{"author_link":"\/users\/100th-coin","author_name":"100th_Coin","author_uid":"100th-coin","comments":[],"epoch":1675199186,"event":"LD52","format":"md","ldjam_node_id":323049,"likes":14,"metadata":{"p_key":"171830","p_author":"100th_Coin","p_authorkey":"1008715","p_urlkey":"401134","p_title":"My 21st Ludum Dare's Postmortem: \"The Bountiful\"","p_cat":"LDJam ","p_event":"LD52","p_time":"1675199186","p_likes":"14","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":"1008715","us_name":"blobo","us_username":"blobo","event_start":"1672963200","event_key":"116","event_name":"Ludum Dare 52"},"node":{"_collation":{"body_sanitizer":"TextUtils::SanitizeHTML via existing importer","event":"LD52","removed_author":false},"_superparent":313060,"_trust":15,"author":8715,"body":"So anyway, I tried making a psychological horror game and scored first place in humor.\n\nI don't usually post anything to the feed, but I crammed 20 postmortems into a single post last time and I thought I'd keep this train rolling.\n\nAs you know, the theme was \"Harvest\" and recently I've been wanting to flip the theme entirely on its head. Last time, the theme was \"Every Ten Seconds\" and I knew every game would have an arbitrary ten second timer on it, so my game took place on the face of a clock, where *every ten seconds* was spatial instead of temporal. When it comes to theme voting, I choose the ones that have a lot of potential for cool twists like that.\n\nAnyway, I came up with absolutely nothing with this theme. In the pursuit of originality, I used an old idea I had for a psychological horror game where you begin the game with purchasing a farm that nothing can grow on. You have no food, and you'll do anything to survive. Luckily there's a crow to guide you, telling you basic tutorial stuff and then eventually telling you to steal, murder, etc.\n\nI present to you, *The Bountiful*!\n\n![WebThumb.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56df8.png)\n\nThis was an idea a friend and I came up with a while back, but I never got around to making it. This seemed like the ideal opportunity to make that game. I still had some concept art in a folder, so it seemed like a good place to start:\n\n![mockup.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56e0c.png)\n\nAs the blood would dictate, it was originally going to be a *lot* darker.\n\nMy previous Ludum Dare game, *Watch Out*, came together in a matter of hours. I pretty much had a playable demo before I went to sleep just a few hours after the theme was announced. All that was left was making levels, voice acting, and an entire day worth of polish. This game did not follow suit, ha! In fact, I very much ran out of time and it caught me by surprise.\n\n## What went wrong this time?\n\nI over-scoped. A lot. I tend to polish things as I go, and I spent a bit too much time on the animations. \n\n![LD52_Run.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56df9.gif) ![LD52_Shovel.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56dfa.gif)\n\nI usually spend the entire first day (theme announcement through sleep) working on art for the game. In my time zone, that's usually only 3 to 6 hours. With 9 hours going into the artwork at the very beginning, I'm starting to see how I ran out of time to implement everything and still compose music.\n\nI planned to compose 3 tracks for the game. The \"serious music\", \"tutorial music\", and \"title music\". I made the serious music first, and it slaps. As usual, I aim for a 3 minute loop, and this track was 2 minutes, 45 seconds. The tutorial music on the other hand, was made with 20 minutes remaining until submission hour. It's a very short loop, and I'm a bit disappointed with it. Now the title music is it's own story, as I had zero time left. I just recorded myself improvising in front of my microphone, leading to the best title music of the jam. \"\u266b\u266b Boom boom boom! It's the *title music*! Boom-boom-boom, It's the... title music! *I raaaaaan out of tiiiiime!* \u266b\u266b\"\n\nSpeaking of recording my voice, I planned for voice acting in this game! Just like the music, I only got around to it in the final hour. It was an absolute mad dash to record everything I had written, balance the audio levels, and implement them in the right places. And I still had to do some of the music after that! (tutorial and title tracks) Ahh! So many recorded lines were cut, and It's devastating. I had one line for when you sleep, planned for the fourth night, where the crow would say \"You dreamin' about me? Ah- sorry, I woke you up.\" Such a good line. I also planned for subtitles, even implementing a \"Disable subtitles\" option in the pause menu, but didn't have enough time to actually implement them. Oh well.