⬆️These attached files were missed assets we couldn't add on time, check below for more information.

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After a lot of feedback from our players, I have decided to update and fix our game one last time.  

Details:

• Updated the in-game credits to contain more information
• Made easy mode easier. Old easy mode added 0.25s to enemy reaction speed. New easy mode adds 1s to enemy reaction speed.
• Lowered the animation speed of the bullet collision by half. (A little bit more visible now)
• Made the tutorial message a little bigger
• Changed the "Dialogue: " setting label name to "Story:".  The setting name was misleading as players wanted the ending story dialogue.
• Changed the initial sound volume to 60%.
• Fixed a bug where the wrong dialogue appears when going to the main menu or the next level 
• Fixed a bug where if you paused and went to the options, the background screen became bright instead of staying dark.
• Changed the "How does your game fit into the theme?" description

The next section is irrelevant to the update and is not important

Now I would like to go over some common feedback topics.

Some of our players ran into bugs that were unable to be replicated, or had no issues by our team. We are not sure if these bugs are real or not, and I really hope they magically fixed themselves if they did exist.

• Sound issues for the real signal. Some players commented that it doesn't play.

• Double input or input issues during the duel. I really hope this was just an accidental double click instead of it being a major bug. 

• Dialogue UI bugs (A reoccurring problem in our game since being published)

We received many opinions on Dokibird's boss mechanic. 

• Overall enjoyable experience until playing Dokibird's level. The boss feature turns a positive impression into an annoyed one, leaving a bad taste in the overall experience.

• Even though some players did manage to beat her, can players beat Dokibird reliably? Is it just luck and RNG?

• Her design goes against the entire game concept/rules. If the game is about "react faster" then why does she make it "react faster but actually not really or else you lose"? Dokibird needs a redesign or an overhaul.

• Even more difficult as the player becomes aware of the fake signal mechanic. The 50/50 chance of the next shot being a real or a fake drastically delays reaction speed and causes some psychic damage to players.

Long explanation and process that led to the current Dokibird

As we were thinking of enemy mechanics during our planning phase, we were in agreement with her unique boss mechanic. (I will refer to her fake signal mechanic as Faker). Here are some reasons why:

• As the final boss, we wanted a difficult opponent that tests your reaction to the limit. We wanted her to be hard, but beatable after a few tries.

• It fit Doki's personality perfectly.
  • Doki enjoys messing with people, and is more likely to taunt others.
  • Doki is sly, and always on the line between following and breaking rules. However, she will follow the rules. (She is not evil, just a trickster) 
  • Faker is an unexpected and annoying boss mechanic.

• In terms of story, we tried to imagine how lore Doki would fight in a duel. As a Bounty hunter and an outlaw, she would definitely try to bend the rules. But as she is confident in her skills, she wouldn't reject a duel at high noon. If her enemy is distracted by some noise that she herself didn't create, it's not against the rules, right?

• Her opponents would probably be intimidated, as she is well-known for her high gunslinger (lore)/ gaming (streamer) skills. Doki would totally take advantage of your mental weakness. (That's how she got into sykkuno's head in tekken)

However, as the jam progressed, I can think of why faker's design might be considered flawed or unfair. 

• I think my interpretation of the playtested data was biased, as the majority of the testers I know are in their prime / early 20s. Doki's win rate on normal seems to be around 40% from my team/testers/friends, but this definitely doesn't reflect our player base if we look at the comments.

• We wanted the players to adapt and change their approach in the last duel. Instead of immediately reacting and clicking to a change in the centre of the screen, we wanted the player to react to the colour/sound of the signal, and then click.  This oversight increased our expectations from our players. This point majorly influences the balance of faker.

• Our game is heavily inspired by "Samurai Kirby". In Samurai Kirby, there is an infamous hard enemy called Meta knight. He is the last enemy and known to be 11 (easy) / 8 (hard) frames quick. That means that you have to react faster than 11 frames to beat him, so 0.16 seconds on easy difficulty. (Also keep in mind that this game was designed for children/teens, unlike our game jam player base). We referred to this game's enemy reaction speed values for our base game play loop.

The effects of skewed/coloured balancing

• Dokibird's balance is hard. Initially, her reaction speed was 0.25, knowing that the average human reaction speed is around 0.27 and meta knight being below 0.2. However unlike meta knight, faker introduces even more delay to the players reaction. This made her nearly impossible to beat. Her speed was changed to 0.35. Immediately after this change, Doki was much easier with practice. But because of this change, she was now easier than initially planned.  Finally, she was changed and is currently at 0.31s.

• I never had any problems with Dokibird. I made it a habit to beat Doki before updating or testing our game. So in terms of consistency, she is reliably beatable on normal (by me). I do always lose 1-3 times to get used to her, and then I beat her. She takes less than 5 minutes whenever I do the final debugging test.  
  I do believe she is not RNG dependant and reliability beatable with skill. Nevertheless, my experiences shouldn't be considered even close to an average player. Please take into account that I am the developer of this game and I fought her over 200 times at this point.

Knowing all of this, why didn't you change/overhaul faker in this update?

• Minor tweaks that we can make, made her way easier than initially planned. There were many suggestions such as (non-rng/predictable fake signal pattern, faker only at first gunshot event, slower reaction speed). I didn't want to remove the satisfying feeling the testers felt when they first beat Dokibird. 
• Other suggestions such as overhauls or big changes were not possible due to:
  • Time constraints. Our team focused on our initial plan (hard but beatable boss), and tried very hard to not add or modify our decided essential features. We couldn't come up with another mechanic that would suit Doki perfectly, like faker.
  • Due to the game jams restrictions (bug fixes only), I believe that any huge changes to Doki would be crossing the line of adding content. 
• Skill issue?
  Jokes aside, I still believe in the unyielding human spirit. If I can do it, you can do it. 💪

Game Jam Experiences ( Knex )

Our team was formed thanks to Hidden_Tree / Rameria. He posted in the looking-for-team forum (In the Doki Jam discord), inviting anybody, including complete beginners. This was my first game jam and some of my teammates were similarity inexperienced in game jams. I learnt a lot of important skills, but I also made many mistakes. Here are some major mistakes I can think of right now:

• I underestimated the dialogue UI system. We also happened to not discuss how the dialogue layout would be structured until around the 4th day. This is why the dialogue UI is buggy, my apologies.
• Many coding features were redesigned or overhauled, costing me lots of time. If the menu input feels unsatisfying due to purposefully blocking consecutive inputs, this is one of the reasons. Debugging was also inefficient and time-consuming.
• I forgot to test for html5 until the first week in. This was my biggest mistake so far. I ran my game through the windows executable, and I made didn't account for platform specific issues. I had to change my entire code architecture that I initially planned. For example, I designed the game using local input scripts, instead of global mouse press events in game maker.

Our team missed the final deadline. Due to many issues I can't describe, all our team members were in vc and working on our game until the last second. We were depressed when we were unable to submit the game in time. Fortunately, one of our team member was able to contact a moderator, who kindly let us submit the game even though it was 5–10 minutes past the deadline. I am forever grateful, Thank you Doki jam moderators  <3

Since our team are mainly beginners when it comes to game jams, we were not expecting to receive the amount of ratings and positive feedback that we have so far. This has been both surprising and motivating to me, as I never realized that I was capable of taking part in a project that could enrich peoples experiences, however small it may be. 
I truly enjoyed this game jam experience, and I am definitely planning to join another game jam in the future!

Knowing that we are unable to make changes after the voting period, here are some missed sprites we couldn't add in time. 

• Dad
• better bullet collision
• comic panels from egg goon's perspective

- Knex