All in all, the 43rd Ludum Dare was relatively smooth sailing for us. The theme was a bit harder than usual (more on that below), but we had already decided on some things: namely the general art style. We knew we were going 2D with some anime inspiration, so we got off the ground with our ideas quite quickly.

At first, we played around with very concrete sacrifices but ultimately landed on a dialogue-driven mystery game. We really haven't made two similar games for a Ludum Dare, nor did we this time either. The more story-driven approach was a bit risky, especially since there wasn't that much time to dedicate on the writing, but judging from the comments so far it seems to have paid off. The short, linear nature and simple controls saved us some time on the programming side to concentrate on the story and actually even do a bit of testing.

Scoping and Art

We decided on having a small number of characters and locations early on. The art & storytelling style was inspired by various games, including VA-11 HALL-A, 2064: Read Only Memories and old text adventures. The final style we ended up with was something that looked nice and was fast enough to produce. In retrospect, the number of characters and/or locations could have been a bit smaller to save time to add a bit more animation and polish.

The story itself was basically Agatha Christie in space, with a dash of Firefly and A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet thrown in.

The reason the characters don't react to the clues you find is also down to scope. Having them react to one thing would make then not noticing another thing feel incohesive, so with the time constraints, it made for a more consistent experience to not have them react to anything.

Overall, the scoping worked out pretty well on both the development and the gameplay side. A short story that can be completed in minutes works very well in Ludum Dare where you're usually trying to play as many games as possible in a limited time, and most players got to experience the whole narrative.

Code

On the code side, a lot was relying on a very simple parser written from the ground up during the weekend. It was a quick and dirty solution, but it enabled me to concentrate on writing the dialogue as efficiently as possible. It's also handy that in a jam you don't need to future proof at all, so adding new features was only a matter of figuring out a new character to represent a command.

One of the riskiest features was probably the scorekeeping for the ending. I hadn't done any web programming in ages, let alone a WebGL trinket that called web pages, so there was a lot I had to either learn or relearn. Ultimately, it turned out the game couldn't contact the server from the Itch.io page (HTTPS vs HTTP), so I put it on my own server which also housed the PHP page.

I also regret not having time to implement a clue window, where you could view a summary of all the clues found so far. I actually wrote down all the clues and even started with the UI, but figured that I didn't have time to come up with a good enough UI and implement it.

Other Games

I have played around 40 different games so far and my impression is that this was a difficult theme. There have been plenty of good and excellent games, but few with really interesting takes on the theme. A very common take seems to be giving the player a bunch of actions and then removing them one by one, or just having some resource as a visible character on the screen.

The theme seems to have inspired a bit darker games than usual, which is not really surprising. There was some very interesting narrative takes on the theme, which made me think of substituting the Humor category with more general Story. It would still include humour but would serve as a broader category where the more serious story-driven games could also compete.

A short list of some of our favourites:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/zoe-and-the-polypantheon

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/total-party-kill

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/keyboard-twister

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/dropboy

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/silent-whisper

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/junkstar

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/burn-out

Here's the link to our game if you haven't played it yet:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/room44

SPOILERS BELOW THE IMAGE, I RECOMMEND YOU PLAY THE GAME BEFORE READING

So, there was the ending.

Many have correctly deduced that there wasn't a concrete confirmation on who the actual murderer was. That was completely intentional, even if we knew it might not work out, as Ludum Dare seemed like a fit place to do some experimentation. Also, I think the way you're not sure if you did the "right" thing makes it feel more like a sacrifice.

Here is the score as of 10th of December (around midnight in Finland):

Total votes: 138

Kate: 39

Fiona: 40

Mack: 30

Lucifer: 29

What's interesting here, is that during the first few days, it seemed clear that Lucifer would gain the most votes and Fiona the least, but not the results have practically flipped. There were no changes made to the game during this time.