It was super exciting to create my first ludum dare game. For 4 years maybe I was like that: -I will make a jam for Ludum Dare bla bla I had a girlfriend then now we got married and it's time 😂

All this models was from me but there's a lack of sound. so I used mine. How much a creative person.. But everyone seems like that so why not try my game? Waiting for your comments too

Hi everyone, we’re Cosmic Adventure Squad and we’ve been doing game jams for over 10 years! You may have seen or played some of our previous games such as Deepest Sword and Game Name. We’ve been asked by a few people to share some of our processes and thoughts for how we made It Was All For The Tuna, our LD52 entry.

It Was All For The Tuna is a chill fishing game where you play as Toro the cat and you’re tasked with catching Tuna to feed the citizens of NekoTuna.

Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/it-was-all-for-the-tuna

This is part 1 of a 3 part post-mortem taking a look at how we approached developing the game. In this part I’ll be talking about the programming and gameplay aspects of the game. Thank you for reading, please leave a comment if you found this informative or helpful!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Programming

Hi, I'm Strega and I'm the programmer on the team. My schedule for LD52 was a bit different from the usual flow. For the last two jams I took Friday and Monday off of work to prepare and recover, but this time I only took the Monday off. I didn’t realize the start time had changed for LD52, starting at 12 noon PST instead of 3 pm like last time. This really cut into our development time since I lost over 5 hours the Friday since I was still working and since the jam started earlier that meant it also ended earlier, overall I lost probably close to 9 or more hours of programming time that we normally would have had, but I think we were still able to get a lot done!

We spent most of Friday just brainstorming ideas and narrowing down which concept we wanted to develop, but eventually landed on a fishing concept with a top down view. Brainstorming took longer than normal so I didn’t have much time to prototype multiple ideals like we usually do. Instead, before going to bed I focused on making a task list and set up our base Unity project and updated packages that we normally use like LeanTween.

Saturday was when I started really working on code! Normally I start by focusing on prototyping the gameplay and making sure that the core game is fun before moving on to supporting systems and polishing. However, this time after I set up some basic movement capabilities using WASD controls, I decided to work on the water and environment setups.

For the water, I created a shader following this toon water shader tutorial by Roystan. This was a great base that I was able to modify to fit our needs. I tried to optimize the water shader to be just a relatively small quad that moved around with your boat as you moved, but this proved to be kind of a waste of time since just stretching the quad across the whole world was performant enough and ended up looking better at the camera angle and FOV that we landed on.

To test out the water shader I decided to use Unity’s terrain system to create the world’s environment. This ended up working out really well for us. We’d never used the terrain system for any of our previous jam games since it is usually overkill for such small projects, but since this game was about exploring vast oceans with small islands it made sense.

We were really inspired by A Short Hike by Adam Robinson-yu (everyone should play this game!) and its environment and wanted to do something similar. Luckily, Adam was kind enough to have tweeted about how he achieved the look for his terrain by using a technique called triplanar mapping and a clever clamping technique with Unity’s terrain system to get nice hard edges between different painted layers. I started from a Triplanar terrain shader by Robert Yang and modified it with the techniques from A Short Hike to get the look we wanted.

After that, I wanted the water to react to the boat’s movement. This meant adding some kind of ripple effect. I found a great interactive water ripple tutorial by Minions Art that was based on using a render texture. I was able to integrate this into our water shader and after a bit of tuning all the shaders together the environment started to look pretty good! Here’s an early gif of it all working together.

Lastly, I found a toon shader that I liked and applied it to all the game’s models and integrated it with the terrain shader to unify the game’s look.

After all these shaders were done, I showed RosyPenguin how to tune everything so that she could independently iterate on the game's visuals as she worked on the art. Getting to this point took most of Saturday. I was starting to worry that we wouldn’t have enough time to make good gameplay so I had to switch gears quickly!

Since we were making a fishing game, I had to of course make some fish! I wanted them to behave somewhat realistically so I implemented a simple flocking system for their AI. You can learn more about how to implement a simple flocking system here. I also gave them some environmental awareness so they wouldn’t get stuck swimming into the islands and boat avoidance to make them feel responsive to your presence. You can see some of this behavior below.

Next, I knew we wanted to have a lot of fish in the game, like hundreds of them and this would likely be bad for the framerate. We wanted a fixed number of actual hand positioned fish to make the game feel handcrafted and intentional. So I started by doing some tests, placing 100, 200, and then 400 fish into the world to see how the game would perform to make sure my intuition was correct. I’d be happy if it all just worked with 400 fish, but of course it didn’t. Luckily, I knew some techniques for solving these kinds of perf issues. I was able to apply a spatial partitioning pattern to make it so only the fish around the player were updated and visible. With a bit of tuning and some other optimizations I was able to get a decent frame rate with the WebGL build. I highly recommend learning about gameplay programming patterns here!

Now that I had fish I needed to figure out how to catch them. Originally we wanted you to be able to upgrade from a fishing rod to a net to an ocean rake, but ultimately these other methods got cut and we decided to focus on just the fishing rod mechanics to reduce scope. I wanted our fishing mechanic to feel like there was some element of skill and not be a quick time event, an arbitrary bar, or a separate minigame. I wanted it to feel integrated and seamless with the rest of the game. It took a few iterations to get there and took up most of Saturday night and Sunday morning. I ended up staying up all night, I don’t recommend doing that!

To start off, I focused on how you hooked a fish. I didn’t want the player to have to spend a lot of time waiting for fish to come latch on to their hook so I opted for making it so you could just click on a fish to start the catching phase, this made the gameplay feel more immediate. I used a cursor to help players confidently aim and target fish. I used both a raycast and a sphere cast from the mouse to confirm which fish the player intended to click on and allow for less precise targeting. To make the hooking part feel more juicy I created a procedural line that flailed out from the rod and snapped to the fish and reel itself back in once you were done. This helped provide feedback for what was going on, sell that you’re using a fishing rod, and made it fun to even hook a fish in the first place. At this point I decided to simplify the control scheme from using WASD to move the boat to just click and hold to move towards the cursor. This made it so you had a lot finer control over your boat’s direction and speed, turned the game into essentially a one-button experience, as well as making a mobile port possible in the future.

Once I had the hooking done I started to experiment on the core fishing gameplay. I knew that we wanted to be able to upgrade the player’s fishing rod and that there would be different levels of fish so I had to keep in mind what aspects could be tuned and scaled for both the rod and fish. To make it easier to think about, I treated the fishing game like a battle system, the fish had health and you were doing damage to it with your rod. This meant that I could generally tune the strength of the rod and the health value of the fish. Now I just needed to figure out how to best deal damage.

I started simple first, I had a system where you just had to hold the mouse button for long enough to continuously damage the fish. To make it feel more dynamic I made the fish swim away from you and drag you through the water. You can see this early interaction in the gif below.

This actually felt pretty good, but I was worried there wasn’t enough of a skill factor and people would get bored just clicking and holding their mouse button. I had my teammates and people on our discord play to get feedback and this confirmed my intuition. I needed to add a more skill based mechanic and some way to lose the fish. First I tested out adding a stamina system, this made it so you’d drain stamina as you held the mouse button down and could release the mouse button to recover stamina, if you held too long you’d run out of stamina and stop fishing or if you didn’t hold enough then the fish would swim off and escape.

After playtesting with the stamina system, we felt that it didn’t quite feel right. You were stuck in a mini-game now, if you encountered a fish that you couldn’t catch you had to wait for it to escape or intentionally fail. This made the player lose some autonomy, because you could no longer just stop fishing by simply letting go of the mouse button since that now made you recover stamina. To solve this I had to think of a different approach for how to interact with the stamina system.

