What did you make?

A write your own disaster appeal/charity single highlighting the planet's overpopulation as one of the world's superstar producers game. It's a laid back, humorous, choose your own song/adventure game type of thing, I guess.

Why?

We said that if we were going to take part the theme would have to be dynamite since we had no enthusiasm for a punishing weekend. We never have but we're always compelled to take part, this is our 12th Ludum Dare! We had mentioned in the week that we could try making a music based game and we could just write a song about whatever the theme is, somehow turn that into a "game".

When the theme was announced we didn't think it was dynamite. We came up with the usual handful of bad ideas before coming back to the music idea. Running out of space could be good material for a song about overpopulation. The player could build the lyrics through dialogue choices and then watch the song at the end. It would be stupid but could be fun.

How?

Day 1

On the first day we spent most of our time working on the music. We decided to provide the leading lines and then we'd offer a choice of 3 counter rhymes for the player to pick between. There would be 8 leading lines with 3 rhymes each so we need to write 3 variations of the same song with 24 unique counter rhymes. We could then divide the song into chunks so when you select the lyrics you want it builds a playlist of chunks that will playback later. It seemed easy enough on paper, we'd just need the words and music. Since we'd keep the same tempo we could have multiple backing tracks for the song. Time permitting we'd have 3 tracks. Time wasn't permitting but we did manage 2!

Day 2

The next day was spent "rapping" and coding the chunk system. Trying to make sure the rapping started and finished within the parameters of the chunk was quite challenging. I'm terrible at rapping but it was pretty fun and turned out terrible enough to hopefully be funny. We then chopped everything into chunks and set up Unity to playback the chunks in the order we call them. It worked! Problem was there's a tiny gap in the audio each time a new chunk plays. Luckily, Rodo quickly figured out a way to make sure there was gapless payback and it all seemed to work! Yay!

So, the music side was all hunky-dory, we just had to make it all work as game. Oh, we haven't done any art assets yet! This is a backwards jam. We usually save the music until 2 hours before upload time, this time we've spent the first 2 days on the music alone.

Day 3

The last day was pretty full on. We didn't benefit from the event starting 3 hours early, we simply lost a critical 3 hours of crunch time we rely on each jam. On the plus side Rodo had the day off, a luxury we rarely enjoy. We had to do all the art, the dialogue trees, make sure all the corresponding choices match the music played, create the intro, animate, make the start and end screen including the last minute review system.

We used the same chunk principle to generate a review based on your lyric choices. We were very tired at this point though so the review fragments aren't the best written text you'll read this Ludum Dare, but we tried! Then we ran out of time...

What was missing?

• The 3rd musical option
• The option to restart from the notepad scene
• Meaningful gameplay
• A balanced diet
• Rest

We have a bad habit of not really making "games" for Ludum Dare, instead we work dozens of hours in the hope of making you laugh for a couple of minutes. I'm not quite sure it's worth ruining my weekend for that but here we are, our 12th game!

See ya all next time. Thanks to everyone who has played and left a comment. We appreciate all the feedback.

If you'd like to make your own song - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/protocol-47-superstar-appeal