Dev Story - Part 2

In the last dev story, we covered the initial development and release of Inked. Today we will take a look at how the feedback and reviews after the game’s release prompted the team to deeply analyze the game, and come up with ways to improve it. This postmortem of the game was supposed to be a guideline on how to do better at any future projects, but eventually became the foundation for the new and improved Inked which you are patiently waiting for today.

Edi, Creative Director @ Somnium Games

After the release of the game, some reviews were pretty negative and it was pretty hard to face them. While a lot of feedback made perfect sense, there was still an amount of disbelief at the general critical reception because we couldn’t believe that after listening to player feedback the game still fell through in some aspects.

We analyzed the feedback in more detail and realized that the game could have been better if we didn’t listen and tried to make everyone happy. And for any designers reading this, the following would be the first takeaway: While game designing player feedback is always important, following that feedback blindly can lead to problems. Extrapolating additional features from player feedback is also problematic.

Not all player feedback is the same, and filtering out what is truly important is difficult. If you give your game to someone who likes that type of game, they will most certainly disregard certain shortcomings, even if they provide good general feedback.The goal is to figure out what prompted the feedback and try to fix that (while keeping the original vision and direction in mind), not to blindly listen to direct suggestions for changes.

Regardless, there were some ideas of immediately bringing Inked to mobile, but as soon as we started planning how to do that, the shortcomings of the PC version became even more apparent. Once all the plans eventually fell through, I decided to compile all the feedback and analysis and write an internal postmortem for Inked.

I always liked game postmortems. They explained why something succeeded or didn’t, or at the very least the reason why something was made a certain way, and what could have been in some other scenarios. Even though this series of dev stories is a distilled version of it, back then it wasn’t intended for the public. It was primarily a reminder of game design mistakes and notes which could help me design better in the future, as well as a set of guidelines for everyone in the team with the intention of helping us maintain the direction of the games better in the future.

The postmortem started from the controls, which were the most criticized part of the game. They made general movement tedious, platforming sections very difficult and some puzzles annoying, in ways they shouldn’t have been. The controls with some other details, made the whole game feel almost like a hardcore experience in some respects, which is not what we aimed at, and was not what the players were expecting - a casual puzzle adventure.

However, I didn’t get very far, since there were still issues with the game beyond the controls which I didn’t know how to fix. Over the next two years as I learned more about game design, designed more puzzle games, and a lot of hypercasual games (both of which gave me new knowledge and perspective), I periodically revisited the postmortem and expanded it. I really wanted to cover all grounds, at least as a design exercise.

As the document expanded, what were just notes and guidelines for the future, became concrete ideas on how to (hypothetically) improve the game. The goal was to try and keep everything that made Inked the game it was: the art, the story (more specifically themes), and the puzzle-oriented gameplay, but to try and list everything else that can be changed as much as possible without harming the core. I ended up with 4 elements: the controls, the primary gameplay mechanic, the (level) structure of the game, and the story.

If this seems like a lot, it is, the team thought so as well. Everyone agreed that certain things could definitely change, but seeing all these made everyone feel like it was a totally different game. But even after reassessing everything, I kept coming back to the same conclusions.

Coincidentally, around the time I finished the document with all these ideas on how to make a better Inked, we got a chance to work with a new publisher Pixmain and port the game to mobile. However, the list haunted me, and after convincing the team we suggested all the changes to the publisher. The idea behind the port wasn’t just to make the game run on mobile, but to use the postmortem to remake Inked and make the best game possible. Pixmain agreed and gave us a chance to do everything we wanted, and everyone was excited about the prospect so much, we decided to do it on all platforms. All of this meant that we got our second chance at a first game, we just had to stick the landing.

The second takeaway from this story for any game designer is - write the postmortem. Whether you find your game to be a success or a failure, analyze it on your own after some time passes from the release. Face the feedback from the media and the players, and filter out the important things.Postmortems will help you realize what worked and what didn’t - use this to establish notes and guidelines for any future designing, they can do wonders for your craft.