This evening we found our game repacked and posted to itch.io under a copy of our username.  I’ve reported it and endeavored to tweet-shame them, but I don’t suspect we’re the only target here.  Is there some kind of collective action we can take?

Tags: whyinternetwhy

As it is the tradition in LudumDare, here is the Timelapse of my game.

Video

I’ve used my own script (for MacOSX) to capture the screen each 10 seconds, and then fed the images to ffmpeg to generate the video. If you are interested by the scripts: https://gist.github.com/gre/11219793

I also used Google Gangout in the whole session, as a way to put my webcam in the timelapse, but more importantly to have other LudumDare friends coming in it  As you can see @mrspeaker appeared a few time in the timelapse showing me the advancement of his crazy Metal Meter game (well next time we may try to be on the hangout longer). 2 LudumDares ago, we experimented working our entry the whole saturday in a Paris Starbucks, this was a bit crazy with all the tourists.

I think this Hangout approach is a nice alternative to the classical Twitch stream. It is much more powerful actually because you could easily stream a Hangout back to Youtube, and Google Hangout is so easy to use from a computer or a phone!

Play&Rate

Hi every body I start working with a 2D artist, to make

a mobile version of Ocean WildLife, with many feature,

new enemies,new obstacles,new gameplay,MANY OTHER LEVELS, and new graphic.

SubScribe my YouTube Channel and follo me on Twitter:

This is a GamePlay from my entry, stay tuned to see it finished

I posted last week about doing another LD compilation, and I’d just like to remind everyone that the deadline for submission is this Friday!

If you’d like your game to be in the compilation, please email me at [email protected] /* */ with the following things

• A .mp4 10 second clip of your game (preferably a dropbox link)
• Your entry’s name
• Your name
• A link to your entry’s page, so I can play it, and so I can add it to the description of the video

Please have your clips submitted by Friday, May 9th. I’ll try to get the compilation done that weekend and up on the internet my Monday, May 12th. Clips will be added to the compilation as they are submitted.

If you have any questions about video format (I really prefer we stick to .mp4 but if you can’t do that I can probably make an exception)

Here’s the compilation video from the last LD! Sorry about the compression issues, I have figured out how to fix that since the last LD.

A week has passed, I’m more or less rested and it’s time for the customary wall of text some people call it postmortem.

During the week before the theme announcement I like to prepare for it by making a little brainstorming. Most of the time the final idea has absolutely nothing to do with any of the concepts, and this was no exception, but it’s still fun and you never know if THE BIG IDEA is just around the corner waiting to be found. This edition the concept of the game itself changed from the initial design to the final implementation as I was running out of time to implement the mechanic.

While discarding roots, submarines and caves as I feared everyone would use variations of this, I took a look at Trompin, my pet rabbit. Half joking with a friend it hit me that I could do a game dealing with rabbits, burrows and the likes. And mating.

You can play and rate Playbuck here

I then thought of a Metroidvania game borrowing the concept of generations from Rogue Legacy: you would get to an available partner (buck or doe, you wouldn’t be tied to a gender), mate and then pick one of your children as the new main character. It would carry around the parent’s skills plus one more, and replace it as the main character. To make this work well, I would have needed a lot longer to focus on level design, rabbit skills and craft a balanced experience.

With this in mind, at some point during Sunday the mating mechanic became a goal in itself. Since gameplay was pretty bland at the moment and the clock was ticking I thought it would add a somewhat original silly touch. It’s a bit too silly for my taste, but everybody enjoys a fart joke here and there, so hey…

 

