We thought it would be nice to share with you an early sketch of the layout of the rooms in our game (a bit of a spoiler for those who haven't played it yet!) . I drew this at Saturday, post lunch time (around 21h into the jam). At that point, we knew the game would be about a character (probably an elephant) that had its memories scattered around a sort-of-spooky-but-not-really place.

We aimed for a minimal challenge around each memory, so some puzzle elements were needed. Those elements had to be easily recognizable - like buttons, gates and bridges - so we could skip tutorials. Also, as a programmer myself, they were considered in a way that favoured an easier coding time :laughing: Our team consisted in 2 programmers and an artist, none of us with great level design experience. So, the idea was to exploit the use of those simple elements in order to mix them and create larger, more complex rooms.

This is my silly sketch of the first 6 rooms

The notes are written in Brazilian Portuguese, but essentially * Yellow stars are memories * Red circles are enemies * Green whatevers are puzzle elements (the bridges, projectile altars and etc.)

After planning those basic rooms, we began to work on coding and creating the assets. Ideally, there would be a second batch with bigger rooms and a more interesting combination of puzzles and enemy patterns. However, we spent a good chunk of our available time polishing, and couldn't spare some for better room layouts! We then decided to include 3 improvised rooms (that aren't in the sketch), and wrapped it up as it was.

How the topmost room turned out

Downsides of our approach * The difference of difficulty between our thought out rooms and the improvised ones is very noticeable (and bothered the majority of players) * We devoted too much time to game feel and specific mechanics (like shooting water), that could be invested in additional rooms and elements

Upsides * We have a structure that allows us to come up with new elements and quickly integrate them with the others due to a good use of C# interfaces and Unity components * The visuals and atmosphere managed to make up for the simplicity of the rooms and the lack of assets (thanks @fredbernardo!)

Well, there were other issues, and we intend to show them in future posts, if we can find a window of time! We all already work as full-time game developers with a fast-approaching deadline, so it might be a little hard hahahah

If you played our game, we thank you with all our heart for your time and feedback. We would love to add more content and fix glitches. Maybe in the future!

If you haven't seen our little friend yet, please do. And maybe leave a comment! We are reading and discussing all of them.

Link to game (WebGL and Windows): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/$166522

This is a great community, and we're having a load of fun with all the games created. Thank you, all of Ludum Dare!

That's it for now. See you around :)