I didn’t want to complicate the control scheme by adding extra buttons so that left me with using the mouse’s position in some way. What I realized was that I could create 2 virtual button spaces by splitting the screen in half based on where the boat was. The area of the screen in front of the boat which contained the fish could act as one button, and the area behind the boat could be the other. This made it so I could remap holding and releasing the mouse button to simply moving the mouse from one section of the screen to the other. Doing this motion also had a sort of tactile sensation like pulling back on the fishing rod as if you were actually fishing. This felt right! You could now release the mouse button any time if you didn’t want to fish anymore and play the whole game with a simple press and hold action.

To enhance the skill aspect, I made it so if you positioned your mouse to form a straight line from the fish through the boat to your mouse position you’d more effectively reel the fish in. To give the player more feedback, I made it so the fishing rod would visibly angle towards the mouse position. These things really helped to sell the feeling of fighting the fish and reeling it in. You can see the final result below.

There were a bunch of other things I added to make the gameplay feel even better. I gave fish stamina as well so that they could get tired and become easier to reel in. I added text doobers to help communicate state and congratulate the player for successful catches with different phrases based on the size of the fish you caught. I made the fish get pulled out of the water so you get a chance to see what you caught and get rewards. Then, I added VFX and SFX hooks for Tenlki and RosyPenguin to add their parts and improve the feedback. I think all these things added together to make the fishing mechanic feel fun.

With the core mechanic done it was time to move on to the supporting systems. At this point it was probably late Sunday. I quickly put together a simple upgrade menu that could be accessed from any of the towns. I put together an upgrade system that could switch out your player’s model and stats. And then, I made it so the fish could drop fish cutlet doobers for the player to collect and use as a currency for upgrading.

With this we had our core gameplay loop completed: catch fish, upgrade your boat, repeat. Simple, but effective. To make it easier to find fish, we added a radar system that would upgrade with your boat that slowly revealed more and more information.

Sunday evening, I spent some time doing an initial tuning pass to make the progression feel pretty good.

The last few hours were all about getting all the UI screens and the tutorial system together. Most of our recent games have a pretty standard UI structure consisting of a title screen with a start button, a HUD with some gameplay elements, a pause button and menu with audio controls, credits, and other settings, some kind of dialog system, and ending screens. However, each game tends to have a unique tutorial system since all of our games have fairly different gameplay. Since I felt we had a pretty novel fishing mechanic, I needed to prioritize teaching people how to play in the game rather than relying on instructions in the game’s description on the webpage.

I didn’t have much time at the end so I had to rely on our simple dialog setup and just displaying text tutorials as the player interacted with the game. I personally dislike games that just show a big image or wall of text describing how to play, so I wanted to make sure that instructions arrived in a timely manner and didn’t interrupt the player’s exploration. I used Unity’s coroutine system to set up a simple way to sequence detecting the player’s actions and displaying the appropriate tutorial dialog. For example, telling players how to move and then detecting that the player had actually moved before going to the next step or waiting for the player to hook a fish before telling them how to reel the fish in, all while never blocking the player from controlling their character. This was really effective to do in the last few hours of the jam.

With the title, tutorial, and end screen hooked up in the game, it finally felt like we had a nice complete package. I was really worried we’d run out of time and submit an incomplete experience, but luckily everything came together more or less in the last hour.

Overall, this was a pretty intense jam. I think I only got like 4ish hours of sleep the whole time, I highly recommend actually sleeping during jams! We definitely over-scoped at the beginning, but were able to recognize that midway through and adjust our planning and expectations to deliver on a solid experience.

I’m glad that I put time into the visual side of things early for this jam. It was good to practice shaders and really helped solidify the idea of the game. I felt like I lost hours just driving the boat around watching the water ripple and the fish flock and avoid my boat.

Originally we had planned for there to be AI boats that were also catching fish, for fish to grow and reproduce, for there to be different upgrade paths and options, and multiple endings. I had spent a lot of time making sure everything would scale once we started adding all these other systems, but we ended up just cutting those concepts for the sake of time. Sometimes it’s better to cut your losses and focus on the core things rather than try to squeeze more things in. Ultimately, I’m proud of the simpler, more chill game that we ended up making.

