Before I begin to explain all the process we have gone through as a team,i would like to point out that this is our fist Ludum Dare , we are a spanish team formed a few months ago and we are in full attempt to grow, trying new ideas and get better.Our desginer started 3 or 4 months ago with pixelart.I , the programmer,learned to code about 3 years ago , I’ll tell you our experience this few days.

 

 

Before LD26

In the beginning my idea was to participate alone in the 48 hours LD , it was more achievable given that I worked on monday (Because of the time zone ,for us the LD started the 27 at 3 in the morning). Talking with the designer in my team he told me : “Don’t you dare going in alone!, I’ll handle all the graphics” .Truth be told I really liked him telling me this but I didn’t want to involve a person to be 72 hours of his time sitting in front of the computer suffering the presion of this hard 72 hours ,yet I let him in.As long as we were participating I started talking with the rest of the team ,the musician and the co-designer(he manages to improve my ideas and the leve design, he is something like my right hand) agreed to help .So we created the account of the team and started to work , voting much interesting subjects. The time came were the announced the theme of this jam

 

Theme

The truht is that when they announced the theme I was already sleeping ( it was 3am here in Spain) , I woke up at 8am ,went to the LD page and BOOM there it was , the worst theme for me :“ Minimalist”.For 5 min, I felt a bit of rage , there were very interesting topics like “Aiming to the starts, useless gods” , topics that without a doubt could have done better for my game , but I decided to take some coffe , take it easy and start the design of my game , at 9am my team showed up and we started to think the idea.

 

Making of

A lot of ideas came trough our heads , we thought many crazy things , we propose ideas like making a grapich adventure , a puzzle game , mazes and many other things.After a while exposing some ideas and voting we created what it is now “Life in a nutshell”.In this game the idea was to create a game in which a person feels aflficted with the life they lead and wants to break the chains that stops them from searching another life style .The game would consists of 2 gameplay styles.The first one , a very dark one, in which there were practically no vision of the enemy and you have to sue the light to hide.With this , we wanted to send the message that happens to many people , sometimes we sink in our bad times , fight against them and sometimes you can’t win so we need a “light” that guides us. It was more or less what we wanted to show.In the second gameplay we wanted to make a part which consisted only of “taking punches”.We wanted to give the idea that “As many times as you fall , as many beatings life gives you , you have to hang on and move on and don’t let anything stops you”.

 

Day 1:

The first day was the best with lead , it was our first day , there were many laughs in the streaming , I devoted my time to the creation of test PJ’s so I could test the gameplay , here you have an example of what you could see in the stream:

   

Day 1 was all about the “dark part” , I was able to create a decent gameplay for the character , fixed the camera so it wouldn’t show unnecessary things , I created an alert system for the enemies, the incognito system , it wasn’t a bad day , everything was going good.

 

Day 2:

I dedicated this day to the “taking punches” part , I created a mob that prevented the pass and didn’ attack , it just stood there ,blocking , say that we were gonna create an archer and give it a parable attempt but I didn’t get the result I was expecting , we finally transformed the archer into a wizard that threw fireballs by the floor.There is nothing like a bug becoming a feature.

 

Day 3:

It was monday already , I had to go to work from 8 to 15( I work as a programmer).That day I kept receiving messages in skype about bugs in the game , big errors, I felt panic of what I could see when I got home.I arrived home at 15:20 , ate ( the food burned and I had to eat it like that , there was no time to waste),my team told me my alert system didn’t work , enemies didn’t detect when you were hidding , I didn’t understand anything, everything was working okay day 2 when I tested.I started to check in my friends computer and nothing was working they way it should .I looked how I put a guard and I went straight for the character , good, yet when the character hid , the guard kept hitting him, weird.I realized something , when I tested the game I only put 1 hidding zone and they were 3 now and I thought “It can’t be that this doesn’t work if I put more than 1” so I looked and yes , this was the error , for a while I fought and I found a way to fix it , then I tough “if I put more than 1 enemy then , this will fail” and yes , I put 4 enemies and It didn’t work only 1 went for the character and the other 3 remained bugged , I lost at least 4 hours in this , the time was ending , I wasn’t making any progress , I was frustrated so I decided to take out the alert system and everything worked fine but I lost my alert system.Then it was the mob in the other gameplay part , the “taking punches” part , if I let it be ,it attacked non stop, it killed the hero in less than 10 sec, I tried to make it better putting a limit of 2-3 seconds, errors came , there were a few hours left and still much to do , so I put a random and now it attacked randomly.Moving on there were only 4 hours to turn in the game , I even consider not turning in , the music was good , the history was good , graphics were good but the gameplay hadn’t turned out they way I wanted ,what do I do? Tell my team they had suffer and worked for 3 days straight for nothing?, that it was my fault for not being able to solve the problems? No , I couldn’t do that , I decided to move on and finish , give it all the necessary tweaks and leavit as much “finish” as I could and prepare my self for the shitstorm I was about to get , even so it didn’t matter because I really enjoyed and I’m really happy , I learnt a lot in this LD and I wish with all my heart I can participate in the next one.

 

“Life in a Nutshell” in Ludum dare

We ended up turning in the game at 2:30am (Spain time zone), next day I had to work from 8 to 18:00.I slept 4 hours that night , while I was at work I wasn’t able to concentrate thinking about the things people could say and that the message we were trying to send with the game wouldn’t get to the people.When I got home I started looking the things people said , not all where good but not all were bad either , I liked the set up and any received criticism.

 

To end

I’m really happy for some things we did and not so happy for others , I hope I can fix the game in its complete and get a new version , I wanna thank everyone that tried the game and leave a comment even if it was bad , any criticism is well received as long as it is constructive.If you haven’t tried it yet you can try it HERE and leave your opinions , you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter