Hey all, I just want to start off by saying thanks to everyone who made LD36 possible, it’s was a blast and I’m very glad that it happened.

The game we ended up making is called “Something is Wrong with this Museum”. It’s a story-led platformer set in a museum in the future. Check it our here.

The picture above is me and my teammate Jack doing a fistbump. No? You don’t see it?

This was my third Ludum Dare and Jack’s first. The first LD I did was as a compo and it was an absolute mess, I really don’t see how I could do compo anymore after having worked with an artist twice now. I have so much respect for people who pull off the compo.

The way I like to game jams is… unhealthy. I was working for around 20 hours a day which, as much as I enjoy it, is of detriment to the game. In the UK the jam starts at 2am. There’s no way I’m going sleep having found out the theme and it’s really just a slippery slope from there. Whilst I might have had 80% of the game mechanics done early on that morning it always leads to that inevitable slowdown afterwards and trying to fix bugs made when tired is a nightmare when you are still tired.

At 2am on the Monday as I was going to go to bed, I found I was looking at the game and finding it boring, and decided to create an entire new mechanic instead of going to sleep. To add a new mobility skill to the game, I created an ender-pearl inspired idea, where you threw a ball and teleported to where it landed. You had charges of the ball that only recharged when you “unteleported” back to your old position.  I spent the time I should’ve been sleeping making animations, sound effects and programming. What a waste of time. The mechanic was interesting but not right for the game we created and by 10am it was gone and I was now redesigning the levels back to not using the new mechanic.

So what did I learn from this? Get some goddamn sleep next time, especially before making big decisions.

The next thing that sticks out in my mind was communication and our workflow. Our workflow in certain areas was amazing and in others sorely lacking. The speed at which Jack created the character sprites and I animated them was pretty amazing. However we really fell down for the rest of the art. Jack had never done art for a game before, and I failed to explain what was required to import it into the game without problems. Lots of time lost cropping and chopping, hampered by the many layers on photoshop. At 10pm on the last stretch, 4 hours to go, and I start importing the cutscenes and realise we never actually spoke about how they needed to be formatted… If I ever lead another jam team again I will try to outline guidelines on how assets should be made before we start making them.

Finally, having looked at our game the day after the jam ended, I think we crucially missed out on getting external feedback on the game during it’s development. It’s hard to show it off when you’re working from home but we should have sent it to some friends or at least got the cat to play it. Our opinions on game design differ a lot. Jack is a story person and I am a mechanics kinda guy. There wasn’t a middle ground between the two games we saw in our mind’s eye but we somehow made it. We also missed out on how bland the walls in the game look. The red wall is almost painful on the eye which is a shame as problems like this could have been fixed if we had asked for other people’s perspectives.

All in all, regardless of all the negatives, this is the best jam game I have made to date. It has more content, feels better to play, and is just overall more professional than my previous attempts. If you look through my previous entries you can really see the astonishing level of improvement each time and I look forward to improving my skills even more!

Thanks for reading and thanks for making the community what it is!

Joni