What went well

• Planning. Last time I almost screwed the submission for a number of reasons, one of them was poor planning. This time I managed to determine what should I focus on pretty quick and, most important, stick to that and handle changes with common sense.
• Haxe/Flixel.  I’ve done quite a bit of AS3 coding, but Haxe was a first, and I’d never used Flixel either. I’ve been gladly surprised at the almost flat learning curve from switching to Haxe + OpenFL, and how many built-in functionality already comes with Flixel. I like to experiment a bit with technology from time to time and I think this time I’ve found something really interesting 😀
• Music! This is the first edition where I can create some music (I used autotracker for LD28, but I think it doesn’t count. Also, I didn’t like the result at all), and although short and repetitive in the long term, it was a funny little tune to listen for 30s.
• Rabbits! I’m not the one to judge, but still I believe the rabbit visuals turned out pretty well. Yes, there aren’t too many frames per animation (and some of them shamelessly reuse  frames from other animation states, in fact), and yes, the does are just reskins of the main character. My focus is on programming and art assets for me always take up quite a bit of time (and don’t look particularly good), but amazingly enough I managed to draw some cool sprites in a manageable time frame. I probably had a nice model

  
  Sketches for rabbit actions

  

  …and here’s the original

What went wrong

• Change of objective. As I explained before, this is not per se a bad thing, but the game became a different thing, much simpler both in terms of gameplay and “concept” than what I had in mind.
• Music! Yeah, even though this time I’ve managed to get music in the game, it tends to get a bit irritating, as the melody is pretty short and it gets repetitive soon. I guess it’s not too bad for a first try. At some point I’d like to take advantage of my keyboard and use something a bit more complex, but Famitracker seems like a reasonable program to start.
• Lack of visual feedback and eye candy. Hearts, dust clouds…I ran out of time to add some visual effects that would have enhanced the appearance of the game and probably give some clues. Next time, I suppose.
• Collisions/Sh*tty digging controls. They’re not terrible, at least, but as gameplay is pretty simple both should have been smoother, specially the digging controls. I wanted it took some time since the point when you start pressing the key and when a tile of dirt is actually removed, but I messed it when I thought about how it should behave.
• A couple of issues with map loading. Even though Haxeflixel had an addon to support Tiled maps there were some things that I couldn’t manage to map well into the game. Next time I think I’ll probably code my own parser class (I can probably reuse some code from Conquer all the castles!), but despite this it saved me a lot of time.

 

Overall, this time I’m quite happy with the overall result, but as always there are lots of room for improvement.

Rojan gets his third and probably last update. There are a lot of new/changed things:

– Better level-generation
– Better block-physics
– Fixed bug in tutorial
– Added explination to “Press R” in tutorial
– New icon
– Health-regeneration no longer at spikes-kill
– Screen is no longer one frame too late
– Screen flashes red at death
– Music in menu
– Esc in menu ends game
– Sound for sword-throwing
– Everything move at 1.5 times the speed
– Different win-screens
– Differnet background for ground-level
– Own art for tutorial
– More backgrounds for menu

Download it here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=33967

 

 

Also we have rated exactly 100 games by now and this are our personal Top 3:

1.  Senilescape byXaychru04         http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=16472

2. Gold Miner by byExclusive        http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37316

3. Final Move by Team-KwaKwa   http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=32076

Ludum Dare needs more charts. That’s why I made some.

Theme Voting Statistics

 

Ludum Dare 29

April 2014 Comparison between the scores in rounds 1-4 and in the final round. Comparison of the number of themes from rounds 1-4 involved in the final round.

Fun Facts:

• The list in the results post seems to be a little bit buggy. 5 themes are listed twice, sometimes with incorrect total score.
• “Death is Useful/Good” has been in the Top 5 of the final round for 4 Ludum Dares.
• “You Are Your Own Enemy” received the most +1’s (2491). “Contrast” received the most 0’s (1283). “Glitch” received the most -1’s (2717).
• This Ludum Dare has been the most successful one with 2497 games in total, followed by LD26 (“Minimalism”) with 2346 games and LD27 (“10 Seconds”) with 2213 games.
• The competitions in April seem to be generally more popular.
• The relative amount of Jam entries has been increasing. More than 40% of all LD29 games are Jam entries.
• If you google “Beneath the Surface”, the first link related to Ludum Dare is on the first page.

Click below to see more!

Ludum Dare 28

December 2013 Comparison between the scores in rounds 1-4 and in the final round. Comparison of the number of themes from rounds 1-4 involved in the final round.

