ferra retrospective
i made ferra with miredly and we came #3rd overall in the jam of 121 entries!! #2nd for most fun! im happy with this
before ferra i was in a sink & id not released anything in years. i came into this project with the expectation of making something pretty bad. it ended up being way, way better than i'd hoped, and watching friends mash replay on it was worth all the effort
starting out
even before starting, we knew we wanted to try something new. we used Monogame, an entirely new framework to both of us with no past code to build on top of, so it was quite a challenge to get started
the vision was "frantic top down shooter"
i made a quick character controller & gameobject system, and with that, miredly made the first boss
steal and shuffle
just before the project, miredly was doing an "ultimate" (some ffxiv thing idk) and showed me a boss fight. the gameplay loop looked cool having big areas to dodge, weaving in mechanics etc. we wanted to use the same idea and were dead set on huge floor attacks
this turned out great and fit our vision of "frantic" perfectly
if we were making a pure regular bullet hell but set in an arena, the idea is to make almost surgical micro-movements like touhou. i feel like this doesn't fit the vision of "frantic"
however, with gigantic sweeping floor attacks that spawn right on top of you, you WILL have to get moving!!!!!!!!!!!!! that's kinda frantic
here's what our big floor attacks looked like:
super subtractive scoping
we had a lot of ideas, and we had to be ruthlessly subtractive. it almost felt like a bad decision at the time, but if we had not been ruthless, we would have made a bad game, or even had no game to show at all
to interpret the jam theme "makeshift" we brainstormed makeshifty mechanics:
- huge chunks scrap falling off the bosses which u can use as a bullet shield
- different random ammo drops - the last 2 you pick up get combined to create a unique kind of bullet
- makeshift guns where you tape together multiple different guns and inherit the attributes of both (shotgun minigun!?)
i drafted out the first 2 and they weren't fun. they sounded like good ideas, but in practice it doesn't add much, and instead was just noise, which made the game messy and confusing
it's difficult to notice when a mechanic simply "doesn't add much", and really hard to justify getting rid of it after the work is done
it's easy to notice if something's bad and makes your game worse, but if it's simply just "whatever", then unfortunately, it still should probably not exist. small things like that add noise, add code to maintain, add mechanics that influence any new ideas you have... i think id rather remove things like this and instead spend bandwidth working on the big important stuff, and in this case it paid off a loooot
having a ton of axes in a game sounds good on paper, but even if we could technically implement all of it, we'll have a thousand unrefined features that clash, confuse or dilute the game. id prefer to have a tiny set of mechanics that people can immediately understand, then surprise them with depth
agency
i hate "easy" "medium" "hard" difficulty selection so much i feel insane. there are more elegant ways around this i think. to let casuals and supergamers both have fun, this is what we did:
for casual gamers, the goal is to beat the bosses and finish the game. you have a huge health pool so it's very forgiving, but this means even casual players can see and experience the final boss and say they fully completed it. (in retrospect this was actually too casual, they had wayyy too much hp)
for supergamers, the goal is to beat the dev times. getting hit increases your time hugely, so it incentivises never getting hit once - a very supergamer thing to do! this became a lot of people's reason for mashing replay
for hypersupermegagamers, everyone got competitive and fought for world record
some absolute viking got this time. 61 seconds for the entire game?! i never came close to getting this time
art direction
i had a few director-y moments which i was satisfied with
art direction is hard, we talked about making the bosses huge scrappy mechs, but the ideas just weren't gelling with me.. i just wasn't born with the gene that makes you love big mechs i think
i had a meltdown, then just settled for something i always do, which is draw cute girls with big swords. i think leaning into stuff i unapologetically love is good motivation. and i love the juxtoposition of pretty timid-looking characters being cool or having huge weapons
i also love homogeneous, thematic color palettes - for ferra, every color on screen is color-picked from a pic of a molten iron crucible. i think it suited the vibe well
music direction
miredly absolutely carried the music department and got a huge stream of compliments for their music. my one contribution to the music was the sort of "seed" of the vibe we wanted for this game. i gave them this;
https://youtu.be/HD4dUMDWM58?t=182
the rhythmic, mechanical vibe of it just suited the idea of clunky mechs and big machinery so well. miredly took that locus and made it way better than i imagined, the soundtrack rocks
but yea
im so so stoked to have something released after not making anything for so long. it was hard work, but it's given me more energy to work harder in future
tysm for reading and playing ferra!