"Red, come in! This is Mission Command. We need to talk about how the mission went."

Without fail, I seem to make some "critical blunder" in every one of my Ludum Dare entries, despite the notes I take after each one. And while I genuinely believed I followed my previous notes very well this time around, I'm not so sure now that I've done some reflection. Here's how I will be structuring this postmortem:

• From concept to game

• The critical blunders

• The bright side

• Reflection part 1

• Results

• Reflection Part 2

• Closing Thoughts

From concept to game

So the theme was "depths" and like always, I fell in love with an Idea I had for a losing theme. It's definitely a weakness of mine. So anyway, imagine if the theme was "keep it together" because wow this game would fit so much better. The concept: The moon has been destroyed, and your job is the use magnets or something to stick it back together.

Step 1: I needed the ability to make a bunch of amusing shapes for all the moon chunks, and I needed to be able to make them fast. I put together a very simple "triangulation by ear clipping" script for creating meshes from a list of points, and a script for the unity editor allowing me to take a list of vector 2's and simply drag them around the scene view to make shapes.

Unity's Polygon Collider 2D worked incredibly well with this! I whipped up a character movement script, some player animations, and got started programming the "magnets" to stick moon chunks together.

And as usual, once the main mechanic was working, I became increasingly ambitious. I like giving my games a story, and if possible adding cutscenes. I began asking questions like, "Why was the moon destroyed?" which lead to "Gender Reveal Party." which I felt was such a good bit, my game would be significantly worst without these cutscenes. I like having boss fights, I like having acapella music, and suddenly I had a lot on my plate.

I forget the exact order of operations I took. I frequently bounced back and forth from writing music, drawing, and building the big level. I added a little shop to the game and fun artwork for all the characters who talk to you.

Once most of the level was put together, I began work on recording voice lines and making cutscenes. I started with the victory + credits cutscene and worked backwards. After that was the boss fight cutscenes, then programming the boss fights. Then the tutorial and programming the tutorial, and finally the introduction cutscene. With pretty much everything in place, I got feedback from my roommates, made some changes, and got ready for submission hour.

And I'll be honest, I was really happy with what I submitted. Until I watched another one of my friends play the game, and I realized just how bad my in-game tutorial was.

The critical blunders

I'd like to stress that the main mechanic of the game wasn't explained. In the tutorial. Oh dear.

So here's what happened. I wanted to explain an in-lore excuse for my anti-softlock features. You can "drill" through moon chunks that crush you, since you would otherwise get stuck. You can drill through any moon chunks you've already restored, because again, you could make an inescapable path. Additionally, there's a button in the HUD to simply teleport you to the surface of the moon if anything else goes horribly wrong.

So here's how the tutorial plays out. Before you are given the ability to move, you shoot a box in a way that will intentionally crush the player. Through this, the player learns it's okay to get crushed. Moving that box reveals a sign reading "Use WASD to move", and now the player can move. I then give the player a fun physics puzzle where you use a box under you to gain height. After that section, I introduce the wall climb ability with another sign on the background. Then the drilling through chunks mechanics with another sign. And now the player exits the tutorial, and begins to move around the surface of the moon.

At this point, the player should learn how to use the un-softlock button in your HUD. Through a voice line, "Mission command" says "There's now a button to take you back to the surface if anything goes wrong".

Blunder #1: This "un-softlock button" is in your HUD. All the other controls were keyboard buttons. Players ask "What button do I press if I get stuck?" While the dialogue just keeps going and making bad jokes. Despite the button in the HUD blinking, out of all 7 of the people I was able to watch play the game, one of them actually clicked it. One. I should have added a big blinking arrow pointing the the HUD or something. Again, despite this button blinking, it is eventually required to leave the first boss fight arena. When I saw comments of people getting stuck in the boss fight arena, I just felt awful.

