Hello! This was my first game jam and really the most complete game I have ever been able to make so I wanted to write about the experience a bit! I'll be making a new post every day detailing what happened throughout our Ludum Dare weekend!

If you'd like to try our game you can do so here make sure to leave feedback if you do!

we're looking to learn as much as we can from this experience thank you!

Introduction

We had messed around making some small projects before but they weren’t very impressive or complete (perhaps I will make a few posts on past projects at some point).

Game development is something I have been interested in for years. It is actually one of the reasons why I began programming when I was younger, but I was never able to fully sink my teeth into it.

I thought Ludum Dare would be my chance to finally do that.

Preparation

The way Ludum Dare works is the week before the Jam starts there are 4 days of voting for themes. The first three days will each have a unique list of themes and then on day four the most popular themes from days 1-3 will be chosen and voted on.

We took some time during the voting week to get together and discuss our ideas for possible games we could make relating to the themes so that on the day of the jam we could get to work as fast as possible.

Some of the highlights from these discussions were:

1. 1 minute to prepare: PvE Auto-battler like Teamfight Tactics / Dota Underlords where each round your economy, levels, and pieces reset. Then, you have to choose how to spend your money before the round starts.
2. Side effects: Each action you take slowly closes the side of the game screen in on you, when it gets too small you lose.
3. Outdated Technology: You’re a master swordsman who has just been attacked by a group with guns for the first time ever, so now it is a stealth game.
4. Momentum: Dynasty warrior type beat em up, every enemy you kill increases the speed of the game.

These were our favorite ideas for the other themes that even though we didn’t get to pursue this weekend we may look into making in the future!

In the end, the theme ended up being “Keep It Alive” which admittedly was not our first choice or one we had discussed much, but we were determined to do the best with it regardless.

Expectations

Going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect of myself, my team, and the game jam itself. I had never finished a game over the course of years of trying to. As a team, we had only made a halfway functional tower defense game over the course of a month so I wasn’t sure how we would fare on such a limited time frame and with the stress of that deadline hanging over our heads.

The only goal I had for our team and myself was that this time we complete a game. I believe this is a crucial skill to develop in and of itself and it was something that I had never accomplished.

Because of this, I had wanted to sway the team towards creating a very simple game that we could feasibly complete within the time frame. In my mind, the simpler the game idea and mechanics the better.

That is not how it turned out.

The Day Of The Jam

So the time has come for the theme to be revealed and we’re less than enthused about the “Keep It Alive” theme, but we had to get to work regardless of that.

Now this is where things went a bit off the rails.

We had decided we would make a roguelike RPG with a few survival mechanics as our game jam entry.

Remember when I said I wanted to do simple? Well, we threw that idea away almost immediately.

This decision still baffles me because instead of sticking with the plan of a simple game we could complete, we somehow made the decision to make a more complex game than anything we had attempted prior.

In any case, it was time to get to work.

Development

There are a few key factors to a roguelike game

Procedurally generated maps
Permanent death
Loot

Many of the older games in this genre also have a tendency to use grid-based movement and turn-based combat along with random item generation to make the loot more interesting.

The first and arguably most important thing we would have to accomplish to make this work was the procedural generation of maps.

So I began coding our GridGenerator script which would handle all of our map generation. I would say this is where I spent at least half of my time during this game jam.

In the end? We made it work well enough to make it one of the features we received a good deal of positive feedback on.

Next Post I will go over how we accomplished our map generation and some of the challenges faced along the way.

Cacophony: The Ballad of the Celestial Goblin-King is a procedurally-generated roguelike dungeon crawler created in 72 hours for Ludum Dare.

You can try the game in your browser here.