This weekend I took part to the Ludum Dare #44, like all of you. Now that 3 days have passed, I think I can write some kind of a post mortem, more like a recap. I usually wait many weeks before taking a step back from my productions, but since the game here was made here in 48 hours, I feel like 3 days is enough. Firstly I'll recap my 48 hours of working on Rashness for those who are curious about it, then I'll talk about the goods and bads of the weekend, and what I plan for the game's future. And I'll add some fancy memes.

DISCLAIMER : I'm not english native, so there might be some english errors or curious syntaxes, please forgive me for that !

CONTEXT

So I'm a forth year student in game development school, and during the weekends of Ludum Dare or Global Game Jams, my school stays opened for students who want to take part to those events, and this time I was the one who got the key and the responsibility of the school and getting the weekend right. Pretty important weekend to me ! Also, during jams I usually work with people I've never made games with, I think it is a great opportunity to discover people, how they work, what they think, etc. But this time I decided to take another step forward and, somehow, to discover myself by doing the Ludum Dare alone ! For my 4th time doing the Ludum Dare I wanted to try submitting a compo game.

SATURDAY 3 AM - THEME ANNOUNCEMENT

I didn't sleep until then, and I was happy that this theme was chosen. As a bad game designer, during the previous week I have thought of games for every theme that could be selected to prevent myself from losing time searching for ideas, and for some themes I had game ideas I did not feel confident with. But for "Your life is currency", I did find 2 ideas :

• a platformer where you have to sacrifice your health to unlock some areas, so the goal of the game would be finding as many areas as possible without dying before
• a boss fight where you can trade initial health for upgrades

And I decided to go for the boss fight, because the platformer would've need level design, lots of tests, probably different environments, and to my opinion too many things to do for me in 48 hours. However, I was a bit confused because I've already done a similar boss fight game last summer (self promotion time : here's the link), and the idea of doing a game like one I already did is sad, but this was an opportunity to see what I could do with 8-9 more months of programming experience, along with testing out my ability to make art, sounds and music for a game. I then started to write on paper for some powerup ideas, but above all for different attacks the boss could use because I didn't want it to be just a health mountain that just shots basic bullets.

SATURDAY 4 AM - UNITY PROJECT CREATION

I always start my game jams doing that : I create my Unity project, setup the things I'll need, folders, physics settings, etc, then I start programming. Only the core gameplay, some of the powerups, not all the boss attacks, no art, and some placeholder fx. I do that so I can quickly know if the game is going to be fun to play or not. If I realize that it's not and I have to change my game idea, then I can go to sleep and hopefully during my sleep my brain will find some nice other ideas ! I could have also gone for the platformer idea in that case. But I did not have to worry about changing my game because I liked the shooter I built and I felt it could become a nice jam game with the complete powerups system and some art. And so I went to sleep for 2 hours and a half.

SATURDAY 7 AM - HARD TO GET INTO IT...

And at this time I had to face the most difficult part of my weekend : being alone :cry:. Of course this is the spirit of the compo and I knew that it would be technically hard, but here I am talking about motivation. Usually when I do jams with a team, first I sleep more hours, and when I wake up, there's some work that has been done, the production has gone a bit further, which is motivating and encourages me to get in Unity as fast as possible ! Here, I was just in front of the little code I wrote a few hours sooner, still no art, only 20-30% of the powerups, nothing more. And it took me a moment to really get into it and retrieve all my will to work, especially since, all my schoolmates who were there were all working in teams, so I was the only one alone and it didn't help motivating me, obviously :laughing:

So how did I keep the motivation ? Well first I was responsible for the weekend in school, so I could not leave. This did not force me to do the Ludum Dare, but it would've been stupid staying at school and not work on my game. Another thing I did was talking to people before the weekend, and tell them I was going for the compo, doing a game alone in 48 hours. Not to be pretentious, but it was somehow a commitment I made, and I would have been ashamed if I could not hold it. I did not want people to tell me "so you could not do a game alone ? I thought you were confident about that ?", and I kept on working.

I then did all the powerup system, and tried it a few times before going back home to take a break (all hail the driving licence), and to wash myself because more than a game developer, I am a clean person. At this point I was feeling a bit bad, with headache and strong need of sleep incoming, so it was the right moment to take a break.

SATURDAY 17 PM - PIXEL ART TIME !

Back to work, fresh and motivated ! Unlike the morning when I still had lot of programming to do, this time I had the core gameplay working, so I was ready to work on the characters ! After looking for graphic references, I created the sprite sheets for both the boss and the player, put them together to adjust the colors, and then I put them in Unity to see how the game would look like with them. And I was not disappointed ! The animations were not perfect, some collisions needed to be fixed but it felt cool controlling a pixelart warlock/magician and face a demon that has fire getting out of his body. Adding art is always a great motivation boost and from that moment my motivation was at its maximum ! Also I added feedbacks, explosions, some lights on the characters, changed the background color, because I always want my game to be as close as I want it to be at the end when I test it. And I worked on all that, slowly but surely, during lots of hours.

