Warning! Lots of text.... sorry!

So LongAnimals asked me to write a post mortem for penguinz. The idea is that we can find out what people liked and didnt like, so as to improve the sequel as much as possible.

I thought I might as well post it up here too, there might be some people interested and its also an opportunity for people to let me know what they wanna see in a sequel!

Ive already got big plans and some really, really exciting ideas. This game will be leaps and bounds above the first, I promise.

Anyway, for anyone that cares:

Penguinz Post Mortem

My initial aim for Penguinz was to create my own favourite game. I had played a lot of flash games on Newgrounds and elsewhere on the internet, but never gone into game development myself. This was going to be my first proper game and I wanted it to fill a hole in the market I felt has been left.

Everyone loves shooting games. First Person Shooters are one of the best selling genres on both consoles and PCs, and most of the huge summer blockbusters like Halo, Gears of Wars, Half Life etc are all about weapons, amazing graphics and killing things. People want to kill things. Lots of things, The more over the top and bloodier, the better. Of course, creating an attractive first person shooter that plays well and hooks an audience is, in my opinion, impossible with the current standards of Flash (Unity on the other hand...).

So how could I translate this blockbuster-overthetop-killfest formula into a flash game? Well, WPNfire did it really quite well. I love the feel of the engine, the weapons, the blood, everything just felt powerful and real. But apart from the gameplay mechanics, there was no real GAME there. No storyline, just a list of different obscure game types. They were fun to mess around with, but after you shot a few things and tried everything out, you were left wanting more. The graphics were VERY nice, but still only stick figures. Where are the characters? Where are the levels, past a few nicely placed platforms and then the top of a building?

I wanted to deliver something with attitude and marketability. I wanted my character to be recognisable. I wanted all the enemies to stand out, be unique and different to play against. One of the most important aspects of a flash game is its learning curve and replayability. Its no use someone playing your game for 5 minutes and then closing it. I wanted people to play for hours, then come back again the next day and play it again. One of my favourite flash games ever is Staggy the Boyscout slayer. The gameplay is perfectly addicting: small fast arena based levels with lots of enemies and a plethora of upgrades and weapons in between each round. I decided to take this highly addictive onslaught style of gameplay and mix it with the high octane, guns blazing Hollywood feel of the big console games.

What went right:

The gameplay just works. The majority of players loved the simplicity and ease of playing the game. The gameplay mechanics work really well and the engine is just fun to play with. Simple, well known controls let players pick up and start playing the game in literally seconds, which was really important in trying to get players to stay past that initial few minutes, in which they decide whether they like the game or not. The game is very addictive and I think we could have lost a lot of potential fans if the learning curve had started off too steep.

New weapons and upgrades keep the player wanting to unlock more. One reason I think why the game has been a success is the shop. People love feeling like they are building up an arsenal, upgrading their guns and adding stats. The upgrades give the user more options on how they want to upgrade and I think players really like this choice, rather than just picking up weapons dropped by enemies.

The engine was well optimised and fast. Having the engine recoded by LongAnimals allowed us to have large amounts of enemies onscreen at once. I think this really stands apart from other games, and on later levels really gave some crazy scenarios, rather than just having enemies getting stronger and stronger. Having tons of enemies also made the game a lot more satisfying to play and gives the player a lot of gratification, especially on the later "bonus" levels with loads of weaker enemies.

The visuals are recognisable, original and attractive. In the early design stages of the game I spent a lot of time getting the style of the characters and weapons right. I think the game holds a unique and marketable visual style, which lends a lot to its popularity. People love penguins and it was an instant way of getting people to clicking on the game. Thumbnails are highly important in flash game distribution and I cant understand how people put so little effort into thumbs for games they've spent months on. It was clear to see that Penguinz got more than double the views some of the other games that were featured on Kongregates front page, and I can only think this was down to the thumb and title.

What went wrong:

The game gets boring and repetitive after a while. You spend all your time running left and right shooting, and there aren't enough game play elements to keep the player entertained for longer periods of time

Proper boss battles would help remedy this. In the sequel we should have attack patterns players can learn and use to their advantage like in Portal Defenders. Bosses should hopefully break up the mindless slaughter sections and keep players interested and active.

We could also have "champions" or something, like mini bosses. These would have more life than normal enemies and a few different attacks. Some levels you would fight a few of these champions rather than hordes of weaker enemies like in the first game. Again this would help keep from the monotony players got into after getting good weapons and running through the game mindlessly. This would also fit with the gladiator/coliseum idea we were going with.

Some of the weapons are misbalanced. The rocket launcher was very weak and didn't have splash damage, and the chainsaw was expensive and used up a lot of ammo, yet wasn't as good as the Gatling gun. This left players feeling pissed off after saving up for the stronger weapons only to find them not as effective as their previous upgraded weapons.

Its important that next time we get the weapon and upgrade balancing spot on.

The enemy types weren't diverse enough. Although there was a large amount of enemies, the way they all attacked and behaved was fairly similar. They didn't give a big enough variety in gameplay, which again added to the repetitiveness after longer periods of time with the game.

Players don't like losing everything when they die. We want people to play as long as possible and keep coming back for another go, so we don't want to frustrate them by losing their money or having to start again. With the next game, players should just revert back to the lobby before choosing their match. It will almost have RPG elements in the way you level up on practise rounds to get good enough to pass battle rounds, so a save system would add a lot of replayability.

Wow, so yeah, sorry about the wall of text :) If anyone actually read that, feel free to leave a comment or any suggestions for what you wanna see in the next game.

EDIT: Too much text with no pictures, I just cant do it! Here is something new and totally different ive been working on with longanimals. Not telling you what it is :)