The core thing I need to get figured out in the next couple of hours is the three main game puzzles. I've made progress on them but they're not figured out yet. So while I've been honing in on those I did a quick first pass draft on two more rooms.
All the rooms will need a lot more detail and iteration, especially once the puzzles are in place but getting the first draft helps move the game forwards.
The game has three puzzle rooms and I've just finished the first one.
So good things right now are that a third of the game is playable and I have a solid design for the 2nd puzzle that I'm going to try and implement before I go to sleep tonight. I have another 3-4 good working hours to try and blitz that.
One the bad side I'd hope to have the whole minimum-viable-product playable tonight but I don't even yet have a final design for the third puzzle room. This is going to put a lore more pressure on tomorrow.
So I'm not where I wanted to be tonight, but I have made a lot of progress and I'm not far enough behind that I need to start scope cutting yet. If I don't finish the second puzzle tonight then maybe it's cutting time.
I ran pretty late today really hoping to at least get 2 of 3 puzzles finished today. Sadly there's still a few more hours to go on Puzzle 2 but I'm out of steam at this point.
Here's half way implemented version of puzzle room 2:
I'm going to see how long it takes me tomorrow morning to finish room 2 before I decided if I'm going to cut room 3 or not. I really don't want to make that cut but I really want to get this project finished by the end of the Jam at the latest.
So higher pressure day tomorrow. We'll see how I get on. Hope the rest of you have had a good day of game dev!
I finally had to make the call today and cut the third puzzle room. I finally had a good design for it but room 2 just took a huge amount more time than I expected. I think I have to accept that making 1 room per day is the maximum I can pull off for an adventure game.
I still have tomorrow that in theory I could use to add the extra room. However I want to spend tomorrow pulling everything together as a game. Lots of polish, bugfixing and adding an intro/ending sequence.
So I'm fighting against my ambition on this project and focusing on a game I will get finished tomorrow. I think if I want to add more beyond that great, but if I don't get this game done tomorrow it runs the risk of ending up in the "good intentions, but never finished" pile.
So here's a quick preview of the scope of the game, two puzzle rooms with the vault door in the middle.
I only managed a few hours on the game today as I had work but I'm very nearly done. I was always actually planning to enter the game in the new 'Extra' category as I don't like competing with my work. However I really wanted to be finished in the jam timeline, but sadly that's not gonna happen. I think one more night tomorrow and I should be finished.
I can't show the main stuff I did today as it's the ending so it's pretty spoilery, so the gif below should show some rooms have a bit more polish to them and I've now got the dialogue trees in.
Hopefully posting one last time tomorrow night to release the game. What's left:
Lesson learned: Same thing I learn everytime, my scope is too big. Even cutting 1 of the 3 rooms it was still a bit too big. I'm going to finish this up because I can't stand to have another unfinished project on the pile but I need to beat myself with the scope stick even harder in future.
As I finish day 4 (and am definitly running into the Extra cateogry now) my game is now complete, as in playable from start to end with everything in there. However I'm going to wait 1 more day before releasing it.
Now it's finished I've made a list of about 10 polish and bugfixing tasks I want to resovle before I put it out. So unless something comes up the game should finally be out tomorrow.
However running 5 days into a 3 days jam definitely gives me pause for thought about how I want to approach LD51. I love timeboxing game jam projects to 2-3 days so they don't become another project on the pile and remain a weekend of free experimentation. However in this case its running up against my determination to finish this project.
So I'm going to finish this and put it out, but next LD51 I want to sure I'm done by the end of day 3. No excuses!
So 5 days into my 3 day jam my game is finally done and published! WOOOO!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/cosmic-castaway
I really like the new Extra category a lot. I like to enter my games non competitively and it allowed me to get this game finished. Even though it took me 2 days longer than planned. To be fair to myself if I'd taken Monday off work I should have been done in 3 days but whatever, it's all come together in the end.