\n\n## Okay, but why did I run out of time?\n\nI keep talking about everything I crammed into the final hour, but what happened on Saturday that lead to having no time on Sunday? I find it hilarious that after 20 Ludum Dare's I still can't really tell how much work a project will take. In my mind, all this game needed was a series of objectives, and a way to check if I the player had done them. Easy enough, right? After making the player move around, making the crow follow, incredibly smooth camera movement, the ability to whack things and make them explode, implementing an inventory, pick up items, wiggle the corn in the field, getting caught by your neighbor, shop in the market, kill your neighbor, and plant crops, I finally got started on the daily to-do list in game.\n\nAnd wow, my approach for the to-do list was rough. I wanted tasks to fade out when completed, and sometimes after obtaining information, a new objective would fade in. (such as stealing food when you learn your garden can't grow anything). Furthermore, there was the challenge of detecting when the player had done the objective, and checking in case they did things out of order, such as killing your neighbor on day one still being completed when it's required around day 4. Anyway, by the end of Saturday I had implemented the fade out and fade in effect, so Sunday was going to be filled with actually checking for completed tasks, and moving on to the next in game day. It also turns out that making around 25 or so objectives takes a lot of time. This can probably be attributed to how poorly implemented in to-do list was, but it's a 48 hour game jam after all.\n\n## Reflection\n\nI've made a story-based game about growing plants twice now, and both of those games overscoped and ran out of time. Something tells me the problematic variable isn't the growing plants part. I keep bringing up how my LD51 entry came together insanely fast, and I think it's because the game is entirely storyless. It was a game focused on a single mechanic, (instead of a massive list of mechanics) and it let me explore fun edge cases with this mechanic. I can't honestly say *The Bountiful* has any mechanics that stand out in a similar way, which *is* something that I can say about most of my other Ludum Dare games. I think that's why this one feels so awkward to me. **I had a story in mind that I wanted to tell, but I completely overlooked how many moving parts were required to tell it.** That's where it went wrong.\n\n## Wait- wasn't this supposed to be a horror game?\n\nYou might be wondering why it was so funny. That's because I have no idea how to make a horror game, and I made it funny. Honestly, even *I* couldn't take it seriously, so I just added stupid jokes to all the signs around the festival. Then when it came time for dialogue, all seriousness was tossed aside in favor of goofy lines. It was going to be all bloody and violent, but I really didn't want my second story based game about growing plants to become my second *edgy* story based game about growing plants, so it took a hard 90 degree turn into funnyland.\n\n![ld_banner.PNG](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56eff.png)\n\n## Results\n\nOkay, I know I've been beating myself up on how much I ran out of time and how bad that was, but despite that I came in 9th place Overall. My goal was to simply not come in 4th place for a third time in a row, so I'm pleased coming in ninth. That's still a top ten.\n\nThe only category I have yet to get a top ten in is Mood. I focused a bit on that category and I got... *drumroll...* 13th! Which, hey, it's a personal best, and really close. Perhaps next time.\n\nOh, and **First place in humor!!!** That's my first gold trophy! I also got also a personal best in Audio at 7th place. All around, I'm satisfied with how my game scored.\n\n## Final Thoughts\n\nIf you can consider the title music of this game an acapella track, that makes two jams in a row that feature acapella music. I might as well keep that going. It's a lot of fun. As stated in the reflection paragraph, I'm probably going to make my future games focus on a single mechanic and let the story come second. It feels a lot better when you get to play around with a single mechanic, instead of struggling to fit everything in the deadline. Quality over quantity and all that. That's definitely the lesson I'm taking from this jam.\n\nEither that, or the theme was bad.