By the way, don’t let this write-up make you think I somehow coded everything perfectly. There were plenty of nasty hacks I did to try to save time and bugs that I spent hours on only to discover it was bad math or an extra semicolon somewhere. Also, not everything was perfectly sequential, I was constantly going back to tweak or fix things in the shaders, fish’s flocking algorithm, tuning variables, camera positioning, etc throughout the whole jam. That being said, the more jams you do the better you get at pre-planning how you structure your code, anticipating when to use programming patterns, making tuning variables, or predicting performance issues. Good luck on your next jam!

~ Strega

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

We had fun making Farm Island, but looking through the comments I am realizing a few things.

1. The control scheme seemed intuitive to me, but was not to everyone. A quick Tutorial Graphic at the beginning would have been a huge help! You control the tractor by clicking/touching the general place you want to go. The further from the tractor, the faster your speed, but larger your turning radius.

1. We made a leaderboard with Firebase, but it would have been interesting to capture not just the overall efficiency, but also the patterns people use to mow.. even in testing this is definitely up for debate! My experience in my youth of mowing lawns maybe helped here, but I guess we don't ding your pay for leaving ruts on tight turn-arounds, so maybe not :rofl:

1. The sound we used for harvesting ultimately sounds kind of like white noise, so probably better to have left this out (because I am particularly proud of the tractor engine-revving sound, and fun midi music we made!)

2. We used the nice little Tractor model from Kenney, but given the actual task at hand, a combine would have been more appropriate, and I somewhat regret not taking a few extra minutes to just make a lo-poly combined for authenticity.

3. We used godot, but had to fight some issues with mesh instancing and webgl output for OSX. Given our familiarity with Three.js, and the simplicity of the game, I am pretty sure we could have put together a game where we were mowing a giant field with great performance. Either way Godot is a pleasure to use.

Everything we did is open source / MIT licensed, so for the curious, please check it out! Made for Godot 3.4:

Overall, it was a fun Jam, and we hope you all get a moment to try out Farm Island!!!

:heart: :video_game: :peace:

Enjoy rhythm games? If you have or have not tried HELLGATE HARVEST before, now is a better time than ever! New user requested features and new, remixed music for you to enjoy.

Here are eight entries I really enjoyed playing.

1. A Day in the Life of Death by @xellaya and @ddrkirbyisq

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/an-amazing-game-probably

This game has wonderful art, animation, music, and narrative. Try going scythe-happy!

2. Live Harvest by @tutti-ankka and @jormarysky

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/elonkorjuu-the-life-harvesting-game

This game has gorgeous 1bit pixel graphics in a 3D environment, and really good level design.

3. Flavors of Victory by @notruche , @pekolio , @helicule , @zacharypinkham @gormand-a , and @kyrio

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/flavors-of-victory

Turn based rock-paper-scissors cook-off with funky cool illustrations.

4. CharacteRizer by @renrok , @moondweller , and @alexhonor

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/characterizer

A text based game where your inventor consists of the very letters you use to type commands! How cool is that?!

5. The Time Traveler's Garden by @lxndrdagreat , @pdog1 , @matthew-philyaw , @joel-shaffer , @artsyomni , @colossalcake , and @drizzle-games

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/the-time-travelers-garden

A twisted interpretation of Overcooked with a very well executed atmospheric and musical transition!

6. The Harvest by @stephenwhoskins , and @epicgamefan

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/the-harvest

A bonafide GBA adventure game with fun point and click / inventory puzzles.

7. The Pets Over The Innsmouth by @cgong , @his-the-unknown-painter , and @21st-century

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/the-pets-over-the-innsmouth

Eldritch farming with incredible animation and illustration.

8. nut another harvest story by @weefairyfabi , and @whalejam

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/nut-another-harvest-story

Serenely drawn interactive children's storybook with a secret (that I couldn't find!).

This has been a really fun LD for me; it's really special to participate in the event with so many skilled people and awesome entries!