Tomorrow I'm going to post a post mortem as I have a lot of thoughts about how this went.
I'm also now looking forward to playing a load of your games.
Hey folks, now everyone's playing games I first want to throw out a huge thank you to everyone who played my game there's been a lot of really kind comments and they're much appreciated.
I want to do a quick post mortem to write up what went wrong and what went well for the event. I want to celebrate feeling good about finishing a game while also reflecting on the lessons learned for the future.
I'm going to do another post this week about how I made the game because a few people have asked who have an interest in making a retro point and click and especially because the process was fairly easy I want to share that knowledge as best I can. That's for another day, onto the post mortem.
This should be no shock to any game jammer. I even warned everyone before the event that my single piece of advice was make a simple game. I thought I was making something simple but still my reach exceeded my grasp.
My core idea was there's a vault door you need to get in and I figured I'd have three simple puzzle rooms that each give you part of the combination to get in the vault door. I figured I could make three really simple puzzles in a day and spend day 2 polishing and bringing the whole thing together.
In reality each puzzle room took me nearly a full day to put together so I cut the third room by the end of the second day, which thankfully made finishing the game still possible. I was always planning to enter the new "Extra" category as I don't like making game competitively but I wanted to stick to the 3 day Jam time-limit but I ended up working until day 5 before I was happy with it.
Next Ludum Dare same plan but better executed. Make a game in 3 day Jam timeline but enter it as an Extra game. Smaller scope! NO SMALLER!
I was using a really simple toolset designed for exactly the type of game I was making which was Adventure Creator within Unity. Adventure Creator is a fantastic tool than handles most of the heavy work for building a point and click adventure game and even has logic tools so you don't need to write code. Not that I mind writing code but it's handy when you don't have to.
However the core of my design was a little off the traditional style of adventure games. I was making a point and click that was more inspired by modern escape room design. It was about interacting with props and solving puzzles through knowledge rather than using and combining items. Although I got this done it made things hard for myself.
I had to built a ton of custom UI interfaces for these puzzles and had to find ways to mix my own escape room style puzzle logic with the puzzle systems of Adventure Creator. I found solutions to all these problems but they slowed me down massively as I was fighting against what the toolset was designed to do rather than working with it.
It also meant I wasn't even using the 9-verb interface to it's full potential and I barely used the inventory at all. I should have made an even more traditional adventure game to take best advantage of the time i had.
I knew I wanted to work on the game for 3 days, however it occurred to me too late I should have taken Monday off work to make that happen. So as I only had a few hours in the evening each night I ended up working until day 5 to get finished. If I'd had Monday off I could have finished all that polish work in a single day.
This was a fairly dumb oversight I should have seen coming and could have easily avoided. For LD51 I shall BOOK MONDAY OFF WORK!
My core design goal was to make a classic feeling point and click adventure game but instead of success resolving around dialogue trees and using/combining items it would instead rely on player's knowledge. In the way someone walking into an escape room who knows the answers could just unlock all the padlocks I want that same ability in this game. You are not blocked by arbitrary barriers in the game, just your understanding of the world.
I had this concept in mind before the jam started. It didn't dictate the game I would make, just the direction I wanted to go. Having such a strong principle helped me shape everything that came afterwards. Once the theme was announced it became about combining the theme with this design principle. The puzzles and the story weren't decided ahead of time, I just developed them as I went and this knowledge based approach became core to all of it.
That's not to say the specific principle I chose is amazing and should be used again, just that having one allowed me to keep all my work focused in a specific direction. It's kind of like having game pillars, but I'm a bit of a pillars sceptic as they're more often used to beat interesting ideas out of a game rather than generate new ones.
I can't sing the praises of Adventure Creator for Unity enough. I've been using Unity for over a decade I could have spent my while jam time trying to program all my own systems but I didn't have to because all the work is already done for me and I could focus on content. It's a tool I've had a for a long time and experimented with a bunch but this is the first time I've used it properly and it was just great.
