Song of Morus: Limbo Express 桑之巫韻︰靈域快線  is a surreal third person on rail shooter game about a young taoist priestess helping a deity of death to escort a spiritual train. The project is one year old already. It started as a submission for Magical Girl Game Jam #9 and continued to grow via Magical Girls FOREVER Continue-It Jam , Magical Girl Game Jam #10 , and now Magical Girls FOREVER Continue-It Jam III. And after all the game jam rushes, the game concept has been matured, and even gain lots of attention from social media.

Therefore , I would like to announce that ... Song of Morus: Limbo Express will target a full length game for Steam
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☯ Continue-it Jam Postmortem ☯
Before this game jam, the project only has 4 game levels and the game mechanic is in barebone level. My goal for this game jam was to extend it to 6 levels, with one level focusing on mob, and melee system, and polishing. It's important to have 6 levels, because it can picture the direction of the whole game, plus it helps me to estimate the production time. I need a 6 levels version to decide if I want to upscale the whole project. And I would say most of the targets are fulfilled. I am quite satisfied for the current result. Although, polishing will continue.

☯ Game Level : Demon Bandits ☯

This game level was planned since the very begining. Supposedly it should have existed in the first game jam to fill the plotline. For classic spaceship game, there is a pattern. Player has to defeat waves of tiny enemies before facing the boss. My game is borrowing lots of elements from those classic spaceship game. So, a mob swarm mechanic is a must. Sadly, it requests quite a lot of artwork and coding to make a mob swarm, plus melee mechanic is essential for player to deal with mobs on exterior. At that time, I was still struggling with basic thing like object positioning (everything is on a speeding train curved on a procedurally generated track) and bullet system. Therefore a mob-focus level was continuously postponed. 

During this game jam, I finally decided to make this level no matter what.I made 3 type of mob enemies. One for melee. One for range. And one for train damage.  The development of last 4 levels has done lots of pathfinding and troubleshooting. So, fortunately, the production is maintainable. And I feel the new level is fun to play.

☯ Game Level : Paper Servant Cowboy ☯

In the begining, I just want to focus on the character, a paper servant who trys to resuce his master from hell. And the kaleidoscope cityscape effect would be in other levels in future. But in second thought, I saw that if I want to promote the current game as a demo of a future product, the 6th level will be very important. It has to charm the player to wish for the full game, and filler-level background won't work. Therefore the 6th game level has 2 main elements: 3d kaleidoscope, a paper servant character that I have imagined for quite a while.I guess this decision is correct. Because the background alone is enough to attract lots of likes from social media. Even 80 LV has written article about it.

For the character's fight pattern, it's quite rough. He has his characteristic. His bullet is much faster than other enemies. But I would say more polishing is needed,  but it will be done later in the future.

☯ Improvement ☯

A lot of small visual improvement is added. 

1. fake exterior reflection
The result is amazing. Before it, the train looks fake with its boiring blank color. But now with the fake animated reflection, the train feels dynamic. And even when camera is focusing on the train exterior, the fake reflection brings a feeling of momentum. 

2. scrollable level menu
it has been planned since first version but it kept getting postponed. But now the game gets 6 levels (with soundtrack page and credit), a scrollable level menu is a must. To make it more dynamic, I made the level tickets rotates based on the scroll speed. And the result is quite joyful.

3. music play system and soundtrack page
for the music system, it's more complicated than it looks. My soundtracks has lots of echo, so it can't just use the normal loop feature from Unity. It needs a system to play the audio loop before the last loop truly ends. And my old script always messed up the timing. Fortunately, I kinda fixed it. And I have made a soundtrack page just to check music. I quite like this feature, and sometimes just launch that page to listen to my music.

4. character camera shoot
In most of the game time, the enemies characters are just a small thing moving on screen, with a UI circle highlighting them. The enemies are quite important for the their episodic plot. So a full body camera shoot is quite helpful to introduce them to player. Also it slightly prolongs the game (most game levels still have game time shorter than my expectation)

☯ Missed Tasks ☯
Right now, even in the latest version, the boss characters are not well animated. They basically just float with a fixed pose. And bullets spawn without them doing gestures. And their floating orientation sometimes looks weird too. As the game jam deadline is close so I decide to skip it for later development.

For the braid girl character (her name is Cesaria, may change in the future), her attack patterns have lots of flaws. And the last pattern design is so bad, it's faster for player to just ignore all spawning braid tentacles and continuously shoot the boss. I haven't done any improvement on that, but I should, and I will.

Also I feel the game levels need some environment camera shots before starting the mission. Right now, it just show the environment name with a big text overlapping the screen, while player can still move around. I believe some good exterior shots will be more visually joyful than that. But the priority is not high, so maybe later 


☯ Conclusion ☯
During this "continue-it" game jam, I have made lots of progress, to the point that there is enough content for a good gameplay trailer that attract lots of attention from public(>11,000 likes on Thread). This result, for me, is very convincing. It definitely needs to upscale to a full game, and have a try on the real market. I will keep developing the game, probably via more game jam. However,