\n\n# \u2603","comments":3,"comments-timestamp":"2023-02-02T04:59:23Z","created":"2023-01-23T18:58:56Z","files":[],"files-timestamp":0,"id":323049,"love":14,"love-timestamp":"2023-02-04T13:03:32Z","meta":[],"modified":"2023-02-04T13:03:32Z","name":"My 21st Ludum Dare's Postmortem: \"The Bountiful\"","node-timestamp":"2023-01-31T21:06:26Z","parent":319486,"parents":[1,5,9,313060,319486],"path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/52\/the-bountiful\/my-21st-ludum-dares-postmortem-the-bountiful","published":"2023-01-31T21:06:26Z","scope":"public","slug":"my-21st-ludum-dares-postmortem-the-bountiful","subsubtype":"","subtype":"","type":"post","version":1010505},"node_metadata":{"n_key":"323049","n_urlkey":"401134","n_parent":"319486","n_path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/52\/the-bountiful\/my-21st-ludum-dares-postmortem-the-bountiful","n_slug":"my-21st-ludum-dares-postmortem-t","n_type":"post","n_subtype":"","n_subsubtype":"","n_author":"8715","n_created":"1674500336","n_modified":"1675515812","n_version":"1010505","n_status":"WAYBACK"},"source_url":"https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/52\/the-bountiful\/my-21st-ludum-dares-postmortem-the-bountiful","text":"So anyway, I tried making a psychological horror game and scored first place in humor.\n\nI don't usually post anything to the feed, but I crammed 20 postmortems into a single post last time and I thought I'd keep this train rolling.\n\nAs you know, the theme was \"Harvest\" and recently I've been wanting to flip the theme entirely on its head. Last time, the theme was \"Every Ten Seconds\" and I knew every game would have an arbitrary ten second timer on it, so my game took place on the face of a clock, where *every ten seconds* was spatial instead of temporal. When it comes to theme voting, I choose the ones that have a lot of potential for cool twists like that.\n\nAnyway, I came up with absolutely nothing with this theme. In the pursuit of originality, I used an old idea I had for a psychological horror game where you begin the game with purchasing a farm that nothing can grow on. You have no food, and you'll do anything to survive. Luckily there's a crow to guide you, telling you basic tutorial stuff and then eventually telling you to steal, murder, etc.\n\nI present to you, *The Bountiful*!\n\n![WebThumb.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56df8.png)\n\nThis was an idea a friend and I came up with a while back, but I never got around to making it. This seemed like the ideal opportunity to make that game. I still had some concept art in a folder, so it seemed like a good place to start:\n\n![mockup.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56e0c.png)\n\nAs the blood would dictate, it was originally going to be a *lot* darker.\n\nMy previous Ludum Dare game, *Watch Out*, came together in a matter of hours. I pretty much had a playable demo before I went to sleep just a few hours after the theme was announced. All that was left was making levels, voice acting, and an entire day worth of polish. This game did not follow suit, ha! In fact, I very much ran out of time and it caught me by surprise.\n\n## What went wrong this time?\n\nI over-scoped. A lot. I tend to polish things as I go, and I spent a bit too much time on the animations. \n\n![LD52_Run.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56df9.gif) ![LD52_Shovel.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56dfa.gif)\n\nI usually spend the entire first day (theme announcement through sleep) working on art for the game. In my time zone, that's usually only 3 to 6 hours. With 9 hours going into the artwork at the very beginning, I'm starting to see how I ran out of time to implement everything and still compose music.\n\nI planned to compose 3 tracks for the game. The \"serious music\", \"tutorial music\", and \"title music\". I made the serious music first, and it slaps. As usual, I aim for a 3 minute loop, and this track was 2 minutes, 45 seconds. The tutorial music on the other hand, was made with 20 minutes remaining until submission hour. It's a very short loop, and I'm a bit disappointed with it. Now the title music is it's own story, as I had zero time left. I just recorded myself improvising in front of my microphone, leading to the best title music of the jam. \"\u266b\u266b Boom boom boom! It's the *title music*! Boom-boom-boom, It's the... title music! *I raaaaaan out of tiiiiime!* \u266b\u266b\"\n\nSpeaking of recording my voice, I planned for voice acting in this game! Just like the music, I only got around to it in the final hour. It was an absolute mad dash to record everything I had written, balance the audio levels, and implement them in the right places. And I still had to do some of the music after that! (tutorial and title tracks) Ahh! So many recorded lines were cut, and It's devastating. I had one line for when you sleep, planned for the fourth night, where the crow would say \"You dreamin' about me? Ah- sorry, I woke you up.