We have colected your advices an we're polishing the post jam Nameless Hero.
While it isn't ready please play and rate the jam version of the game (and keep in mind the we had a limited time to produce this, so some stuff isn't as good as we wished for).
Well, glhf :DD
This weekend I took part to the Ludum Dare #44, like all of you. Now that 3 days have passed, I think I can write some kind of a post mortem, more like a recap. I usually wait many weeks before taking a step back from my productions, but since the game here was made here in 48 hours, I feel like 3 days is enough. Firstly I'll recap my 48 hours of working on Rashness for those who are curious about it, then I'll talk about the goods and bads of the weekend, and what I plan for the game's future. And I'll add some fancy memes.
DISCLAIMER : I'm not english native, so there might be some english errors or curious syntaxes, please forgive me for that !
So I'm a forth year student in game development school, and during the weekends of Ludum Dare or Global Game Jams, my school stays opened for students who want to take part to those events, and this time I was the one who got the key and the responsibility of the school and getting the weekend right. Pretty important weekend to me ! Also, during jams I usually work with people I've never made games with, I think it is a great opportunity to discover people, how they work, what they think, etc. But this time I decided to take another step forward and, somehow, to discover myself by doing the Ludum Dare alone ! For my 4th time doing the Ludum Dare I wanted to try submitting a compo game.
I didn't sleep until then, and I was happy that this theme was chosen. As a bad game designer, during the previous week I have thought of games for every theme that could be selected to prevent myself from losing time searching for ideas, and for some themes I had game ideas I did not feel confident with. But for "Your life is currency", I did find 2 ideas :
And I decided to go for the boss fight, because the platformer would've need level design, lots of tests, probably different environments, and to my opinion too many things to do for me in 48 hours. However, I was a bit confused because I've already done a similar boss fight game last summer (self promotion time : here's the link), and the idea of doing a game like one I already did is sad, but this was an opportunity to see what I could do with 8-9 more months of programming experience, along with testing out my ability to make art, sounds and music for a game. I then started to write on paper for some powerup ideas, but above all for different attacks the boss could use because I didn't want it to be just a health mountain that just shots basic bullets.
I always start my game jams doing that : I create my Unity project, setup the things I'll need, folders, physics settings, etc, then I start programming. Only the core gameplay, some of the powerups, not all the boss attacks, no art, and some placeholder fx. I do that so I can quickly know if the game is going to be fun to play or not. If I realize that it's not and I have to change my game idea, then I can go to sleep and hopefully during my sleep my brain will find some nice other ideas ! I could have also gone for the platformer idea in that case. But I did not have to worry about changing my game because I liked the shooter I built and I felt it could become a nice jam game with the complete powerups system and some art. And so I went to sleep for 2 hours and a half.
And at this time I had to face the most difficult part of my weekend : being alone :cry:. Of course this is the spirit of the compo and I knew that it would be technically hard, but here I am talking about motivation. Usually when I do jams with a team, first I sleep more hours, and when I wake up, there's some work that has been done, the production has gone a bit further, which is motivating and encourages me to get in Unity as fast as possible ! Here, I was just in front of the little code I wrote a few hours sooner, still no art, only 20-30% of the powerups, nothing more. And it took me a moment to really get into it and retrieve all my will to work, especially since, all my schoolmates who were there were all working in teams, so I was the only one alone and it didn't help motivating me, obviously :laughing:
So how did I keep the motivation ? Well first I was responsible for the weekend in school, so I could not leave. This did not force me to do the Ludum Dare, but it would've been stupid staying at school and not work on my game. Another thing I did was talking to people before the weekend, and tell them I was going for the compo, doing a game alone in 48 hours. Not to be pretentious, but it was somehow a commitment I made, and I would have been ashamed if I could not hold it. I did not want people to tell me "so you could not do a game alone ? I thought you were confident about that ?", and I kept on working.
I then did all the powerup system, and tried it a few times before going back home to take a break (all hail the driving licence), and to wash myself because more than a game developer, I am a clean person. At this point I was feeling a bit bad, with headache and strong need of sleep incoming, so it was the right moment to take a break.
