Spring Escape
Deep Down Demo Postmortem
Introduction
Let's start off by giving some context on what Spring Escape has become, what goes behind it and the factors that lead up to the creation of this demo.
Essentially, Spring Escape is the first game of mine that I see as getting fully completed, so far my catalogue of games was composed of either canned project or game jam games that you bet never truly reached their intended vision on release, even with what's technically my first shipped commercial game, VESSELED, I don't think it's anywhere as complete as I'd like it to be.
All of this to say that Spring Escape over what have now become over 3 years of development has grown into something I have never faced before, especially as I continue being the lead/writer/artist/programmer/publisher/... of it with bouncytorch being the sole responsible for the music.
And so around almost a year ago, I decided to finally create a Steam page for the game.
Ideas for a demo came up pretty quickly, participating in an event like Steam Next Fest sounds really enticing as an indie developer, and since it would take place in June of 2025 we'd have a lot of time to make it! It had also been over a year
since the game's second demo, Sneak Peek, which while it showed off a much more solid vision, it was very light on content,
so a new demo was inevitable to really show off what the game had to offer.
Unfortunately, we had to delay the demo pretty last minute by a whole month, but such is how these things go.
A little fun fact, originally the demo was going to feature Level 1, 3, the first level of the game's second sector and light challenges, all around a special hubworld themed around steam/valve's games, however after seeing the demo could have potentially been the final one, I scrapped that idea quickly.
What did and didn't work
What I found we really nailed was having the game be both intuitive and engaging at the same time, we got many compliments in regards to the amount of new mechanics introduced in every level, the level design itself and how the movement jammed with these aspects. It was incredible to see people experiment and figure out moves the game never even mentions.
On the flip side, I think we overestimated the game's clarity when it comes to certain parts of the levels' designs, often players would bash their heads on walls of boxes and I can hardly blame them, curiosity is tough to control.
Another thing that really worked was keeping the player engaged all the way to completion, we knew Blossom Time was pretty fun but seeing people even go out of their way to collect logs and buy colors so fast was really surprising! Even the demo's story, while pretty light to maintain the focus on gameplay, was met with intrigue and even speculation, hopefully one day someone gets to really dive into the demo's secrets (chuckles holding back laugher)
If there's one significant chunk that didn't work as well as we would have liked to it'd probably have to be the boss, I could say a lot about how it came out the way it did but the feedback on its amount of slower moments and unclear attacks are very understandable. However it's very nice to see players were still engaged with it, and the buildup to it in the second half of the demo still remains something we're very proud of.
On a more minor but no less important aspect we've really learned that in the future testing will have to be more throughout, quickly after release a lot of patches had to be pushed out to fix both small and very significant problems that slipped past, some even had to be reverted and reworked again.
The future of Spring Escape, again!
Like I said at the start, this for me is a completely new chapter I've never managed to reach while making a game of this size before, and I'm glad this demo allowed me to better understand what works and doesn't work about the game in way more aspects previous demos could.
As for the future of Spring Escape, we'll of course keep working on it and maintain the demo.
I'm currently thinking better ways to share future progress reports, take advantage of this site and allow the game to continue a somewhat active development, but for now we may stay low for a little bit before we have more to show!
And as a final word, thank you, really, for playing the demo and enjoying Spring Escape.
My dream has always been to make games, and seeing players come in and play something I made for hours, checking out every detail in it, diving into a world I created feels incredible.
I'll continue to work not only on Spring Escape, but this big story I want to tell, and I hope you'll be there to see it unfold bit by bit.
Bye!
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