Fun Facts:

• In this Ludum Dare, none of the themes in the final round had a negative score in the previous rounds. The last time this happened was LD26.
• “You Only Get One” received the most +1’s (2419). “Illusion” received the most 0’s (1192). “Genetics” received the most -1’s (2543).
• If you google “You Only Get One”, the first four links are related to Ludum Dare.

Ludum Dare 27

August 2013 Comparison between the scores in rounds 1-4 and in the final round. Comparison of the number of themes from rounds 1-4 involved in the final round.

Fun Facts:

• “10 Seconds” received the most +1’s (2563). “Replication” received the most 0’s (1083). “Darkness” received the most -1’s (2298).
• Exactly 50% of the themes in the final round are from round 1. This seems to be a general tendency.
• If you google “10 Seconds”, the first link related to Ludum Dare is on the third page.

If you find any mistakes or more interesting facts, feel free to point them out in the comments.
Thanks for being an awesome community.

Tags: stats, theme

Please enjoy my son’s YouTube video lets play “Ocean Explorer”. You can still play game here, but post competition version will be available on IndieDB website.

Hello guys. we added a Ranking online in our entry for the ludum dare 29

 

The record its 200. WHO CAN BEAT IT???

Hey guys!

NIKRA is having a MASSIVE makeover, and I would love it if you read about it here:

MY BLOG

 

 

~Seth

I made some .gif screenshots of gnome fortress. MoviePy is a fantastic library for making animated gifs in python. The post-compo version of gnome fortress will create gifs if you have MoviePy installed.

Now I can show you the garden gnomes in action:

Mining

Crafting

Building / Teamwork

Harvesting

play and rate it here

Tags: crafting system, destructible terrain, gif, gnome, screenshot

Here is some of my favorites in each category:

Humor/Mood: Scary Ugly Face – Jonochrome

Audio: A Glorious Escape for A Lich King – Benjamin

Overall: ScubaBear – _Rilem

Graphics: Delve – conormn

Fun: A boy and his Hellworm – orangepascal

 

You can also play my entry here:

My game turned out to have super-simple controls and short rounds with an addictive quality, so I decided to port it to mobile with touch controls!

You can grab an Android .apk on the entry page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=30865

This is a feature-identical compo port – I’m making some additional tweaks that make it shine more on mobile, but I wanted something people could still vote on.

 

Here’s an animated GIF of the PC version to tempt you:

 

HI HELLO.

I am Pedro Machado Figueira, Co-founder of the Baykush Studios here in Rio and i would like to share with you my favorite games developed during this year’s Ludum Dare.

I had my mind set to play only the minimun in order to get enough exposure to my game…over a hundred games after, here am i, a wiser person and a better game developer.

First, in case you feel like blowing up submarines, boats and blimps using a military-grade dolphin in a fast-paced, water-splashing bullet hell, check out my Game - Delph Ops. People are loving it so far and it’s tons of fun!

Dolphin Loves You

Now, to my list. I’ve split the entries in two diferent categories: “I would totally buy this” and “Dude, check this out”. And there is also a “Winner Entry”. “One Entry to Pwn Them All”. Each list is a top five.

Dude, check this out!

Strange and novel stuff that would forever stay beneath the surface weren’t for game jams.

#5 Morton

Look at this cute little guy….!

That, my friends, is the kind of stuff i love about jams. It’s a Bunny-Frog-Detective in a mission to uncover the terrible misteries of the city….i don’t remember it’s name, but it’s probably somewhere in Rhode Island. Why ? Well….play it.

#4 The Surface

Behold the Pun Throne

Now, Telling anything beforehand about this game would kill it. Grab a friend and play this puntastic game.

PS: The intro song is priceless.

#3 Jet Force Gemini

Evil lurks behind this screenshot

WHAT!? Impostor! Jet Force is a N64 classic, why is this game so weird? And why is it called Jet Force Gemini? Who in the world would consciously design such a weird, pointless game?

“Who” is the wrong question, my friend.

Check out this game,  read it’s description and find out why this is Asimov ghost’s stuff of nightmare, and why the developer behind it might someday take your job.