Then, I did a mistake ! I did not want to go to sleep because I felt I could still work a bit. And I could, but I decided to work on something that just made my brain explode : the music. Using Bosca Ceoil - one the softwares I have lot of fun using btw -, I tried several melodies, drums beats and other different things, but everything was just a disaster, so I lost like 1 or 2 hours doing this, to finally delete everything and go to sleep with horrible music resonating in my head and the feeling of having lost my time. And oh boy 2 hours is precious during a 48 hours jam ! :worried:

SUNDAY 9 AM - FINALLY GOT THAT MUSIC

After 3 hours of good sleep, I stood up in front of my game music and I was ready to do it properly, with a fresher brain than sooner. So I worked on it more slowely, I searched some inspiration on YouTube, thought of melodies in my head, and finally I came up with something ! The track I composed is really, REALLY not extraordinary, but I was happy I did it myself. It would have been pretty sad to make a whole game alone for a compo submission but not having my own music. Then I did all the sounds with SFXR and added all that in the game ! Once again, this was a step that help me keeping my motivation for the last day.

SUNDAY 13 PM - PRODUCTION END

Start of the final rush. Nothing special to say, I did the UI art, fixed the bugs I found, then I tried to balance the game a bit. The problem is that you can not balance your game by playing it yourself, this is impossible and I realized it for real a bit later.

SUNDAY 19 PM - PLAYTESTS !

So because we were around 40 devs in the school doing the Ludum Dare, we got together in a classroom, and every team shew others their work. This was really a great moment, seeing what everyone came up with from the same theme is really interesting, and some builds were still bugged so it made us laugh (imagine 40 tired people laughing for nothing...). When I presented my game, I asked if anyone wanted to give it a try. Someone did, and just killed my boss on first try, after I said it was a hard fight... Funny moment tho, but then I knew I had to work on the balance before the deadline.

So as I said, I tried to balance my game myself but I could not. The prices I chose for some upgrades that I thought were well chosen, were actually pretty stupid, the boss did not have enough life, the "burn damages" upgrade was waaaay too overpowered. And that's why I want to say that you should always have people to playtest your game, even during a game jam, because they will always find some bugs, or break your game somehow, and having other people trying your game is always positive.

MONDAY 0 AM - LAST 3 HOURS

After cleaning and leaving school, getting back home and washing myself, I opened my project and worked for it for 2 hours. During this time I balanced it more, I added some tips displayed on screen when the player loses, so that he doesn't have a frustrating "DEFEAT" text but he has some tips to make him want to try again and give him confidence. The game might be hard, but it doesn't want the player to ragequit. I also fixed a few more bugs I found, added credits, leave button, etc.

Then I created the itch.io project, along with writing the Ludum Dare post for my game. I took screenshots, made a key art for the vignettes, a game icon, and after I uploaded everything, I went for a night of well deserved sleep, feeling happy with my weekend and proud of the game I just finished !

CONCLUSION

So here's how went my first compo : a great weekend, with a difficult start, a motivation that took a while to come, but that finally ended up with a game I am proud of and that is complete and polished. However, I do not think I will do solo jams again, it is way better to work with people than working alone. I mean, I like working alone on my games, but not with such short amounts of time. Still, I'm really happy I challenged myself with that, it was very interesting and made me think about myself, my ability to work hard, keep motivated, in fact it taught me more about myself than game creation I think :laughing:

So if I had to list the good points / things I did great : - Overcome demotivation - Be responsible of an event with around 40 people when everything went well - Make nice pixel art sprites that I think are pretty cool, along with FX, UI, menus, etc when it's not my thing - Make a music myself. Just a 1 minute simple loop, but still something I did not think I could have done - Publish a complete and polished game in time, with clean itch.io and LD pages presentations

And the bad points : - Keep on working while being too tired too work. Game jam or not, compo or not, sleeping and taking breaks is too important to be forgotten, and I slept 5-6 hours from friday morning to sunday evening, which is too few hours, I got headaches, I felt bad sometimes, but I kept on working and that is a bad idea - Making a simple game was a good idea since it helped me keeping the scope down and completing the game, but in my opinion I could have exploit it a bit more and make something more interesting than a simple boss fight. The theme was good enough to find more ideas, and I should not have been afraid of the compo and the time I had. More than a contest, Ludum Dare is a way to bring fresh game ideas to life ! - Some things I could fix but did not even realize : a trail that is not rendered in the correct order, a bullet spawn position that is wrong, the "quick tip" that sometimes doesn't show any tip... those are details but, details are what make a game polished and great, and I pay a lot of attention to that, so I consider that a bad point

As I said I was happy of my game. However I did not expect it to be appreciated this much by people, I only got nice comments about the fun, the art, the music (I swear I did :sunglasses:), some feedbacks of course about things that need to be changed, but always with a positive touch, so huge thanks to anyone for that. It is currently the 5th most rated game of this 44th Ludum Dare, and that is just crazy. I don't want to be boastful, I simply want to show that even if you're working alone, or don't feel your game to be able to reach such scores, it actually can, and that's really cool.

Now what I will do is wait for the jam to end and fix the bugs I already need to fix, then I think of maybe improving the game, making different bosses, maybe some levels with 2 bosses at once, teleportation powerups, new things like that. What do you guys think ? Would you like playing that, or have you any ideas of what I could do for the game ? Or do you think it is good as the jam game it is and that I should not keep on working on it ?

Make sure to tell me what you think about that, and about my post, tell me if you had a similar or completely different experience :) Thanks for reading, best of luck ! Rashness is available HERE, every feedback is much appreciated !