Back to work, fresh and motivated ! Unlike the morning when I still had lot of programming to do, this time I had the core gameplay working, so I was ready to work on the characters ! After looking for graphic references, I created the sprite sheets for both the boss and the player, put them together to adjust the colors, and then I put them in Unity to see how the game would look like with them. And I was not disappointed ! The animations were not perfect, some collisions needed to be fixed but it felt cool controlling a pixelart warlock/magician and face a demon that has fire getting out of his body. Adding art is always a great motivation boost and from that moment my motivation was at its maximum ! Also I added feedbacks, explosions, some lights on the characters, changed the background color, because I always want my game to be as close as I want it to be at the end when I test it. And I worked on all that, slowly but surely, during lots of hours.
Then, I did a mistake ! I did not want to go to sleep because I felt I could still work a bit. And I could, but I decided to work on something that just made my brain explode : the music. Using Bosca Ceoil - one the softwares I have lot of fun using btw -, I tried several melodies, drums beats and other different things, but everything was just a disaster, so I lost like 1 or 2 hours doing this, to finally delete everything and go to sleep with horrible music resonating in my head and the feeling of having lost my time. And oh boy 2 hours is precious during a 48 hours jam ! :worried:
After 3 hours of good sleep, I stood up in front of my game music and I was ready to do it properly, with a fresher brain than sooner. So I worked on it more slowely, I searched some inspiration on YouTube, thought of melodies in my head, and finally I came up with something ! The track I composed is really, REALLY not extraordinary, but I was happy I did it myself. It would have been pretty sad to make a whole game alone for a compo submission but not having my own music. Then I did all the sounds with SFXR and added all that in the game ! Once again, this was a step that help me keeping my motivation for the last day.
Start of the final rush. Nothing special to say, I did the UI art, fixed the bugs I found, then I tried to balance the game a bit. The problem is that you can not balance your game by playing it yourself, this is impossible and I realized it for real a bit later.
So because we were around 40 devs in the school doing the Ludum Dare, we got together in a classroom, and every team shew others their work. This was really a great moment, seeing what everyone came up with from the same theme is really interesting, and some builds were still bugged so it made us laugh (imagine 40 tired people laughing for nothing...). When I presented my game, I asked if anyone wanted to give it a try. Someone did, and just killed my boss on first try, after I said it was a hard fight... Funny moment tho, but then I knew I had to work on the balance before the deadline.
So as I said, I tried to balance my game myself but I could not. The prices I chose for some upgrades that I thought were well chosen, were actually pretty stupid, the boss did not have enough life, the "burn damages" upgrade was waaaay too overpowered. And that's why I want to say that you should always have people to playtest your game, even during a game jam, because they will always find some bugs, or break your game somehow, and having other people trying your game is always positive.
After cleaning and leaving school, getting back home and washing myself, I opened my project and worked for it for 2 hours. During this time I balanced it more, I added some tips displayed on screen when the player loses, so that he doesn't have a frustrating "DEFEAT" text but he has some tips to make him want to try again and give him confidence. The game might be hard, but it doesn't want the player to ragequit. I also fixed a few more bugs I found, added credits, leave button, etc.
Then I created the itch.io project, along with writing the Ludum Dare post for my game. I took screenshots, made a key art for the vignettes, a game icon, and after I uploaded everything, I went for a night of well deserved sleep, feeling happy with my weekend and proud of the game I just finished !
