The MermeladaJam 2 is over, the voting has concluded and the results are already published. We are quite satisfied with Dead Men Do Tell Tales.

Although, to my regret, I am not entirely happy. I have learned a valuable lesson and that is that you should not neglect the most important thing: the user experience.

If a game is very beautiful, with history, effects… but you neglect how the user will interact with the environment… it’s useless. And that’s what happened to us.

We could have had better results and the feedback received has been sincere and honest. In short: it was difficult to find the coins. There was nothing to indicate which objects were clickable. And depending on the resolution, due to an error, the message that the coin had been picked up and the oxygen restored was not visible.

Since I couldn’t leave this unfixed, I compiled the feedback and made a list of post-jam improvements needed to leave a clean and polished version of this great little adventure.

Improvements

• It is a game in which it is possible to die. The first dialogue is long and we want it to be funny. But it loses its grace if you have to repeat the whole thing when you die. The first improvement is to add a button to skip the initial conversations with each NPC.
• The first coin is confusing. It is a coin as such. When you pick it up, it doesn’t disappear. But, even if it did, it would still be confusing not to see more coins. Because let’s remember that the coins are hidden. So the solution has been to remove the coin and add a new object that “contains” it.
• The visual feedback on what can be clicked has been the most requested. Taking advantage of the distance system with the player, I have implemented that a second material is added to the clickable objects. When you hover over them, they “light up” and only if you are at the necessary distance to interact. In other words, you still have to approach the objects, but once you are close you can see which ones are clickable.
• There were some areas where you were behind walls and couldn’t see anything. I have implemented a raycasting system and modified the wall materials so that they attenuate when the player is behind them. This makes the room appear larger.
• Taking advantage of the last improvement, we have decorated a little more those spaces that can now be seen. Like the treasure chest room, the lower part of the room, the back of the wall of the captain’s room.

BUGS fixed

• Fixed the positioning of the information messages in different resolutions.
• Improved and reduced the roaming area of the ghosts so that they do not end up in unwanted spaces.
• Fixed the oxygen counter. This was reported by quite a few people.
• The cell with skulls had a bad collider and you could sneak in for the coin without breaking the curse.
• Depending on how the character collided with some objects, it would move on its own. Fixed.

As you can see, it is a version of Dead Men Do Tell Tales with quite a few improvements and bug fixes that leaves the game in a much more playable and productive state. I hope you can play it again and enjoy it!

With this, I now consider this project finished and I can move on to the Blender and Flantastic Café Run projects.

Until next time!