You can check the game here!

The judging is going to end up soon, so I want to publish some things about the game I made with two friends; one is a seasoned game developer and for the other one it was his first game ever, so I'm hoping he enjoyed the jam as much as we did! First of all, let's start with a trailer video, to see what the game is about. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkjE4uvN6Ks

Theme

When we went to sleep (we are in Central Europe), we though we have a game for every theme. For A Small World, it was a game with small planets. However, when I woke up and saw how many people have similar grasp of the theme, I went to search for another take on the theme. Others joined me soon after, we went to brainstorm. Obvious one were ants and such, but I'm already creating a game with ants in my spare time, so that was out of the question - especially since I want to do LDs to learn new stuff, not to reuse the stuff I already know and did in the past.

After some discussion and brainstorming, I remembered a board game from my childhood, which seemed as a base for the game. In this moment, we wanted to have a small circular world, with nice heavens and sky around it, crumbling (and becoming even smaller) as you run inside towards the circle. To add some interesting mechanic, the colorful gates were added, to be forced to decide between staying for few seconds to match the color, or run and catch the next one.

So, where did it go wrong and kinda disconnected from the theme?

Well, simplifications had to be made, once we realized what we actually envisioned, if we wanted to have some visual quality similar to our previous LD game, One Room Factory. We found out it's much easier to do rectangular than circular, especially if we want the crumbling floor and walls, and that some underground industrial-ish/hell-ish setting is much more time preserving too. We tried to preserve the idea through narrative, but it probably is not enough in retrospect.

Development

As soon as we decided on the theme, we started doing the code, prototyping, and creating assets. I started to prototype and code basic sutff, @amertak was trying some stuff related to level generation and level design with the code, and @zgragselus focused on creating graphical assets.

As I mentioned previously, we are from Central Europe, which means the timezones kinda screw us during LD; after Friday spent in work and having to do work on Monday as well, the time when people can focus on the game is kinda limited. We also could do something on monday evening, but it wasn't much. So, definitely shot out to @zgragselus for staying up late on Monday until the deadline, and submitting the game!

Leasons learned from LD37

Our LD37 game had a lots of comments about being hard and having no tutorial; we learned a lesson, and made a fully scripted tutorial and more simpler game by itself, so this is definitely a plus.

Also, people disliked no WebGL build last time. We have it now, but it's still the non-preferred to play our games, since we focus a lot on post-processing and graphics, and the WebGL has performance issues even on OK computers. This is especially true with the shatter effect.

We did not learn from the HW requirements; we again have a game that is ridiculously demanding for LD games, but hey - we are gamers, and we just like creating games for people with gaming rigs and can't help ourselves!

We have a custom audio track, made by a friend of @amertak, for our game. Be sure to check out his SoundCloud, his music is really great!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

• G: Having a tutorial
• G: Shattering floors and walls!
• G: Controller support (yes, you can play the game using a controller)
• B: Repetitiveness of some levels
• B: The theme connection getting lost
• U: Performance issues

Feedback

Any feedback you give us is really appreciated! We love reading it, and are happy with anything that helps us improve as game developers for future LDs or for our careers. So please, if you try our game and have some feedback, don't be afraid to write it! ;)

Shatter effect

Expect a special feature about this in the next few days by @zgragselus! It will definitely be worth a read, and it will show you how we did the shatter effects.

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Until next time (LD39, hopefully!), see ya!