I love using Unreal Engine to make my games, but I sometimes thinks this game engine is made in a way that makes people not wanting to play my games. So here is a list of ways it preventing people from playing my games (especially my jam games):

1) No way to upload a version of the game that can be used in a web browser. Okay, there was ones a solution but it was never really good, and it was not very easy to use.

2) Big file sizes. It can be reduced a bit, but often it gives more issues then it solves to do this.

3) When you have a game with a big file size, you automatically get less downloads. If you are really lucky you get so few downloads, that the browser begin to warn people from downloading it at all. The warning says "That because it is nearly never downloaded, it must be dangerous to be downloaded".

4) If or when you download the Unreal Engine games to your Windows PC, and try to start the game you get the "blue warning of terror" that tries to prevent you from starting the game. And if you do not select the option to get more options you can't start the game at all.

5) You will naturally also be stopped if you haven't already played a unreal game before, because then you need to install some really important plugins.

6) If you are so brave you insist on starting the game, there is a high chance you get a final warning, telling you that the game wants to connect and send information through your network. What a reassuring and relaxing message to get when you try to play a game from a unknown person.

7) If none of this have stopped you, then you can play the game. Or maybe you can't, because naturally Unreal Engine is pretty demanding on your PC. So there is a high chance it will only run with 5-15 frames per second. Or even better it will not run at all.

8) I am sorry to everybody else using Unreal Engine to making your jam games, but there is one more thing that will stop people from playing Unreal Engine jam games. And it is that games made in UE (especially in jam games), they are often pretty doll and extremely similar. The issue is the game engines templates, is getting used by way to many people, and it is sadly used in a not very innovative way. If you like me have played a lot of unreal engine jam games, you are probably also pretty tied of template games. So this sadly gives one more reason not to play my UE jam games.

There is probably more great reasons not to download and play my Unreal Engine jam games, but I think this is more then enough. And by the way this is not a way to getting you to play my game, it already got more then enough ratings. But what I really want to say is thank you to everybody that still is playing my game, even though they have to go through all those demanding obstacles.

Hey everyone! I posted a dev log on my youtube channel about how I made my entry for this Ludum Dare :)

https://youtu.be/bcCl48LIXb4

Hi everyone, I've just published the OST of Happy Tree Harvest! It's certified organic, locally grown, and happily harvested by humans just like you!

https://sakuramagika.bandcamp.com/album/happy-tree-harvest

Thanks for all the kind words and support <3

Given the response to The Ballad of Eric Hernandez, Cattle Rancher, I thought the most morally responsible course of action would be to submit the work for preservation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Below is the email I sent for consideration:

If you're curious, play the game, and you'll understand the constant stream of accolades I've been receiving.

The number one issue people have had with our game is the collision with plant pots. It’s cause they have square colliders instead of round ones, so they are extremely unforgiving: catch the corner of your collider on them and you slam to a halt. I even tried to make them circular, but I accidentally changed the trigger for the plants that is used to harvest and not the actual collision box. I assumed that the same issue was happening, just that when part of the player’s box collider hit part of the circle it was now stopping.

But apparently, I just didn’t change the actual collider for player collision. So I’m watching people say that they liked it all except for a few critical errors from me and I feel like I let my team down. I’m so proud of everything they’ve made and it was a truly wonderful experience working with them. I know it’s harsh, and I should forgive myself for making the mistake, but I can’t help but feel like the weakest link as a result.

We've been having a blast rating games during the first week. Interacting with other creators is always one of the highlights of the jam for me. For that reason, I'd like to share 5 of my favorites from this week for you to consider!

Deep Harvest VIII

This is a wonderfully crafted experience by a team with experience in the film industry, and it shows! From a compelling narrative to an immersive soundscape, it is definitely one of the stand-out entries for me!

Deep Harvest VIII by @cassreads, @drummerfever, and @bloodfin

Elonkorjuu - Live Harvest

The unique "1-bit" visual style of this game is enough to draw you in, but the clever gameplay and high amp soundtrack will keep you hooked.

