First of all, here is our entry: check it out

Inner War

This was our first time entering Ludum Dare. We are a team of two and we have one released game so far. One of the problems we had when we made our first game was planning. So we thought the Ludum Dare Jam was a good place to test and refine our planning abilities.

What Worked

1. As I said, our goal was to see if we are able to think of an idea and then finish it within the time limit. We succeeded at that! At this point everything else is just a bonus!
2. The idea. I think we have a good concept here. What we basically did was replace the A B C choices in dialogue trees with a minigame and we think it’s an exciting idea. (and we believe we can take to many directions in the future)
3. The production values. Admittedly, we did pull characters from Lost Echo and most of the music was from bits and pieces I had already written in the past, but it still surprised us how much we were able to produce in the 3 days. I also really like the splitscreen we did.

What Sort of Worked

1. The physics. It was the first time we worked with Unity’s physics. I realise it’s a Ludum Dare sin to use things you are completely unfamiliar with, but we managed to pull something usable out of it. But at the same time, the block and push moves are completely unreliable.

What didn’t Work

1. The level design. The 4 stages in the game are, well, very basic. That’s not exactly bad, we were going for more of a proof of concept game here, so the stages being barebones is fine. But at one point, we realised the gameplay would feel better if we allowed the player to move while he was attacking, or he had a bit of a faster walk speed, but we didn’t do any of that, because the stages were pretty basic and the game would have been way too easy.
2. The story. Well… There isn’t much of it. And what’s there is pretty basic. Which is fine, but it felt really cheesy when we tried to make somewhat “moody” endings, that had little to no build-up. In the end, it works as a proof of concept, but that’s all.

Conclusions

Regardless of what kind of ranks we get (although I have to say, the comments we are getting are generally positive and we are really happy about that!), our first Ludum Dare was a success for us. We also have a concept in our hands now that we like. There were a ton of ideas we had during development that we immediately scrapped because of lack of time. Hopefully we’ll be able to revisit the concept and make a complete game out of it.

Thank you all. This Ludum Dare has been amazing.

Tags: innerwar, kickback, ld29, postmortem, unity