A brief account (and thanks) of how I got in this community

Hello, everyone! I'm Pedro (@pedonho). I never thought I would be in this game industry, even though many years ago I was involved in this. I have always enjoyed being involved in creative areas and seeing how everything was done/developed and with games it was no different. Anyway, a little while ago I found myself doing this. It was something suddenly, it just happened... All of a sudden, since 4 months ago actually, I found myself programming and creating little games and I was having a lot more fun than I could ever imagine. I always hated logic and things of sort, doing the math and etc... I was always much more connected to the artistic part of anything I put myself into, but over time I became more and more interested in programming. Construct 3 also made everything more accessible and fun to learn. After some time I felt confident trying some new things, I got together with some friends and we created a game just to see how it could go: that's when "Madeline" emerged. Madeline was our first attempt making a game, a very intense experience and also a very big learning phase for all of us. And with it we learned to work as a group and decided to do Ludum Dare's 48 for the first time, but with 2 great additions to our team. If it weren't for me creating Madeline before, I would never imagine that in 3 days I would do anything like Hell Deep Is Your Love. I was very excited for this jam, it's all too recent and new to us still... But everything I have done so far in this game area amused me and gave me a feeling I had never felt before... a feeling of finding myself. Every comment, every live stream, every feedback feels like I'm finally in the right place.

My experience in Ludum Dare 48

Now, let's talk a bit about the process of programming this game. I'm going to talk about my two biggest challenges in programming Hell Deep Is Your Love... So, our first concept about the mechanics was that they would be mainly based on simply going up and down in ladders and ropes, so I tried a lot to polish the player's movement in it, although it wasn’t 100% I was somewhat proud of what I achieved with that, but obviously it has room for more adjustments. After I finished this part, I jumped to the death mechanics... Since the game has a lot of dying and functions around the idea of "repetition is learning", to get the death element right was very rough, so I thought several times about how it smoother so the player could enjoy the game. Then this solution came to me: how about zooming the player to see where he died and how? This could help him to learn from his mistake and it would not take long, and also wouldn't be the classic "game over/you're dead" annoying screen. Another thing I faced in this game jam was that some things went out of schedule (as always) in the face of all the stress, short time to handle things, and being the first time that the 5 of our team were together creating something like this. But in spite of everything... I loved the experience, learned so much from it and most of all, had loads of fun!

A little bit more about HELL deep is your love?'s future

The last thing is that we’re glad to announce we decided to take this project further and make it into a full developed game to be released on Steam. We love that you guys are interested in knowing Baphe and Elizabeth’s love story, and we want to give you this entire experience. Consider following us on Twitter to know more.

Oh, and of course, our game jam version (the web version), made in 72 hours from scratch, is still available for you to play and rate us in our Ludum Dare submission page. Feedbacks are still much appreciated!