Long overdue, but here it is nonetheless.

Post Super Skeleman
When I released Super Skeleman, it quickly became my most played game to date. This is because of a lot of different factors: people retweeting my screenshots on twitter, @gnomeslair writing about my game on RPS link, and of course being featured on Gamejolt itself. Looking back at Skeleman a month or so later, I realized there was quite a bit of potential left in the game, so I started making some new tile sets. After posting some mockup screens on twitter, I decided to start Skelemania.

What Super Skeleman did right
Super Skeleman is still a good game, and although I think Skelemania is the better game, Super Skeleman still has a lot going for it. One problem a lot of my previous games have is difficulty. I’m often good about starting off easy and gradually increasing the difficulty, but I usually don’t know when to stop. Super Skeleman starts easy, gets slightly harder, and then plataeus. This makes a lot of the game fairly easy, but in a good way. It’s a game that can be breezed through once you get the hang of the fairly obtuse abilties. It’s also a fairly short game, which caters well to a more mild difficulty. The world design is also quite good. There are a few awkward spaces or irrelevant passages, but for the most part I’d say it’s very good overall. The world has a good flow to it, and there are no dead ends.

What Super Skeleman did wrong
The controls in Super Skeleman are not perfect, not even close. The backflip is very easy to perform on accident, which is especially bad considering backflipping cancels a triple jump, which was also sometime hard to execute correctly. The game also ends rather uncemoniously, which should be nothing new if you’ve played any of my games, but it’s still very bad in this game. The text system is also kind of awful since it uses sleep() which means you have to wait the full length of the text even if you’e already finished reading.

What Skelemania fixes from Super Skeleman
Although the controls are still not perfect, I’d say they’re close. Backflip won’t be triggered on accident as much and it doesn’t cancel triple jump. The world design is just as good if not better (with a few quirks I’ll address later). Again, there’s lots to explore and never any dead ends. You’ll also be entering new areas and encountering new obstacles constantly. There’s also a few new abilties: bowl and blast, which a lot of people really enjoyed and made the skeleton feel even more real. I also make the text system a lot better with the abiltity to skip through text and show more text on the screen at a time. There’s also a good amount of secrets in the game, which people really enjoyed discovering. Other major new additions include: a pause screen, a self-updating map, gamejolt achievements, a cooler main menu, a harder difficulty mode, and a lot more probably.

What Skelemania still got wrong
People still had a lot of difficulty understanding both backflip and triple jump (even dive to an extent) which is a problem. Honestly I’m not sure how I could have fixed that. I don’t know how many videos I watched of frustrated let’s players trying to understand what I mean by “press left and right at the same time and jump to backflip” or thought by “jump three times in a row to triple jump” I meant double jump +1. It’s hard to properly communicate these skills without watching someone else. This also is a problem because the game is a lot harder. Some people went as far as to describe it as a masochist game (which is overkill, really). There are quite a few difficult platforming sections in the game including some that had to be made easier post-release (parrot hell one, parrot hell two, the end, etc). Unlike Skeleman, Skelemania has a consistantly increasing difficulty. This is good because the game is longer, and it should get harder than Skeleman. But some might argue that it gets too hard, especially which the very limiting controls Skelemania provides you with. This is definitely something I would have changed, and is something I will change if (when) I make another Skeleton game. One other issue that’s kind of minor is that walljump is a little too obvious to accidently discover this time around, particularly at the beginning of the game before you get backflip.

Where will I go from here
As Skelemania was even more successful than it’s predecessor, the only place I see myself going is up again. One thing I really want to do if I do a SUPER Skelemania is change up the art. I love the ZX Spectrum look, however I’m a little tired of doing my own art. I can do tilesets ok, but anything that lives and breaths is beyond me. There was a lot more I wanted to do with Skelemania that I just couldn’t do because of my own art limitations, and that’s something I’d like to change. I like how Skeleman/Skelemania look, but I’ve hit my artistic ceiling. I can’t talk about a sequel too much yet, but it’s definitely something I’m interested in and want to do. Do know that even though I released Super Skeleman in October of 2014, and Skelemania in October of 2015, I simply cannot make what I want and release it in October of 2016. I’m not trying to Assassin’s Creed myself, you know.

Anyways, the gist is there’s a lot more Skeleton game left in me still, and if I do start another one, undertstand that I want it to be the best game it can possibly be, and as different of a game from the previous two as possible. Anyways that’s all from me. Thanks for reading.

Thanks!