UGJ #102 Postmortem

UGJ #102 Results

Untitled Game Jam #102 is now over. The Shiftshaper development team and I would like to congratulate Shape Run for winning best overall! Please feel free to check out their submission, as well as all others who participated in this jam :)

Shiftshaper placed 3rd overall with a total of 2 ratings. Here is our submission page with all of our stats (also listed at the end of the post)

We received a lot of feedback from players of our game, and will now use that feedback to discuss what went right with out project, what went wrong, and how the future looks for Shiftshaper.

What went right?

Audio Experience

Logan of Mugiwara Music composed the soundtrack, which received critical acclaim from our player base. Additionally, the sound effects created by LegendofZubin were well received.

Visuals

Player feedback indicated that the aesthetics and art direction were generally well done, with many players citing the "visually appealing" color choices and modern DORFic sprites and tiles.

What went wrong?

Controls

The majority of players who we asked for feedback did not enjoy the control scheme of the game, with it feeling too difficult at times, and feeling too "unnatural" at others. Oftentimes the players would forget about certain controls until reminded by in-game tooltips.

Game and Level Design

Player feedback also cites the overall game and level design to be lacking in certain areas, with most players stating that there could have been more done to utilize the square shape transformation. Additionally, players felt that the overall difficulty curve of the game was too random, and that levels could be rearranged, added, or removed to improve the overall feel of the game difficulty.

Bugs, softlocks, and Performance

Overall there were only a few bugs reported after launch (with some even being considered fun and interesting to the players we received feedback from). Of the bugs reported however, are ones related to the interactions between the player shape and non-player shapes, and for the game performance becoming poor when being run in fullscreen mode in the HTML5 version of the game. In one case, a player accidentally got stuck on the first level due to being unable to move past the non-player circle in the level, which meant said player unfortunately had to restart the level from the beginning. Additionally, the physics engine seems to run poorly during the "ball pit level", causing some performance and game enjoyment issues.

What can we do next time?

For our next project, we will be considering everything that went right and wrong. Going forward, we will perform more rigorous game testing to ensure that the control scheme, level design, and gamefeel are all up to par with the expectations of our players. Additionally, should we design another physics-based game we will create new ways of controlling the player to make the game feel natural and satisfying to play.

The future of Shiftshaper

In the coming weeks, we plan to create an update to the game that implements changes to fix, and better match, player feedback from our initial release. We will be posting an update on the Shiftshaper itch.io page before the update is released, so make sure to follow SolidShibe's itch.io page for notifications.

We would like to thank you again for playing Shiftshaper, and we can't wait to create more fun projects!

- Solid

Submission Results

*Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.