Upon @creatorvrx ‘s request, I'm making an additional post about what I plan to do and how I'll be going about doing so during this jam. I recommend reading their post for context, and to follow suit by posting your own explanation and setup. Trust me when I say putting thought to paper (or bytes, I guess) greatly solidifies the concepts and keeps you to them better.
So, without further adieu, humour me by reading through my wall of text.
My Reality
I am a software engineer by trade. I work for a company based in Toronto, ON, Canada. I'm in my 20s, and I've spent a great deal of my life working on skills useful for game development. My mentality has been “be good enough at everything to be able to convey ideas to specialists.” As far as this goes: I am a skilled programmer, a decent creative writer, an amateur illustrator (see my instagram @jakeuskoski for some examples of daily ink sketches and digital paintings), practiced 2D animation, and try to wrap my head around game design from time to time. I'm still missing 3D modelling, bone rigging (2D and 3D), 3D animation, SFX, musical composition, video editing, accounting, and marketing.
I don't want to do all of these, but I’d like to at least have a passing understanding in all of them enough to be able to stand in for one if needed. Ludum Dare, by extension, is the ultimate test of all of these skills.
I'm missing something like half of them. They're strangely optional, but if I don't give them enough effort then I'll be incredibly limited in what I can produce. (A 3D game with no animation, or even models? Oops...)
My Plan
So how am I going to handle my shortcomings? Not by avoiding them. I plan to enter the compo, the jam being my fallback if I'm unhappy with my product by the end of the compo time limit. I still plan to produce all the assets myself within the time limit. I want to follow the spirit of Ludum Dare for my first time entering it. I can take a much more freeing and resourceful route in December (not to be confused with easier, since less time on certain aspects just means more work in others).
For this, my list of software is important. You can look through my earlier post for what I mean.
Visuals
Starting off, I'm most likely going to use 3D assets instead of 2D assets. “But Jester, you said you can't model!” You’re correct, Suspicion, but I have a trump card. While I may be terrible at using traditional modelling software, I'm actually pretty good at kitbashing. Kitbashing normally applies to physical models, where you take pieces of various models and put them together to make something new, or, if you went to art school, transformative. Lucky for me, I've found software that enables me to do exactly this in a digital space, exporting to .obj and .fbx formats! Huzzah! The software is AssetForge, made by the infamous Asset Jesus Kenney. Version 2.0 is coming out hopefully in the next few months, so I highly recommend picking it up before then. I'm sure Kenney will thank me for this unsponsored plug later.
As for animation, I plan to limit the style of game I'll produce to use simple transformations and rotations in order to save time. It would be far too time consuming for me to do a full 3D pipeline of modelling, rigging, and animating, even if I had the skills, since I'm working alone. I can whip together 3D models faster than if I was sculpting them from scratch by kitbashing, and they'll look good.
“But Jester, don't you know illustration and 2D animation?” Yes, but that doesn't make me particularly good or fast at either. I used to do pure keyframe animation, which will take eons, and honestly I can illustrate but that doesn't mean I can make game assets. I can do more like produce static 2D images for the game. Backgrounds, portraits, etc. And I'm a very slow artist too, so I'd absolutely run out of time. 3D and basic to 0 animation it is! I need time for everything else + polish.
SFX
I'll use Sfxr. It gets the job done in a pinch. If I have to, I'll also record some basic stuff like mouth sounds, tapping, hitting things together, etc. and layer them in Audacity. I've watched enough videos on YouTube to be able to layer various sounds into a single effect… I hope.
Music
I have no musical skill. I've been practicing and studying for a bit, but this is my largest fear and greatest hurdle. I'll either make something very minimalist and atmospheric, make it procedurally generated, or hum it.
Yes. Hum it. My master fallback plan is to hum a melody. I'm not a great singer, but I know notes decently enough. Never underestimate the charm of a well-hummed tune!
But in the event that I actually produce some composed music, I'll be doing so in Bosca Ceoil. I understand some music theory, but only enough to know how terrible anything I can make really is. Music is my next target skill, and I'll likely be starting piano lessons next year which I hope will result in some compositional skills 3 to 4 years down the line. Until then I'll continue studying and practicing musical composition in hopes of one day reaching competency.
