TL;DR: Because of a lack of time, money and fundamental issues with the core idea, I'm moving this game out of early access, leaving it free and moving on. If you want to learn more about the reasons and the process of making this game, keep reading.

I've wanted to write this post mortem for a while now. I was finally moved to do it for two reasons: the first is that I have put this on hold for a while to work on another game: The people of Sea, Sun & Salt. The second is that an alert now appears on the steam page mentionning the fact that it has not received any updates in the past 23 months. It's entirely fair of Steam but I don't want to give the impression that this is some abandonned game. It is fully functional and completable as it is. This pushes me to release it but I don't want to do so without an explanation.

So here we are.

I'm still very proud of the project and I think it is a fun experimental game. I'm so happy that tens of thousands of players have had the chance to try my game.

Unfortunately the game fails in fundamental ways that make it hard to fix. I'll go over some of these reasons and then try to imagine a better version of this game.

The starting point of the project will sound a bit silly: This scene in the opening of Dune (2021). I get that it's entirely missing the point of the shot but seeing it made me think "I want to make a game where a scene like this happens".

I knew I wouldn't be able to do anything in 3D so I focused my thinking on a 2d game. I also wanted it to be a roguelike. I workshopped the idea and I landed on giant mechanical worms firing missiles from side cannons, similar to pre-modern warships.

It's a perfect idea, an awesome concept but I had to ruin it by actually trying to implement it.

It is just very hard to get used to the controls. There is no singular intuitive way to control the worm so the early part of the game is inevitably this clunky experience of slowly grasping movement.

The player barely has time to understand movement before they have to figure out targetting and weapon control.

It's a mess. You can get through it but by that point so much goodwill was lost and a lot of players will drop out.

I tried to give move control options to the player but expecting the player to go to settings to fiddle with configurations and key bindings is in itself a hurdle.

Possible fix: It is very hard to say, the game SNKRX is an obvious place to look at: maybe if the game was less about precise strategic gameplay and more about button mashing, the difficulty to control the worm would go down easier.

I hit a brick walls with visuals. I'm not a very good graphic designer to begin with so the task of making the ground you go through look good was impossible to me.

People have managed (I'm looking at games like Pepper Grinder, see gif). But I just couldn't figure it out. So I fell back on this sub-Limbo esthetic. It works for a free early access game but I would never have found the will to sell a game in such a state.

Even if I could pay an artist to do this work, it's still tricky: it's easy to commission a static background but how do you commission the entire way worms appear underground? It's no longer a graphic design task where you just output pngs, you probably need to experiment in the engine.

It's possible but it is much more difficult, failure prone and expensive.

Possible fix: Collaborate with an artist and spend sometime iterating visuals. That's straightforwardly the solution but this was just not an option

A roguelike lives or dies on variety and sadly I could not produce it in this game.

I has assumed that I would be able to come up with a ton of different weapons but i ended up with five or so weapon types with a few different levelled up versions. There are more weapons than that but the other ones are barely worth ever picking up.

The end result is a roguelike that you will finish in about 2 hours and probably not come back to.

The partial solution was the upgrade system: at regular interval throughout the run, you get stat upgrades. But the game still fell short even with them.

At the end of the day, there is only so many things you can do that fit into the "lateral worm cannon" mold. I've done seeking missile, cannon, gattling, laser, grenades. What else is there that wouldn't largely overlap with these?

Possible fix: One lateral solution would have been to make more encounter variety: instead of only fighting worms there would be different enemy types. That could create more varying runs where the choices of weapons could have more influence on the run.

For all these reasons and some further personal ones, this game will never be fully finished.

But I do hope that someone does explore this idea again some day. I doubt they will ever come across this post but who knows. I wish them luck nonetheless.

In the end, I do believe that the only hurdle to people making good art is time and room to fail. I'm infinitely grateful that I was granted both to try and make this game.

Thanks for reading through this and please consider checking out my new game: The people of Sea, Sun & Salt