Gravity Grapple | 28/07/2020
Gravity Grapple was made for Score Space Jam #9 and was my second game jam submission!
I tried not to fall into the trap of doing something way too big, meaning that I can learn the lessons and move on in order to improve my future games. I think the two main lessons I learned were keeping the difficulty manageable for new players and not sacrificing too much theme in the pursuit of originality.
First things first: difficulty. Reading the feedback I got from Gravity Grapple it soon became obvious that people were struggling to get used to the mechanics (namely the slow build up of momentum and grappling onto small objects). While developing the game, I had become very accustomed to the games controls as I had not only made them myself, but also tested the game at least a hundred time over the course of creating it. Therefore, while I could fairly easily get a score upwards of 7000, looking at the leaderboard most players were struggling to get past 2000 - 3000. This combined with the fact that in a game jam, at least an online one, people (including me, if I'm honest) will not put a lot of time into learning a game. Because of this games without easy to grasp mechanics are less fun. I mean I don't have any data to back this up, but I would estimate this to be true. Its the same with downloadable games vs web builds, people are more likely to play an online game. Don't take this as me trying to deflect criticism, Gravity Grapples is not a perfect game, but the fact that webGL games are more likely to be played and instantly understandable mechanics are on average going to do better in a game jam are important points I will have to remember in the future. When scaling the games difficulty I will have to put myself in the position of a new player.
Secondly, sacrificing theme in the pursuit of originality. As soon as I saw the theme for the game jam was climbing I immediately thought of concepts like wall climbing, escaping from lava (in a Mario esk style), things like doodle jump or even something where you have to defend against enemies climbing up a hill or mountain. I thought these were quite obvious ideas so I wanted to distance myself from them as much as possible. However, looking back I don't think this was the right call. It isn't an originality jam - its a jam about climbing. While having a unique idea is definitely a good thing you don't want to be straying too far from the theme. I am writing this before the voting period ends, but if I had to guess the game will rank poorly on use of theme. My link to climbing is pretty strained and I think this will hurt the games score. Even something as simple as making you have to grapple upwards instead of to the side could of made a big difference - and while I could of done this I chose not to because I just felt like so much screen space was being wasted. I would have also probably had to slow down the game quite a lot to make it doable.
One final thing I want to mention is the presentation of the game. Just a few minutes customising the itch page can go a long way. Even though in the actual game jam I don't know how many people will visit it (seeing as you can just download the game from the submission page), I am very happy with the aesthetics and will never again leave my game pages at there default settings!