Blunder #2: The whole "shoot moon chunks to re-attach them and fix the moon" thing wasn't ever explained. The core mechanic of the game. While there's a secondary objective of collecting "gravity gems" which unlocks the boss fights, I need to stress again and again, the main objective of reconstructing the moon was being overlooked. I don't think a single player I watched even tried shooting the moon chunks until 2 or 3 of the 4 gems were collected. That could've been at the end of the tutorial, forcing you to combine two chunks before leaving. Even better, force the player to use the HUD button to leave after that. Ahhh.

Blunder #3: There are multiple ways to softlock in the tutorial. The HUD button was supposed to be disabled during the tutorial, but you can "resurface" before unlocking the ability to move. Whoops! Also for some reason if you complete the first step of the tutorial before the opening dialogue completes, the dialogue engine locks up, eventually preventing the boss fight dialogue from playing, leaving the fight unbeatable (and leaving all dialogue missing!).

So at this point, I went from being incredibly happy with my game to being incredibly upset at myself. I pretty much refrained from playing and rating games because I just didn't even want people playing my game. I felt bad.

Even worse, this "lack of tutorialization" is specifically something that I have been recently struggling with in my other jam games, and something that I was incredibly aware of going into this one. My notes specifically say verbatim, "Full in-game tutorial for ANY unique mechanics. It must be explained." And I didn't explain it?! Unreal.

The bright side

Okay cool, with all that behind us, let's talk about what went well. Because despite those absolutely massive mistakes, I still think I did a lot of things well. For instance, the character design! I mean, just look at the villain of the game, "The Necromooncer":

What a fun looking skeleton man. I also just noticed I accidentally moved part of the crescent he's riding with his animation... that shouldn't have happened, but oh well! But look at these guys!

I mean, they're fun.

I think the music for this game also turned out really well. I've been trying to learn some music theory, and I added diminished 7th chords to the song, which absolutely slap. I mean, it really turned out well. The acapella music this time around also turned out well! I will say, recording one of the lines for the diminished 7th chords was incredibly difficult, because it really just feels like a flat note. I actually chose not to include one of my harmony tracks, since I rushed a bit and it fell out of sync with the other notes.

But I'm still really happy with how that turned out, and this is my 7th LD in a row with acapella music!

I also believe the jokes in this game are some of the funniest I've had in my LD games. The gender-reveal moon-explosion, Mission Command's 4th wall breaks, the bit about giving "Yellow" a fake walkie talkie, Yellow obtaining a real walkie talkie and Mission Command apologizing for that, the "Box Co" product placement, and of course the earth exploding at the end with another gender-reveal. I'm writing this before the results are live, but I'm optimistic about my humor score.

The graphics category has historically been an interesting one for me. Last Ludum Dare I had the critical blunder of making a computationally expensive shader for a minor background detail, which caused framerate issues that I didn't notice on my beefy PC. The art style of the characters clashed with the art style of the background forest, too.

This time, the background/foreground elements are a lot simpler. Partly due to not having the time to make them more detailed, but it also kinda works with the story as the game is canonically the set of a low-budget television show. Perhaps the lack of details works. I used a lot of colors from the NES color palette in this game. I didn't restrict myself exclusively to using the NES palette, but I enjoyed making my characters look like they could've come from a NES game.

Granted, that's significantly more colors than a NES sprite could have without tremendous object overlapping, but I really like that palette.

Reflection part 1:

So if you completely ignore the fact that I didn't explain how the game works, it turned out really well! Let's see how I did when examining my notes from LD passed.

LD52: "Focus on a single mechanic."

The "single" mechanic of this game is the whole magnetic-moon-chunk-attachment mechanic. But to be honest, I kinda wish I did a little more. A few comments mentioned the single mechanic getting a bit stale by the end, and I wish I had done more with it, or at least added some more stuff to the environment to play with.

LD53: "Get feedback before the deadline."

The feedback I got before the deadline was mostly that my roommate wasn't aware of the cave leading to the first boss encounter, so I added big arrows. There were a few minor bugs they had that I fixed too, which is nice, but it completely missed "the big issues" mentioned in the critical blunder section. That might be partly my fault though, as I was pushed for time when getting this feedback, so I probably gave them too much direction just to speed it up.

