Delaying Ludum Dare by Emily Pitcher
Have you ever participated in a game jam where your team can't decide what to do? Of course you have, that's why you're rating games for Ludum Dare. Now you can relive your (recent?) experiences in our game!
The Premise
Ludum Dare 50 has just started. You hop in a Discord call with your friends to figure out what game you're going to make. At first, your game has promise, but it soon derails as your team members cannot agree on what game to make.
Controls
- Press and hold A and D keys, or Left arrow and Right arrow keys, to move left and right.
- Press Spacebar, W, or Up arrow keys to jump. Hold for longer jumps.
- Press O to open the options/settings for the game.
- Jump onto platforms with words to select it/pick that response.
Gamepad and other controllers are supported in theory, but are untested. We recommend using keyboard.
Credits
- UI: Julia Lee
- Audio: Ben Young
- Writing: Emily Pitcher
- Programming: Richard Cheng, Peter Sutarjo
- Art: Julia Lee, Caroline Wang, Tiffany Shen, Megan Xu
- Voice Acting: Peter Sutarjo, Richard Cheng, Emily Pitcher, Megan Xu, Caroline Wang, Ben Young, Julia Lee
- Special thanks to Secret Lab for developing Yarn Spinner, the basis for out dialogue and voice over system.
Patch Notes
- Fixed physics bug with elevator platform. Now you don't fall through it at a low frame rate!
- Added many more checkpoints and reduced overall difficulty of platforming.
- Rewired the player’s brain so that it doesn’t get confused when you press too many buttons at once. (Pressing W, S, Up arrow, or Down arrow keys no longer slows your horizontal movement.)
- Taught our team members how to mute themselves on Discord. (Profile icons no longer remain lit up when no voice overs are playing.)
- Renegotiated our deal with the ghost in the machine to make spooky sounds for more than 30 seconds. (Horror game music now plays on a loop, instead of stopping after playing once.)
- Painted the spikes red to improve visibility and emphasize that you shouldn’t jump on them.
- Replaced voice overs for “Everyone” lines with files that actually contain multiple people speaking.
- Edited dialogue to more accurately reflect the content of the voice overs.
- Added a greater variety of fonts.
- Subtitles box now resizes vertically, to hide less of the screen when possible.
- Implemented actual pausing while the options/settings are open, instead of only disabling player input.
- Installed shrink ray on the title screen. (Modified title screen so that “Ludum Dare” will fit on the screen regardless of screen resolution.)
- Particles now render behind platforms.
Based on feedback so far, we also plan on improving visibility of foreground elements like platforms. Stay tuned for more updates!
Other Notes
Spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club are in this game.
Ratings
| Overall | 515th | 3.657⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 719th | 3.357⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 201th | 3.809⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 479th | 3.833⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1116th | 2.971⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 130th | 4.014⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 25th | 4.386⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 337th | 3.818⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 14🗳️ | 9🗨️ |
The text block and background made me hard to see where the platform is and the game itself is quite hard also.
Anyway, well done guys!
We'll also look into increasing the visibility of the foreground platforms against the messy background! @honeyhop
I'm glad you enjoyed the theme and concept!
There was a *lot* of dialogue content in the game, so as I played I jotted down some notes and thoughts:
- The particles created by the player are a beautiful touch, as is the changing background, it really adds some good graphical touches to a game otherwise mainly made from geometric shapes!
- Nice plug for A Taste Of The Past haha, I still need to go play the new-and-improved full version once Ludum Dare ends.
- This ^^^ sounds like a great idea for a game, actually. I think I'll call it "The Story of Peace Of Cake Game's Life".
- The music in this game in *insanely* good, I could listen to it for hours and still be jamming out to it!
- The part where the spikes were added really made the difficulty curve have an extremely sharp increase, thankfully it wasn't too hard and didn't take too long to get past.
- The actual Discord sounds really confused me haha, I thought I was actually getting Discord notifications while playing a game about a group of game developers collaborating on Discord.
Overall, this is probably the most polished entry I've played all Ludum Dare! A perfect difficulty level, good hilarious dialogue, and some nice visual novel-style elements in the ability to choose your own response in certain scenarios.
Looking forward to "Killer Rabbit Bakery: A Horror Visual Novel About Bunnies Doomed To Be Single Forever While Mining And Crafting The Heck Out Of A Valley To Kill Innocent Fish" in Ludum Dare 51, and its Netflix Original TV series shortly afterwards!
And I look forward to making a visual novel horror management baking game with bunnies and fish in Ludum Dare 51!
I'll check back in later because I really want to see how this wraps up :)
... and btw, it's definitly Da-ray !! ;)
@furano I'm proud of you for agreeing that it is Dar-ay. 😁
The game resonates with me a lot, I think it's a great idea and that the "background" game is a platformer (which is usually what most people do as a first Ludum Dare or as an idea when they run out of ideas) it's the best touch without a doubt it blends so well with the history
The dubbing and the way it's written seems spectacular to me and it would be a great game without the platformer.
I'm a bit annoyed by the inconsistency in the length of the platformer parts, at the beginning they are super long and from the "horror" part onwards they become very short. I got to the choices before you finished talking and sometimes I would choose without knowing what I was doing!
Also tell you that with the plug to "Taste of the Past" I just downloaded it and will play it without hesitation.
Best of luck wherever your development adventure takes you :)
Anyways, great job!
Seriously though? This is great. I actually haven't seen many platformers submitted this time, so it was great to play a solid "normal platformer" where everything worked well and the controls were tight. The audio track was worth top marks in that category alone, so funny and entertaining, and letting the player make choices and putting up all that amusing background art and different music tied it all together just enough to work.
Great work guys!
I like the meta idea, and the way to show the story, but i think the plateform side is a little too difficulte and you need to concentrate on your jump and its hard to concentrate to the story. And maybe the music is a little bit looder than the voice actor. But good job ! i love the idea
However, the platforming is pretty frustrating! I appreciate the generous checkpoints in some sections, but a combination of factors really hurt the platforming:
- It’s very slippery and movement has slow acceleration, but the platforms get really tiny at times. Makes it super hard to precisely aim for platforms in mid-air.
- Some jumps have very low ceilings from platforms above them, further restricting your aerial control options.