#2 Jeremy Brain: Brain Doctor

We all love some redundancy in our titles.

If you like Stanley Parable and the Antichamber this is a great and quick entry. The voice over is incredibly well done and the text is really really good.

I mean, come on, this is a game that contains a button labeled “PRESS TO ACHIEVE ERECTION”.

It suffers from a few dull moments here and there, but it’s a 5-10 minute story that deserves your attention. Who knows? The patient might be you.

#1 The Loudest Ballerina

Plié, Pirouette, BLOOD.

This game is scary as hell, and i besides one game you’ll see on the next list, this was the most terrifying. It’s the kind of story that would never come out without a set theme and it was, IMO, the best interpretation of the beneath the surface i’ve seen around here. Not the best gameplay, but it really made me nervous and shaky while playing it. Good Show!

Next list:

I would totally buy this!

Games that should take it to the next level….if you know what i mean.

#5 Infection

Deathbed = FUN, aparently.

Something is clearly wrong with the developers of this action defense game. It’s noy only polished to the bone, it’s packed with content like towers and upgrades. It suffers from performance issues, but with some code-scrubing it would be a really really good web arcade game. Co-op would also be a great add!

#4 Planet Corp.

Pictured: half a planet. The other half is DLC

This person nailed it.

Great, easy-to-learn gameplay. Great narrative, media and corporate critique. This is my kind of game.

You play as a miner, gathering the resources of our Solar System’s planets until…well, until they get unstable as hell and blow up (and you though chopping down threes was a BIG harm to nature).

It could (and should) be ported to multiple platforms.

#3 Doomsday Bunker

Its like an apartment building, but it goes down and protects you from air raids.

It’s a post-apocalyptic war bunker simulator. Gather resources, stay sharp for air raids, build bunker facilities and hire employees. I’ve spent almost one hour on this one and it would do great with an embeded achievement system / narrative regarding the survival.

Oh, and the music is depressive as hell. Quite fitting.

#2 A Glorious Escape for the Lich king

Hexgasm

A Tower Defense mixed with RTS Resource gathering system shrouded in gorgeous old-school pixel art and hex-based strategic gameplay. If this is not enough to make you play this, there is nothing else i can do. For you. You’re doomed.

#1 The Dead Rest Beneath Us

Rage Quit: The game

Remember what i told about the ballerina game? This is the scariest. Amnesia my buttocks, this game is suffocating.

Now, i did not beat one single level. I’ve tried over and over again in each stage and no luck. But i think perhaps this is the point, it might be as unbeatable as death.

I Think a proper name would be “Helplesness Simulator”. This is how you’ll feel by playing this. Helpless.

Try for yourself, this goddamned thing just ruined my day.

Now, my top game:

One Entry to Pwn them all

Watch Your Step

You know you are going badass as soon as you see this screenshot

You see, this is the kind of stuff i would check out the release dates every week. It is fun, gorgeous and above all, challeging, but fair.

It’s a Roguelike 2d survival shooter. In order to beat the game you’re suposed to kill spider monsters that come out of the sand for 10 minutes.

It offers you fluid and responsive controllers, pacing, action and awesomeness. I would totally pay monees for an expanded, co-op version of this game (and i trully hope it comes out).

Honorable mentions:

Delve

Not a game but god, it’s beautiful.

The Monastery 

The developer here know hisdungeoneering. Oldschool goodness for your pleasure. If you like games like “Excelsior”, you will love this one.

 

Thanks for reading so far. I hope you like my list!

If you are a Ludum Dare participant, kudos for being part of this!

Ludum Dare was really inspiring for me as a developer and i will certainly take part on the next ones.

Hugs and kisses for ya’ll!

Hello, I made a little gameplay video of my entry.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=12944

Feedback for our game Water Hazard has been super positive so we decided to make an enhanced version of the game during this month. Here is a dark sneak peek of upcoming boss battle.

We are trying to add following features for enhanced version:

– 4 new rooms

– boss battle

– puzzle

– door transitions

– new dialogue

– fix visual and game breaking bugs (72h didn’t leave as much time for QA :D)

 

You can follow the development of the new build here:

https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=8206&sid=8506125875f947e2c251984cd381ce4f

We will release the game to Oculus share when it is ready.

