This isn’t something I’ve done before, but hopefully something I’ll do more of in the future, especially at 2am on my phone. Not sure if it will fulfill the title of postmortem or manifesto, so “I’m sorry” in advance.

Gears is a game I put a lot of love into, and I’d consider it my best game thus far, with Super Skeleman at a close second. I think the main reason why I am so fond of this games design directly correlates with how I developed it. This is a very abstract game and the main mechanic is hard to describe, so unlike mosy other games I’ve made, I started with a prototype and took extensive critique from Tigsource. Once I felt the concept was down and worked well, I started making the art, which I like to do in huge bursts, and began designing levels.

Gears demonstrates a very effective “show don’t tell” tutorial system which is short enough to not bore the player and subtle enough to be entirely unnoticed. Many games waste players time by introducing concepts they’re very familiar with throughout many levels, wasting game time. Instead of retracting the player how to play a genre familiar to pretty much everyone, Gears carefully but abruptly introduces the player into the game by providing all of the most basic game mechanics on a single screen, and still make it a fun and interesting level to play. The player learns how high they can jump, how fast they an move, how far they can jump, how fast they fall, the lose state, and the win state all in the first level. Immediately after this first level, the player is thrown into the unknown and the main mechanic is revealed in a linear way where the player can’t mess up. This level should be simpler than the first to avoid confusion. The next level is left to showing the full potential of the mechanic while also introducing another familiar concept, the lock and key. Beyond this, the game continues to dynamically evolve and surprise the player as we transition out of the seamless tutorial.

One of the reasons why I think Gears works so well, is that you can never really pinpoint what it actually is. Yes, it’s a puzzle platformer, but sometimes it’s a hardcore platformer, sometimes it’s just a puzzler, and sometimes it’s a reaction based quicktime… Thing… (What????). What I’m getting at here is: it’s dynamic. There’s only 25 levels, but not a single level is filler. Levels come in three types: introduce new concept, expand concept, combine with other concepts. When something is feeling stale, throw something totally different at the player like a level where you have to avoid arrows in a small space until a timer runs out, then continue as normal. This system is pretty much the same design scheme for the 3D Mario games, and it’s something I plan on continuing to use for all of my games in the future, or the linear ones at least.

Now obviously the game isn’t perfect. The biggest issue I’ve seen people have is difficulty with the block pushing levels, specifically the last, and most infamous one, because of the trial and error required to beat it. To this, I say woops. I’d been obsessed with La-Mulana at the time so block pushing was everywhere. Anyone who’s player La-Mulana should understand immediately. The sound design also isn’t perfect, specifically the ambient noises that repeat throughout the game. That’s mainly out of limitation. I wanted to have a ton of different sounds that would cycle through levels, but my lack of sound knowledge and SFXR being as limited as it is prevented it from being a thing. It would have also just taken too much time, as I literally spend hours hitting the random button until I find something cool, and then edit it. This is how all of the sounds for all of my games are done. Presets are no good and amateur. There’s also some bugs still, like the glitch that deletes your save if you quit on the boss fight under some other weird parameters.

Gotta wrap this up here, hopefully I haven’t rambled too much. I’m very happy with how Gears came out and am glad I spent the month making it that I did. And even though it hadn’t gotten too much exposure here on Gamejolt, it was on the front page of Itch.io for a bit and was feature as one of PC Gamer’s free games of the week. There were some other smaller things too including various YouTube videos. I hope this is informational to someone.

Thanks for reading. (If you read all of this, you’re a real champ :O)