A post-mortem thinking about Quasar Shrine's last Ludum Dare entry God Awakener

Introduction - Hello world :computer:

Hey and welcome to this Post-mortem ! I'll talk about what happened or went well, what went bad and our overall feeling about this this Ludum Dare :)

Hope you'll learn things or have advice or subjects to share and the comments :)

What happened - A rough start :head_bandage:

The start was a bit rough 'cause 'Tiny Creatures" was absolutely not the theme we wanted. It didn't inspired us... Or I may say "didn't help us a lot".

The thing is that creativity is boosted by constraints. And a theme like "Tiny Creatures" is... WIDE. There is not much constraints in it... It's like just a "skin" to apply to a game. We were at this strange crossroad where too much freedom give you no clues on what to do.

But we had to find something...

We thought that "tiny" was easy : it's size comparison so we'll add our game space into a "big thing"...

So we decided to focus on the "creature" part of the theme.

Creatures - a walk in the park :park:

We asked ourselves : "What does something can give to players the feeling to have creatures in front of them ?" What make a simple square, on a blank screen, feel like a creature ? And this without a text telling us it was a creature, or a sprite of a mouse :mouse: , bee :bee: , microbes or others tiny creatures. The answer was "free movement like they have their own will". To achieve this we thought of making our squares moving around and going back and forth to predetermined places, so they act like they were moving on their own.

Then we needed some way to interact with the player. For this we had the idea of something like a "ping", or a beacon that* would incite/motivate creature to go see where the player clicked*.

Then we came with some ideas : - A puzzle game were you have to push/incite creatures to pass through traps and mazes - A disk where creatures would wander upon its edges. The disk/2D planet would molder over time and you had to keep you creatures alive the longer you can - A "big thing" need the tiny creatures to be in some place for a said time to make the "big thing" move/act/wake-up...

The initial concept - Awaking an ancient God :clock:

So we chose the later idea : Tiny creatures interacting with the inner body of a fantastic beast to help it wake-up.

• A journey

Under the surface of a dead planet, an ages-old god was let dead. It body lying in a deep dark cavern. But by chance, a lost tiny elemental creature made it into it's body. This elemental tiny creature, led by pings creatures by the player clicking, had the power to activate some magic ("shut up it's magic" time) part of the host's body that could summon more the first elemental. This part would also make the host start breathing again.*

We had also in mind that the player will start with only one tiny elemental. The game would tell they to click somewhere to show that the creature would go there, at least for a moment. Then we would led the player to understand were the creatures should go to activate host's functionalities. We wanted an organic tutorial.

Then, after summoning other elementals, they would be able to activate a new host body : making open its eyes so the player could see the host surrounding. Then a new type of elemental would allow the host creature to walk.

The host would eventually walk into different area which would change how the inner body was to function, forcing the player to move elemental in a new way.

Example : if the host was walking under water, the inner body would be flooded, water elementals would thrive, fire ones would disappear and rock ones would act slowly. The player would have to move elementals to different body part to make them keep the host walking until it get out of the water.

And so on...

Eventually the god-host creature would get out of the cave system, would then look to sky and make a long scream that would bring back life to the planet, ending the player journey.

What went well - Gnocchis with lardons, music in our head :musical_score: :bacon:

We are 3 friends and therefore we easily laugh and have good time together. So, this is a good thing to start on :) We ate well (and a lot of snacks too) and listened to Metal :metal: and Synthwave :wavy_dash: all 3 days long.

It was not our first jam so we knew some traps to avoid and some ways to generate ideas, so what could go wrong ? :angel: (foreshadowing...)

Saturday morning we were confident about finding the right ideas and put them together by the end of the day in a prototype

Could be worse - right? ...

We struggled a lot (as you'll see below) but we managed to publish a game, just in time, with only few minor bugs and some friends (@freego and Zat) successfully made a music for our game :notes: We also recently pass the 20 ratings received mark so we will have a ranking :trophy: (thanks to all of you who dared reviewed our game !)

But shadows were casting darkness upon us all along...

What went bad - Turning in circles :recycle:

Game Design is hard - We thought we knew this...