It's been in development for a long time and used on a bunch of commercial projects so it's already battle hardened in the way you want it to be. They even had a custom plugin for the kind of retro 9-verb adventure game I wanted to make. The tool is very flexible in what it can do and lots of freedom for you to do things you own way.
The most complicated code interaction I had was hooking up my own custom logic for some custom UI screens. The fact that Adventure Creator can make standard Unity Calls and has a simple API for reading its variables meant it was a painless interaction between my code and theirs.
Adventure games can be fairly content heavy. So before I went into the weekend I had to figure out what I was going to do about art. Since generating characters and environments quickly would be essential or the whole jam time would get eaten up by it.
For characters I found that the AGS (Adventure Game Studio) community had created a community asset pack for helping people get started. In there I found a really good female character art sprite set that I could essentially paint over to make characters quickly. I had originally planned the NPCs move around more and I even made movement animations I ended up not using.
For environments drawing these was out of the question and 3D assets packs were the very obvious tempting route to go down. However getting those kind of assets packs to look good and well lit can be a time consuming process. So what I tried was assembling some scenes with assets packs and then resample screenshots of them down to retro adventure game resolutions (320x200) and then making 2D adjustments in photoshop. You know what... it kinda works. Scenes that would probably have looked pretty copy and paste in HD glorious realtime 3D looks pretty nice as low resolution downsamples.
While the final art style isn't something you'd be happy with if you bought a boxed product I think it allowed me to produce a reasonably nice looking jam game in a few days.
This one is simple I didn't burn myself out making this. None of the days did I work from waking to sleeping. I worked in a few hours chunks, had food, watched some Netflix, played some games. I spread my day out so I got a lot of work done but I didn't create an environment of stress or burnout.
I know this isn't always easy for everyone to do, especially if you're chronic procrastinator but I'm fairly good at managing my time and staying productive. I've been making games and jamming for a long time and this is one of the most important skills I've learned over the years.
If you can end a weekend of jamming with a cool game, and you didn't ruin yourself to do it then that's an absolute win in my books!
Excited for another Ludum Dare. Going to be entering the Extra category as I don't like submitting my game competitively, but planning to just use the 3 days of the Jam to make it.
Over the next few weeks I want to nail down which platform I'm working on. It's going to be from this selection: * Windows (Unity) * Amiga * SNES * PSX
I want to decide ahead of the start to get a basic framework up and running.
Whatever I make is likely to be some sort of adventure game as that's what I'm enjoying working on the most at the moment. I tend to go with the more risky approach of trying to get the theme to fit around the kind of game I enjoy making rather than designing from the theme outwards.
First time I've jumped on LD early enough to get involved in the theme slaughter and boy it's a lot of work. I don't know how some of you have got through the whole set.
Thought I might experiment with how many election memes I can repurpose for LD voting. I'm actually not personally as fussy about the themes as some people. I can usually work with whatever comes up.
I've had plenty of gamejams go to ruin by bouncing against technical issues I should have seen coming. So these days if I'm using an unfamiliar development kit (basically anything other than Unity) I try to do some prep work so that my time during the jam is focused on the game itself, and not learning the platform.
As I've decided to make a SNES game for the jam, I've been spending my evenings this week learning how to build games for the SNES and building myself a fairly basic framework so I can hit the ground running.
I'm working with the PVSnesLib SNES SDK, and oh boy am I glad I decided to do prep work. There's a lot to learn here. My goal was just to get a background image, control an animated sprite and draw text on screen. Theoretically it's straight forward and thankfully PVSnesLib includes lots of examples. However there's a lot of weird eccentricities to working on the SNES that have thrown a lot of obstacles in my way.
Thankfully it's starting to come together and as you can see from the GIF above, I've got some placeholder assets in place and I have my character moving around the screen on real SNES hardware. I'm going to look at music and sound effects tomorrow night to make sure I have a good pipeline for them and then I should be ready for the jam.
