Flipip - Game Jam Postmortem

Project Overview and Scope

Flipip is a game designed for the 2022 GMTK Game Jam: Roll of the Dice. Our game needed to incorporate this theme into the game design in some creative manner, so we tasked ourselves with creating a unique dice experience that would set us apart from more traditional ideas. 

Flipip combines three elements: dice, cards, and a grid-based game board. With these, we strongly felt that our game would feel wholly original, especially with the limited 48 hour time frame. As a programmer, I have had previous experience with each of these mechanics, so I was confident in challenging myself to incorporate each into the game by the time limit.

The core game loop is simple on paper: There is a 5x5 grid of enemy cards that serves as the playing board. The player rolls their die and then moves that many spaces within the grid. Any cards that the player moved over are flipped, and they choose one enemy to fight. They fight the enemy with their cards and add it to their deck if they defeat it. If the player’s card is defeated, they lose. This continues until the player defeats a Boss card on the board.

Successes

First and foremost, a submission to the Jam was completed within the time frame. As a solo programmer with little game jam experience, this was a milestone in my game development career. GMTK 2022 was my first Game Jam experience with a team, and coordinating with them to successfully deliver a product in such a limited time frame was extremely motivating for all of us!

Each of the three elements made it into the game in a form very similar to our original vision, and there were no (discovered) game breaking bugs. The cards were auto-handled with fast, snappy movements, the player movement and state machine was smooth and intuitive, and the deck building elements were functioning as expected, with accurate data transferring between card lists and updating accordingly.

Careful time management allowed for each of the 3 systems in the game to work seamlessly, with clever data transfers facilitating card movement and battles. At face value, for a jam game it looked nice and the elements functioned as expected, what more could I ask for?

Shortcomings

Oh, how this list is so much longer than the successes! To start, Flipip was not even the game that was being developed on the first day of the Jam. We had originally started with a color based game with dice dogs, which would be bred to spawn 1d6 colored puppies depending on the parents colors. The prototype was functional…but it wasn’t fun. Not at all. Currently12 hours into day 1 and needing to sleep before beginning the next, we had to make a call to find the fun in the prototype and brainstorm a concept that made it enjoyable, or start again. So we started again after a fruitless brainstorming session to save the prototype and the concept of Flipip was born!

A game is only as good as its UX. The greatest shortcoming of the jam game was lack of intuitive UI/UX design and a brief tutorial. Of course I knew how to play the game, and it isn’t reasonable to expect the jam participants to need to read the game page to understand what is going on. The most consistent feedback from the jam was that it took effort to understand what was going on, if the player reached that point. 

The second area of confusion was the function of the cards and the combat system. Each card had 2 abilities for the combat part of the game. A die rolls on each card and if it’s higher than the printed number on the card it uses its strong ability. Otherwise, it uses its weaker ability. These abilities were represented by small icons and no text - a big mistake. In conjunction with information being displayed poorly for each card, the indicators meant to display what actions happened during combat rolls were not functional at the time of the jam submissions. All players saw was three cards, their dice animations, and two health bars changing. Then they either got the card they beat or were told they lost. Not fun.

Another source of confusion, and arguably the worst, was how to win the game. It was unclear what the Boss card was, meant, and what it did. Intuitively, many players intuitively picked up that the purple card with different symbols from the rest was the boss. However, once it was flipped and a valid option to fight, there was really no discernible way to tell which card among the others was the boss, and if chosen incorrectly it was discarded.

In addition to the players’ feedback, there were visual bugs of sprites being incorrectly displayed on the card, attack damage and health felt arbitrary with no indicators of what was being done in combat, and even a softlock condition that arises if two cards with healing abilities were in combat at the same time. The softlock was such that the 2 cards perpetually healed and combat turns would continue infinitely since the exit condition is one party running out of health.

Risks and Challenges

As with any game jam, there are inherent risks and challenges associated with the nature of the competition. Primarily, you only have the allotted 48 hour time window. For those like myself, even less if the developer(s) work full time. Time was the biggest factor in not finalizing the UX for the game. Although it is nice to think of what could have been done with the extra 12 hours wasted on the initial prototype, realistically there would always have been that “one more thing” that would have been needed.

In conjunction with the time window, the next obvious limitation is the scope of the game. Simply, if the tasks you wish to include in the game cumulatively take more time to develop than the window of the jam, you’ve failed right off the bat. However, this is the gamble you must take when deciding the scope of the game, as time needed is rather arbitrary and depends on a multitude of other factors such as debugging, previous experience with the task at hand, the mental fortitude to adhere to strict deadlines for each task, and damage mitigation to preserve as much of the core idea while making cuts. While this game was successfully developed within the time frame, concepts needed to be cut or reduced in order to make the deadline with a functional game loop.

While at the time I may have thought that damage mitigation was successful and that cuts were made correctly since I had a game that worked, I was ignorant to how clear the game would be to other people experiencing it for the first time. I had a simple text indicator that vaguely told the player what to do next, but not why they should do that or what it meant. In hindsight, this seems obvious. Unfortunately, during development all I was thinking of was finishing my vision of the game completely and tacking on a tutorial was a bonus.

Conclusions and Next Steps

While there were many missteps made during this game jam, ultimately, learning can only happen by going through the experience to the best of your ability and reflecting afterward. The feedback obtained from this process was invaluable, and has provided immense insight into how players view your product compared to my own tunnel-visioned outlook. While I’m not so naive to believe that the shortcomings are limited to those listed above, what I have learned has changed the way I will approach design scope moving forward. 

Abandoning the original prototype was a successful development decision. It hurt, it sucked, and a lot of time was “wasted” as a result, but it was infinitely better than developing an unfun idea in the hopes that we’d figure it out along the way. Also, while pursuing originality is a great goal, accessibility of the idea and UX is just as much of a mechanic as the actual hard game mechanics themselves. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you have the greatest game system in the world if no one knows what to do with them. Designing an intuitive tutorial that eases players into the core game loop is just as essential, especially in the context of a game jam where players do not have time to read about your game and hear your life story to understand why a red card has an advantage over the green cards.

This postmortem marks the death of the Jam version of Flipip, but also the beginning of a new development journey to rid it of its shortcomings and produce a game deserving of player’s attention. Prioritization of UI/UX will be critical in these next updates, and I look forward to making these improvements until others can enjoy the game as intended!