Hello! This is a post mortem of Hitogochi, a short dating sim for Ludum Dare 33. Thanks to everyone who played it, and if you haven’t yet, you can play it (and rate *wink wink*) over here. I also made a timelapse video of it, if you’re into those.
Before I start, some of my friends also submitted games! Here are theirs:
Project Box by klbrazil
Nomzilla: Munching Mayhem by PixlWalkr
You should check those out also. 😀 ..and now for the post mortem!
Before the jam:
While I was in school, I thought about game ideas for each of the themes in the final round. Some of them were good, some were okay; then there’s those where I just went: “Can’t think of anything creative with this, lets just hope it doesn’t get picked”. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to enter until a few days before the jam, so I didn’t practice. I planned on joining the compo. I did it before, maybe I can do it this time, too! Yeah, should be possible. (..or is it?)
Day One:
..one of the themes that I wasn’t prepared for got picked. Of course that would happen. I didn’t know what to do at the start, since the idea that I had for this theme was kind of boring, so I just continued on with my normal life and complained about it. After a few minutes of doing nothing, I started to think about things that relates to monsters.. giant monster that kills things? Nah, already did that before. Monster-raising simulator? Maybe, but I’m not feeling it. I wanted something that’s different.. something unique– then it occurred to me. Tamagotchi. Then the theme. Back to Tamagotchi. So… what if.. YOU ARE.. THE MONSTER..? Brilliant. Good job, me. Let’s do this.
I started to think about how the gameplay would work. I kept telling myself: “think about the mechanics, not the story.”, since I’m not confident with my story-making skills and it will probably turn out boring. But then, everything I thought about the game made it become something like a dating sim, and my mind kept thinking about a certain story… both of which I didn’t realize at the time. So anyways, I had the basics of it planned out and thought: “Yeah, good, this’ll work!”.
So then I started coding a dialogue system… for the whole day. “Looks like the game would just be all dialogues… Will this.. really work out? Maybe this jam’s not for me..”, I said. I thought about backing out, since I wasn’t really having much fun.. but then, I realized that it’s just the first day! There’s still hope! So I went through the day and finished most of the system. I also worked a little on the art and the story as the day ended.
Day Two:
I coded more of the dialogue system while I slightly panic, realizing that I still don’t have fleshed-out dialogues for my game and that I might not finish in time for the compo. It went well, albeit very slowly. I really should have warmed-up for this. Hours go by, making me more and more tensed.
As I finally got that done, I then worked on the art side of the game. I haven’t done any pixel art in a while, and, since I’m planning to have portraits, It might take me long if I went with that.. and I’m not sure if I could do it, either. I went for a kind of a low-res art style instead. I haven’t drawn anything in a while anyway; it might be fun, even though I’m bad at it. Somehow, it worked surprisingly well, I think. I might have been very slow and spent too much time on it though. I’ve been pretty slow at everything so far. Oh well. Once I finished, I started importing and implementing them in the game.
After a few hours of revisiting spaghetti code and adding things on them, I started writing the actual dialogues for the game… or at least I would’ve, but bugs on my dialogue system suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was already late at night; I tried squashing them fast, but no, they kept coming! I even stayed up late, which I usually don’t do when game jamming. Nope, it didn’t help either; there were still bugs, and I was getting really frustrated and very sleepy. I figured I won’t make it in time, so I just switched to the jam, bid my friends who’re joining the compo good luck, and slept with all my frustration. 😛
Day Three:
I was feeling a little down since I didn’t get to join in the compo, but oh well. I started fixing more bugs and wrote dialogues; Tons of them. I was panicking a little, thinking that I’ll feel really bad if I still didn’t get to finish this, even after switching to the jam. The dialogues got kind of rushed because of that. Even more bugs popped out as I wrote and tested the dialogues in the game. I had to cut a lot of the dialogues that I planned, since time was running short. “This might end up being boring after all, but I’ll just expand on it later. I want to at least be able to submit something.”, I thought.
After hours and hours of typing dialogue (some are.. cringe-worthy) and cutting some more content, It’s finally done! I was debating with myself whether to try adding music to it or not, since I had no practice and there’s only a few hours left. I decided to at least whip up a simple tune for it. It kinda worked well, I think. I also made some decent clicking sound, good good, slapped those into the game, nice, that’s it, yeah!
I started making builds for the game. After I made all those, I noticed bugs and mistakes, like the game UI not resizing on different resolutions. I kept switching from fixing those and rebuilding for a while. I was panicking, ahaha. Then after countless loops of doing those, I noticed the weird lag from the start. I wasn’t getting that in the editor, so why is that happening– nope, I’m tired, I had to rebuild too many times, let’s just submit! …and off to bed I go.
..and done! It went well for the most part. I made a thing! That’s cool. I’ll be adding tons more story on it in the future, as I had fun making the art for this..
*looks at pile of games waiting to be finished and/or made*
..maybe when I have the time. We’ll see.
Thank you for reading this far. For those who entered, hope you had fun! 😀
The knight throws his sword directly to you.
The ghost travels all around the screen and blows on you when you’re near.
The Slime falls from the ceiling.
The skeleton throws his bones on you.
And much, much more…
But i am glad that my idea seemed to be liked. Even if almost everyone say that controls are a bit difficult. It´s true and i asked myself afterwards to why i made it that way. But oh well, i´ve done it and it´s not really a bug, so no changing it. But i am really glad that people seem to like my idea