Hey everyone! Team Juicebox here. Like many people who made games this Ludum Dare, we also made a game. Haha. That is a human joke. You can play the game that we made here. Anyways, after we made the game we spent some time thinking about what we could have done better, and we ended up writing this insanely massive postmortem. Most of it is written from my (johnfn's) perspective, with the exception of a few of the paragraphs at the top.
Good and bad: Big teams are amazing, but hard to manage
Don’t get me wrong, I love working with a ton of people - we get so many more ideas during brainstorming, we keep each other motivated when morale is low, and the overall output is obviously higher. But in a game jam, unless everyone knows each other really well or someone takes on the role of project manager, being a large team is tough. It’s harder to implement the things you want in the game without stepping on someone else’s toes, and the more people involved, the harder it is to agree on anything. I think part of the solution here is using task-tracking software, part of it is working with people who have synergy, and honestly, part of it is probably just luck. This is something I think about after every game jam, and there’s no obvious answer. But hey, if anyone has it figured out, let me know.
Bad: Virtual jams kind of suck - especially for brainstorming.
It’s really hard to get aligned on what a game will look like when we can’t scribble on a whiteboard. Figma helped, but it was probably too late (happened after we narrowed down the idea)
Good: Single owners
One thing that I’ve been thinking about is that it seems to be best to let everyone loose on exactly one thing that they enjoy doing. E.g., fawnblue was responsible for the art and the presentation, Miyo was responsible for the music etc. But I think one error that I made is that everyone was responsible for the game mechanics. I’ve learned again and again - for reasons long enough to write an entirely separate blog post - that having lots of people try to be creative just doesn’t really work. The more people there are, the more likely someone is to shoot down one of your big ideas, so you tend to settle on the most agreeable and standard ideas. This is no good.
I think in the future I want to put exactly one person in charge of game mechanics. Stuff like how health works, what enemies do, and what mechanics exist should really just be the domain of one person. The weird twist on this is I think it means we explicitly disallow mechanic brainstorms during the idea generation phase. Like, story generation during the idea phase is still fine, and I think we should still do that. I also think that brainstorming an overall mood is kosher. I furthermore think that saying “this is a platformer” or “this is a puzzle game” is OK. But as for mechanics, I think we need to leave those up to exactly one person, as to not hamper anyone’s creative instincts. (I actually don’t know if this will work. I’ll have to see if everyone’s OK with this…)
Good: Godot is AWESOME
If you poll 100 random people that have done Ludum Dare a couple of times before and ask them what their biggest mistake was, 99 of them will say “don’t use tools you don’t know”. OK, that may not be an exactly accurate statistic, but I have read that that is basically the most common Ludum Dare failure mode. And the day before LD, we basically abandoned all of our previous toolsets and knowledge (HTML5/TS, Unity) to dive headfirst into Godot… and it basically worked insanely well! (At least from my perspective). Godot is just so good - a lot of the time I wouldn’t even have to read the docs because I’d be able to blindly guess how features would work and get it right. The 2D workflow is just so sane and consistent. I love it. We didn’t really run into any perf issues at all, and we even were able to drop in a super snazzy 2D dynamic lighting effect in the last couple of hours that would have been completely impossible if it wasn’t essentially pre-made for us by Godot.
I’m really excited to use Godot again in a future game jam when I really know how to use it well!! :D
Eh: I (johnfn) didn’t actually like the idea that much
In our idea generation process, I think that I didn’t really make us really pin down the idea that we ended up running with as much as I should have. This meant that the picture in my mind of the idea ended up being vastly different than the pictures that everyone else had. Honestly, the game ironically has a bunch of restrictions on it that I don’t really like all that much. I really don’t like games that basically railroad the player in one direction, and that’s exactly what we ended up making. I also really like games that allow the player to get stronger over time, but in our game that basically doesn’t happen at all. Finally, I like games that have some sort of original mechanic to them and our game basically has the most staid mechanics you can possibly imagine.
OK, it probably sounds like I hate our game, but I don’t, not really… once I realized that we were going in this direction I basically steeled myself to it and found a bunch of things that I could work on that I would enjoy. Specifically, I really enjoyed making sword combat. That was a first in LD, and it was super fun to do and super rewarding. Probably my favorite thing about it is watching streamers - everyone who streams our game almost always ends up swinging the sword around randomly chopping stuff down, even though there’s no point to it at all.
Buuut… BAH, I really do wish that our game was a bit more imaginative on the mechanic side of things. NEXT TIME I suppose! I’ve noticed that this is a challenge in all jam games, not just ours, so I don’t feel too bad about it.
Good: Watching streamers
Not much to say here, and it’s not really even related to the development phase, but it is really fun to watch people play the game. You get a really good sense of what works in the game and what doesn’t work. Of course, everyone always runs into the same bugs, which is kind of annoying (oh god the dialog… don’t even say the word dialog to me) but still, you learn a lot.
Eh: Splitting my time 50/50
I work a day job as a programmer, so that’s usually what I tend to do. Generally when I do solo LD I can just spend 100% of my time on coding. It feels great, and it also means that I get a ton of features implemented. However, whenever I do LD as part of a team I always spend at least 50% of the time on managing the project - making sure everyone has stuff to do and that everyone’s separate work is coming together into the game. This ends up meaning that I can’t get nearly as much coding done as I would like. This greatly annoys me, but I honestly don’t know what the alternative would be.
Eh: Bug and feature tracking
We really should have been more principled about keeping track of what features we were working on, and what bugs there were. I think everyone had their own separate docs where they were tracking stuff, and that made it really hard to figure out the overall picture. Easy solution - in the future, we should all commit ahead of time to just using a single doc. (I think we should also check out some other task-tracking options, like trello, asana and stuff like that.) I think we should just have a god doc that has “FEATURES” in 100pt font and “BUGS” in 80 pt font and then direct everyone to write everything in there. A discord bot would also be nice :-)
Good: Discord
DIscord is awesome. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Bad: Way too much Discord spam
On the first full day I had Discord open the entire time, which was a non-stop stream of spam and memes (OK, and occasionally some progress updates…). This was really fun, but it also made it really hard for me to focus on the game. On the second day, I got in the habit of muting discord for an hour to go heads down, then emerging after an hour to check what all my notifications were, and then repeating the process. (This almost got me into trouble on the last day when I totally broke the game and then muted my notifications for an hour. Hopefully no one ever realizes that was me…)
Good: Polish
We got in a lot of polish in this game, and I was particularly proud of some of the polish I got in. One of the subtle things I added in is that the sword actually performs a raycast to every target to ensure it has a clear line of sight to everything it’s about to hit. This super subtle, but makes the sword feel much better to swing around and cut down grass.
Hey, if you made it to the end of that, congrats! If you just skimmed down to the end to look for a TL;DR, good for you, too. Why not play our game?
Much love to everybody who participated this year, as you should feel very accomplished for what you've created whether it be your 1st or 10th submission -- be proud!
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