Some things, future plans etc

Hi, this is zerock, programmer of What Lurks. Congratulations to everyone who participated in the jam and managed to make a submission, I look forward to playing everyone's games.

I'm really glad to have participated in the jam (thank you Brackeys Community), and I learned a lot from this experience. Qitsunne (the artist responsible for the character sprites in the game) came up with the basic idea of a game centering around a creepy door with whispers coming from the other side and we expanded from there.

While I'm glad we managed to come up with a submission, I have to say that I'm not really happy with what I ended up making. That's completely on me - qitsunne's art is great, but I feel I wasn't able to create a satisfying enough gameplay experience to really make it shine.

I'm making this post mostly to list down some things I need to change and features I want to add so I can hold myself accountable in future.

Some things I don't like about the game are:

Repetitive combat

The combat is simple - that much is obvious. But I think the real problem is more so that the combat is frustrating.

There's no hitstun at the moment and it's frustrating when an enemy appears unfazed and just attacks back immediately after you went to the whole trouble of fully charging an attack. The player should be rewarded for timing an attack well and being punished for it in such a way is understandably rage-inducing. There's also no pacing because the enemies are simple AI that just walk straight towards you and wail endlessly so the player just constantly feels pressured and stressed with no break, creating an unpleasant experience.

My plan is to first add proper hitstun to the game then see if I can make enemies act a bit more naturally and not just be on attack mode 24/7 (I might actually make the ghosts do a relatively weak ranged attack as well). Then I'd like to experiment with a combo system and some kind of bar that executing combos builds up that can be used for a special attack but that's something that I think needs to be added much later. I might end up changing the ring and knife mechanics in the process.

No healing

Lmao. Originally I wanted there to be a fountain where you could heal in the main hub. That ended up being forgotten in the rush to finish, unfortunately. Now everyone's pretty much doomed to die haha.

Will probably just add some health pickups around the dungeon that you can use with Z or something.

Sound

Sounds SUCK (horror ambience music and the stun ring sfx is alright tho i think). I'd like to know where all the other great games I play on here get their nice and juicy/crunchy sounds  - I'm less knowledgeable about these things unfortunately.

The south hall

In hindsight, I wonder what the fuck I was thinking with the south hall labyrinth. Having to find 10 enemies in a pitch black dark maze and slogging through the same combat you've done for the past 6 rooms must've been an absolute drag and I pity anyone who went through the whole ordeal (though I appreciate them giving the game a chance).

I'm honestly not sure what I should change it to. I might straight up remove it and give the player the knife straight away.

Cutscenes

I wanted there to be a little intro sequence that quickly sets the tone for the game describing the festival and the situation Maia is in. I need to come up with a name for the festival too, actually. The whole idea of a shocking and evil festival is kinda inspired by the Termina Festival in Fear and Hunger 2: Termina (an absolute masterclass in occult horror atmosphere btw) but without the whole Death Game part.

The ending cutscene is really short because I made it with about 30 minutes to go in the jam and still needing to tweak some other things lol. I'll be expanding that too.

No real ending

Well, I guess it's still an ending of sorts. But I think a lot of people probably expected a boss fight - and of course, that was my original plan. Which was just dumb. The game was already stretched for a 7 day game jam, and I wanted to make a full boss fight? No idea what I was expecting.

After fixing the above problems, I hope to add it in.

Boring dungeons

I'm a non-artist, and qitsunne is more of a traditional 2d artist with little game engine knowledge, so I had to figure out how to set up the tilemap and lay out all the dungeons - and I ended up doing the bare minimum for the most part. The tileset includes some extra objects and special tiles I could use to make some more aesthetic rooms - hopefully I can use these. Shoutout to Szadiart for his amazing dungeon tileset btw: https://szadiart.itch.io/rogue-fantasy-catacombs

Well, doom and gloom aside, I'm pretty invested in what I tried to create and I'll see it through as much as I feasibly can.

Thanks for playing my game.

- Zerock