Post-Compo Version

I have replaced the LD version of Dear Clicker with a post-compo version with significantly cheaper upgrades (less clicking) and a speedrun timer (more replayability)

Play here: https://blubberquark.itch.io/dear-clicker

As you can see, you can now comfortably beat this game in under 10 minutes and with under 2000 clicks.

Rating Results

I was somewhat happy with my Ludum Dare 41 results, because this game is kind of obscure: Riffing on two other games, not fun, comedic but not laugh-out-loud funny, deliberately bare-bones. I made lot of things bad and weird on purpose: Invisible walls, jumping, empty areas. I felt that the slow walking speed, sparseness of the level layout and the absence of meaningful interactions called attention to the linear, gamified structure of Dear Esther, and I wanted to replicate that in an exaggerated way. If you don't know Dear Esther, this game is just weird and slow.

Nonetheless, this is the best I have ever hit the theme, and a good overall score. I was expecting far worse for such a meta, high-context joke game.

Postmortem

On the morning of day 1, I thought about themes. My first idea was to cross a social sim with a metroidvania, like in Persona, but you have to hang out with friends to get the double jump. I had thought about this idea before (somebody please make this!), but it was too ambitious.

Instead, I went with walk sim and clicker, two genres with lots of free time and waiting, and an emphasis on subtext and slow discovery. I generated an island with my trusty lowpoly-island-generation script, loaded the island into Wings3D, and sculpted a path. Then I re-sculpted the mountains around the path until it looked nothing like what my script had produced in the first place.

I had a sore throat (it's better now) and a German accent (still there), so I sent out a "casting call" to my internet friends to record poems, and researched poems that fit the theme of the game.

On the afternoon of day 1, I loaded the island into Unity3D and started coding up the clicker game part. At first I added clickable buttons to the UI layer, but my first hacky prototype that used keyboard keys for buying upgrades looked better and was easier to use than having a split-screen where the mouse is used for looking around on one half of the screen and for buying things on the other.

On the morning of day 2, I added the first poems recorded by my voice-actors to the game, and uploaded an in-progress prototype for feedback. I played through the game several times to get the costs of the upgrades right, but it turns out I aimed much too high. I modelled some clicker game paraphernalia, and put them into the game.

On the evening of the second day, I integrated the last bits of voice acting, uploaded the finished game, and went to bed on my usual schedule.

What went right:

• Scope If anything, this idea was too small. I could accomplish everything I set out to do.
• Game Idea It fit the theme really well, and nobody else had the same idea!
• Tools I used Wings3D to edit the static meshes, Emacs to edit the code, and Audacity to cut up the sound files. Unity3D fit my game idea. Unity3D can be overkill for jam games, and the data structures of Unity can get in the way of just drawing stuff on the screen (use Löve or PyGame instead), but for a first-person exploration game, it was perfect.

What went wrong:

• Audio Quality I had talked to the voice actors on Discord and didn't think it was a problem at first, but a couple of them had really bad audio quality in comparison and had to be cut from the final game. One of the poems in the compo version sounded much too quiet.
• No background music/ambiance I didn't want the poems, which can be triggered at any time in the game, to be overshadowed by chirping bird or the sound of waves. I didn't add background music because I didn't know how much poems I would get in the end. The compo version has a lot of silence. The result is too sterile.

What could have gone better:

• Game Balance The game definitely required too many clicks.
• Visual Style Not enough going on, no exciting vistas.
• Game Idea I vastly overestimated how many of you have played Dear Esther.

Call For Participation

Dear Clicker is not quite done. The next version will address the sound issues. I would like to add more poetry to the game, a bit of randominsation and scatter more weird 3D artefacts in the landscape. If would like to read a poem for the next post-compo version of Dear Clicker, please comment below!