Every jam, we follow a certain tradition - we say "we're gonna make something minimalistic so we can do a more relaxed jam" and usually end up with "this is the farthest thing from minimalism". This time was no different. The only difference this time was in the sense that I had even less time to work on this (work on Monday, had a gathering to attend on Friday), so it was effectively 2 days. This also compounded with our usual problem of teammates being 6 and 12 hours apart from each other timezone-wise.

Instead of the usual detailed what went wrongs and right list, I'll mainly talk about our process this time (from my perspective as the programmer / designer).

GRAPPLING HOOKS

Post theme reveal, ideas were thrown around - starting from kings losing power to running after batteries. Someone at some point mentioned grappling hooks like the ones in Attack On Titan (maneuver gear) are cool. And everyone else was like YAS GRAPPLING HOOKS ARE COOL WE'RE GONNA MAKE A GAME WITH THAT!

Didn't take long to come up with an idea around that, since we went with the least nuanced and most literal interpretation of the theme. Our original idea had the player running, jumping and hooking around, building, recharging and upgrading turrets, as well as attacking enemies with the hook.

This may have been our first mistake. We built a game around a feature because we thought it was cool, cramming the theme in. We didn't ask "Why do we need this feature again?" (I asked it actually, the reply was because it's cool.)

This was a mistake, not because it's a bad idea - but I spent almost the entire 1st day getting the player movement and hooking just right, trying out several combinations.

FEATURE CREEP

This left the 2nd day for... literally everything else from turrets, AI, player attacking, recharging, a building and upgrading system etc. Around midway through Sunday, after I programmed the system for turret upgrading in, I decided - screw this. I wouldn't be getting enough time to balance anything with different upgrade levels, seeing as I'd barely have any time to finish programming all of the systems. I could forget about designing a level and waves.

PLAYER AGENCY

At that point, we decided to scrap the upgrade, building and player attacking systems (even if I had the upgrade system programmed in). We'd be doing just the core running around with hooks (cuz it's fun), recharging turrets and managing resources. We decided to take away control from the player.

This led to our 2nd mistake - taking away agency from the player to some extent. The player never had any direct interaction with the enemies, and basically once enemies ganged up - you'd have nothing to do but hopelessly watch things get destroyed (it also didn't help that it's not the most balanced game, considering I had like an hour to program the waves).

TRUSTING TEAMMATES TO GET SHIT DONE

By Sunday 4 am, I finished programming everything - but the game looked like this.

I had to go to sleep, and the artists in our team are 12 hours away from me timezone-wise, so I told them that I'm gonna go to sleep and you guys need to make it beautiful by tomorrow.

I woke up to this.

Quite a change huh? I love having teammates I can trust without telling them what to do. :) (Ignore the background, it's controlled through code.)

TRADEOFFS

And I proceeded to upload the game after that, which is where the jam version is at. Sure, the artists changed some depth layers over the UI and you can see the UI arrows going beneath walls in the jam version, but that wasn't a big deal considering I had to push the level's design almost entirely up to them this time. Are we satisfied with the end product? Can't say on behalf of the others, but yeah - to an extent for me. I keep thinking whether we should've kept all the features and removed the hooking, or kept the hooking and removed features (like we did). Giving weight to these tradeoffs are the hardest decisions in a jam.

Protip for next jam: Make it minimalistic for once.

Oh, and you can play our game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/zapdune

Thanks for reading!