I am very happy with my 3rd successful entry in Ludum Dare. Deeper Trance is a very simple game with not one but two illusions : * One visual: all the display is an interactive image magic ( you may have seen them as kids ) that give you the illusion of depth * One auditory: The theme music is getting deeper and deeper in pitch continuously never stoping akin to a Shepard Tone

Can you see the rotating cube (with compression to fit in 4mB this gif is not as good as the actual game)

I have been getting a lot of views and nice comments, but you can still go check if you can see the effect if you'd like!

I'll make a post about improvement ideas post-Ludum Dare (part-2) and one about reviewing 100+ games (part 3)! (I love reviewing games !)

Post mortem:

I was so excited for this ludum dare, this is my once-a-year treat for myself. Last ludum dare was a blast, it was my first time using Unity, that solved many of my issues for developing games, allowing me to implement quickly my ideas and ship something in 48h while taking time for familly . I found that I could code in the early morning while everyone slept, during baby's naps and after dinner (this year time was even tighter as I was spending time with familly and friends!). My last game had 3d, a very nice mood, music and SFX. It only lacked to be a Game.... There was no goal, no progression. It was just a fun sandbox playground.

My goal for LD48 was make a game first. It was to be simple and I should be spending time on the game mechanics. I tend to have crazy ideas, being super creative and ending up far from my goal.

I had one game idea coming in: I have this tile-based puzzle I am exploring as a Research project. I don't know the solution to the puzzle and I was expecting to make some sort of foldit where players explore possible solutions and would help me. Making the idea into a game would require a fitting theme and finding some sort of fun gameplay.

I woke up a 3:40 (40min in). The theme was not fitting for my ideas. I considered dropping out and spend the week end with family. But I had the idea right away in my bed to do a game of falling through levels and use that shader I had developed a year ago for another research project. A colleague was working on autostereogram and I had the idea of a new algorithm to implement it on shader. Apparently reading my entry à 4am I already had the idea of reversing the Shepard tone (which is usually higher and higher). I had this old riff I played on the guitar as a warmup exercise that could work for this idea.

So at 4am after a coffee I draft a plan for the development : Day 1 was mostly free, but I had a barbecue planned with friends for day 2 from 12 to 19. So most of the game should be done on Day 1. Day 2 should only be making it better.

Day 1

• 4:30 - 5:00 - Github + VSstudio + Unity
• 5:00 - 7:00 - Have a prototype falling game
• 7:00 - 8:00 - Read old code about autostereogram and shader
• 8:00 - 10:00 - morning with the family and the baby
• 10:00 - 12:00 - Shader code
• afternoon - Family time and maybe some music
• 21:00 - 23:00 - first release

Day 2

• 7:00 - 11:30 - Menu, colors
• 20:00 - 23:00 - Play testing and improvement in particular
• 23:00 - 00:00 - Releasing

Everything went according to plan, which is nice and unheard of!

I knew the shader worked for me, it was nice to validate at the end of day 1 with family and other people that they could see/play !

The music idea worked right away. The most fiddly thing was that I invented the riff on a guitar for which I now how to read tabs but not sheet music. But for composition and in particular harmony arrangement I know sheet music. Going from one to another was troublesome. I need to learn sheet music for guitar.

I commited regularly on github so I can tell :

• I Had a game at 07:51:47 CEST without the shader. Three hours in !
• I had the first prototype 23:34! Exactly on schedule. It allowed me to test it with family
• Compo was released at 23:00 CEST (4h before the deadline) Fixing the hosted version on github.io and writing the post

I'll write more but in separate posts, but it took me the better of one day to write this one...