Let’s talk about it

While plenty of the feedback from the jam is not in yet, I wanted to breakdown my feelings and thoughts on my own project.

What is Durgon Outpost?

Simply, Durgon Outpost is a dungeon crawler RPG(ish) set in a science fiction setting. The core gameplay consists mostly of walking to NPC, doing a task, and reporting back to unlock a door.

What went wrong?

As of writing this, there is only door. While scope creep is the major downfall of almost every game jam, I don’t think that was the case here. I am a programmer by trade and can get really into system development. In the early stages of the game jam, that was great building up modular and reusable code was super helpful. But later on in the jam, there were a ton of opportunities to implement content and give a full game feel, but that time was spent doing system work.

What went right?

I am have come away very happy about the way the game looks and feels. I’ve never sold myself as an art person, but it is very cool to be too see how much I have improved in this area. Music as well turned out excellent and I was glad to have gotten that bee

Ideas for improvement

1. Game Loop first - This is advice I always give to others that I also need to give myself in this case. For a game jam, the sooner you can play the game, the sooner you can improve it.

2. Test Tooling - I used Dialogic for this project and while it was super powerful, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to debug it.

3. More Focus - During this same weekend, I ended up spending about as much time on TetraForce as I did on Durgon Outpost. Might be worth fixing critical bugs ahead of game jam time, so there is less jumping between projects.

What’s next?

Since there was plenty of system development throughout this jam, I thought it might be a good idea to build on top of it a little bit to give it a more complete feel. This week, me along with a few friends, are doing a “jam” where we all put a little bit more time and polish into our Ludum Dare games.

More content coming soon!

I have a few more ambitious ideas on how to improve the game, but I’ll leave those to the future!

To stay in touch with my projects follow me on Twitter, also checkout TetraForce!