BACKGROUND

Mono is a puzzle platformer about a colorless mime who wanted to keep the world minimal. Collect all the colored cubes to help Mr. Mime remove all the colors in the world and make it monochromatic.

Play it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=21974

I worked on the programming and level design, while my friend Dave made the art. I made an “I’m In” post for the tools we used. Also, we were miles apart during the event, so we had to talk and send files and do everything online.

STORY

I am a big fan of minimalist digital art and typography, especially those minimalist movie posters thing.  So when the theme minimalism came out, I was like HOLY FUCK YES THIS IS GONNA BE EASY!!! Only, a few moments later, I thought well making minimalist typography posters and stuff is easy, but we’re not making freaking posters here, we’re making a video game.

I spent a few hours thinking for a minimalist game idea. My girlfriend and I spent the whole afternoon on a coffee shop just brainstorming. I figured, well we could take a common video game, like a shmup or an infinite runner, and just use minimal graphics such as geometric shapes. But I didn’t want that. I wanted a game about minimalism, not a game that has minimalist graphics.

We couldn’t meet up for the event, so I had to send this image to explain the game idea.

Finally, I came up with an idea about taking out colors from a world, or like turning the world grayscale/black and white. I told Dave about this and he replied, “Hey what if our main character is a mime, like that one episode in The Powerpuff Girls.” Yes! That was exactly what I thought. That moment was a bit awkward though, you know, watching a lot of Powerpuff Girls episodes and all. Hahaha 😛 Anyway, so we started. Except that was already about 14 hours past the theme announcement.

Day 1 – Core mechanics. I was able to make a basic platformer as well as our color thing mechanism in less than a few hours. Also, I had a couple ideas for levels. The mime sprite was ready as well.

Day 2 – I spent some hours on fixing the buggy collision, but got no luck. I didn’t want to keep working on something difficult for a long time, so I just went on to do something else – level design. I had to learn how to use Tiled and how to integrate it to Slick2D. The Tiled wiki was great though along with some online tutorials. Mime animations were also ready. About 75% done now. So far so good except for the collision.

Day 3 – I still couldn’t fix the collision problem so I thought, to hell with it. I also added a monster to the game, which resulted to more interesting levels. Polishing, sound effects, main menus, tileset sprites, more levels and Mono was finished 3 hours before the Jam deadline.

Evolution of Mono

THE BAD

1. I had no experience with making a platformer before, and I had no time to learn and apply a physics engine, so I just made a really really simple jump mechanism. It looked bad, but hey it works.
2. The collision is very inaccurate which ruins some levels. I also didn’t have time to fix it.
3. No music
4. Time. 10+ hours could have been enough time to solve # 1, 2 and 3.

THE GOOD

1. A lot of players loved the gameplay. The take-out-the-colored-blocks concept worked well and allowed for some interesting level designs which I didn’t really expect at first. Although this was my first time designing levels, I was able to make 10 puzzly ones.
2. Sprites and animations, especially the mime, looked great and minimal at the same time. Also, the levels with 3+ colors looked nice.
3. Though I had to learn Tiled map editor during the event, it helped so much with level design. It also worked perfectly with Slick2D.
4. We finished it! That alone is a really really huge achievement + bragging right for us. 😀

This is our first time joining Ludum Dare and it has been a wonderful and fun experience for us. We surely are not going to miss LD27!