So here's how went my first compo : a great weekend, with a difficult start, a motivation that took a while to come, but that finally ended up with a game I am proud of and that is complete and polished. However, I do not think I will do solo jams again, it is way better to work with people than working alone. I mean, I like working alone on my games, but not with such short amounts of time. Still, I'm really happy I challenged myself with that, it was very interesting and made me think about myself, my ability to work hard, keep motivated, in fact it taught me more about myself than game creation I think :laughing:
So if I had to list the good points / things I did great : - Overcome demotivation - Be responsible of an event with around 40 people when everything went well - Make nice pixel art sprites that I think are pretty cool, along with FX, UI, menus, etc when it's not my thing - Make a music myself. Just a 1 minute simple loop, but still something I did not think I could have done - Publish a complete and polished game in time, with clean itch.io and LD pages presentations
And the bad points : - Keep on working while being too tired too work. Game jam or not, compo or not, sleeping and taking breaks is too important to be forgotten, and I slept 5-6 hours from friday morning to sunday evening, which is too few hours, I got headaches, I felt bad sometimes, but I kept on working and that is a bad idea - Making a simple game was a good idea since it helped me keeping the scope down and completing the game, but in my opinion I could have exploit it a bit more and make something more interesting than a simple boss fight. The theme was good enough to find more ideas, and I should not have been afraid of the compo and the time I had. More than a contest, Ludum Dare is a way to bring fresh game ideas to life ! - Some things I could fix but did not even realize : a trail that is not rendered in the correct order, a bullet spawn position that is wrong, the "quick tip" that sometimes doesn't show any tip... those are details but, details are what make a game polished and great, and I pay a lot of attention to that, so I consider that a bad point
As I said I was happy of my game. However I did not expect it to be appreciated this much by people, I only got nice comments about the fun, the art, the music (I swear I did :sunglasses:), some feedbacks of course about things that need to be changed, but always with a positive touch, so huge thanks to anyone for that. It is currently the 5th most rated game of this 44th Ludum Dare, and that is just crazy. I don't want to be boastful, I simply want to show that even if you're working alone, or don't feel your game to be able to reach such scores, it actually can, and that's really cool.
Now what I will do is wait for the jam to end and fix the bugs I already need to fix, then I think of maybe improving the game, making different bosses, maybe some levels with 2 bosses at once, teleportation powerups, new things like that. What do you guys think ? Would you like playing that, or have you any ideas of what I could do for the game ? Or do you think it is good as the jam game it is and that I should not keep on working on it ?
Make sure to tell me what you think about that, and about my post, tell me if you had a similar or completely different experience :) Thanks for reading, best of luck ! Rashness is available HERE, every feedback is much appreciated !
Test your luck in Hot Slots: All In.
Finally, I have some free time to write a brief postmortem about my very first Ludum Dare game Big Fascinating Mutants.
Although I've been working as a game designer for years and have broad experience with crunches, I made a lot of silly mistakes. However, I'm happy with them as it's a valuable experience for my team and me. What kind of mistakes did I make?
Firstly, I suggested a redundantly big idea. We were planning from at the beginning to develop a colossal game for LD, e.g. we wanted to make: - 8 weapons; - 5 different enemies; - 1 boss fight; - 4 battle arenas with different level design; - 2 different player characters with unique abilities;
I was so excited at the start that I couldn't asses the volume of the work. Fortunately, our team managed to scale our ideas, but not very fast.
Secondly, I failed miserably with UI and UX. I have a lot of experience working on UI and UX alone as a game designer. However, this time I forgot to create a proper User Flow of the game which could have helped our programmer; as a result, our UX and UI awful.
Thirdly, the programmer had forgotten to make GIT for the project before the jam. Thus we lost a lot of precious time. We could have better spawner and AI, but we have what we have. Anyway, the programmer did his best and did a lot of work.
On the other hand, other game designers and I managed to make a lot of GD stuff, e.g. mutations design, level design (which we cut off) and balance table. Speaking about the table, it was beneficial when I had a hand in the game build for the first time. Unfortunately, it didn't help me make the game easier.
Although the problems we faced, I enjoyed the process and atmosphere of the jam. First of all, because the first two days of Ludum Dare 44 we spend at the creative space for indie game developers Indikator (RUSSIAN LANGUAGE) in Saint Petersburg. If you are in Saint Petersburg, you should visit this place. Additionally, I love seeing so many good games here on the web site. Hope, next time I'll be better.
Hey, we need new workers for our company!
The only job you need to do is to fix the machines and gain money from our generous boss!
What are you waiting for? Come and join us!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/sweat-shop
Heya everyone! Make sure to try out our game! We are aware of some bugs and a little lack of UX, but we felt that updating the build after the time limit was unfair, so it will be as it was when we posted it. Please leave a rating, we hope you enjoy it!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/warlock-soul-war
I will be playing and rating games on my stream for a few hours. If you want me to play your game, join the stream and send me a link to your game:
https://www.twitch.tv/amastryukov
Leave a link in the comments and I'll leave you some feedback.
If you'd like to return the favour and play our game that's awesome, or you could play something from the list below, that's awesome too!
