Not wasting any time, you know what a post mortem is :D

Older Posts: * Day 1 Progress * Day 2 Progress * Day 3 Progress * 6 ways to beat Karawan * Camerons Music Post Mortem

What went well

Discarding unfit Game Ideas

Originally, i wanted to make a tile laying game with hex tiles, maybe themed with an animal ecosystem or medieval society. The tiles you'd place would interact with tiles around it, adding or taking resources from them. I knew this could be interesting, but would very much depend on if i could find fun interactions between the tiles, and proper chain reactions. I went about designing this on paper for 2 hours, after which i hadn't come up with anything good. The interactions were simplistic and chain reactions always carry the risk of not being predictable for a player, and thus frustrating. It was great to reach that point without having to implement anything, saving time and allowing to move on early to the next idea. a few early ideas - none of them made it

Try something new

For game jams i like to have something new and fresh, which poses an interesting challenge for us, without making it impossible to deliver a good game. You'll see that in our game jam history, as we wildly jump genres. These are among them: - life/body simulation - pacifist thief stealth game - strategy chess like board game - god simulation - restaurant tycoon - sokoban-like animal puzzle game - bird flying action game - taxi driver game - resource mining action game some of our games

We also wildly switch the 2D perspectives and whether it's tile based or not. This time we tried something very new which i was always interested in: hex tile maps. This was a challenge and i spent way more time implementing this, than i'd have spent if i'd just went a path already travelled by us. But it is fun and facilitates improving as gamedevs. I think this can still work out great, if not too many aspects of the game are "unkown territory".

It was also our first time working with @cameron-paxton as a composer, and it was a great experience. We was very hard working and created a soundtrack that adds so much to the game :)

No Sprite Animations

The only reason Karawan could have nice and varied sprites is, that none of them have any animations. Animations simply take a ton of time. We actually have only a single sprite animation, and that took what felt like ages. Bigger teams have other options, but we only have @idinakloppstock (Anne) to create all graphics for the game, so we have to plan accordingly. the whirl is the only sprite animation ingame

Initially i wanted to have a really living caravan, with small people roaming the areas around it, and the player seeing them getting to work. Anne opposed this, explaining that this was not feasible. I reluctantly agreed to postpone this stuff to the end, if we had time left - which of course we didn't.

In other words: Know your team and listen to it.

Discipline

I remember how we took the evenings off in our first game jam, playing some games or just relaxing during the day for some time. Over the jams and maybe with getting older, we developed a good discipline - now we really work all 3 days for the maximum time, probably around 14h a day. This helps a ton in getting things done.

Content and Polish

Development was so fast that i had a lot of time to polish and playtest. I added a ton of small effects, tweens, delays and animations, also to make up for the lack of sprite animations. I think that shows, it is surely our most complete jam entry in that regard. The tutorialization also worked well, with context sensitive explanations popping in and explaining the mechanics wherever needed. I think that little can do a lot, if it hits right. For example, i made the star-like background in 5 minutes - it's just a basic, slow moving particle effect. a lot of little things - the harvested resources scale in and out, the wagons shake while moving, the popup moves in nicely

We had our first real playtest on the second half of day 2. It quickly was clear to me, that the game had a ton of problems and was no fun yet. But i understood well what wasn't working, and what i needed to change to improve it. These changes were playtested again, slowly showing we were going in the right direction. For example, we had a fully implemented mechanic to plant wheat fields and harvest them, which i completely scrapped because it was too complex to teach easily. If there would have been little time to playtest, i wouldn't have understood the problems well enough, and the game would be worse. wheat fields got cut completely

But even after these changes, i wasn't totally sure if the game would was interesting, understandable and fun. This leads to one of the bad points: the idea might have been too big.

Concepts -> Placeholders -> Final

We established a workflow over time, where we'd first sit down to establish a general look and palette for the game. If we have this ready, Anne creates placeholder sprites quickly, which i can use to implement the game. The final, polished sprites only come in after all placeholders are ready. Of course during development, new things come up which start their lives as placeholders too. This works great for us, as we don't need to discard as much work as before, because it doesn't fit. It's also efficient because the sprites later just need to be replaced, with no impact on the code. different palettes for our tile sketches

Improve next time

Clearer, more complete Vision

We started "production" with a good idea what the gameplay will end up being. What moved a lot and only got clear after 50% of the time was up, was the mood the game. I had a rough idea where i wanted to go, but i didn't think it through and didn't communicate it clearly enough, wasting time and work from @cameron-paxton who made great music that ended up not fitting the game. We got a good process for finding the game design and art style, but it's clear that we have to find something similar for music and mood. We mostly made our games without a composer, so that's something we are still learning.

Find someone for Sounds

We had no one who could make sounds from scratch (as usual). I tried finding someone on the ludum dare discord, but had no success. So we used a soundpack - which is fine in general, but we had to opt-out from audio as a consequence, despite cameron making an original soundtrack with a ton of effort.

Unsure: Too big?

I'm not sure about this, but Karawan seems like a big game for a game jam, design wise. Content wise it is fine, but the concept feels like it needs a week of playtests to balance it right and make it really fun. I described that even during submission, i wasn't sure whether it was any good and would resonate with players. I'm not sure if that's a huge problem, but the uncertainty did really not feel good.

Thank you!

For reading this, and for all the feedback! I'm looking forward to see you on LD50. I love ludum dare, and it's a huge part of us growing as gamedevs. We are glad we could participate again :)

She won't read this, but i need to thank my mother here! @idinakloppstock and i have a 2 year old daughter, which means we can only take part in Ludum Dare if we get some help. Since LD47 my mother always visits us over the weekend and spends some quality time with her granddaughter, which our offspring loves a lot and which enables us to really commit to making a game with some ambition. All this is only possible thanks to her support, and i'm very grateful for that. This time they did some autumn handicrafts :D