 

Our game, StromnetZ, is a pipe-esque game with bombs, vaults and other fine things. The idea for a pipe game dawned on us almost instantly and we worked on the game for the whole 72 hours (minus the time spent sleeping and eating).

---

Without boring you anymore: the good, the bad and the ugly… Actually no ugly.
The good:
+ We focused on the essential stuff first -> we managed to do everything we wanted
+ We managed to include some extra features, like the leaderboard!
+ Semi balanced scoring system
+ Nice difficulty curve
+ Already had some stuff ready from LD28 so we didn’t waste time learning new technologies (highscores was new and required some effort though) or creating the basics of the game.
+ Explosion animation is brilliant

The bad:
– No dinosaur skeletons in the background images
– The cross pipe and the over-under pipe are hard to differentiate
– Still no musician (music is royalty free from incompetech.com)
– UI is like that of a real power plant: bland and dull
– Not enough juice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

---

Click HERE or HERE or even HERE to play StromnetZ.

Tags: eat your vegetables, help i am stuck in a tag, post-mortem, postmortem

Made some gameplay footage of my game above. Check out my game here: Nereids’ Sea

post mortem-y thing
So overall I’m kind of happy with how the game came out. I wanted to use the Ludum Dare to do some Unity practice and create a better game than my last Unity entry and on that ground, I think I succeeded 😛 There are things I would have liked to add, I think being able to look down and see your feet would have been a nice touch, the various structures you can find could have had better textures, I considered randomizing the treasure’s location etc but everything important made it into the game I think.

Ideally the AI would be very different, but I’m not too used to Unity so I stuck with something simple that I knew I could get done in the time limit. So the monster AI is kind of like a T-Rex/Enderman fusion. If you look at them, they become alert – and at that point, if you move, they attack you, so you have to wait for them to swim away. If I had more time I would have tried to make them scout around for you, and you would have to hide from them by keeping your distance or hiding behind any of the weird structures you can find at the bottom of the sea. This would have necessitated some kind of radar system though, to ensure they couldn’t sneak up on you unaware unfairly, and I wasn’t confident about getting anything like that working in the time limit.

Based on feedback, if I was doing this again I would have added some kind of checkpoint system. I thought it was short enough I wouldn’t need to, but it is very slow paced, so I can see that was the wrong call. Having some kind of checkpoint structure/item would have also given the player something extra to look around for, so definitely would have been the right thing. Ah well 😛

Beneath the surface is where it started, Obolos is where it ended. I’m still not sure how you pronounce it (we’re dutch), but that doesn’t matter

We had a blast, again. A team of two, from hating the theme’s guts to coming up with an exploration story-like (think Dear Esther meets Journey) game with multiplayer (because we felt like it). We almost ended up ditching the multiplayer altogether after one of us was already working on it for two days with almost no result.

Gameplay video

Spoilers after the break so make sure you finish the game before reading the rest.

What went wrong?

We both wanted to do something with multiplayer, we didn’t want to use photon or unity’s drop-in solutions because we wanted to save state ourselves on our server to be able to have some kind of persistence in the world. We first tried a socket.io + unity lib approach, which seemed to be buggy. My friend then burned a lot of time on trying to get his Haxe server-client code compiled to C# to use in Unity, and just trying to get some messages across. Eventually we found another socket.io unity library which did work properly and got it working on sunday evening.

We should’ve had something working before ludumdare on the server – client part, to avoid wasting 50% of the resources which could’ve been spent on the game itself.

Want went right?

Everything else basically, I could start on the boat rowing mechanics on the first day then pulled together some assets from the asset store (since we lacked an artist). I wasn’t really motivated on the 2nd day after messing around a lot with the buoyancy not doing what I want and having no clear purpose with where the game was headed until on the 3rd day when it all came together.