Try our mini metroidvania game! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/garua
I made a new banner art now that I got enough sleep after the jam
Here's a bit from one of the many boss fights! (Just kidding there are only 2 boss fights)
We got through 20 games on Tuesday and would like to get through another 20 tonight! I try and give some honest verbal feedback whilst enjoying your game! There is a queue system, check out the !queue and !submit command in chat for more info.
Hope to see you there at https://www.twitch.tv/honestdangames
Hey guys,
I would like to play your games and are live streaming right now :)
https://www.twitch.tv/rahtainka
Just add me a link in a comment.
The only condition is that your game has a web version.
Thanks :heart:
https://andre-schuch.itch.io/escapismo
Heyyy! We made an 3D platformer inspired by games like Mario Sunshine! Rate us!
https://andre-schuch.itch.io/escapismo
Just played a few games on this ludum dare and there's been some very funny ones in today's batch. Major kudos go to Your Life is Collecting Really Nice Cats which had me laughing a lot on top of being a super fun entry. Try it out!
As for my own game, I'm at 15.75 reviews in! If you want to try an NES game I did in 48 hours, feel free to check it out here - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-stranger-1
To begin with, I created a sketch of what our logos and potion bottles will look like.
The idea with a bottle of "skull" or the emblem of "shield and sword" were not bad, but in order for all the elements to look organically in our game, it was necessary to abandon the details.
This is how the second stage of the picture looked, with which the programmer could already work, but, of course, were not ready. Well, the result was such a result 😁
As you can see from the picture, we decided to change the view of the last bottle to the cake. Becouse this element is not a subject for sale, but it restore player's HP. Therefore, it looks like something edible, and not something that can kill "Snow White" 😖
You can play the game through your browser at This link.
Now that I've had a few days to breathe and think about what I did for the compo, I wanted to share a more in depth look at how I approached making a game in 48 hours.
Game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/the-oarsman
I think this was the most important night for me. I actually didn't do any prep for this and had no prior ideas what I wanted to do with the theme (I did for the color and shelter themes, but that was it), so while I thought of a theme, I did art. Specifically the characters sprite and the animation for running, jumping, falling, and backward dashing. Those two mechanics were the only ones I knew I wanted in the game - dashing and jumping. So on to setting up controls.
I play a lot of platformers with keyboards, so I know what I like. I like tight controls and fast movement. Therefore I balanced controls around that. Another thing was going for accessibility or comfort. For me, these are the same thing, but I know some don't feel the same. I wanted the whole game to be able to played with one hand so even if someone has problems using both hands, they can still play. I also thought it was intuitive to be able to dash in the direction you are moving, so combining movement with dash direction made the most sense to me. I intended to put controller support here, but it skipped my mind with all the other stuff. It's here I had the idea to put in a backdash when standing still, but because of time constraints, after the movement was further refined, it was left in because I didn't have the time to take it out.
Once I got the basic animations and controls down, I made the general use auto-tile template I use to speed things up. It was originally colored black and white as I hadn't settled on any kind of color theme let alone what this game was. At this point, I just knew I had this ghost like figure and wanted to save souls.
Finally, before I went to bed on the first night, I wanted to get my shadow effects on the character (inspired by the Castlevania games I played as a child). I accomplished this by creating a brand new sprite every frame, adding it to a node which I had preset in the level template, and adding a script to it to force it to fade and delete itself after a set amount of time. This allowed me to constantly add the shadow but not add an endless pile of objects and create a memory leak. That was my biggest fear - creating memory leaks and bugs with this stuff. I'm happy to say I avoided that.
This is where I got the bulk of my work done. I had thought of the color theme I wanted, a simple purple and blue background. That translated to night, therefore my game was now at night. I wanted it to be outside so I could use layered parallax backgrounds to make. So that was my first step. I created the night sky by simply coloring a large canvas a dark blue, adding a ton of noise, and then zooming into the noise to make the stars. The clouds and mountains are really just blobs with some layering. The trees are inspired by Shovel Knight's trees, but really it's just one tree layered and flipped. The moon is what I was most proud of, it was simple, but it's my favorite piece of art I did for this game.
At this point I added the dash animation you see in the picture above and with that, I started making traps and obstacles.
