Looks like today I can finally keep my head above my shoulders and not doze off, so it's finally time for the post-mortem of Deep-fry Deeper, @ladycerberus and yours truly's entry for this edition.

You can play it and rate it at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-fry-deeper

Joining, coming up with the idea

@ladycerberus is both a good friend and a talented UI/UX artist, and for some time the possibility of making a jam game together had been brought up in the past. Unfortunately, compo-fixation on one hand (more on this later), real-life commitments on the other and irrational fear sprinkles would usually get in the way.

This time, thankfully, both of us were willing to engage and I'd also taken Monday off work, theoretically in order to rest from the compo(#LOLNO), but also accounting for the possibility of joining as a team.

Once we learned about the theme, we finally agreed to participate and on Saturday morning we gathered over Discord and started brainstorming.

We began with the more obvious takes on the theme in order to get them out of the way as quickly as possible unless we thought of something amazing. A steady flow of new ideas became more and more interesting (A matrioshka boss rush still feels appealing to me :thinking:), and eventually we came up with the magical word(s): Deep-fried.

Cooking Mama was our main inspiration when it came to mechanics, and it was an obvious fit for the idea, so we went for it. Then, regarding the recipes our minds began to wander and think about the grossest food or the most insane things we could just dump in a pot full of burning oil, to add a twist to the plot and potentially the mechanics.

Here's a small spoilerish sneak peak of how we imagined the game might progress towards:

After doing some super-serious R&D while also laughing our asses off, we finally had an idea for a game!

What went well

• Teamwork! This has been the first ludum dare I've done as part of a team (and my second game jam with a team in total, if I count one I did at my previous job). I've always preferred participating alone, even if I was curious as to what engaging as a team would be like, because of:

  • A strange sense of self-pride and the drive to prove that I can make a good game by myself covering all areas, not just code.
  • Pathological insecurities delivered in two flavours: First, the thought "What if I don't like what they do or they drag me down?", and the second and more important, is "What if THEY don't like what I do or I drag THEM down?" However, I'm happy to say that I was proved WRONG. Communication was great, we complemented each other nicely (I think) and we had a lot of fun. I'd also like to add that, considering the amazing job @ladycerberus did with the visuals of the game PLUS the fact that she is also a mom PLUS the fact that she was a bit ill during the weekend, she's a fucking superhero :bow: :bow: :bow:

• Passion. A cool side benefit of being part of a team was that we hyped each other. We really liked the idea and were really stoked about the potential of the game, so even if not everything turned out as we would have liked, we remained highly motivated all across the duration and then some.

• Exciting game concept. As proof, these days I can't take a walk around Barcelona without looking (or smelling!) at bars, fast food restaurants or pretty much anywhere and come up with new ideas. Looking at the (insane) number of ratings we've received and the generally positive comments, it looks like it's not just us who enjoyed it. Thank you all! :heart: :heart: :heart:

• Making the right call to settle for the churros recipe. By Sunday morning we'd both started to feel like maaaybe the 6 original recipes were too much (We had implemented 2 steps and -maybe the third one? I can't remember now- of the first recipe). We started to think that perhaps we could still show off the main vision by making three, but we also started polishing what we had. By Monday morning we were already taking for granted that we'd only do the churros. This drastic scope reduction, while painful, helped us submit a well-rounded game rather than a bunch of unfinished mechanics.

• Polish. An obvious consequence of the previous point is that by cutting scope to one recipe we could focus on improving what we had, so we worked hard to enhance the UI and game feel. There are still some small areas for improvement, but the reception in this area has been overwhelmingly positive as well (I'm still gladly surprised at people appreciating the sound effects since I feared that they could feel like placeholders...except the splat, the splat sfx is just great :sunglasses: )

• Extra computer available for builds. WebGL is the main platform I target so I can show it to people for playtest during development and because it's usually more convenient to play during the rating phase. However, building for it is usually slow af compared to standalone versions and it basically locks me away from Unity for a while. Last month I got myself a second hand Macbook pro laptop, so I could use it to make not just Web builds, but also target and test Mac and Linux versions easily. Win, win!

What went wrong

• Drastically reduced scope. By cutting down on the recipes we'd brainstormed the game turned out to be way shorter (obviously), but it also lacked the absurdity of the original vision. We tried to address the length issue by adding randomness and increasing the difficulty of the current minigames, and we achieved it without making it unmanageable, but the trick still does feel cheap. The end result is still good in its own way (Who would have guessed that churros would be so popular? :smile:, which is great, but we also regret a bit not having managed to do at least a couple more recipes for the main submission.
• Lack of a proper, thorough planning stage at the beginningx We were so excited about the game that we rushed to implementing fast. We did have a Trello board, but since we were in constant contact we didn't really bother too much with it. Perhaps if we'd focused on properly defining the tasks at the beginning we could have spotted that we were aiming for the moon.
• Minor, but annoying, technical hiccupsx Nothing you wouldn't expect from a Ludum Dare using Unity, and considering that I decided to use the latest alpha version it all went relatively smooth, but still those issues cost us two-three hours of work.
• Becoming familiar with new tools To achieve the pixel art look without actually doing pixel art and to implement the oily VFX ladycerberus tried a couple of tools by Kronbits and CodeManu. The results were really good, but being a completely new tool she had to spend some time learning how they worked.
• No time for music or integrating the remaining SFX (there were two or three, I believe, but I was forced to submit a bit before the deadline).
• Code? What code? I focused on speed, and the code works, but the amount of copy paste is embarrassing :expressionless:. Refactoring is my top priority if we keep working on the project.
• Post-jam exhaustion This time I tried not to miss a lot of sleep, but my sleep habits are usually crap anyway, so even despite the day off, the compounded effects of last week, the weekend and this week just wrecked me up until now.
• Too worried to experiment. When I created the project I was thinking about properly using Unity's new Input System and, more importantly, learning about their new and shiny visual scripting tool. Regarding the input, in the end I didn't really need to use anything new because the IXXXPointerXXX interfaces worked well enough with the minimal setup, so this was fine. With visual scripting I started to feel the anxiety of not touching code, not knowing how to do things or having to hack a lot to make it work as I wanted it to be, so in the end I came back to usual scripts. I'm still curious about it, but I guess I'll just have to try it on my free time.
• Embarrassing secret: I DON'T LIKE CHURROS, now they'll haunt me for life! :sob:

Next steps (?)

We're super proud of the work we've done and the great reception players have shown so far.

People have asked for more recipes and minigames. We have ideas for several more, too, and we're still enthusiastic about the concept, so we'd certainly like to continue. This said, past me has expressed similar wishes in the past for other games and then life got in the way, so I want to remain grounded. At the same time, looking at last weekend I'm inclined to believe that we can keep encouraging each other to keep expanding the game a bit more, as much as work and family obligations allow us.

As always, if you've managed to read this far thank you! (and sorry! :sweat_smile: )