You were lost, on the river Styx, trying to get across by yourself since you couldn’t pay the fare. Since we went with the story/exploration like approach I wrote a short poem of which you would find parts in these crates drifting in the river. Slowly uncovering what was going on. The first idea would be finding a word at once but we realized that would take you quite a while, so we just split it up in 8 figuring the ludum dare audience would then be patient enough getting them all to get the full poem and hopefully figuring out what was up.

Now the multiplayer had to have a purpose, I mean, it’s cool to see other boats without anyone in them just rowing around but why are they there? We solved the visual ‘lacking a person in the boat’ by adding particle effects that would represent a ghost, also hinting towards the fact that you are also one and thus dead. Thinking of how to incorporate communication which isn’t just a chat that would pull you out of the experience we came up with representing every part of the poem that you’d find with a sentence or a word that you could then also speak by pressing the corresponding numbers (which other players would hear). I think it very well adds to the experience, except for the occasional player who just keeps spamming one voice 😀

As regarding to the theme, we started with the usual ‘monster beneath the sea’ but once we swiveled into the river styx direction we figured the ‘beneath the surface’ part would be you. In the real world, being dead. Buried, beneath the surface.

See you next ludum dare, if you want, you can play and rate Obolos here.

Bonus: google Obolos or Obol 😉

New Dawn was the first Ludum Dare entry for both members of our team, and the first game jam/compo of any sort that we’ve done. We went in with little preparation and an overdose of optimism, but overall it came out pretty well! We weren’t able to do as much as we’d hoped – that probably goes for everyone here – but we finished in 72 hours and still came up with a solid little game.

We had a general idea of what we wanted to make before LD started: some kind of mini-RPG or adventure game. We couldn’t help brainstorming as we were voting on themes, and we really liked the idea of setting the game in a dystopia. A few of the themes could’ve made that setting difficult, but luckily for us,“Beneath the Surface” fit really well. It led to an interesting post-apocalyptic setting where the action takes place underground because the surface is no longer habitable. Plus, a dystopian setting was perfect for adding layers of secrets and false pretenses, which meant we could interpret the theme both literally and figuratively. We didn’t get to do as much of the latter as we originally planned, but we think it still comes through pretty well.

Although we started with the idea of a “mini-RPG,” we knew we probably wouldn’t have time to add many RPG elements. As it turned out, we ended up just sticking to a point-and-click adventure game. In order to have time to code extra RPG features, like a combat system, we would’ve had to spend less time on art and the dialogue system. That would have led to a very different kind of game, not necessarily a bad one, but we felt New Dawn would be better served by focusing on the story and the atmosphere. Having a better dialogue system and more detailed art helped to strengthen the story and atmosphere, whereas RPG mechanics wouldn’t really add as much in that sense. That said, if we had more time, we would have liked to add those as well.

New Dawn — A subterranean dystopia

Individual Thoughts:

Stefan (Coding, Art, Concept/Gameplay Design): Going in I knew I was going to use Unity (and C#), along with 2D Toolkit. I had laid out a basic plan which was to try to implement all the features by the end of the first 24 hours, then all the art by the end of the second 24 hours, and leave the third day for testing, bugfixing, and polish. I did this because I know that games always take longer than you expect, so this gave us some room to work with and helped curb our ambitions and expectations. As it turned out, this was a great idea, because although I did finish all the crucial features in the first 24 hours, the art ended up taking much longer and wasn’t done until well into the third day (and I didn’t sleep at all Sunday night either!).

Ultimately I’m a programmer, not an artist, so I’m not very efficient at that stuff because I haven’t done it much. However another big reason it took so long is that while 2D Toolkit is very convenient, it has some very tedious interface problems that require manually doing repetitive actions over and over, which really should be automated. These actions can be automated by script, but at the time I wasn’t sure if the amount of time it would take to write those scripts would be less than the time it takes to do the stuff manually. In retrospect, I think for the amount of art we had it probably wouldn’t have saved us that much. However, if I could do it over again, I would have set up those automation extensions to 2D Toolkit before LD started, because that definitely would have saved a lot of time.

