Brainstorming-

The method I used for generating ideas was very bare-bones. Once the final 10 themes we're announced, I listed them in a word processing document and started jotting down any game ideas came to mind. However, only one of those ideas truly stuck out to me: "A game where you try to reach the “Magic world in the sky” by stacking objects and climbing them." Although this idea belonged to the theme "A World in the Skies", I loved it so much that I had to find a way to make it work with the actual theme, "A Small World". As soon as the actual theme was released, I took a shower to think about how I could implement this game to fit the theme. In the end, I went with simply making the world a small sphere (I know! Creative right?).

Coding-

The coding was probably the easiest part of this project. I already had previous experience working on two of the problems I needed to solve: small world gravity and inventory systems. The only system that I had no experience working on was placing items in the world, which I was able to get working fairly quickly.

Art-

This was the most time-consuming part of this project, as I am a rather novice blender user. At first, I wanted to simply go with a "childish" aesthetic because the mechanics of the game seemed childish to me. After finding a font and trying a few colors for it, I thought "Why not just go with a stereotypical 'girly child' look?". And that is the aesthetic that stuck for most of the world. Once I made that decision, all that was left was making a list of "stackable" and "non-stackable" objects I wanted to make and (slowly) working them off the list.

Music-

I made this between the hours of 3am and 4am... Don't do that...

But seriously, the music was heavily inspired by the old "Kiwi!" animation. This kind of music really fit the "child-like determination" feel I was going for. I opened LMMS, found two good open-source samples for the background riff and melody, imitated the background riff from "Kiwi!", and composed my own melody through trial, error, and a little bit of music theory.

Problems-

One problem I had with the first person controller was clamping the vertical look range (you can actually do a full 360 front-flip right now). I had solved this problem before, but the quaternion math with the small world gravity threw me off. I never fixed this problem in STACK, but no one's called me out on it sooooo...

Another problem I had pertained to the optimization for the webGL build. All the objects that the player could pick up were using Unity physics, which caused an abysmal frame-rate. Now, almost all objects do not have unity physics enabled, allowing for a much smoother web browser experience.

Also... I forgot to go to bed one night... DON'T DO THAT!

Thanks for reading. :)

Submission link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/stack