Last weekend i joined my 17th Ludum Dare with a team of old and new people. We made "Tristram", a game about summoning heroes into your village so that they might venture into the dungeon below the village, with you being on the sidelines of the action, only taking care of the village.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/tristram

I thought i might do a mini post mortem already :)

What went right

Preparation

I've done this 18 times now (one GMTK jam in there) and got a routine for preparing the jam for the team. I think it works well and avoids most issues i had to painfully meet before :D

As usual, we - set up a new git repo - created an empty Godot project - created a Miro board - created an empty ldjam page - created an empty itch project - made sure everyone had access to everything and was added where possible

We always run with this framework of timing: - Saturday until 12:00 - figure out what game we want to make - Saturday until 18:00 - have a first playable with placeholders and some core mechanics. Like move & jump if we make a platformer (which we won't 😅). Generally we want to be as quick as we can in having something that looks shitty (placeholders) but can be used to iterate already. - Saturday until 24:00 - have a first playable with core mechanics in place - Sunday until 24:00 - have all must have features in - Monday until 24:00 - polish, polish, polish. Accessibility, Sound, Effects, Tutorialization, Ending Screen, Start Screen. If you see anything really polished on Saturday or Sunday, that's a bad sign - everything should be quick and dirty until here, with few exceptions like the player movement. - Tuesday - polish itch and ldjam page with descriptions, graphics, animations, maybe trailer. Test browser export and build, and upload if working.

One key thing that is not obvious with which this framework helps is scope. Knowing we got to have a core running on Saturday does limit the scope somewhat and makes it even easier to judge than planning for 3 full days.

I think the preparation went really good and that we actually did not learn anything here.

Team

The team was really mixed with the full spectrum, from my wife Anne who i did all the 18 jams with, to 2 completely new people we never worked with before.

We had a team with fantastic experience in total. I'm really looking for people who do really good work, can work independently but also well integrated to the team. I am happy to say this fits to everyone in the team of 6 who worked directly on the game.

The beauty really unfolds as a group i think, when everyone comes together and brings in ideas that inspire each other, and does such good work that it pushes and motivates the other people. It's wonderful to experience, and i'm really proud of the team.

I do run a games studio called Bippinbits, and everyone works there except for our long time contributors Martin Kvale (Sound) and Cameron Paxton (Music). So it was kind of natural that it worked, but not a given either. When we started doing Ludum Dare in 2017, we were still hobbyists (and would stay hobbyists for 5 more years), so i'm really excited now about having a big team of great people where all aspects of the game are covered by someone.

Idea

I'm really happy with the idea for the game. It is still a concept i'm really intrigued about, and it seems to resonate with a lot of people, despite the shortcomings of the jam.

The connection to "Summoning" is not as strong as for other games where summoning was really in the center of gameplay too, but to be honest, i rather make a game i'm really excited about than have a perfect fit to the theme.

What also worked well was the brainstorming around the concept. Initially we formulated some "experience goals" of what the player should feel and experience in the game. Something like Design Pillars, but very much from the perspective of the player as opposed to the perspective of the game designer. I think that helped at least some team members to work more independently and decide more things on their own, because they understood how it aligned with the goals. This way i did not need to hand out fine-grained tasks as much, but was myself able to focus on the design and balance of the game more than in any game jam before.

What went wrong

I love when things go wrong, because this is where we learn the most. Most of what i know about making games i learned in game james (at least it feels like it!).

Undercooked Core

One of our experience goals was that the player should feel like they can guide the fortune and misfortune of the heroes indirectly. Overall, that aspect of the game fell quite flat. We were missing some buildings and mechanics like the training ground, equippable items, hero sanity and age.

The concept was very ambitious for a jam, but i still think we could have developed these things much more if we'd have been cheaper with some features. Like, having a full fledged pixel art map, 6 character classes and 8 different monsters and 3 bosses is great, but i feel like we could have done less there and instead pushed the possible actions for the player a bit further.

It is humbling to see that even with great preparation, great people and a clear vision, it is still so easy to work on things that are really not the most important bits of the experience.

Lost in Details

On the third day we got lost a bit in details, mostly arising from being a bit overworked, only talking via chat that day and not understanding each other well. We discussed minute details for an hour or more, instead of really wrapping up the game a few hours before submission. We wrapped it up still, but it was unpleasantly tense and unfocussed.

We talked about what went down on wednesday, seeing where we understood each other wrong and how it came to be that we got so stuck. This was the biggest mistake i made as the Director/Producer of the game, of getting bogged down in my Game Designer tasks too much. I kept track of the big picture, but i wasn't able to put the whole team behind it, instead losing overall productivity because i didn't "step out" of my tasks enough, having too little patience and empathy. A great lesson for me, and both something that feels really hard to get right, but also something that is really important and that i want to work on.

UI

I really like this one, because it is a quick win for the future.

We didn't make an UI theme until shortly before submission. This hindered us in quite a few ways: - whenever building a UI, we didn't know if that would fit the final size, making everything feel like a suggestion and unfinished - we had no idea if it would look bad at the end - it was boring and uninspiring to look at, not being clear if players would enjoy it or if and how we could polish it further

When talking about this afterwards, we were surprised why we didn't do this earlier, but will do so next time. A nice UI adds so much, it's nothing to skimp on.

Debugging Tools

We had some basica debugging tools ingame from the get go - we are pros, right? Except for one thing that probably overall cost like 2 hours: a quick way of going into the dungeon battle scene. Whenever we wanted to test something there, we had to call over the heroes, let the parties form and send them to the dungeon. Over and over again. This got worse when we wanted to test something late game, because then we'd need to do this cycle 5 times or so.

We could do this on quick speed thanks to our debugging tool, but this was still arduous. It was funny afterwards when we noticed that everyone thought "i'll just try it this once without debugging, it won't take that long. I'll add the debugging later". Only, no one ever did. What would have saved hours was one button being like "generate random parties and go into battle immediately". This is not only time, but also churn of concentration. Doing that over and over again eats at you.

So next time, we should be more proactive with this. A "what went right" definitely is that we even had a debugging/quick test tool integrated, but i kind of look out more for the things to learn from :)

That's it! Do you agree or disagree with something? What did you learn this time around?

Maybe it can be comfort and/or motivation to you, that I still make many mistakes and learn a lot after 18 game jams. It's all about learning, and it feels like there is an unending wealth of what can be learned :)