Hi! This is Erdal Ural from team catwheel. This has been a great Ludum Dare for us. We got a good amount feedback from the community. We decided to do a postmortem of our LD45 experience for those who might be interested and for us to remember it better in the future.

In case you missed our game "Zen Man" you can play it here: https://teamcatwheel.itch.io/zen-man

The Team

Team Catwheel is usually a three person indie game development team but in this project only my wife (İdil Ural) and I worked.

Our third team member Umur Altürk decided to go compo and made his own game. On the third day of the jam Umur joined us for mental support and gameplay testing.

We also appreciate the brain storming session we did which included our next door neighbors who happens to be my cousin. That led us to the idea of making a game about meditation which is a topic my wife and I are very interested.

The Good

• A few months back I decided to make a game about meditation. I was really inspired by the book "The Miracle of Mindfulness" by Thich Nhat Hanh. We are so glad that the theme "Start with nothing" was an excellent opportunity for us to give it a try.

• İdil was so happy to try out a new art style and that it fit the minimalist nature of the zen philosophy so well.

• We are so glad that the project we choose was something easy to create on the surface so that it didn't ruin our weekend in a stressful crunch. Half way into the first day we had the skeleton of our game that we could polish it into the current product.

• We made a game that is really meaningful and enjoyable to play for us. We get that the meditation is not a topic which everyone is interested in but in our daily work routines both of us end up making stuff that is focused on what's popular for everyone. This project freshened up our love of making games.

• During the rating stage we decided to focus on giving valuable feedback where it is needed as a strategy to get more ratings for our game. Which ended up a quite good strategy. Currently we received 83 ratings. We did only one "Come and play our game!" kind of self pr post on the LD Page.

Below is an interesting image of the effects of that post. Second spike is the day of that post! I did roughly 20 game reviews per day until weekend. (12th of October)

• Lastly we got a lot of great feedback for our game which will give post jam development of this game a direction.

The Bad

• We couldn't decide on how to represent the thoughts(enemies) in our game until the last hour. So the enemy prefabs were a bit rushed which currently causes a bug where enemies can get out of the ring! We decided to fix it after the jam to make it fair.

• We had to go to work on Monday so the first week after the jam, we were exhausted.

• During the the brain storming session we decided to challenge ourselves to make the game understandable without any instructions. But our initial play testing showed us we failed on that so ended up adding a text to the game saying "Avoid distracting thoughts!"

Also we made the first level spawn no thoughts with the hopes of "if there is nothing to do other than chasing the fishes they would learn that they have to chase the fishes!" but unfortunately we weren't able to make it clear enough that something happens when you are touching the fishes so some people got confused right from the start.

What We Learned

• Explore a single mechanic and polish it good if you still want to have an enjoyable weekend at home during Ludum Dare.

• Start with laying out the game screen on the paper or on the unity scene. Make the layout abstract so there is room for change and improvement. Use the layout as a skeleton for your game to build on. That way you wont get distracted before you got your core game completed.

• Keep your cool especially when things are not going the way you want. Focus on how you can fix the problem. The moment I got the "I dont understand this game!" comment I didn't panic and decided to add some instructions to the game page even though I can't add them inside the game after the submissions are closed. Also tried the pinpoint what exactly the reviewer didn't understand about the game by commenting on their comment and starting a short conversation.

• Make the main thing you expect the player to do ten times more clearer than you think it's necessary. Make it ten times more clearer even if it contradicts with your game's minimalist mood. I increased rotation speed, increased local scale, added small shockwave effects, increased frequency of koto string notes to tell the players something is progressing when you stand inside the fishes. And added a huge shockwave effect and a tibet bowl hit sound effect when the progress is compete. And on the top of that the background image details revealed a little bit to make sure player understands that a new level has been reached. But unfortunately it was not good enough.

Thank you Ludum Dare community

Thank you if your read my first ever postmortem of any game I made. I would appreciate your comments on this post and/or on our game page!

Thank you again if you already played our game!

Peace be upon you all!