After this was all done, I finally decided on the mechanics for the theme - you must sacrifice your life to interact with objects and to save souls. With that, I went through and created the three basic interactions - souls, doors, and switches. I had added hearts to the UI at this point and had this all hooked up quickly by using groups and placing all the code within the player's script so I didn't have to do much if any scripting for objects.
Next, I needed to add danger.
I don't know how to do AI that well, so creating enemies were out of the question because I didn't have time to teach myself that, so the solution? I'm making a platformer, let's use traps and spikes. The classics of the platformer genre. I took a few shortcuts with this. For example, instead of determining when they hit, all of that is done via collision within the player's script and placing all things that damage in a "danger" group. Next, I had built platforms at this point, so for moving traps, I simply attached the spike traps (a trap without any scripts) to a platform, and voila - I now have a moving trap that I can adjust to go horizontal or vertical, change distance, and change speed all from the ui thanks to exported variables.
I took he exported variable root with my range traps as well as you can see below where the direction Vector2 dictates not only the direction of firing but also the direction the sprite is rotated in.
At this point, I started putting together a single level.
I wanted to show off just about everything in the first level, but still make it extremely accessible. All balancing was done without any power ups, so if I couldn't beat a level without power ups, I didn't think it was a good level. Placing a switch outside a building with the wall and soul all in view was to show the player the interactions. A hidden room with a lantern was clearly visible underground to try and show that there are hidden rooms to upgrade. Once I had the basic level design, it was already 3 AM, so I ended my night there with less than a day left to complete this.
So I had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. I woke up at 8 AM and immediately started working on sound effects and music because those add the most atmosphere. I used Bfxr and BeepBox to make 8 bit sounding music. At this point, I also wanted to put in an effect from one of my first projects I ever did - lanterns that disappeared and had light intensity that goes with the music. Godot doesn't have a lot of tools for this, so I used 6 different music channels each with eq values set to only pick up one range of sounds within the music and then used range_lerp to change it to the within the range of values I actually needed.
At that point, it was just playing with colors and lighting. I try and add some reference to either the bisexual or LGBTQ+ community in all my games, so I made 6 colored lanterns that I would use later all with the pride flag colors and mapped them to each of the 6 EQ busses I had set up with a white one for the music bus. From there it was creating victory music, creating level transitions, and various other small improvements to help the feel like shaders for the water and the bullets. Things that no one is going to stop and really notice unless they were missing.
I originally wanted to do a level editor to make levels quicker, and if I had been doing the jam and had the extra day, I would have, but for the compo I didn't have time. So I reduced my scope from 8 levels to 3 and wanted to show off every feature I had put in within those three levels.
I put in 3 souls and only required 2. Because of how agile the player is, movement wasn't a problem for me and if you grabbed upgrades, you would be even more agile - so I balanced around base power until I found it fun. I wanted platforms to disappear on a timer, so I added that and then placed the warning sound in a global audio node rather than a 2D one to give the player warning. This one was supposed to be difficult, but not impossible.
I doubt many will notice, but it's actually just a big turtle with teeth. This was going to show off everything. I wanted it in the water as that was the original reason I wanted the water effect. I made this one - admittedly - very hard unless you had upgrades. Still beatable, but very hard.
The UI was the last thing I did. Adding sound options, credits, menus, and the theming were all done within about 2 hours total. This is the part I feel is the most rushed. I wanted to put more indications on what happened when you interacted with things and more indication what the coins did, etc. Mostly I ended up relying on sound design for that, but I don't think that was sufficient. I needed visual feedback, but I didn't have the time to put it in effectively. One of the nice things about how I design levels, is that playtesting was pretty much done at this point as I playtest as I create - section by section. There were still more things I wanted to add - options for various hearts, controller support, and better UI placement, but these were all lost due to the time crunch.
This is where I think I've gotten the most value from this experience. It was my first ever compo and I've only been making games for about 9 months now, so this is the first thing I'll have published for more than friends or people who watch my streams get to see and give feedback. There have been extremely helpful feedback that's shown the faults of the game that I didn't even consider. All of it reinforcing the idea that player testing is not only important but necessary.
Overall, this was super enjoyable and something I'm going to do more of - though maybe next time I'll be able to improve thanks to the experiences from this one. This one was kind of a "let's wing it" experience, the next one - I hope - will be more planned on my part.