The protests outside the Ludum Dare offices are getting pretty heated, hopefully they'll get bored before it turns to violence.
From the pulse-check here on the blogs it's looking like "Every 10 Seconds" is a front runner. Though that's not necessarily indicative of the final voting. Maybe the silent majority will drop a surprise on us all.
I was originally a bit dubious of this theme because I personally prefer themes that guide the tone and content of the game more than the mechanics. However I thought of a fun idea to use with it so I've changed my tune to TEAM 10 SECONDS!
With an hour left until the theme announced I'm getting through my last bits of advance preparation. Audio on the SNES is weird and confusing but I'm getting there. On it's simplest level I'm just converting WAV for sound and IT MOD tracker files for music into something the SNES SPC chip can play back. Implementing that, even with PVSnesLib doing most of the heavy lifting is taking me some time to get working nicely. I'm terrible for leaving audio until last so I'm glad I'm ironing out some of these problems tonight, so that I'm not left making excuses on Monday why I'm submitting a mute game. I also wish I was better at composing music. It's the one aspect of the "lone wolf indie" I've never been able to pull off and normally I get away with some royalty free music. That's not so easy when working with systems that need MOD tracker based music.
Anyway here's my first meal of Ludum Dare. It's a steak pie and it tastes a lot better than it looks:
Welcome aboard everyone, WE'RE ALL TEAM 10 SECONDS NOW!
Since the theme is always announced pretty late UK time, I usually just spend some time thinking about my idea then go to bed. This means I wake up to start of my day 1 with all of you already making awesome progress, feeling a little behind. However never the less I've got an idea I think I can make work and I've now started working on it properly.
I knew I wanted to make an adventure game since that's where my head is at lately so I've decided to make a game where every 10 seconds you flip between two realities. One an american detective noir crime scene and the other a scifi moon base. Time resets each time you move back and forth, the only thing not resetting is you. So you have to use knowledge from the two locations and how the next 10 seconds will play out to solve puzzles and escape.
I've got my SNES framework up and running and I have broad designs for 3 puzzles, including a relatively fun twist ending. LET'S GO!
Progress on my SNES adventure game today is going really great, main focus this morning has been sorting out all the visual assets. With other genres I don't go so heavy on content until the end but with adventure games I find getting the rooms and characters sorted fairly important as they define the tone of everything else. So right now I have my character shifting between two dimensions every 10 seconds.
My schedule for the jam looks like this:
DAY 1 - ~~Rooms and Characters~~ - Adventure Scripting Engine
DAY 2 - Puzzles - Dialog
DAY 3 - Audio - Polish
So for the rest of the day I'm implementing a really light weight scripting system to cover my basic adventure game needs: dialog, choices, variables, inventory items. Then tomorrow I'll start bringing the puzzles and dialog in using that system.
I stopped for some tasty Chicken Katsu Curry and to write this blog post, and soon I'll be back to the code mines.
Making good progress on the game, I got the bulk of the adventure scripting engine in place. There's still a little to do around inventory handling but that won't take long to finish. I also took a bit of time to come up with a name and title screen for the game. Yesterday was a lot more bug filled than I expected, there's some weird behaviour with SNES variables being lost (or maybe overwritten) in certain contexts that I couldn't quite understand. In the end I had to work around because I was wasting hours without finding the root cause.
So now it's time to get into the puzzles. I've got broad strokes for all of them, goal now is to get first drafts of them in as quickly as possible. I can sometimes get a bit hung up on making puzzles "right" the first time, but since I always revise them after the fact I'm forcing myself just to get rough versions in place and iterate from there. As long as that goes well tonight I'll be working on dialog.
DAY 1 - ~~Rooms and Characters~~ - ~~Adventure Scripting Engine~~
DAY 2 - Puzzles - Dialog
DAY 3 - Audio - Polish
Nothing too fancy to eat today, just a straight forward Turkey and Ham Sub. Good food keeping me going though.