Elonkorjuu - Live Harvest by @jormarysky and @tutti-ankka

Harvest Season

If you've played our entry, you know I'm a sucker for a strong ambience. Harvest Season has that in spades, with an added kick of 80s horror nostalgia.

Harvest Season by @drunkardwolf

Wheat World

The amount of polish in this puzzle platformer is preposterous. The core mechanic is a trick to learn, but a treat to master. With seven main levels and five secret levels to discover, there is an incredible amount of playtime packed into this jam entry.

Wheat World by @belonzik

Shred-A-Bunch!

You know how you always wished you could mow down a horde of zombies in bullet time while blasting an 80s rock anthem? No? Well you will.

Shred-A-Bunch! by @hayricakir

That's it for now! I'm looking forward to another week of rating entries. I'll be back with my next five recommendations!

- Hawkin

Heya, everyone! Today I wanted to share some stories from the creation of our entry, Soul Property: Who's Life is it Anyway?. If you haven't tried it yet, now's a great time to do so! Either way, let's get to the story at hand.

This was our original concept sketch. Seriously, this is all the visual notes we took before we got to work. Because we went with such a straight-forward premise, there wasn't a lot to jot down. You can see the player character on the left (The Griminator!), as well as a few simple platforms. The B, P, and S were to indicate the three types of baddies you'd encounter - evil people, neutral people, and good people (meaning Baddie, Person and Saint). We opted to have the evil people give up the least number of souls, while the good people would give up the most.

These are our people. However, they weren't our original design. I actually started with a rotund dude, who looked a little like this (from our livestream):

But, I screwed up and ruined the model beyond repair so I had to start again from scratch, creating the trio you see above.

Level design early on was stupid-simple, as it should be. Since we were using colored capsules as filler until we got the models done, the player script got named PillPlayer. The human script became SoulPerson, because as far as the game was concerned, they existed solely as soul sources.

In this image from our livestream, I'd asked the game's co-developer @Floata3 to send me a scythe reference image to work from, and this was one of the ones he sent me. I concurred with him that it was badass, but it was a little beyond what I was going to be able to churn out in a reasonable amount of time.

Once I got the reference picture I needed, I used it to refine and sculpt the handle of the weapon. I took a few liberties with the blade, but this helped shape our scythe's proportions.

The level designs, pre-art, were really garish and hard on the eyes. The cubes on either side of the people on the map were nav aids - when an enemy hit one, they turned around 180 after a short delay and proceeded to the next one. The large cube on the side of the screen was the trigger for the next level.

I had fun making the fighting animations for our baddies. I wanted the attacks to look somewhat goofy and half-assed, like they weren't any good at fighting but weren't going to go down peacefully. The Bad person just two-fist shoving the player was my favorite one.

This was damn near our undoing - me spending over an hour on the pre-game text scroll. I kept tweaking it and refining it, but it could have been simplified and the time lost actually resulted in us having to cut over level count by over 50%. I've had people tell me that the scroll was too fast, but I was concerned that if it was too long, no one was going to sit through it long enough to read it. As it is, they simply can't read it because it's too fast. We would have been better off if I had just gone ahead made it slower, it turns out.

In the end, we're still pleased with how it turned out. @Floata3 nailed the music tracks, I mumbled into a mic to give our characters some lines, and we got it turned in right at the deadline.

If you haven't tried it yet, why not? Go steal some souls, Griminator!

hello there, here is the polished (graphics) version of our game...the HTML5 game on LD page is dull ...so we updated it on itch.io..hope you like it !!!

itch.io: https://jozdev.itch.io/ld

LD: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/ld52-1

Why wasn't the texture shown on the button after I created a StyleBoxTexture of a Button? I have changed its texture and margin,but the texture wasn't shown,either.

Thank you so much for rating our game over 50. We will improve our game more than before!

Soooooo~

NEW UPDATE IS READY!

