Part 1: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/$406164
Part 2: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/behind-the-scenes-of-mikus-minion-madness-the-first-24-hours
Part 3: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/behind-the-scenes-of-mikus-minion-madness-the-second-day
Misa here, back with the final development blog (maybe we'll do one more for the judging phase...) for Miku's Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness) to discuss...
* The Final Countdown *
The last day! In a perfect environment, we would’ve had a lot more concepted. But for a weekend environment, one of Godot’s biggest strengths is being able to sketch out your interface in real time using its various drawing features.
We had a dwindling time and quite a few things to complete!
@miku focused on the art and UI, she needed to complete a title illustration as well as dressing up the general UI so that it’s decent enough to convey the purpose of the game. She also had some additional feedback from our industry friends regarding the UI, and that was helpful in making sure that all the elements look unified.
@poco continued to work on the features that we would need to have for a fully playable game. We created a method to spawn creatures and advance through rounds, completing after 3 rounds. We also wanted to make sure that different creatures could use different types of attacks, although due to some bugs we had on the back end, we had to abandon ranged creature AoEs.
In a later iteration, we plan to enable more of these capabilities on different creatures, as well as convey more information about the creatures.
@jason-woerner took lead on balancing the creatures with the wave spawning system that we had made, and balanced how players would advance through the three rounds we would have for the demo.
@emiri started to work on the music and sound effects in the last 24 hours as everything was taking shape. Our thought on the UI was that we would make it look somewhat arcade like, which inspired the whimsical track that you hear when you play the game.
With all these things going, all these elements would need to be blended into the game that we would submit to Ludum Dare 56.
As avid Hatsune Miku fans, we've always enjoyed making fan projects that feature her. Hatsune Miku is a character created by Crypton Future Media, a company based out of Sapporo that works with voice synthesizers. Hatsune Miku is a unique character in the sense that she is molded by the community that creates with her. She's a perfect fusion of creativity and technology, and so bit like elements and Hatsune Miku mix together naturally.
With this, our creative vision fell together as Miku summoning pixels to fight against an unknown force. In later iterations, the portraits of the mysterious character that you fight will perhaps show different characters that Miku would be competing against.
The UI was still under heavy consideration, but we knew now what was needed to support it now. We moved the heart elements, made the cards look more card-like, made the colors more Miku-like, added some surrounding textures, added more information to them, and added supporting illustrations for each side. Using Godot’s various Rect Nodes, and taking some feedback from early testers, we finally had a version of the game close to what you see currently live.
With all our elements set up, we needed to polish up the game’s look and feel. As Jason put in some time to do last minute iteration, we continued to refine the UI by adding more elements on the screen to make each section pop out. As we were running very low on time, some of the last art touches in the game were extremely last minute (such as the specific look of the cards as well as how the health and attack portions worked on the card.)
We’d also play the game a lot during this time and sent it out to our friends to test out the balance of the game. Our main goal was to make sure that anyone playing the game could make it through the experience. An hour before the jam, we also needed a logo that would look nice for the title screen and captivate attention.
Although @miku would make the mock title first, we were able to recruit @kooh to help come up with the final title. The concept would be that it would be Miku’s Minion Madness, with the minion text being at a smaller size to showcase that we’re a game with tiny creatures!
The time was approaching quickly, and although we would’ve liked to put a lot more customization into fonts and how various UI elements would display, we simply needed to get a version that was good enough to upload. We tested it several times on our PCs and a few times on our phones, and before we knew it, it was time for our submission pages. We quickly worked on fixing final bugs, which involved some AI acting aberrant and modifying a few UI elements to make it look much better, but then it was onto the judging period.
We hope you enjoyed reading our devlogs as much as we enjoyed working on the game and writing them.
Also, remember.... If you want to follow @miku on socials, then just always be miku.miku.ing!
