynamic. We eventually decided that we’d rather the player be forced to move too much than be struggling to move enough. We probably haven’t gone extreme enough in the movement direction, as I think the game can still be a little sluggish at times.

We also gave a lot of the cards downsides in the form of Warm Ups and Cooldowns. So you’d have to time your cards out. This was especially difficult to navigate with the beat system. You’d play a card with WU 1, so the beat before the beat you played the card would be crossed out, because you’d be caught up in warm up for that beat.

At some point, we got rid of warm ups and cool downs, then later we got rid of the beat system all together. It was at that point that the core gameplay became what it is.

What Went Right

A lot of the games best features came about from quick, seemingly unimportant decisions.

Drag and Drop

When we dropped the 4 beat system, we needed a way to choose which direction to play cards. We didn’t want to make dedicated left and right cards, because we were afraid players would end up with a bunch of cards they didn’t need. So we just went with dragging them to the right or the left of the protagonist, which I think worked out really well. We might run into challenges later if we want cards to target things more specifically, or in different ways, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Bopping Enemies

We were pretty worried that our game’s genres weren’t going to be incompatible enough, so we were insistent on adding platforming elements. This led to jumping, which led to falling. Andrew asked the group what should happen if you land on an enemy, and we just kind of defaulted to bouncing off of it and dealing damage. At the time I don’t think we realized how important to the game this was going to be. It acts as a way to get free movement, damage, and jumping, and kind of becomes the characters primary means of travel (so long as there are enemies around).

What next?

We are working on expanding the game! It’s been really amazing and encouraging how much attention and feedback we’ve been getting, so thank you to everyone who left us comments and to the youtubers who played it!

We’ve been working on a plan to improve upon and expand the game, and it’s still pretty up in the air, but we have some basic goals in mind.

Make it harder

Let’s face it, the game gets pretty easy once you get the hang of it. The game needs more variety and harder challenges.

Specifically, we want the enemies to be smarter and for the game to be more densely packed with danger. When the player is in the middle of a fight, each move should have to be very carefully considered.

Squad Based Enemies

We have a plan to make enemies work in squads with one-another. Currently the enemies just kind of murder one-another if they get jumbled up. We intend on making enemies that pay attention to each other and to traps in the environment. Enemies will still be able to be hurt by each other and traps, it’s just going to take a lot more player influence to get it to happen.

More Cards, and Possibly Trinkets of some Kind

Obviously we need more cards. And not just more cards that shuffle around move, draw, and attack, but we need some more unique abilities.

We have… some ideas…

Trinkets or equipment would be cool, too! Mostly just little stuff that would influence your character slightly, like, “when you vanquish an enemy, the next card you play has quick.” Stuff like that.

Stay in Touch!

We’re not really sure when the next version of the game is going to be available, but its coming! If you want to keep up with what you’re doing, follow us on one of these:  https://www.patreon.com/Romi, https://twitter.com/JoeHasDiedGames.

Thanks a ton for playing!

-Joe