Hey, have you played our latest Ludum Dare entry? It’s called Tsurara Donna (that’s pronounced sue-RA-ra DOH-nah), and it’s nifty! I’ve only been doing Ludum Dare for about a year, but I’m very proud of this game.

Before I start this postmortem up for realsies, a reminder: the song from this game is available on my Bandcamp page, and it’s TOTALLY FREE! Go play it in the background and see if you can guess what song I was shamelessly ripping off when I composed it. I mean, you won’t guess it because you’re presumably not an obsessive Sondheimite like yours truly, but you can certainly make an attempt. I’m digressing here. Alright; Tsurara Donna postmortem. Here we go.

How’d You Come Up With This Wacky Idea?

I had a pretty cool idea for the “Companion” theme called “Rosalind” which I immediately had to scrap once “An Unconventional Weapon” became the theme. My immediate thought for the theme was to use an icicle as a murder weapon. You’ve likely all heard about a hypothetical murderer stabbing someone with an icicle, which would then melt, removing all the evidence of your crime. Well, unless there were witnesses or security footage or… you get the point. Eventually I decided on an arcade game where you stabbed people with icicles by ground pounding them onto your enemies’ heads.

I vaguely remembered a figure in Japanese mythology called the Tsurara Onna or icicle woman; this led me to find a lot of similar monsters who became this game’s enemies. The Yukinba and Oshiroi Baba both turned into monsters for you to fight.

What Went Well? Quite a lot, surprisingly.

• The game feels complete. This wasn’t an issue to begin with, since I always intended for this game to be an endless old-school arcade game in the vein of Mario Bros or Ice Climber (hence Tsurara’s visual similarity to Popo) and thus it was impossible to have a concrete ending. This was a bit of an issue with Rare Earth (my LD31 entry) where beating the game would get you… a generic popup saying “Congrats” and your time of completion. Whoops.
• The graphics are very polished! The ice looks very, very, very nice, and it makes juicy little shards when the icicles shatter. I got the 8-bit font working properly, which makes the whole game look pretty authentic; Tsurara’s little body is adorable.
• Novel gameplay. The core mechanic here is pretty cool, and I feel like it could be expanded into a full game very easily.
• The music! This game only has one song, but it’s a pretty cool one. I’m a sucker for songs in weird time signatures, and this one is in 13/8! The song’s melody was based partially on “Poems” from the musical Pacific Overtures, the soundtrack to which I listened to get into the mood for this game. It sounds very, very nice; I composed the whole thing on the subway Monday afternoon, then tapped it out in about half an hour in Famitracker. It was really nice to not use DPCM for the bassline like I usually do; the whole song sounds really clean, and it always keeps the player on their toes despite otherwise being fairly peaceful.

What Went Wrong? Quite a lot, unsurprisingly.

• Weird controls. I thought there was nice symmetry between having to double tap to do either of your attacks, but it mostly proved annoying. The other reason I wanted the game to work with just WASD controls was for the two-player mode I wanted to implement. Speaking of which:
• Single player only. I wanted a second player to be able to help you. In hindsight, I should have had the second player be able to assist you by attacking with the mouse; throwing snowballs or something.
• People didn’t ground pound. I found that people were more willing to shoot everyone with icicles then ground pound their enemies, either because the timing was hard or because they had to jump into enemies to do it or because half of the enemies were immune to them. This was a pretty glaring error, in hindsight; I could have added a little shockwave when the icicles hit the ground in case they missed, but I didn’t. Can’t blame myself for that, though.
• I misspelled the protagonist’s name in the HUD. Whoops! Fixed that pretty fast, though.

In any case, this game went very, very well. I’m not sure I’d say it was head and shoulders above my last two entries, and being better than Dr Pepsi Marriage Consultant isn’t a feat so much as it is a necessity for any serious programmer. But it’s still pretty good. So go play it!