The first, and I think the biggest, of our mistakes was to go head first into creating a world for our game that wasn't even a prototype a this point... We created goals for a gameplay loop that wasn't even fully conceptualized. This lack of focus on the main game mechanic (the ping thing) left us with a taste of "meh-ness". We hadn't identify yet that is was the main problem, so we thought that adding things around this (not enough developed) game mechanic would help.

Saturday evening we hadn't even started coding yet, we were busy arguing about why adding this or that, about how to best identify better game mechanics to get out of the "meh-zone".

We eventually decide to go ahead anyway and add those "add-on" around the "ping". This led us to making a sort of management game with lots ponderation, statistic of creatures movement, percentage and so on... This should have alerted us... While @arktas was coding the creatures decision system, @lut1n coded the path finding and I was thinking of more graphic design and creating sprites that we already needed. But we were feeling that it will not be our best LD entry.

Git - Your best friend and sometime your worst ennemy

Git ! We love you but FOR GOD DAMN SAKE why did you failed us ? :sob:

Two times, our private Git repository just... removed several commit from our main branch ! We didn't, and will certainly never will, understood what led to this. It was the first time we saw that, and just to let you know, we're 3 pro IT developers and are using Git in our daily work life.

And off-course this occurred when two of u had to push something important :sweat_smile:

Fatigue - Ain't no cure for that

With all of that we were more and more tense and exhausted. I personally lost interest in the prototype we were trying to make and was sure that we wouldn't be able to include all we had in mind first (The host-god and its lore, the animation, diversity and more important the organic tutorial) so I was less an less motivated to work hard...

@lut1n had warned us that he wouldn't work on the game jam on the third day, before the jam started, but @arktas and I just keep developping the game like we had a third pair of hands on the last day. Why ? I don't even know... Bu that was stupid, we should remembered what he said to us and re-scope our work because on the last day we missed him a lot :slight_frown:

On the last day, I was hope-deprived and was thinking to give up seriously, @arktas kept the line like warrior and managed to finished all the code we needed to make... our prototype... On the last day we had.. our prototype

But we had something to ship and @freego came with his music, after some back an forth, he handled us a sample that was a blast, it re-booosted us a bit and kept going.

I made a bit more sprites. I wanted to hint the player on were to move the tiny creatures. But because we had so little time left, I just went for some sprite that weren't to ugly.

And then it was time to publish.

While @arktas was building a web build, I had to prepare the Itch.Io page (we prefer using Itch.io than the LDJam site) but... I couldn't FOR THE LOVE ALL GODS log to the Quasar Shrine's page...

And to this day ItchIo support didn't answered me, to the email I immediately sent them, yet.

So I had, in full stress, to go to my own old Itch.Io page and upload our build there 5min prior to the end of publishing hour.

In the same time @arktas uploaded the zip to the LDJam, to be sure.

With all that tensions, I didn't add the Quasar Shrine logo and animation we usually add to our games. :cry:

Conclusion - "git gud" :end:

To conclude, that was not our best and most loved Ludum Dare for sure but we delivered... a game ? A tiny creatures vivarium ? Something at least and some of you seems to had liked it, so that the most important thing done ! :smile:

The most frustrating thing is that, we already did those mistakes but on our 2 first game jams ! Several passed after those two and we didn't repeat those mistakes until this last one.. Why ? Maybe a bit of overconfidence...

Anyway what he would have done was to focus on the very lone ping mechanic and make our prototype around this, then iterate with creating a world around it and add those "add-on" I talked about.

Keep it simple as heck !

And if you want an example of a game that has a really good an simple game mechanic for this game jam, I present to you : Souls of the Lost and Insignificant by @nondev. By the way go check their game, they have a problem we their LDJam account and can't make link to their game (it only appear as "link" in their posts :frowning2: ) and have only 9 ratings !

Good Gam Jam recipe - To sum up what we should have done

1. Get a cool and simple game mechanic, it's even better if it fit the Theme
2. Create a prototype of it (with ugly squares, don't bother add graphic or music yet)
3. If the proto is fun, THEN develop it, add colors, music, story what ever you like
4. Keep it simple and listen to your teammate

Now, have a nice day or night and go have fun, there are a lot of LD entries yet to test ! :heartpulse:

Like our "God Awakener", if you didn't checked it out yet