Want to try a stealth-lite/narrative game? I tried making one. Or rather, that’s what ended up being made. It’s currently embeded and on Unity Play, I’m adding it to itch soon. Glad I could participate and finish. Good luck to everyone still finishing the jam.
I submitted Deliver Us, Brother about an hour early but was famished and had to eat something before I could finish uploading on Itch.io.
Now I'm all done and can start playing your games!
https://otergen.itch.io/deliver-us-brother
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/deliver-us-brother
First compo! I was worried I wouldn't make it in time, but I think I did!
Please check it out on Itch.io: https://otergen.itch.io/postcards (if links are allowed in posts these days... well it's here -> otergen.itch.io/postcards)
Note: This is a twine game, so it's pretty much just text. Maybe bookmark it to play after you've gotten some sleep? :grin:
After hitting 20 ratings and with the positive comments I've been getting on my compo submission, Postcards, I'm planning on continuing development for the game.
See the full roadmap outlining 4 updates here: https://otergen.itch.io/postcards/devlog/619022/post-ld-jam-roadmap-for-postcards
If you haven't played, Postcards is an interactive story following your adventures backpacking through Europe and writing postcards back to your to your Ludum Dare co-developer, Paul, who agreed to be your pen pal during the trip. It's a sweet, thought provoking, text-based game.
Check the game out through the link below, or bookmark it to play after some updates - the first one, a polish pass, will hopefully come around the time the ratings period ends.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/postcards
Oh, and if you're curious, that image shows an approximate route you take during the game! The map data is from Google Earth.
I just finished the first update to Postcards, with a LOT of polish, typo fixes, some slight graphical improvements, and a few relatively minor bug fixes.
One of the biggest features of this update is that dense walls of text were massaged into a more readable state, and many passages were pulled apart to increase both interactivity and readability. This was the biggest point of critical feedback on the game, so if it deterred you before, come give it a second look!
If you haven't heard of Postcards before... it is a sweet, meditative interactive fiction game where you take a backpack tour of Europe and write postcards to your co-game developer and Ludum Dare buddy, Paul (so named because "Paul" rhymes with "pen pal", in case you were wondering).
The game had a lot of newness, being my first Twine game and first Compo, but I was very pleased with it, and other people were too so I kept working on it. Now I'm even more pleased with it, and I hope you will be too.
Here's a little comparison of the original and the newly polished first letter that you receive very early in the game:
As you can see, a big difference. Letters are the most text-heavy and least interactive passages, so I tried to help readability and to make them stick out a bit more from the rest of the game.
If you want to be immersed in a backpack trip of Europe for a little while (~25 minutes), please consider playing the new and updated game. Then, if you want, compare it to the original, which you can still download from the Itch page and play by clicking on the "index" file. A few more ratings of the original game - which conveyed the story fine, just in a less polished manner - would be awesome, but as this is only Update 1 of 4 (check out the roadmap on the Itch page), I would greatly appreciate comments over on Itch.io to help the game long term as Ludum Dare winds down.
Play: https://otergen.itch.io/postcards
Rate: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/postcards
Whew! This has been a really great Ludum Dare :smile: Sending you all positive vibes in the final stretch of rating games!
Postcards was my LD54 compo entry that did way better than I could have hoped and got a lot of good and helpful feedback besides. Because of that, I was originally inspired to continue developing the game, so almost a month after the first update (which was a lot of post jam polish), the second update is now ready.
Postcards is a text-based interactive fiction game in which you backpack across Europe, sending postcards to your pen pal Paul along the way. In this update, I've expanded the final city, Venice, considerably - the game's overall content has more than doubled. Venice used to be a very brief place to see either of the two endings to the game. Now those two endings are entire versions of Venice, each with a lot of different options to explore. And there is a third, somewhat hidden ending I added too :)
To help balance the fact that the game starts pretty linear and then becomes much more branched, I also added the ability to replay from any of the major cities when you reach the end of the game.
Besides plugging my little game, I'm also here with a bit of postmortem thoughts after working on this last update.1. Making a branched game was much harder than expected. I'll spare you my groaning and skip to something I'm currently wondering about though: I did my best to allow players to make choices that feel right to them and true to the narrative. But doing so also makes it harder for a player to see everything in the game, requiring multiple full playthroughs to see all possible choices and outcomes. Having just realized this at the end of update 2, I'm starting to wonder what an optimal middle path might look like: how to provide choices that matter (to both the player and the direction of the story) without making it a chore to see 100% of the game.
If you've worked on a branched narrative game in the past, I'd love to hear your thoughts while I continue to mull it over.
2. The game lacked (lacks?) art direction. I've had to go back and try to provide some love to the graphics, but only because I didn't properly consider the art direction (and my level of skill) ahead of time. But, in struggling with the art, I stumbled upon something I'm rather fond of: creating line art in Blender. As someone with better 3D skills than 2D, I ended up reproducing a bad 2D drawing of mine in 3D (with the help of Google Earth and reference photos), then having Blender trace over the line art for me. With some more polish in Krita and Inkscape, it turned out much better looking:
(and if you're wondering, I was so excited to figure out this process and see it work well that I forgot to add the train to the reproduction!)
It's been a lot of work, but in all this continued development has been a great learning experience and has kept me excited about making games and writing stories. Thanks to everyone for such a great jam - even while I've continued work I've been looking forward to the next LD many months away. Big thanks to Mike for doing so much for the community, it's really great.
Hello! I just released a post-jam update for my little Compo game, Forgotten Files!
The game is a small, text-based puzzle game, and the update adds more content, polish/changes people had requested, and achievements!
I opted out of ratings but would still appreciate feedback, and if you leave a comment, I'll play and rate your game!
A massive Thank You to the people who already played and left comments, your positive feedback was what led me to update the game, and everyone's responses were way, way better than I expected. Ludum Dare is great, and you all are awesome!
Play Here: https://otergen.itch.io/forgotten-files