This weekend was amazing!

It started with a hype and challenge to stay awake until 3:00 AM CEST to see the theme reveal. We soldier on, half awake until it hit twitter: "Deeper and Deeper"

@burchyn and I had directly a very productive brainstorming, discussing many ideas, trying to find something unique and fun. We finally settled on Date Night!

For this Jam, we had decide to change things up, to tackle a few extra challenges. We wanted to learn more!

• For the 3D design and animation, we would use Blockbench. A simplify block based 3d modeling tool mostly aimed at designing for minecraft mods. I used it a tiny bit in the past while contribution to minecolonies but Bu never saw it before and she would be the designer for this Jam.

• For the code, I wanted to get rid of my dirty baggage and start fresh. Over the last Ludum Dare I joined, I slowly built a code framework of tools and utilities that where supposed to help me code cleaner and faster. However, this was also restricting me on how to make the game. This time, I wanted to start without it, code freely and without shackle. This was in order to learn different way of coding for Unity. The result? Well... It works but... it looks like a nice plate of spagetti if you know what I mean.

During the course of the three last day my mood went on a real roller coaster. From stress down that it was too much work, to exited that we made progress, back to worry that we will never finish, and back up again when I saw that the design was looking amazing.

I didn't implement any gameplay before the end of the first day as I had many other foundation to build first. But having solid-ish foundation made the gameplay pretty quick to implement. The first game activity out of three was finished by the end of day 2 just before our first stream on Twitch

To make my emotional roller coaster even bumpier, Twitch throw a curve at us by unlocking our Affiliate status on our common channel https://www.twitch.tv/tobugis in the middle of the Jam. We will start testing your game live tonight by the way so stay in touch if you wish to participate.

Day 3 was a smoother ride. We slept a good night, at least according to my standard, woke up well rested. @burchyn created the last few model we needed and added animation. I finished the gameplay and then we started to work on the atmosphere: polishing the UI, color palette, adding sound fx, creating music with the help of ai to go faster, etc.

Then playtesting! We did so much test, spend a whole extra stream playing the game and taking feedback from Chat! Thanks everyone!

And suddenly: the game was done, we had 45 min left for the Jam and it was time to publish it!

How was your experience? Did you also took a ride on the roller coaster?

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/date-night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQct8TIiv0Y

Ohh and did I forget to mention that we lost internet for the most part of the second day due to "issue on the network" from our ISP? Thanks a lot ISP, this was very helpful :D