Unveiling Ruinblade: A Post-Mortem Journey into the Creation of an Epic Rogue-lite Dungeon Crawler

The Causation

The task was: to create a game, make it fun, run, and get a good grade. Simple enough, right? Well, yes and no. At the very beginning, it was clear we as Roguebyte Games, a strong-willed student-run group of programmers, were ready to take on the challenge of creating a great product. 

Trying to capture the action and excitement of games like Dead Cells and Diablo, within moments of forming the group, ideas manifested creating a foundation for what we are presenting as Ruinblade, a 2D rogue-lite dungeon crawler shooter. Something with quick combat and a compelling story featuring an amnesiac adventurer, given visions of a shattered past leading them to the war-torn realm, where demons roam. Battle through varied enemies and bosses, recover the Ruinblade's shards and weave your forgotten memories into a tapestry of triumph as you face off against the demon king, forging a legend that transcends time.

The Reality

Roguebyte Games was formed with eight like-minded individuals with one common goal. Though as fast as the group was formed, some unfortunate situations would arise leading to some members leaving the group and having the morale at an all-time low. With 3 milestones alongside presentations ahead of them, the odds were not in their favor. 

With the team having experienced some rough patches, the first few weeks lead to a working first playable being created with some movement, audio as well as a working map and placeholder assets. Not only did the project look like a nice start, but some enemies were also added for the beginning of the combat loop.

Although the core basics were added, the game still lacked an end vision, not showing an end goal or something to work towards. Taking inspiration from medieval fantasy games like Vampire Survivor and The Binding of Isaac and achieving those milestones in our first playable created a shift in focus to finalizing the aesthetics and creating a fun and engaging combat experience for the player to have in our alpha release. 

The plan was for players would experience being surrounded by waves of enemies, fighting amongst swarms with their commander at the end being the end goal of that level, obtaining a piece of the legendary Ruinblade. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and personal issues arising for several members of the group, the progress that was going to be accomplished was never reached. Creating a rift between the motivation and the reluctantness to continue the project. 

Though this project was not forgotten! A crunch for the beta release was to be held by the group. While members were still under immense pressure from external circumstances as well as other projects maintained a burst of hope to achieve goals that were missed. While doing so, features that were missing from the initial alpha release were successfully added to the beta. Animations were done for various states of the player as well as the enemies they faced, UI elements like a score counter were implemented, as well as screens for credits, and win or loss conditions.

What Went Right

1. Team cohesion

The Ruinblade team was constantly active, working incredibly long hours under a tremendous amount of pressure but managed to (mostly) keep their tempers and their professional focus when tasks needed to be completed.

   2. Effectively communication when needed

Most of the group was able to be reached via a discord message or when in person at school. Whenever a question or issue arose, someone was there to answer the call, so to speak.

   3. Resourcefulness

The team’s success was achieved through resourcefulness when faced with problems. There were adaptations in the face of challenges, utilization of limited resources as well as using skills and knowledge obtained from prior courses and experience.

What Went Wrong

1. Lack of up-front design

We never had a proper design document, which meant that we generated a lot of code and used sprites that we later had to scrap. What’s worse, because we didn’t have a detailed outline of what we were trying to build, we had no way to measure our progress (or lack thereof) accurately. We only realized that we were in trouble when it became glaringly obvious. If we’d been about the design rigorous up front, we would have known that we were slipping much sooner.

    2. Everything was saved to the end and there was very little work done until the last minute

Things happen in life, intense crunch periods mentality, although not ideal, highlights the team's dedication and willingness to do what it takes to meet deadlines and the team rallied during crunch periods, putting in extended hours to implement features, refine mechanics, and fix bugs.

    3 . Low effort, motivation, and hierarchy

The loss of original members and personal issues for many members affected the school-life balance leading to an overall bad product that wasn't indicative of the true potential the group really has the original passion when creating the group was lost as well as the lack of clear leadership and task setting had the group astray for moments during the development cycle.

The first ending, the second beginning

In the beginning, we created a group based on connections and a strong workforce, having members that communicated effectively, provided great insight, and had strong problem-solving and coding experience. Though as with any group, the loss of members due to withdrawal from the program, a lack of attendance, and communication between existing members created a rift in the end product and the relationships that were formed before and after the project. 

 Ruinblade’s development cycle was a 3-month roller coaster ride. The project was too ambitious from the start, particularly with the undersized, inexperienced team with which we began. We barely survived the basic requirements, poured effort into our releases, and crunched late into the development cycle, as well as the loss of two fantastic members within two weeks of the group’s formation. Our presentations for each release coupled with the lack of support from everyone member hindered our true potential and progress. By all rights, the final product should have been a buggy, unplayable mess. The reason it’s not is that lots of very talented people who tried put in lots of hard work. We at Roguebyte Game will not say Ruinblade is a perfect game, we know we could have done better but the experience gained while working on this will help us evolve as programmers and friends.