Download Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here??, well, here.

Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here (or WAYAWAYDH) is a bizarre mix of top-down stealth and point-and-click adventure. You play as a shapeshifting thief trying to steal from the (possibly evil?) rich people of Sanctuary Bay. You’ll need to impersonate the members of the Rump family and fool the guards if you want to infiltrate the house and open the vault.

So the postmortem. This is the first time I’ve ever written one of these, which is appropriate given that this is the first time I (or my teammates, for that matter) have participated in a game jam like this. It was an interesting and really fun experience, though there are definitely some things I wish we would have done differently.

What went wrong:

• Lack of sleep! I stayed up 36 hours straight, and my teammates got minimal sleep over the first 24 hours. This really came back to bite us as we were much less productive than we should have been due to not sleeping. Next time, sleep more often, but for less time.
• Getting the mechanics together. Because we had a few different mechanics to worry about, I started by building them in separate projects. Unfortunately, I had a hard time integrating everything (probably due to lack of sleep). Each component was playable individually, but things weren’t put together in a truly playable state until Day 3.
• We had too much ambition. We wanted to make something a little bigger than we were capable of doing in 72 hours, so we had to scale back at the last minute. This is something we’ll have to remember for next time.
• Controls… In the chaos of trying to get things simply working, I put a lot of actions on somewhat random keys. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and I didn’t get a chance to change them to something that’s more standard for these types of games.

What went right:

• Level design! I was really happy with Hunter’s design for the house, and the way she used actual blueprints as a basis. I also really liked Chris’s tiles, which made it feel a lot more like an actual home.
• I did the concept drawings of the characters, and I’m really proud of them. *arrogance increases*
• The overall concept. We were worried about the “shapeshift” theme, but once this idea started coming together, we found that we all really liked it. We plan on having a post-jam version up in a couple of days, but we’ve also been discussing completely rebuilding it as a full game. Feedback so far seems to be mostly positive, particularly regarding the general concept.
• The fun! We had a lot much fun making this, even despite the stress that came with it. And while it didn’t come together perfectly, we think it’s a good start. We all learned so much during #LD35, both about the technology we were using as well as about the process itself. The feedback we’ve received from the other LD’ers has been invaluable, and one of the best parts of this whole experience. Everyone else’s games have been incredibly impressive as well.

I think that’s probably good for now; We’re already looking forward to participating in Ludum Dare 36 this August, as well as continuing to work on WAYAWAYDH and our other projects. If you haven’t already played and rated it, please do so!