Lost in the Dark | Post-Mortem

I  am (Matéo) writing this Post-Mortem a year after the game jam mainly to understand and analyse what went wrong in the development of the game. But if you are passing by, hello!   :)

The theme was "Wonders of the Deep", so we started with the idea of the depths of the soul. The character has to mourn his dead wife and to do so he has to go through all the stages of grief, which were represented by a level each.

In the end the theme doesn't stand out at all, apart from the fact that you go down into the depths of a cave (which was deliberate, we wanted to reinforce the idea of grief by having the player constantly go down to the last level where he comes back up to the surface, as if he was coming out of his grief, like Celeste with the mountain)   the theme is only very little dealt with. There is also the character's "wife" represented by the ghost at the beginning of the game and then as a boss at the end of the game. In my memory, his ghost is supposed to represent the remains of his wife in his memories, that's why she is the one who guides him in the tutorial. She ends up getting angry and asks us to slaughter everyone because in the imagination of the character, his wife does not accept that he can have a new relationship. And the same at the end when he has to beat the ghost of his wife, as if he had to beat her to move on.  
Even though I think it might sound a bit cliché now, I think that the original idea is not fundamentally bad but it mostly suffered from a lack of time given to it.

We were too ambitious for a game of this kind, we started the game jam with the idea of making a big game, without really knowing that a game jam is more oriented for small concepts. On top of that, the team didn't agree on some points and so we made some mistakes in our choices. We added a double jump, a wall jump and 5 different levels instead of focusing on the core game with one level. Because of that we didn't have time to take care of the sound design, which I think is very important for the immersion of the player.
We also wanted a level that moves forward by itself in rhythm with the music and in connection with a stage of grief. This would have given much more life to the level and would have developed the theme much better. At the beginning we even wanted to make a level selection menu which we fortunately abandoned. With a year and a (much more successful) game jam of additional experiences, it would have been the worst idea to make a menu haha.

Here is our idea for the menu, levels that go down to the depth of the soul:

In the end the game is very flat, not fun, full of design problems and still has a lot of bugs. With levels without lives (the flames don't even kill!).

Nevertheless, we have a very good memory of it, and it had to start somewhere. And the game is still pretty good for only 30 hours without a game engine.   In high school I was taught to make an opening at the end, so let's go for new game jams and new adventures! (yes I didn't have many points in writing haha)

PS: I wrote this devlog at 2am the day before a midterm, it's very stupid of me but passion before all, right? no? Ok RIP my exams