If I Was A Worm: itch.io demo notes

Overall it feels like reception has been pretty good. People respond pretty well to gameplay footage, the trailer less so, but I think it still works OK. My biggest misgiving at the moment is that I feel as though I've fallen into a worm trend, it’s ‘another worm game’ which isn’t a great feeling. This is also something that people on reddit have called out. I think this is just something to stomach. Not the end of the world.

In terms of gameplay, I feel like I've got some strong foundations, but have not yet adequately explored all of them, and I feel a risk that perhaps I won't find the gameplay depth that I'm looking for. My gut tells me that there is enough there, and i just need to take the time to find it. I’m also nervous about throwing in too many mechanics and ending up with a muddled game that doesn’t really explore mechanics in interesting ways.

Numbers

Over the weekend, we saw:

• Itch demo page, 920 views, 521 browser plays, 7 comments. decent.
• Trailer, various subreddits, youtube, 1.7k views. Not great.
• Egg gameplay vid /r/godot 2.3k upvotes, 92k views. Pretty good.

Visuals

I’m really happy with where the game is aesthetically. When I compare the game to its peers, I’m pretty confident that it’s punching above its weight in terms of visuals, overworld notwithstanding. The simple block colour art with wiggly postprocessing and noise is successfully delivering a cartoony handpainted look, and elevating it from where it was originally in lo-fi pixel art. 

The animations on the worm are consistently called out by people giving playtest feedback. I don’t think many sokoban games really deliver this kind of juicy player character, i’m happy with where things are at visually.

Peers:

• Can of Wormholes
• Baba Is You
• Patrick’s Parabox
• Steven’s Sausage Roll

Overworld

I’m still not happy with the art for the overworld, and I don't yet know what a good solution would look like. I think the overall structure is good, but implementation is a bit shit right now.

Having one large piece of terrain that the player moves through, with sub-areas and sub-chambers works well.

What’s not working is the actual terrain artwork, it’s pretty rough, and just one flat area. I think we need multiple distinct biomes for the player to move through, perhaps above ground areas.This all feels pretty opaque to me still, i don’t know what a good setup looks like, or if i have the artistic chops to deliver a good looking overworld map. I’d rather not spend any more money on art for this game, so i think i’ll just have to keep chipping away at it.

Features in the demo

Snipping I think is the signature and most unique mechanic in the game, it plays into the theme well, and is visually striking. However I've not yet found ways to fully explore the mechanic in exciting ways in puzzles. I think the switch to inverting worms post-snip opens up a few more options, but I would still say my confidence in this mechanic isn’t quite where I want it to be. I’m still struggling with having snips in levels without it feeling super obvious, i think i’d like to introduce some more ways to snip yourself but idk what yet.

Eggs have been great, I think they’ve quickly become my favourite mechanic in puzzles, perhaps to the detriment of the overall game theme. I think ‘Precious Cargo 3’ is one of the most interesting levels in terms of complexity, and the truths it teaches you about the rules of the game. I’m still a bit concerned about readability of the egg mechanic, feedback from gameplay footage has been that people sometimes don’t grasp the gravity behaviour of the egg. I think snipping doesn’t suffer from this issue.

Unexplored Features

Bugs (insects not code bugs) Little creepy crawly guys that follow simple navigation rules, e.g. if i can, move forward, else move left, else move right, else turn back. Move rocks and your body around to create barriers to force the bugs down certain paths. I think these guys will be a fun late game mechanic. I'm a little concerned about complexity and readability, but I think they could be tutorialised.

Gaps. This one I got from playing ‘Can Of Wormholes’, having the ability to exit the terrain and re-enter, but only if some part of your body remains touching terrain. I think this could be fun for some secret mechanics that come back into play later, e.g. you could hide things in early puzzles that only reveal themselves later when the player is taught the mechanic.

Water. I think water would be an interesting thing to explore, this is the loosest at the moment in that I don't really have a clue about what this mechanic would do, but i think it’s compelling to play with water levels and valves, maybe less so than swimming in water. Maybe swimming is what makes sense thematically though.

Feedback

The most urgent and constructive feedback I’ve had is that some levels felt like filler, and that i was retreading ground from prior levels without interesting evolutions on the mechanics. I don’t think that’s been such an issue after i did the first round of level cuts, removing 5 levels and reworking a couple. I also reduced this again with the ‘teamwork’ level rework. Hoping i don’t get blind to this again.

So far i’ve only seen a handful of bugs, none too terrible, and a bunch fixed already. Nice. There are some lingering unreported bugs in the replay system though that i gotta fix at some point.

What’s next?

• I gotta make a bunch more levels, I want to feel like I've fully explored each individual mechanic, then follow the GMTK matrix approach of combining mechanics for later levels.
• Saving and loading, main menu, pause menu, settings menu. boring shit. gotta do it. wah.
• Overworld rework.
• Get the steam demo ready, I think the same amount of content, just some polish and level reworks. If I add any levels, it should be snipping oriented.
• Start a mailing list? I need to start recruiting a large number of ‘clean’ playtesters. ✅