Few thoughts on the making of my game Six Degrees of Separation Between Me and the Party.

Game Idea

The game is inspired by the concept of Six Degrees of Separation which states that human society is a Small World type of network. According to this idea all living things and everything else in the world are six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps (source Wikipedia).

The game is an adventure of 2 kids who try to put this theory in action in order to get invited to a party organized by their favorite rock star. It's a classic adventure coupled with a "chat" feature. Because the two are going to chat a lot.

I wanted to make it interesting by introducing several outcomes(endings) to the game, each one of them triggered by different set of actions (one of the endings is triggered by talking on the chat only, while others require to do other types of actions as well). The game is supposed to be lighthearted and humourous, but at the same time there's a hidden message on society, which becomes apparent if you play all the endings.

Developpement challenges

The game has two different gamplay modes: the point&click adventure and chat. Although I already have an embrion of a house engine for point&click adventure that I build upon with every game, I still had to add some stuff to it such as: the dialog system, hotspot click management, NPCs, improuvements of character animation... Fortunately it didn't present much trouble. The main challenges of this Ludum Dare were: - to code the chat feature from scratch - to make the game pixel perfect: cursor, fonts and character movement

What went bad

Developpment has taken me way too much time. I had a hard time with pixel perfection (I made a blog post about my solution here). I've also spent lot's of time developping chat and particularily the dialog tree selection, a feature I practically didn't use at all in the end as I ended up having very little time to write all that dialog possibilities... As for the chat characters I had to reuse the portraits from my previous game and create some place holder art for all the characters that are not visible (fortunately, as they are not visible it may appear intentional). I also didn't have any time left for composing music, but the tune I found at incompetech.com was just the right thing.

What went good

What went good is that in the end I managed to implement all 3 endings as planned. Most poeple who played the game until the end, found the hidden message and I'm really happy with that! :smile: I'm also very happy with the graphics and the general look and feel of the game. It is probably one of my best jam games.

Conclusion

I had great fun this time around as usual which is the most important. I've also played so many great games and received lot's of fantastic feedback so far. It's very inspiring, thank's a lot!