Version 1.03 * Fixed an issue where animations did not synchronize when C slept and woke up. * Modified the range of motion * Fixed the issue of interacting in the air after fear when hunger or thirst is below a certain level. * Fixed an issue where only one C entered the tent, and the number of Cs in the tent was not initialized during the day. * Fixed an issue that C interacts at night on the way to the tent, but C does not disappear. * Fixed an issue that if you step on C near C while sleeping motion comes out and kill it, it only moves and the sound and animation are not played. * Now you can harvest souls only when you step on the c and kill it (the animation will be added later. Don't be surprised if the C disappears all of a sudden!) * Now, when two Cs fall asleep in the same tent, four Cs come out!

Come to our page and enjoy a more pleasant gameplay!

Cheers!

The Pets Over The Innsmouth

You wanna play this GAME? Come this page! and give some vote for us!

But there is still time to play and rate

Play the game HERE - try the polished version if you want all the latest bells and whistles - like configurable controls!

Please give it a whirl and rate it but please provide feedback and let me know what you think e.g The Good, the Bad and the Ugly aspects of Seed Gun?

If you have a web playable entry I will return the favour, Thank You.

link -> https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/seed-gun

Just added controller support for Hermesh, our small Metroidvania about harvesting escaped souls from possessed ducks!

For now, I didn't release this version, just because it was mainly an experiment.

Is a mobile (Android) version and/or controller support something people would use on a game jam entry?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Also, you can come and tell us how the game turned out: Play Hermesh!

This is Tavern Tale Studio's entry to the Ludum Dare: Little Eden! A fun mix of spaceship dogfighting and farm/resource management!!!

This project was really fun to make, and your positive feedback on our game has been incredible for all of us. For that, we thank you wholeheartedly!!!

And please, if you haven't played it yet, we would LOVE your feedback and input, we are very eager to hear it. Come play our game!!

Check the game out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/little-eden

SATURDAY

Prototype

Unable to sleep, Rianna spend Friday night making a prototype of the combine harvester game in p5.js

Quite simple gameplay - use the left analogue stick to move your combine harvester (white circle), but use the right analogue stick to move your tractor (black circle), which must always be within range of the harvester. The aim is to collect all of the little white squares.

But this on its own was too simple - so she added little red enemies that, if touched, end the game. These enemies picked a random velocity every few seconds, making them feel a bit alive. Rianna got this idea from another prototype she has been working on.

Playtest

It is important when making any game to playtest! How your game feels is vital to the experience.

After getting a few friends to play it this rough prototype, they found that the dual control felt a bit "sticky" - that the independent control for each piece just wasn't enjoyable - they would often "get stuck" on the inside edge of the outer circle, and it just wasn't satisfying. Lots of strange quirks showed up, like players not using the left stick at all and just dragging themselves around inside the outer circle as it was faster.

Players don't know the "proper" way to play, and will very quickly pick apart early iterations of your game. This can be a bit disheartening, especially when you have already put so much work into getting the game working as-is, but it is just part of game development. You cannot tell the player that they aren't not enjoying themselves, it is up to you as the developer to ensure the players experience the game how you want them to experience it.

So we went back and refined the controls - putting less emphasis on the twin-stick controls, and giving the player a bit of momentum when moving around. After these relatively small changes, we were getting a lot more positivie feedback, and testers were enjoying playing the game. Mockup

Dan saw the circles in the prototype and immediately thought "looks like planets hoovering up dust & gas" and so made this mockup. Little orbiting planetoids could act as little shields to protect the baby star accreted matter, and more would be added as you grew larger.

To get this effect, Dan used a gradient map in Photoshop on some Perlin noise to mimic the cloudy look of false-colour images of nebulae. Add some very minimal-looking planetoids & comets in over the top of the prototype circles and we had a look we were very happy with! We were glad the game had moved away from the intial visuals of farm equipment & fields of wheat, now it felt a bit more unique, and we got our name for the game:

vacuum

We had the general idea pretty much locked down, and spent the rest of the day refining the look and feel. The plan was to spend Sunday doing nothing but polish, polish, polish..