Sondrian’s Ludum Dare 39 Post Mortem

Its that bittersweet moment when ludum dare is at an end, and you only have to show what you were able to produce. This has been my 8th time participating in Ludum Dare (second since the new website was officially launched), and overall I am pretty happy about the results.

I worked with 2 other people; Fariel and Mr McGibblets. My job was to produce the audio visual assets and smarter people than I took those assets and actually made them into a game. Given this narrow-ish band of involvement, I was still extremely busy until the last 6 hours, and even then there was a lot to do to get ready to publish the game.

There is a difference between an artist and a game developer who makes art though, because it comes down to a lot more than just how to do the art. My greatest challenge when producing assets is to a two-fold challenge. I need to figure out what we are going to need before we need to implement it, and I need to know how to format what we are working on so that the implementation process goes smoothly. These two aspects make a huge difference in terms of volume of work that can be outputted given the limited timespan.

I had not really done a Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past/ Binding of Isaac style game before, and it was an interesting challenge. Using a predetermined tileset layout, I made the tiles and Fariel was able to simply take the image and turn it into a paint brush and “paint” the level without having to hand place each tile. You can make a pretty big game if you don’t have to waste time with silly hand work. Figuring out how to open doors and do all the rest of that was interesting. I think next time I want to use the assets as a 2:1 pixel scale as I just think pixel art looks better blown up a bit.

I used a “orange/red is off” and “green is on” color scheme to help indicate to the player the progression and whether or not a thing was activated. I think that it worked out pretty well.

Those enemy things were really creepy too

I had a lot of fun making the music and SFX, but other than the really nitty gitty, there isn’t a lot that can be said about it. What I can say is that, and it amused me to no end, I wrote the music in the key of C# because it was robots and computer system. The usual challenge with sound effects is how to create the sounds so that you can hear exactly what was going on, nothing is too loud/quiet or out of balance, and that the sounds feel “right” for the think that is happening. You have to use sounds to communicate to the player what is going on when they can’t use the visual clues, and also to reinforce those things with are going on on-screen. For this, I felt pretty good about the results.

There isn’t really too much that I want to say went badly. I would have liked to see more set pieces in the game to make the world feel better, more broken things and what have you. I would also have liked to have been able to add more “feel” effects. You can’t add too much feedback, that just makes the game world a better world to play in.

Also, animation is hard, but its really rewarding. I can’t wait for the next LD jam. The best game out there is yet to be made!

Thanks to everyone who watched me on Twitch and who has and will play and rate the game. I love this community and I’m glad to be a part of it.

Sondrian out!