The art itself also took a lot of time because I chose to put a lot of detail into it, despite it being very low-res pixel art. The details are largely in the shading, which ate up a lot of time, especially for the tilesets which required many different versions of each wall tile in order for the shading to match up. This also meant more work for Olivia when placing the tiles to build out the levels. The shading, especially on the tiles, is a very subtle effect, which I don’t think most people would notice unless they’re familiar with how tilesets work and are specifically thinking about it (which you usually don’t do when you play a game even if you are familiar with how it works). However, I still think it was worth it to spend this extra time, because although most people won’t consciously recognize that the shading is there, when it isn’t there it really stands out and looks noticeably worse. In particular, I think the atmosphere of the game was really well served by the extra shading detail. After drawing the basic shape and applying the shading, I also applied a noise filter to all except the character sprites to give them a bit of extra grit which I think fits the setting well.

On the third day, once the art was finally completed, we only had a few hours left before the submission deadline. At this point I implemented a few extra features that I didn’t consider crucial, most notably the ability for NPCs to move. At this point it struck me that the ending we were planning was going to be very anticlimactic; so I decided to spend the rest of the time quickly building out an additional final level to provide a more climactic ending, while Olivia was finishing up the penultimate level. I think this was definitely a good decision in the end, however it was risky, because we ended up cutting it very close; if it wasn’t for the submission grace period we would have missed the deadline. But overall it definitely makes the game feel much more satisfying when you finish it, so I’m glad I made that choice.

Olivia (Writing, World/Level Design, Music): We knew the general kind of story we wanted to tell before LD started, so once the theme was announced I started hashing out the details. I spent most of the first day planning the overall plot, with input from Stefan, and writing descriptions/dialogue for generic NPCs and a few items. Though I didn’t implement them that day, all of those descriptions made it into the game, and really helped the world feel more inhabited. I also wrote text for an intro screen which eventually turned into our game page’s description.

Saturday and Sunday were mostly spent setting up levels: I’m pretty new to level design, and that turned into a huge, unexpected time sink. One of the original “exterior” areas I’d made was close to the size of a real city block – way more space than we had time to fill with interesting stuff! That time would’ve been much better spent populating the existing areas and doing additional writing, but…lesson learned. I said goodbye to my hopes of having all the levels finished by midday Sunday, and had to cut a plot branch and simplify the remaining ones to make sure I’d have time to finish the story.

Monday was mostly a rush to implement the last of the plot. Thankfully I’d planned it all and written some of it beforehand. The penultimate level, two crucial dialogue trees, and two optional but pretty significant NPCs didn’t exist in-game until late Monday afternoon. I also wrote the second (and shortest) part of our music that day, since I wanted at least a little variety. In our rush to submit, there wasn’t time to put the intro text on a starting screen, but that’s something I definitely plan to fix post-comp.

There were a few things I’d hoped to fit in, even with the deadline looming, that didn’t make it. The main one was a set of PA speaker announcements (in the form of text dialogue) which would’ve given more backstory and context to the world. I also wanted to implement sound effects – we’d made a bunch in bfxr – and additional music. My next priority would probably have been adding waypoints so generic NPCs can move and putting more decorations and ambient descriptions throughout the world. In spite of all those cuts, though, we still managed to tell a complete story in 72 hours, and I’m pretty happy with it.

What We Learned:

After we submitted the game, we got a lot of great feedback from commenters. Several people had problems with the click-to-move interface, and since we didn’t anticipate that we hadn’t put in any alternate control schemes (though our post-LD update lets you click and hold, which should alleviate much of the problem). We also made the main quest a little easier to figure out in some post-LD tweaks, since several people were getting stuck. Additionally, given the amount of content we had to cut due to the time limit, some of the areas ended up feeling a little empty. They probably should’ve been shrunk down. On the whole, though, the story and art that we had came together really well, and we ended up with a short but atmospheric adventure game.

LD was a great experience, and it really motivated us to make a game of our own from start to finish. We might do something totally different next time around, but we’ll definitely be there!

Tags: 2D, adventure, jam, ld29, ludum dare 29, new dawn, post-mortem, postmortem, RPG, SuccessStory, unity, unity3d