Super Shirtless Guy World Postmortem

Back in December I started a platformer prototype. In February I entered it into a marathon game jam, which is an exercise where participants enter an existing project that they'd like to push themselves to finish and everyone presents their work a month later.

What became of this project is Super Shirtless Guy World, which I consider to be a massive failure despite the game working and being relatively bug free. Basically no one understands it or likes it. In this post I'm going to try to cope but also figure out how I might avoid several pitfalls in the future.

Why People Don't Like The Game

"I think you're breaking a cardinal rule in game design. You can have difficult obstacles, you can have a difficult controller. But you have both."

Player Controller

The game wasn't designed to be difficult to control but I can see how people think it is. It was designed so that you can do almost any jump if executed correctly. But there are some things that those two different design philosophies have in common.

I was blinded by not thinking of it as the controls fight back. In my mind it was, "It feels good that you can clear any gap or distance if you input correctly." I still think it feels good to do that. But I admit that the inverse of that is feeling out of control.

So to me, who knows everything, it feels amazing to exploit jumps you shouldn't be able to make. To the player, who knows nothing, it feels like being crippled.

Esoteric Mechanics

The primary influence of this game is kaizo Mario, a genre of modification levels for Super Mario World. This is a genre that probably most people would consider unplayable on its own from how difficult it is, but that isn't the problem.

I could pitch this same game to the kaizo community and they probably wouldn't receive it any better, and the reason why is that kaizo levels are created by and for players who have been obsessed with the same game for decades. Every player of kaizo mario can give you an autistic-grade info dump on every intricacy of that game. The only person who can do that about my game is me.

Level Design

This somewhat ties into the above section. The levels are designed around esoteric knowledge of the game, and while I actively tried to minimize doing that as much as possible, there is an extraordinary gap between what the creator of a game knows and what the players know. No matter how hard you try to minimize this gap it's going to be there. I tried to do the thing where you teach the player how to clear obstacles through level design but I failed at doing that.

Whose Fault Is It?

Mine

It should go without saying but it's my fault. It's always the developers' fault when players don't like the game.

Virtually every gamedev is at war with an impulse in their mind that says, "Players don't understand this because they are stupid! Clearly this wasn't intended for these people and obviously they don't get it!"

But this is wrong.

A lot of things in life are not fair. For example you could get a speeding ticket for going over 5 MPH and a lot of people would agree that such a minor infraction maybe doesn't deserve a citation. But you have a choice to say, "This is all my fault," because in practice, you're the only one who can do anything to prevent it from happening in the future.

This example isn't entirely similar but it illustrates what I mean.

Lessons Learned

I'm not saying that all of these will apply to every game developer. Maybe some game designers have thought about these problems better than I have and know how to avoid the pitfalls. These lessons apply to me and where I'm at. Maybe someone out there will relate.

On Difficulty

Every game I've made thus far has been intended to be a difficult experience that is balanced around my enjoyment. This is a problem.

Every time I find myself saying, "You need to nerf this! You need to nerf this!" Even I'm tilted by the initial difficulty.

So I nerf and I nerf until finally it feels just right, but as we've established, it feels right for me who knows everything about the game and has been grinding on the most fucked up difficulty that the player never even sees.

I like difficult games and if I continue to make games that are supposed to be difficult, I'm going to keep running into this problem.

On Playtesting

My projects so far are not commercial projects. There's no budget for thorough play testing and as such I need to stop working on games that require a large amount of play testing such as a precision platformer.

That being said, the benefit of having even one person's input at every major stage of development, such as after finishing player controller but before moving to level design, would be so huge. I need to take advantage of this in the future.

The reason gamedevs often don't do this is because they know the game kind of sucks. They think when it's polished and ready to show, it will be a better time to get input and they won't have to go through the hell of the person having nothing good to say. But it's critical to hear that.

On Advice From the Internet

There are a lot of people online and in gamedev communities who are going to offer criticism and advice from the context of having never played your game. They're going to act like the second coming of Jesus whose father in heaven is video games, and you have to ignore these people.

If there is someone who really wants to give input for you, you need to get them a playable demo. Without that, nothing they have to say is valuable.

The reason I say this is... towards the end, I knew that my game was not like other platformers and the chances that players would be confused by it was very high. So I built a system to have text boxes that would explain different mechanics.

Is that a perfect solution? No, but given the time left until the deadline and the confusing nature of the game, I should have done it to make sure that people understood how to play.

But people told me repeatedly that platformers don't need to have their mechanics explained. They pointed me to all the classic platformers as evidence and successfully talked me out of using text boxes to explain mechanics. Even when I protested that, "You know, my game is a lot different from Mega Man," their responses were, "Pft, it's a platformer, it's all the same, no text boxes."

I would agree with the assessment that needing text boxes to explain esoteric mechanics suggests underlying problems, but at the point of the deadline when there was nothing else to do about it, I should have made the call that I knew was right for my game instead of listening to people on the Internet.

The Silver Lining

There are a lot of salvageable systems that were built for this game. The collision, the level editor to game engine pipeline, the keybind menu, the customizable player skins, and more. When I'm ready I could probably flip this game into something more simple and likeable. While there are no plans yet, I'm already working through different ideas, and it's only matter of time before I start something.

It's true also that only a small number of people have tried the game, so maybe not everyone will hate it. But I'd say it's pretty likely someone will.

Try the Game

You've been warned I guess.

web and desktop versions available on itch.io

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