Marketing
Thankfully I don't care as much about this. I'd like to get a good rank, but more importantly I'd like to make a game I'm personally happy with. I'll try to write some posts/articles, maybe read others’ while taking food breaks, and I'll tweet occasionally too. I may as well use that dead twitter account for something.
I downloaded OBS so that I can record the entire process, but that's more for making timelapses and such later than it is for streaming. Who knows though? Maybe I'll stream too. The footage will likely make an appearance in a post-mortem post, and will be a relatively stress-free time for me to learn and work on [the most] basic video editing.
Playing Others’ Games
As everyone should be aware, playing and reviewing other people’s games is crucial to your game getting visibility. Sadly, I'm a bit handicapped in this regard. I don't play video games. I suffer from video game addiction, and so while I'm still very passionate about the development of games I don't play them for fear of relapsing. I've been clean for over a year now, and I'd like to reach 2 if I can.
So for this reason, I'm getting a friend (JUST ONE!) to play games in my place he works the same hours as I do, so it won't be like I'm replacing myself with someone who has more time. While it’s a bit of a weird case, I'm doing my best to to still be as fair as I can and follow the spirit of the rules, but I also don't want to let my own mental illness hamper my ability to participate in the event. I'll still be reading posts by others and participating in the community in other ways.
My Process
Day 1
Now the fun stuff. This isn't my first game jam or hackathon, just my first Ludum Dare. Since the event starts at 9pm in my timezone, I'm going to spend the first night doing all of my brainstorming and planning. Normally I’d be in a group and have to deal with the whims of their decision making along with the painfully slow process of democratic decision making. I appreciate the ideas that can come from a team, but as an idea person myself I look forward to the chance to work with myself instead of others. If I can plan appropriately and quickly enough, I'm hopeful I'll be able to get my project set up and started before I go to sleep at 11pm. I'll be looking to bend the theme as much as I can to avoid doing what everyone else will if I can. Outside the box thinking and all that. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't already have some thoughts to jump off of.
Day 2
Wake up at 7, put on comfy clothes, eat breakfast, and program until noon. Take a 1 hour break to write a report on my idea and progress (and eat). Program until 6pm. Take another 1 hour break to report on progress or read others’ progress (and eat). Program until 11pm.
Day 3
I should have the entire MVP done and bug tested. The rest now is visuals, music, and polish. If this is a semi-complex game with levels, scrap all likelihood of completing it in the compo time.
Wake up at 7am, eat breakfast, report on my progress last night. 8am focus on visuals. Aim to have all visual assets done by noon. Break for lunch, read others’ panic posts. 1pm get sound effects out of the way, then do what I can for music. Aim to be done by 6pm. Break for dinner, write a post if I have time. 7pm to 9pm is for final tweaks, adjustments, and deployment testing/fixing. 9pm to 10pm, get the game published. 10pm, write a post declaring done-ness!
Day 4 (Jam day)
7am wake up, eat, shower, read posts. 8am to noon, level building. Lunch break and report. 1pm to 6pm, level building. Dinner break and check others’ reports. 7pm to 9pm, deployment testing and fixing. Final tweaks/adjustments. 9pm to 10pm, get the game published. 10pm wrote a report declaring happiness.
Day 4 or 5 (Compo vs Jam)
Write a development post-mortem.
After Rankings are Announced
Write an experience post-mortem.
Closing remarks
Thank you for reading all this! I hope any of it is useful or interesting to you. At the very least, it's an honest account of one of the many people taking part in this event.
I chose these themes because I focused on... wel the theme. The other choices feel a bit restricting on the game mechanics "you are the final boss", sounds cool, but sort of forces you to make a combat focused game. Something like "safe in the dark" has so many more possibilities, and if you use some word trickery "safe in the dark = vampires" BAM! You can literally make any game with vampires in it, and it would technically fit the theme. Or maybe something with nocturnal creatures, you can interpret "safe" in a few ways. The ones like "it's spreading" seem really awesome, because where is it spreading? The world? Your body? Your mind? What is spreading? Is it good or bad? Do you want it to spread, do you need to stop it from spreading? Is there some sort of trade-off for it spreading? There are just so many interesting possibilities. 