So our Ludum Dare 31 entry is in, and Icy the No-Man’s Trivial Travails is up for rating. How did it go and what happened during development? Time for Icy’s Retrospective.

The first night:

Like so many others, my friend and I expected the snowman symbol to win, so after learning the actual theme, we had to take a step back and rethink our plans. We started with a concept map where we went through a list of genres before settling on a few that we felt we could adapt to one screen, ultimately settling on a board game, figuring that would be a fun, single-screen experience.

We continued to flesh out our concept map, and my friend (and game co-developer) Floata decided that a board game alone wasn’t going to be interesting enough, so he suggested that it become a trivia-based board game. Since I’m not great at trivia I left that part of the project in his hands while I began working on the mechanics. We didn’t want the snowman idea to die entirely, though, so wintery theme was chosen as the visual aesthetic.

Using a simple placeholder play board, I began to work in the player token movement. This took me about over an hour because I was really feeling my way around the concept – I had not made a tile-based game like this before, so I wasn’t sure exactly how to make the player march around the board, space-by-space. Once I got the tile moving, I redrew the play board, and then it was time to draw night one to a close.

Day One-Two:

Day two started with me implementing the trivia question panels while Will gathered the actual questions and answers. I struggled some making the answers selectable, waffling between using screen regions and clickable actors. I settled on the clickable actors and that turned out to be a good idea as it actually made the rest of the process easier. It enabled me to tie behaviors to the actors, effectively tying the answers to their buttons.

I was drawing a key for the board’s gates when it was suggested on our livestream chat that we should have color coded gates and keys. This struck Floata and I as a good idea, so I recolored my key into red, blue, green and yellow variants, doing the same with the gates. The addition of the entire color-based key part probably only added about an hour or two to the overall development process, which wasn’t bad.

I also drew a new player character, a snowman. This is Icy, and I wasn’t happy with him just standing around so I gave him a few idle animations, including waving to the viewer. Lastly I added a space to collect the aforementioned colored keys for points you earned answering questions.

That night I was up late implementing all of the trivia Floata had gathered into the game. Thanks to some sneaky text editing and Stencyl’s text file input capabilities, I got that done in no time. Some of the questions had to be rewritten/reworded since they didn’t fit onto the screen, but other than that it was smooth sailing with the trivia part.

Day Two-Three:

Early, early in the morning on Day Three I added a yeti to chase the player’s snowman around the board. I recorded some dialog for the Yeti to make him more menacing (my favorite being “I ate Mrs. No-Man”), and synced his mouth moving to the spoken words. It was here that I hit animation limits and had to pare back some of the lines so the animations would fit.

With the game just about done, we added some more music (Floata made all of our music) before beginning the big testing crunch. This is where everything went to heck in a hand basket.

Things seemed to be working just fine, but in playing the game over and over (or trying to), we found multiple issues. The yeti catching you caused a crash, passing a gate caused a crash, winning the game caused a crash, restarting the game caused a crash… it was a mess. That lead to about three or so hours to bug fixing before we got it all ironed out. Most of the issues stemmed from variables not being returned to their default states when the game board would get reset. In the end we fixed those issues (we’re pretty sure…) and submitted it. Thus ends Icy’s Retrospective.

What went Wrong:

I struggled with the coding of player movement for way too long

Not enough testing during development led to a last-day bug fixing crunch

What went Right:

We’re happy with the feel of it as a board game

The multiple key concept turned out really well

I personally like the yeti

You can play and rate Icy’s Trivial Travails here.

Tags: ld31, post-mortem, postmortem, stencyl