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Hello everyone! I’m Arhan, a young game developer from Turkey and this is my third Ludum Dare entry so far. So far, it’s been a pleasure creating games along a lot of creative people who loves video games as much as I do, and for my third success in Ludum Dare, I feel like I managed to come up with a unique idea, albeit coupled with ugly, boring graphics.

After consecutive flops in Ludum Dare 27 and Ludum Dare 29, I knew that I had to produce something in this summer edition of my favourite game jam competition. I was awake at 9.00am in EET, which is five hours after the theme was announced. Connected Worlds, you say?

GOALS

I had a couple of goals that I wanted to accomplish for this edition of the jam. These were:

• Game should only use mouse movement and LMB. I wanted the game to have simple controls for a possible future mobile port. I succeeded in my goal, and the game will be playable with only one finger when I eventually port it to Android.
• I should not use the first idea that pops up in my mind regarding theme. Connected Worlds! Space! Planets! Aliens! Controlling characters in different worlds! That was just the first 60 seconds of me thinking right after I saw the theme and I immediately put all these elements into my “forbidden” list. Don’t get me wrong, space is cool, aliens are awesome, I enjoyed every entry with multiple different characters stuck in multiple dimensions. It’s just that I knew these ideas were going to be overused for this theme, and I didn’t want my game to feel like “that other game you played, but with worse graphics”. Although it’s worth noting that my game could easily be themed into a space game.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

• The Idea: Basically, in this game, you’re trying to keep a group of people together by conducting successful conversations in pairs between them. I won’t get into details, but the idea and the gameplay concept is, in my personal, biased opinion, a solid one. I feel like I have succeeded in making all game mechanics feel natural and related to the story. A good conversation keeps people together, while a bad conversation makes them repel each other. Characters which are too close to each other collide and push each other away in order to protect their “personal space” in a way.
• Prototype: I was quick to put the first prototype out and to decide that the core idea is fun enough to pursue for the rest of the weekend. This was something I was unable to do in the first two succeeded attempts of Ludum Dare for me.
• Time Management: I briefly followed Pomodoro principles to use my time more efficiently during the weekend and I feel like they helped me a bit.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Time Distribution: While I believe I managed to use my time efficiently, I insisted too much on implementing a few more gameplay elements (some of which went to garbage afterwards), resulting in a lack of attention in all the other details of the game, which will follow this entry.
• Graphics: Couldn’t find the time to draw decent faces for the characters, a decent conversation line, animations for all kinds of events related to getting and losing points, and so on. Heck, those lousy eyes, nose and mouth were added to the game literally in the last hour.
• Gameplay Polish: My game lacks polish in every aspect of it, but gameplay is the most critical of them. Currently, the game is hard as hell and controls are rarely well understood among players. Moreover, the game is boring in my opinion, because I wasn’t able to tweak the gameplay to make the player feel like he’s/she’s accomplishing something. This could’ve been easily avoided with more attention to detail and less attention to additional elements that ended up not making it in the game.

CONCLUSION

I’m happy to put out yet another successful entry for Ludum Dare. I feel that I’ll get rather low scores thanks to lousy graphics and rather boring gameplay which is also hard as hell. However, I’m really happy with the core concept and I’m thinking about taking this game further and making a better version of it at some point.

It’s been an awesome game jam, big thanks to all the gaming community here and the organization. See you later in December for Ludum Dare 31. Keep playing!

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