\" Such a good line. I also planned for subtitles, even implementing a \"Disable subtitles\" option in the pause menu, but didn't have enough time to actually implement them. Oh well.\n\n## Okay, but why did I run out of time?\n\nI keep talking about everything I crammed into the final hour, but what happened on Saturday that lead to having no time on Sunday? I find it hilarious that after 20 Ludum Dare's I still can't really tell how much work a project will take. In my mind, all this game needed was a series of objectives, and a way to check if I the player had done them. Easy enough, right? After making the player move around, making the crow follow, incredibly smooth camera movement, the ability to whack things and make them explode, implementing an inventory, pick up items, wiggle the corn in the field, getting caught by your neighbor, shop in the market, kill your neighbor, and plant crops, I finally got started on the daily to-do list in game.\n\nAnd wow, my approach for the to-do list was rough. I wanted tasks to fade out when completed, and sometimes after obtaining information, a new objective would fade in. (such as stealing food when you learn your garden can't grow anything). Furthermore, there was the challenge of detecting when the player had done the objective, and checking in case they did things out of order, such as killing your neighbor on day one still being completed when it's required around day 4. Anyway, by the end of Saturday I had implemented the fade out and fade in effect, so Sunday was going to be filled with actually checking for completed tasks, and moving on to the next in game day. It also turns out that making around 25 or so objectives takes a lot of time. This can probably be attributed to how poorly implemented in to-do list was, but it's a 48 hour game jam after all.\n\n## Reflection\n\nI've made a story-based game about growing plants twice now, and both of those games overscoped and ran out of time. Something tells me the problematic variable isn't the growing plants part. I keep bringing up how my LD51 entry came together insanely fast, and I think it's because the game is entirely storyless. It was a game focused on a single mechanic, (instead of a massive list of mechanics) and it let me explore fun edge cases with this mechanic. I can't honestly say *The Bountiful* has any mechanics that stand out in a similar way, which *is* something that I can say about most of my other Ludum Dare games. I think that's why this one feels so awkward to me. **I had a story in mind that I wanted to tell, but I completely overlooked how many moving parts were required to tell it.** That's where it went wrong.\n\n## Wait- wasn't this supposed to be a horror game?\n\nYou might be wondering why it was so funny. That's because I have no idea how to make a horror game, and I made it funny. Honestly, even *I* couldn't take it seriously, so I just added stupid jokes to all the signs around the festival. Then when it came time for dialogue, all seriousness was tossed aside in favor of goofy lines. It was going to be all bloody and violent, but I really didn't want my second story based game about growing plants to become my second *edgy* story based game about growing plants, so it took a hard 90 degree turn into funnyland.\n\n![ld_banner.PNG](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/56eff.png)\n\n## Results\n\nOkay, I know I've been beating myself up on how much I ran out of time and how bad that was, but despite that I came in 9th place Overall. My goal was to simply not come in 4th place for a third time in a row, so I'm pleased coming in ninth. That's still a top ten.\n\nThe only category I have yet to get a top ten in is Mood. I focused a bit on that category and I got... *drumroll...* 13th! Which, hey, it's a personal best, and really close. Perhaps next time.\n\nOh, and **First place in humor!!!** That's my first gold trophy! I also got also a personal best in Audio at 7th place. All around, I'm satisfied with how my game scored.\n\n## Final Thoughts\n\nIf you can consider the title music of this game an acapella track, that makes two jams in a row that feature acapella music. I might as well keep that going. It's a lot of fun. As stated in the reflection paragraph, I'm probably going to make my future games focus on a single mechanic and let the story come second. It feels a lot better when you get to play around with a single mechanic, instead of struggling to fit everything in the deadline. Quality over quantity and all that. That's definitely the lesson I'm taking from this jam.\n\nEither that, or the theme was bad.\n\n# \u2603","title":"My 21st Ludum Dare's Postmortem: \"The Bountiful\"","wayback_source":[]}