Play and rate Mediator here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/mediator

I always have a lot of story-driven adventure-game type ideas for every jam. Usually, I wisely choose to ignore them and try something with much less art & writing required. This time, for some reason, I was not wise... but I didn't like any of the simpler ideas I had come up with for the theme, and somehow I convinced myself that I could pull this off in a very minimal fashion quickly, and expand on it later. I was wrong, and this is the first LD I've participated in that I did not complete to my satisfaction.

Still, I am happy with certain aspects of my game, and I learned some stuff.

Art

A few weeks before the jam I came across a suggestion on how to best use colours to create paintings with a unified feel. The suggestion was basically to choose one colour to be highly saturated, and form a backdrop and context, and have every other colour be more desaturated the further it was away from that colour on the colour wheel.

I didn't quite take that suggestion because I thought it might be too overpowering in a videogame to have the backdrop be highly saturated. But I did use the suggested approach to designing the palette, with a single colour-ramp (minty green) being massively more saturated than the others. I intended to use this for characters and interactable objects. I limited myself to 7 colour-ramps overall, and I think it works well to create a separation between the action and the background.

I think this might have been my first time doing a walking animation. I felt it was passable, but a little bit stiff. I'm not really sure how to improve it at this resolution, but I will be trying.

Music

I hadn't really intended to do anything special with the sound and music, but it was probably the area where I ended up learning the most.

I wanted something gloomy and tense for the music, and a 12-bar blues in a minor key seemed to work quite nicely without having to try a bunch of different chord progressions. After a few attempts at this that were either too dark or too upbeat and intrusive I hit on the version that made it into the game. It features low & high drones throughout, and a sparse melody of some of the "pad" instruments in Bosca Ceoil.

All of the instruments are heavily filtered, similar to the sweep pad pictured above. The "atmosphere" instrument I brought down the y axis of the filter as well. I don't really know what this means, technically, but I've found that it distorts the notes and makes them unpredictable. This instrument overlays the melody bars and produces a discordant and, I hope, disquieting effect.

Finally, I underlaid the whole song with two tracks of white noise - one solid and one broken - intended to be reminiscent of radio static. I don't think it quite achieves that, but I like the effect anyway.

Unfortunately I failed to export the tune as a perfect loop, and there is a significant click when it restarts in the game. I always struggle with this a bit with Bosca Ceoil because it doesn't include the reverb from the end of the song at the start of it. I generally fix this in Audacity and I thought I had the process down, but clearly something went wrong this time.

Sound

One big change from the usual for me was that I didn't do any of the sound effects in BFXR, and instead used Bosca Ceoil for them as well as the music. I just didn't really feel that BFXR's bleeps and bloops would be right for the type of game I was making this time.

It was tough to find the instruments I needed to create the effects that I wanted, but it was just a matter of trying things out and tweaking them until they sounded right. The footsteps, for example, were done with a really low "bagpipe" and a slightly higher "glockenspiel". I think they sound convincingly enough like footsteps on a wooden floor - not quite right for a spaceship maybe! I'm sure there are other music production tools that would do a better job, but I never seem to make much headway with anything else.

Out of Time

I realised quite early on Sunday that the game I'd chosen to make was not realistic for the jam. At that point I was still working on the basics of displaying text and dialogue choices, and although I had the music done and a main character designed, there was still the entire story to write with dialogues for at least two or three significant characters, and art for maybe six locations. That wasn't going to happen, but I decided to bring the introductory scene on the ship to as high a standard as I could and throw it upon #LDJAM's mercy.

For the next Ludum Dare I am going to make sure I have a framework in place for putting story/dialogue driven adventure games together quickly. They're not the only types of ideas I have, but they are a significant portion of them, and they are some of my favourites. I feel confident that if I was able to spend the whole weekend working on the art and story for something like this, I would be able to put together a complete experience.

Bring on #LDJAM 39!