This Ludum Dare some friends asked if they could help. While they were very motivated they did not have much experience with the development tools I was using. So my main challenge this Ludum Dare was to get the most done towards game development from my friends enthusiasm.

Since the game jam allows you to use a private code base I started making a generic side scrolling beat-em-up engine a few weeks before the contest. Regardless of the theme I figure I could it could be made into a side scrolling beatem up. Its key features would be movement on the XZ plane, the ability to jump and 2 types of attack. I used place holder art to verify my systems worked.

For art assets I wanted to take digital images of my friends against a green background then convert the green to alpha to make sprites. I encouraged my friends to bring what ever costumes they had lying around their homes on the day of the event, and we would try and figure out what we were going to make on the fly.

When the theme was announced the first idea that popped into my head was trying to distill the “Hero’s Journey” into its core components and check off as many of those components over the course of the game. Considering the how much is written academically on the Hero’s Journey I figure it was due for a quick dirty video game treatment.

I cribbed off this page:http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html for the main steps in the Hero’s Journey. I formed a loose plot outline consisting of 7 stages: Call to Action, Training, Death of Mentor, Escape from Fort, Meeting Goddess, Climax, Return to normality. Each stage would have a series of enemies and some dialog giving pretty blatant hints about what step in the hero’s journey it was checking off.

I spent Saturday morning cleaning up the side scrolling fighter code so that it would do the game specific tasks like AI mentor, boss battles, and event triggers. Saturday afternoon my friends came over with their costumes and props. We decided that all the bad guys would be T-shirt Ninjas (made by tying a tshirt around our head to look like a ninja mask). The roll of Protagonist and Mentor was foisted off Zach and Crystal because they are the most photogenic of our group, and because they didn’t bring a computer that could do development on.

Saturday night and most of Sunday was spent cleaning up the images and importing them into the game engine as characters. Zach had a great idea of doing the backgrounds on notebook paper to add to the whole minimalist theme. I like the note book aesthetic since it conjures memories of high school day dreams. During this period jimmy did of the image processing. While I created character prefabs from his finished art assets. I also created the basic scene files on which we would build the encounters.

Around 9:00 we were finished with the character prefabs and decided we should actually make the finished levels. Zach was down sick and Crystal had work on Sunday so the task of level design was left to Jimmy and I. We tag teamed each level with one person in front of the computer and the other watching and making suggestion. By midnight we had 4 out of the 7 levels done. Jimmy went home at this point and I soldiered on until 2:00am finishing the last levels. I spent an hour on QA, bundling the application, taking screen shots and going through the submission process. Then went to bed around 3;00 am.

Thanks to “cheating” and using base code written before the event this was one of the more relaxing Ludum Dares I have participated in. I intend on refining the code base and image capture process so that it will be even easier to make games of this type in the future. I wish we had more time to fiddle with the game play variables to make combat more fun, but we spent too much time making sprites.

-Wilson