Another year, another So Bad It's Good jam submission! And this year I set my record for the latest I've submitted past the initial deadline 🙃.

Here’s the stats for those interested:

Dangerous Hunts was inspired by Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013. For those unfamiliar with it, imagine a Call of Duty campaign made from a hunting simulator. It was totally ridiculous, but awesome in a way I thought was perfect for SBIG.

This MandaloreGaming review is the honestly the best overview you can find for the game.

I also knew ahead of time I could find a lot of models I would need for free, which would be critical for both capturing the same feel as the Cabela’s game and speeding up development. And I would need to save time, because I knew this game would have some risks. I had only finished grid-based dungeon crawlers in Godot, and I had no cohesive weapon management or AI logic, just hacked together bits and bobs.

The modifier this year was ‘excessive sound design’, which I decided to implement by having sound effects with lots of layered effects added in. For example, one of the shotgun fire sounds contains a layer for the gunshot itself, a layer for the pump sound, a layer containing a foley sound of leather gloves rustling, a layer with a sound effect for joints cracking, and finally a layer for the shell dropping on the ground (the pipe drop meme sound).

But anyways let’s get into the details of what worked, what didn’t, and how this game will inform my future work.

What Went Right

Humour Not Totally Reliant on References

While there are references in the game, they were done in a way the player either doesn’t notice it was a reference, or they think it’s a reference but find it funny anyways. A good example is the house level following the chase sequence.

The level overall is based on the Clean House level of the COD Modern Warfare reboot, and the house hippo enemies within are based on a Canadian children’s advertising PSA from the late 90’s.

These two references overlap more directly at one point when a woman begs the player not to shoot her baby, and her baby ends up being a house hippo. Originally, I wanted the woman to THROW the hippo at the player but that proved too difficult to script, so the hippo just runs out of the crib instead.

While these are some cool references for those in the know, they’re still funny/absurd if you don’t know them. I mean the idea of being attacked by tiny screaming hippos, in a dark house you navigate with night vision goggles, and then being attacked by some crazed woman who views the hippos as her children is ridiculous no matter how you slice it. Especially if you use the RPG to kill the woman or hippos.

Also, I got to include game box models of several of my past games which is always fun. And the image on the monitor in the bedroom is a screenshot of Crocodile Head, a fake game made by FunBaseAlpha.

Those references aren’t really jokes, just fun little details for me personally.

Web Build Is King

Much like my spooky dungeon crawler Neptunes Children, I decided to push for a web build for my jam entry. With Neptune’s Children, the web build allowed me to more than triple the player base it would’ve otherwise had. And just generally in jams web build games do better than the download only ones.

And this was a great call by me, because this year suddenly it seems having a web build became almost a requirement for your entry to receive more than 10 ratings. Of the 86 games submitted to the jam, 61 of them were playable in browser, almost ¾ of the entries!

Also just compare the stats for Dangerous Hunts, which has been out for only a month, to my 2023 SBIG entry which has been out for a year.

Dangerous Hunts:

How To Be A Hugh Mann:

Another side effect of focusing on a playable web version of the game is it forced me to focus a bit more on file-size optimization and performance. So the download file size is just 178mb, and the game only really stutters when particle effects are spawned for the first time.

I’ve mentioned in past postmortems I’d like to try releasing a web build for my SBIG games, and this year I’m happy to say I finally did!

Slow-Motion

Part of the Cabela’s games was how time would slow down while the player aimed at an animals organs. I had initial plans to copy the system, which were quickly scrapped.

However, I liked the slow motion so much I wanted to keep it in somehow. Having the game slow down when the player was aiming turned out to be the easiest implementation. Since I let the player aim indefinitely it also acted as a crutch for players who couldn’t aim and shoot quickly, or when combat got too intense.

Juicy Guns

This aspect was partly unintentional. I had initially planned for the weapons to just have fast animations and maybe some exaggerated recoil. But the tutorial I was following was solid and worked so well it was easier to have the guns feel good. And since all my games prior to Thesmothete were criticized for bland shooting, I decided to keep the extra juice.

I also finally got bullet trails in a released game, something I’ve been trying to do for a couple years! I don’t think the bullet trails are critical, but I just like them for helping show where shots are going and how bad bullet spread is.

Something I do think improved the gunplay was the addition of having weapons automatically reload when the magazine runs out. Forcing the player to manually reload caused the deaths of many players in my 2021 SBIG entry Stalewater, and having it allows the player to just keep holding down the shoot button.

For a system I built from the ground up during the jam, I’m incredibly happy with how it turned out. I even ended up ranking second in Gameplay!

