Symbiotic: Personal Postmortem
In all the collected notes and dev blogs on Symbiotic things have probably gotten a little scattered so I’ll start off with an overview of what the game actually is.
Symbiotic is a roguelite first person shooter in which the player must defeat aliens in a progression of compact arenas, with a miniboss and eventually a final boss at the end of each sequence of arenas. After the player defeats a certain number of enemies (determined by difficulty setting, and how many enemies they have already defeated) they unlock a choice of two upgrades for their gun. These upgrades can be something simple along the lines of more damage or a faster fire rate, or they can be more complex such as exploding shots, more bullets per shot, or shots creating damaging acid pools beneath the enemies they hit.
In addition to these unlocked upgrades, the player can also find one of two active upgrades in various spots in the arenas. These active upgrades are a grappling hook that can grapple the player to a targeted surface, and a black hole launcher that draws enemies in to a black hole.
There are three basic enemies, the swiper, crawler, and flyer. The swiper runs at the player and ‘swipes’ at them with a basic melee attack. The Crawler explodes when shot or suicide bombs the player if it gets close enough. Finally the flyer flies over the player and shoots at them from above. The two minibosses are bigger versions of the crawler and flyer, the crawler boss spawns normal crawlers when it dies and the flyer boss has a more powerful attack and an arena that requires the player to constantly chase after the high ground. The final boss uses a lot of different attacks but maintains a charge moveset that is reminiscent of the swiper.
Once the player has defeated each miniboss and the final boss, they can loop around again or end their run and return to the main menu.
The game has a steam page here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1953760/Symbiotic/
In terms of what went right, Symbiotic is a playable game with a start and an end, it has a well formulated core loop, and the systems and mechanics are polished and mesh together to create a solid core of a game.
To skim what went wrong, there were a lot of ideas that were had too late into development, or had early and then forgotten until it was too late, that meant a lot of polishing on side mechanics didn’t get done and some things that should have been in the game got left behind. This is not a particularly profound thing to happen in game development, but it’s still worth mentioning.
To highlight what went right and wrong I will examine more closely, three aspects of Symbiotic.
As a narrative designer, I was onboarded to take what story the game had, and refine it into a larger and more cohesive experience.
Arguably Symbiotic came out with less story in the final build, than it had in the vertical slice. However, it came out with more refined story that helped build the core game loop.
The voiceover that would play during certain events in gameplay is no longer in the final core game. It was generally decided that the tone was too light and the experience we wanted to deliver with the game was more bleak in terms of story. However, we did get in codex descriptions of each possible upgrade, which are displayed during a pause menu the player can use to read up on the specifics of a given upgrade.
Additionally a lot of narrative work was done behind the scenes to ensure assets and mechanical choices were made to keep a consistent world behind the scenes, even if the player only gets brief glimpses of that world through what they see in the player character’s actions. The world of Symbiotic is mysterious, and that further feeds into the desperation of their character to escape the hostile alien world they find themselves on.
As we neared our deadline, a decision was made to reorganize some of the team members to fill alternate roles, one of which being my switch from narrative design to UI design for the final few sprints. This meant that for the final few weeks, I was mostly creating, iterating, and implementing UI assets. For the most part this actually went very well. However, towards the very end of this, much of the team decided they disliked the more minimalistic art style I was working with, and preferred the more detailed and intricate art made by one of the teams’ artists.
This meant that within a rather short window said artist had to make a lot of wholly new assets. While I definitely agree that their art turned out better than mine (I’m a designer, not an artist after all), this flipflopping close to our final deadline led to a lot of extra work being done where those hours could have been put into other areas, such as narrative or our next topic, AI.
This is one area that I had very little to do with, I was a narrative and later UI designer, so while I definitely worked with our gameplay designers and AI programmers, I wasn’t in the direct line of creating or polishing many of these systems.
Because of this, what I have to say is essentially limited to the fact that a good chunk of time in development was spent trying to implement AI behaviors that were ultimately cut, which resulted in the final AI behaviors of the ‘swiper’ enemy in particular being less than ideal. It is common rather than uncommon, to see said enemy stuck on platforms and other terrain features, whereas the crawler and flyer enemies do not seem to have this issue.
All three of these examples show that while the game works at a surface level, there were multiple cases of multiple members of the dev team being sidetracked with content that went ultimately nowhere in addition to having to be redone.
Again, this isn’t exactly new to game development, and that I am being critical here. Overall the game came out wonderfully for a Champlain studio project, and these are just the few things I can point out in a postmortem. There were no major interpersonal issues or anything adjacent to them.
As a developer this project has given me what I would consider my first wholistic dev experience, as many game studio games never get past the vertical slice stage, and those that do, are solo projects which are of such a small scope to begin with that the difference is minimal. I’ve been forced to fill differing team roles as needs changed, and I’ve worked on a game that ended up on Steam. I think that as a game project to end my Champlain experience on, I couldn’t have had a better one.
