Wow, what a weekend, I’ve played some great entries and I’m totally impressed by the level of quality I keep seeing in some of the games.

So, this was my first Ludum Dare, we  made a game jam in Beijing, China and it was a blast to get my first taste of games design (I usually only make pretty things haha)

In the end we created a twitch platformer called Parallel Rift

The Idea – Connected worlds

So, for a while all of us sat around a table and blasted off a few ideas, the board was covered in interesting directions, then Sam mentioned TimeCop (the old Van Damme movie) and how when the same person came in to contact with their past self, they went boom boom!! I totally loved this idea, but the other guys went off to do their own things (all of them turned out really great) so there I was, sitting there with a great idea in my head, with no programmer… Luckily Andrew Li came to the rescue, and we started our jam!

Day 1: We started at around 12 O’clock

So, I explained the idea to Andrew, and layed down the basic gameplay for him. I then got Peter Long to help with character design while I concentrated on environment. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that for the jam you could use pre-made assets, so we created everything from scratch!

The backgrounds were actually made in full 3D, I then used a cell shader to get the mood I was going for, and rendered it out to be a static background. Then I added the dynamic 3D objects (the vortex / platforms / particles) to create the scene you see below

During this time Peter was sketching out the initial ideas for the character, and I gave him some examples of the style I was aiming for, then he moved on to the basic animations. All this time Andrew was getting the development side done

Day 2: Music and putting it all together

I wanted some trippy, catchy music to go with the visuals, so I opened up my audio software and got down the track in a few hours, unfortunately, now I constantly have it playing in my head (so I guess my job was done), I now hate it! More coding, polish on the art assets and finalizing all of the character work! We got some basic UI in and working and prepped for the next day of bug squashing and polish.

Day 3: Bugs / Polish / Bugs…

We had a few problems with collision of the shadow characters causing a game over (we were moving the characters instantly away in the x axis) we figured out that even though it was moving instantly, it could still hit the player character and cause an unexpected GAME OVER, this was a simple fix of translating in the -Z axis instead! A few more issues, balancing the level / speed / jump height and we were pretty much done!

What went wrong?

It was pretty smooth all together, as Andrew and I work together on a daily basis, but it would of been nice to add a little more depth to gameplay. Unfortunately time wasn’t on our side. We also wanted to implement a High-Score board.

What went right?

The platform mechanics worked very well pretty much from the start, there were a few issues with the wall jump but that was magically fixed by Andrew. Peter’s animations suited the mood perfectly (overly stylized poses and motions) and we were pretty happy with the final result!

What’s next?

We’ll definitely be doing more Ludum Dares in the future, it was a great experience for me (first time designing a game), we’d like to push Parallel Rift forward, I think it would make a great tablet experience with lots of polish and more levels of complexity

Most of all thanks to all of you for sharing your games, I’ve had a blast playing them, and it’s given me inspiration to continue doing game jams!

Enjoy the game HERE!

Daniel Arnold-Mist