Excessive Sounds

As mentioned in the intro, I decided to make the sound effects excessive by layering multiple effects and having weird sound effects for different actions. Like the wolves having human sighs and screams for pain sound effects.

Here’s an example of the multiple layers in one of the shotgun reload sound files in Audacity:

Another neat new feature was having multiple possible reload sound effects for guns. I also added a random pitch shift to each gunshot and reload sound effect, for further variation. This is something I’d like to build on further in future games and add multiple animations for shooting/reloading as well, kinda like Cyberpunk.

I ended up ranking 6^th in the modifier implementation and 7^th in Sound, so I think my work paid off.

Not Terrible Enemies

I wouldn’t say the AI in Dangerous Hunts is good, indeed it was intended they be a bit jank, but it’s mostly stable. The enemies do get stuck on level geometry, specifically item pickups, but they don’t lose track of the player or get stuck spinning in place. The enemies aren’t exactly complicated but are varied enough and have mostly telegraphed attacks.

The bear boss fight in particular is notable for being the only enemy in any of my games to switch between ranged and melee attacks without breaking completely.

Frankly for as hacky as the AI code is, Dangerous Hunts probably has the least janky AI I’ve ever made. Which I think says more about me than the game, but in any case, I’m happy with how it turned out.

“An Enygmatic Game Through And Through…”

For me the most comforting feedback I received is Dangerous Hunts feels right at home alongside my past SBIG entries.

I knew during development I had something interesting, but I was still concerned between the engine switch, heavy scripting, and no longer using UMA character models, the game might feel alien to my past work.

I think it also shows I’ve learned design-wise what helps a shooter feel better to play, at least a little. Because despite not being able to carry over any of the scripts from my past SBIG games, I was still able to create an FPS where the guns felt good to shoot, the enemies were varied and are a threat to the player without being impossibly tough (mostly).

For better or for worse, it’s good to know I haven’t lost my touch.

What Went Wrong

BFS (Big F@%king Scope)

Scope has been my number one issue as a developer. Every postmortem I’ve written has me reminding myself to reduce scope in future games. And somehow, I never listen.

I was too dedicated to the idea of an over-the-top Cabela’s style campaign, and once I latch on to an idea it’s incredibly difficult to remove from my mind. Having a chase scene, multiple boss fights, and multiple weapons and enemy types, to me it just didn’t work unless EVERYTHING was in there.

I once again fell victim to wanting to focus more on mechanics than on making a game. Even just for the weapons I added recoil, muzzle flashes, bullet trails, multiple gunshot/reload sounds, randomized pitch for said sounds, multiple projectiles per shot, projectile and hitscan attacks, multiple impact effect types, a hitmarker, weapon sway and automatic reloading. You can imagine how much was added for the rest of the game.

While I’m happy I managed to get so much done and I learned a lot during development, it really took a toll on me. I ended up submitting almost 4 DAYS LATE. That’s the latest I’ve ever submitted, and it was to the point some other devs had basically given up on me submitting at all. I spent several late nights trying to tie up the loose ends, but almost everything took more time than expected.

It’s kind of amazing the end result is as good as it is considering how ambitious it is and how spent I was by the end. Because my last SBIG game to have a massively overblown scope, Ja Wizardman, which I wrote a postmortem on, took multiple extra weeks to finish. And while the reception to Dangerous Hunts has been great, the massive scope meant I was spending the entire jam finishing the game and spent little to no time polishing or balancing. Speaking of which.

No External Playtesting

Another big issue my games have suffered from is I’ve never had enough time to properly playtest anything. I play the game myself almost constantly, so I’m usually able to at least discover most bugs. But I’ve never been a good judge of if my own games are too difficult or not.

With every game I’ve released featuring combat, I thought the combat was too easy and there’s too much ammo and health given out. And inevitably players will leave comments stating there’s not enough ammo or health and enemies are too difficult.

Ideally, I would be done one day before the jam deadline and could get at least SOME feedback from someone who isn’t me. Admittedly this may be a pipedream, but it would be very beneficial for my future games.

Too Many Things To Keep Track Of

Another possible aspect of the difficulty is something I noticed not only in playthroughs of this game, but my past ones as well. There are simply too many things to keep track of, and too short a time to get used to them.

The player has to handle reloading, aiming, dodge rolling, and manual healing, all while fighting enemies who charge directly at them. To be honest I was worried the gameplay mechanics would be too anemic, but once again it ended up being the opposite.

For starters, I noticed multiple instances of players getting killed or almost killed because they were being attacked while reloading.