LD54: "Full in-game tutorial for ANY unique mechanics. It must be explained."

So, we've already explained how I completely fumbled this one. Lots more reflecting to do here before the next Ludum Dare. This game had a tutorial, and I still dropped the ball, right? Perhaps if I made a tutorial that really highlights the core mechanic in a step-by-step way for the player to learn how it works, it could have been way more intuitive.

LD55: "Make sure the camera isn’t jank."

I'm really happy with the camera in this game. Sure, it's "stapled" to the player for the most part, but I think it's zoomed out at a good size, and the view map button has a really cool zoom out of the whole level. I think I should've bound that to "TAB" instead of "M" but oh well.

LD56: "Be reasonable with your shader effects."

So, the only real shader effect I had was a neat shockwave when two moon chunks collide. I think it looked cool, while not being distracting or computationally expensive.

And what did we learn this time?

I frequently find myself just repeating notes I took from previous game jams. I think it's pretty clear why I'd like to just repeat what I said in LD54. In the spirit of writing something new, I think the big takeaway from this game is to scope smaller. It sounds ridiculous to say it, but I think my ambition is really getting the better of me here. Maybe it's not even a scope issue, but the map I made for this game was huge. I keep looking back at "Inbox Fool" and a little bit of "Prince Charmony" where it took place in small rooms. Every time I make a game that happens in one large map, I just wish I structured it like those other games. Maybe that wouldn't work with the concept I had for this game, but I still could have made the map smaller. It takes like, 60 seconds to go from one side to the other. It's much too big. The map was time consuming to make, and it didn't really pay off the way I thought it would.

And now I brace for the results.

Results

Honestly, nothing to write home about. I'm a bit shocked I only scored 20th in audio... the main music track, acapella, and voice acting in this game I thought was some of my best. Oh well.

Reflection part 2

Reflecting on my score in graphics (3.85 stars, 80th place) I'm just now realizing how strong the graphics score for my LD56 game Prince Charmony was. I'm a bit shocked to see the score dip this much, though I guess in hindsight it shouldn't have been a surprise. There's basically no details, just a looping star texture for the background, looping moonrock texture for the foreground. This was my worst score in graphics since LD42, which... ouch. So note to self, forget everything I said in my Prince Charmony postmortem, go nuts with the art I guess.

I think at this point I need to ask if the cutscenes are worth it, because those take a lot of time to make, and evidently aren't really paying off. I was talking about "scaling back the scope" as the main takeaway from this one, and perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the kind of cutscenes I've been making.

I think the 4 stars flat in audio was the biggest shock. The past handful of LD games I had around 4.4's in audio. It's especially shocking since I thought I put some real music theory to the test in this one with those diminished 7th chords... I was really happy with how this music turned out. My LD43 game scored higher out of five stars in audio. You know, perhaps I could have added some sound effects... I'll keep that in mind for LD58.

Closing thoughts

Welp... I have more reflecting to do on this one than I thought I would. The bad tutorial in this game is specifically something I need to think about during my next game jam. It was pretty painful reading the comments of people getting stuck or softlocking, especially considering how happy I was with this game while submitting.

In other news: just like what I learned from Ribbon 2, the scores don't actually reflect my growth or skills as a developer. Yeah, it sucks having ratings similar to my games from 6 years ago, but I know the music I wrote in this game is better than what I wrote 6 years ago. Regardless of the scores, I'm happy with the game I made.

I feel like I've been saying this for a while, but I need to stop making platforming games during Ludum Dare. Remind me during submission hour of LD58 to slap myself if I upload another platformer. Unless its status as a platformer is ambiguous like my LD50 game, I've gotta start trying something new.

"Red, you still there? This is Mission Command. I'm just chiming in to let you know the studio ran out of money and we didn't get picked up for that second episode we were all hoping for. Anyway, we've got two trucks full of action figures with your face on them... I don't know if you are interested, but if you could take all of them with you on your way out I'd greatly appreciate it."

☃