With a couple days having passed, it's a good time to write our post-mortem, along with everything we never got to blog about.
Saturday
The first day went by rather quickly, as all three coders of our team were preoccupied with figuring out the Godot engine, and its scripting language GDScript. Both were actually very intuitively designed, and it's a testament to the engine that with no prior experience we managed to create something playable within 48 hours - but still, most of the first half of those were spent on learning our tool. It's a good thing that (apart from me,) everyone was already familiar with Git.
Pictured above are the burgers we got for lunch, and our working area. The basement is actually much more spacious than most. And it has good Internet, and plenty of power outlets, and desks and a spare monitor and a keyboard and four (!) couches along the walls. It's very cozy and helped us retain our sanity while working for two days away from the sunlight (for some, those might actually be ideal conditions).
We started out brainstorming, and quickly settled and expanded on a concept georgesdoe had come up with at a previous jam - a platformer/puzzle, wherein the player selects the colours to shoot, depending on the colours of the enemy, and even allowing him to combine two basic colours to obtain a complex one. The reverse is also possible, by shooting complex colours towards obstacles that act as filters, and remove one of the basic colours from the projectile. A nice, but also simple idea, which surely wouldn't pose any difficulties in implementing.
The slow progress on the coding part didn't stop TSTigris from creating loads of assets though, first and foremost Prisma - our main character.
* EDIT: Please note that this character, while made from scratch, has a huge resemblance to the main character from Nykra (http://nykra.com/). This is entirely unintentional on our part, and we'll try to redo our art to make it more distinct. We're in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Nykra, and would like to thank endesga for pointing the similarity out to us in the first place. *
* EDIT 2: We've confirmed that Nykra's character has indeed been used as a direct reference to create our character. We're very sorry about this, and have thus removed all media containing our main character. We have posted a public apology on our blog. *
Sunday
Having put most of the engine-related studying (at least the basic stuff that we needed) behind us, the second day was more productive. We even had two colleagues visiting, bringing supplies and fresh hope. We divided the coding work among us, and regularly pushed and pulled our repository, which went much better than I had imagined. It was the first time I shared a repository with a team; an interesting and informative experience for me. We decided to go for souvlaki this time, and soon after lunch georgesdoe had a working colour and colour-filter system. After a little while, I also had figured out how to do the inputs and the animation, and we all gathered round to marvel at Prisma in action. TSTigris was enamoured; it was the first time he saw any of his creations animated and in a game. Mistermij shouldered the ungrateful task of creating the whole dynamic, auto-resizing, floating health-bar for the enemies, and of course the enemies themselves, which required him to dig deeper into Godot. By afternoon we all felt a little sleepy and weary (the souvlaki didn't help), so we decided to go for a walk.
We emerged from the dark depths of georgesdoe's basement and marveled at the beautiful day. The cloudless, but not too bright sky was a welcome change after sitting inside for so long; we could see from the mountain in the north to the southern sea, and strolled aimlessly around the broad, quiet streets. The break was desperately needed - soon after we returned, mistermij had figured out how to do the health-bars properly, and went on to help me out with a bug about an invisible projectile (it turned out that it wasn't invisible, just off my laptop's screen limits). The game was coming together nicely, and the few glitches that remained for the basic functionality only made us laugh.
By the end of the second day, we had a running prototype, with moving and shooting enemies, colour combinations, and a first small level.
Assessment
What worked
- The place. Having a dedicated space to make a game is something of a luxury, especially for younger participants. Having a spacious, well-connected, fully-equipped space is a double luxury.
- The team. We'd never all met before Ludum Dare, but this never proved to be a problem. We had a good chemistry, all of us felt involved in the game-making process, technical collaboration as well as personal communication was so good that we probably wouldn't mind getting locked in a basement a second time.
- The tools. The Godot engine worked without a hitch between a Mac and two Linux distributions, is easy to understand and quite intuitive. Same goes for its language, GDScript. Git was indispensable.
- The game idea. In hindsight, I'm relieved that we didn't go with the real-time, medieval, city-sieging, strategy/stealth mix I'd envisioned during brainstorming^^. Our game was simple enough to actually be doable, while also interesting enough to keep us engaged.
What didn't work
- The lack of preparation. None of us had had a look at Godot up to a couple days before the Jam's start, which caused us to spend most of the first day reading up on the documentation. Although, proper preparation might've needed twice the time investment, which is rather difficult for people working full-time.
- The burgers were a tad expensive.
What's next
We were all immensely proud of how far we'd come. For mistermij and me, both LD-veterans, this was more than we'd ever accomplished in the past. Alas, we had to essentially wrap it up by the second day already, since georgesdoe, mistermij and TSTigris all had to go to work on Monday. We added a little functionality during the last day's evening, and are playing with the idea of perhaps continuing to work on it in our spare time. Little does the game's state matter, though. We had a lot of fun, honed several skills and learned a lot. What more can one ask of a single weekend?
LD40 vs LD41 player sprite sheet
Hey everyone! Work's out early today so I have a few hours to play more of your games here:
https://www.twitch.tv/flightyfelon
Originally I pondered about doing something more Dark Souls than Zelda, but given I was using Pico8, figured it was easier mechanically and aesthetically to do the latter! :p
The end of Day 1 combat system let you target anything nearby, and attacks were distributed randomly to each target. This made it incredibly annoying if you wanted to target an enemy bearing down on you and instead you just attacked some nearby pot, so it was changed to focus on the closest, importantest target!
2 Enemy types didn't make it in since I ran out of time - the Blob was originally going to bounce at you in time with the music and divide into 2 smaller ones. Therewas also going to be an enemy wizard which would fire projectiles at you - that's why there's a bunch of islands in the water with enemies, they were originally going to be firing at you. The boss would also fire projectiles at you too, but instead he's basically a slightly tougher version of the kobold enemy.
Dialog systems are a faff!
Overall I think Witchbeat went pretty well! There's a few issues with how the rhythm mechanics were done in Pico8, which were mostly due to silly technical implementations early on - I've a better idea on how to do this properly if I choose to do something similar in the future. I really liked this LDJam's theme this time round, and hope everyone's having fun playing all these crazy mashups! :D
play with sound :sound: to feel football atmosphere! :smile:
Pictured above are the burgers we got for lunch, and our working area. The basement is actually much more spacious than most. And it has good Internet, and plenty of power outlets, and desks and a spare monitor and a keyboard and four (!) couches along the walls. It's very cozy and helped us retain our sanity while working for two days away from the sunlight (for some, those might actually be ideal conditions).