I intentionally removed reloading in my 2022 SBIG entry Thesmothete because I saw too many players get screwed over by reloading in Stalewater. It doesn’t help that the reloading animations can’t be cancelled.

I also noticed players forgetting to heal, not noticing if they were low on health, or even forgetting the control for healing, resulting in them dying. This was previously an issue with Stalewater, and in Neptune’s Children to a lesser degree. And it stems from the fact the player is required to manually press a button to heal.

The game doesn’t prompt you to heal yourself, and there’s no persistent visual indicator you’re low on health. Meaning if you aren’t actively paying attention to your health, it can be easy to be ground down and unexpectedly die in some sections.

I seemingly forgot this was my reason for having kills restore and even boost the players health in Thesmothete. I’m glad it only took me 7 months to relearn this lesson in Godot, rather than the several years it took in Unity.

Finally, I saw a couple videos where the player wasn’t using the dodge roll as much as they probably should have. Which leads into another issue.

Dodge Roll Was Too Janky

The dodge roll was inspired by the dodge roll in Cabela’s, where the camera suddenly pulls out from first-person and shows the player doing a slow Dark Souls-style dodge roll.

While pretty much everyone found it funny, a lot of people also found it too janky or cumbersome to want to use it. And combat turned out to be far more reliant on dodge rolling than I had intended, so this was a pretty lethal issue.

One friend of mine said she couldn’t finish watching a video of the game because the dodge roll animation made her head hurt.

I think this led to several players having issues with the game difficulty. Because if you don’t use the dodge roll then a lot of damage becomes practically unavoidable, especially in the bear and Billy boss fights.

In hindsight I don’t think the game clearly explains the player is invulnerable while rolling, or it’s possible to reload while rolling. The latter wasn’t initially intended, but it became a QOL feature during development, so I never bothered to fix it.

I think it would’ve been smarter to have the roll replaced by a slide or dash of some sort rather than the soulslike roll.

Future Work

For Dangerous Hunts, I honestly don’t know if I’ll do more future updates. Adding the controller support was an off-the-cuff experiment, so the fact it exists at all is a surprise. There are other things I CAN fix, but frankly I’d rather get back to my other projects so I can release more games this year.

After 5 submissions (and one botched attempt in 2020) to SBIG, I honestly don’t feel like I have much left to “prove” in terms of my ability to make a “so bad its good” game. The only thing I really feel I must prove, if only for myself, is I can finish a submission on time.

This past jam especially I really FELT the effects of the lack of sleep. After going to the gym on the last Friday, I felt sore for the several days after where I barely slept. And I felt genuinely demotivated at a couple points because I thought I would be done in a couple hours, but then would still be not finished 12 hours later. While almost everyone really liked the game and were overjoyed I had submitted, I just can’t continue to dev like this. I really need to start devving smarter, not harder.

For next years jam, expect a MUCH smaller game. I’m going to set a hard rule of one level, and it will probably reuse a lot of existing logic I’ll have built up over the next year. Specifically, I hope to have a more robust inventory system, a save system of some sort, more organized AI logic, and just generally more knowledge of how to make an optimized game in Godot.

It will definitely be made in Godot, there will definitely be a web build, everything beyond that is still up in the air.

Beyond SBIG, this game was good for forcing me to recreate more fleshed out weapon logic, which will be used in future games. My next steps are to attempt to combine it with a grid inventory setup I’ve been working on behind the scenes. Ideally, I’ll be on or near par with where I was with my Unity logic before the end of the year.

While Dangerous Hunts was my least janky SBIG game, I plan to continue working on making my non-SBIG games less janky and more juicy.

Because being told this game felt familiar to my old Unity stuff, specifically seeing the phrase “an Enygmatic game through and through”, gave me flashbacks to Bethesda describing Starfield as a “Bethesda game through and through” prior to its release. And seeing how Starfield turned out, I’m consciously trying to make my games more stable but without losing what makes them enjoyable. It worked here, and I’m hoping it continues in my future games.

If I do another shooter in the future, I already know a few things I would change. I would make reloading interruptible, I would add a melee attack the player always has access to, and I might try experimenting with regenerating health ala Halo or Call Of Duty, or at least make it more obvious when the player is low on health.

I also plan to use slow motion more in future projects, because it worked better than expected and was surprisingly fun.

Basically the TL;DR of this postmortem can be boiled down to: game was really fun but took way too long to release, will be able to take a number of features into the future but I have to really clamp down on scope next year.

So thanks to all who read this far, thanks to Ned Reid for hosting, all the other jammers who made the jam so fun, and to any streamers (especially FunBaseAlpha) who played through the games.

Here’s hoping next year goes more smoothly!