Our team The Keyboard Cowboys have been absolutely adoring the feedback that we’ve been getting for our most recent LD entry Wayward. We took a ton of risks with this game, and now that the dust has settled a little bit (and our sleep schedules are almost back on track), we figured now would be a good time to reflect on our highs, lows, and in-betweens throughout the weekend. So, without further ado…
What went well
Proper Scope
Right out the gate, we started off strong by forcing ourselves to limit our scope as much as possible. We learned our lesson with our previous entry where we bit off a bit more than we could chew, and ended up paying for it dearly with a rather unpolished, confusing experience. This time, we wanted to make something that “even our grandmother could play.”
So we landed on a game that you just needed a mouse to play with. Left click to move, right click to interact. Super-duper simple. From an engineering standpoint, there weren’t too many technical hurdles to jump over (although there were some tricky maths here and there). As a result, we were able to dedicate much more time to developing the more critical aspect of the game, the tone and story.
Making engineering tools accessible for artists
Another aspect of the jam that we focused on was trying to eliminate downtime for anyone. In previous jams, our fantastic artists (@ruddgasm and @ruddiculous) would inevitably run out of assets to create, and would often have to wait around while us engineers frantically tried to squash the last few bugs.
This time, however, we took steps to allow our work to be parallelized. Extra effort was put into creating code snippets that could be modified directly in the inspector for artists to tinker around with when they were done making assets. One such code snippet was a random object generator that allowed us to mass-produce hundreds of trees throughout our scene. By just tweaking a few variables, the artists could generate a plot of trees and scatter them throughout our level without any assistance from the engineers whatsoever.
With helpful tools like this in place, the artists could put together our main level scene while me and @alphabetasoup cracked away at wrapping up the gameplay. The whole process of putting together the scene took several hours for the artists, so it was incredibly fortunate that they didn’t have to wait for us to finish our dev work before we could even begin to think about putting it together. An extra hour or so making our systems accessible to non-engineers ended up saving us several hours of everyone’s time thanks to the bottlenecks that we were able to eliminate.
No lights!
Despite how it might look, Wayward was actually created using absolutely zero lighting objects! Everything you see is a colored texture with some magical shader effects on them. You can learn more about how we pulled this off by reading this awesome write-up by @ruddgasm.
This decision was made super early on, as in the past we’ve been burned almost every time when it came to putting together a WebGL build for people to play. In almost every game we’ve developed, the artists have had to compromise what their vision was when we discovered late in development that the lighting effects we used absolutely tanked WebGL performance. So this time, we completely eliminated lights from the equation, and were able to make something that still looks pretty shockingly lit, all things considered!
The Challenges
Getting a bunch of goofballs to be serious
Anyone who’s familiar with the catalog of Keyboard Cowboys games knows that one of our biggest strengths is just how stupidly silly we can get sometimes. To be fair, at first we approached this jam no differently, and our brainstorming sheet was filled with the usual off-the-wall antics that we were used to running with.
…But somewhere along the way, things slowly got more serious. I blame the circumstances of the jam. For a lot of us on the team, this was going to be the last LD that we’d have time to do together for quite some time. The sense of finality was very sobering, and we began to discuss the possibility of making something on the more serious side. Going in, we had absolutely no idea if we were capable of pulling something like that off, but everyone’s enthusiasm about the prospect meant that we were willing to try.
Story-based games are scary!!
Especially in a 72-hour period, writing a story that successfully conveys its ideas and tone to a player that can theoretically do anything they want is ridiculously tough, and none of us on the team had any professional experience writing stories. Looking back, it’s kind of bonkers that we even tried in the first place (but we’re glad we did!).
With our writing experience (or lack thereof) in mind, we decided to focus on writing snippets that conveyed an emotion, or captured the core essence of what we wanted to say. If we tried to make one cohesive story with a beginning/middle/end, we knew we would fail to highlight what we truly wanted the player to feel.
So for our story, we all got very personal and very exposed. The snippets of text you see in the game are an amalgamation of all of us writing our own personal thoughts and experiences. There’s four different voices in there, and they each have something to share. Putting together enough story content for the game was a very therapeutic and eye-opening experience for all of us.
"Wait, what are we making again?"
Throughout development, almost up until the last day, we struggled constantly to communicate what it was we were trying to make. We were all on the same page in terms of overall concept, but executing on that concept was a difficult thing to keep straight in everyone’s heads.
Wayward is so loosely-defined, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s not even a game at all. We didn’t have a language to fall back on to communicate how we wanted certain mechanics to work, or story beats to play out. Hell, even during brainstorming, I had a completely different idea of what perspective the game was going to be played in compared to my teammates. I had no idea until we all sat down and drew on paper our own interpretations of what we thought it was supposed to look like.
This vague confusion persisted throughout almost the entire weekend. It’s a wonder we were able to put something together in the first place, but the constant back-and-forth between us was fundamental in making what ended up being the final game.
Reception
Before we even created a new Unity project, we were all on the same page with regards to the fact that we were planning to make an experience that would not have universal appeal. Some people might not connect with the game at all, and find it a boring, unchallenging piece of fluff, while others (hopefully) would be able to connect with it and learn something about themselves from it.
Our goal was to make something that appealed to the latter group. For the people who did find something to connect with, we wanted it to resonate greatly, so we put a lot of focus into that. And so far, it seems to have paid off!
We’ve been seeing so many heartwarming responses from people who have played Wayward, talking about how it impacted them emotionally, got them to consider their path in life, and more. Naturally, we’ve also seen plenty of comments from people who were expecting something a little more “game-y”, and that’s okay too. At the end of the day, we were able to make something that accomplished exactly what we set out to do, and we’re all ridiculously proud of that.
...But what does Wayward’s story even mean?
We’re not tellin’! :wink:
Truth be told, the game means something a little different to all of us on The Keyboard Cowboys. While we started with an initial idea for the tone, it slowly evolved into something completely different and personal to each one of us.
…But we won’t share those thoughts either. :smile:
The absolute most important thing for us is that Wayward might mean something very important to you. We don’t want to take away what someone might adore about it by giving a definitive answer as to what the game is or isn’t about. If you were able to take away some message, and it connected to something close to your heart, then we want to honor that.
We didn’t try to make a game to tell someone our opinion about something.
We tried to make a game that gets the player to discover something about themselves.
And what that thing ends up being is not up to us to decide.
If you haven’t yet, come check Wayward out for yourself! We are all super duper ridiculously proud of what we were able to make this time, and reading about everyone’s thoughts on it has been absolutely wonderful.
Until then, we’re still plenty busy rating peoples’ games in various comment sections. Be on the lookout for more from us very soon!
‘Til next time! :pointright: :cowboy: :pointright:
Front page of compo, but still... Only needs 7 more ratings now, to be counted. Hopefully it will get there, give it a rating and help it out https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/pulse-1
- Full playthrough is 3 minutes or less. Multiple endings.
- Best played in Fullscreen.
- Windows and HTML Browser Supported.
- Those who rate and comment will get their username in the credits as a “Test Subject” as a thank you.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/vital-2020
(Does this look like the face of mercy to you?)
A game where you play as God and protect your son from the dangers of Jerusalem!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/hive
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/finn-the-fox
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/feed-the-fire-1
