Slow day, and lots of struggles with the audio. Since it's my first time participating, my only goal is to finish rather than to make something amazing.
Seeing all the games from the compo makes me want to work hard on my jam entry so I can play what everyone has been up to!!
I've made the thumbnail and I think I should be able to make enough art in this style.
I'm not too good with 3D or lots of movement, so if you've played visual novel-type games you enjoyed (or made one yourself) leave them here and I'll get through what I can! Something similar to https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/chain-mail-1 or https://bun-tired.itch.io/potion-delivery-service is fine as well.
DDRKirby's postmortem writeup for Goodnight, Meowmie was one of my main motivators for participating in the Ludum Dare 53 game jam, so my experience wouldn't be complete without a postmortem of my own!
First off, let's start with the scores:
Scores: - Overall: 883rd (3.297 average from 39 ratings) - Fun: 1181st (2.473 average from 39 ratings) - Innovation: 567th (3.365 average from 39 ratings) - Theme: 625th (3.892 average from 39 ratings) - Graphics: 579th (3.703 average from 39 ratings) - Audio: 469th (3.389 average from 38 ratings) - Mood: 113th (4.162 average from 39 ratings) - Average Score: 3.469
My rating for fun was the lowest, which isn't surprising considering the nature of the game. Most of the ratings circle around a bit of a "meh" rating of under 4, but I'm pretty pleased with mood having the highest score.
For my first jam game and first game altogether, I'm happy that I got enough ratings to receive a ranking. It's easy to get competitive and feel disappointed for not getting a higher ranking, but I have to say that for what I put in what I got out is entirely fair. It motivates me to make something better in the future. In addition it felt really good to have some influence over how many people would play my game depending on how much effort I put into other participants' games. Getting to play other people's works and comment on them was a really enjoyable part of the process, but also made me feel, for the first time in my life, that playing a game was "work." It's a different attitude to have towards what you're playing when you know that you're going to be giving it ratings and leaving a thoughtful comment, and it was an interesting role to take on.
As for what went well during creation, telling a lot of people I knew about the game jam and setting myself the goal of creating something (anything) even at the risk of making something bad helped me to keep going even as I wanted to quit because I didn't want to feel ashamed in front of others or myself. With a schedule to adhere to, I HAD to create, so my brain juices were flowing a lot more freely than they have in a long time. I think I was extracting inspiration from every piece of media or moment in my life that I've experienced ever, which is a level of intense creation I don't think I've had before. As soon as the theme was announced, I lay in bed (it was quite late in my timezone) brainstorming for about an hour until I could fall asleep with an idea I was excited about. After it got to marinade as I slept, I woke up with more ideas and a zest for creation. And finally, because I was in charge of the entire game, I got to switch between tasks and do whatever I was excited for at the moment.
Regarding what went badly during and after creation, the main thing is that my workflow was entirely without structure. I kept sleeping, procrastinating and then staying up all night full of excitement, torn between wanting to give up, forcing myself to continue and being entirely giddy with excitement. It worked out fine regarding the creation of the game, though I'm sure many people could have created the same in 48 hours and much fewer breaks, but for me the issue was how much it ate away at me in the following days. I think it's normal to need to recover a little (and going by the blog posts on the Ludum Dare website it would seem others experienced a few days of fatigue as well), but I don't think this workflow is sustainable if I want to participate in multiple game jams a year in the future. On top of that, I severely underestimated how much a topic that was so close to my heart would end up affecting me. For one thing, I hadn't expected to feel so giddy and terrified to send my baby out into the world (no pun intended), but more than that I think my own game genuinely triggered something in me that I wasn't prepared to deal with. In the future I definitely want to have more of a social net and some self-care plans for the following days to recover more healthily both mentally and physically.
Positive aspects I'd like to mention include that it proved to be extremely beneficial that I learned the basics of RenJS at the last minute instead of opting for Ren'Py, as people overwhelmingly chose to play in-browser. As for my game's content itself: While keeping in mind that those that commented are probably from a baseline of people that don't mind unsettling plots, I was still very pleased by comments from people who enjoyed my spin on the theme and the dire atmosphere. I have my doubts that anyone interpreted the story the same way as I did, but that's perfectly fine. I enjoyed keeping it abstract, and I think I was still able to convey the overall atmosphere which seems to be reflected in the mood scoring. I think that the atmosphere did make my game stand out in its own way as something different. On top of that, I think (and hope) that the game wasn't boring! which is the sin I'm the most afraid of committing, so that's a huge relief. A few people said it was quite a ride, and a friend told me that it gave them goosebumps midway in. What surprised me the most was that aside from one ear-strainy bit (which I did leave in intentionally, but admit might have been a bit much), people seemed to find the audio decent, and some even enjoyed it. Since I had absolutely no idea what I was doing as I threw it all together I can't really feel proud, but it definitely makes me feel like I must have been on the right track about something. Before my next game I hope to learn how to compose simple melodies instead of relying on noise so heavily. Feedback on the minimalist style for the graphics was generally positive, so while I think there were a lot of parts that would have been improved with more illustrations, and there are some illustrations I'm pretty unhappy with, the overall style appears to have been the correct choice.
I'm extremely grateful for all the comments I've received on what I could improve in the future, and I've split up the ideas into small and big fixes.
Small fixes: - text should appear about twice as fast - a CTC button when images only are showing to indicate how to proceed to avoid confusion (I'm not sure how to implement this on RenJS aside from a hacky technique of making text the color of the background appear, but it should be possible) - settings menu (I actually made one but couldn't figure out how to have the buttons align properly in the GUI builder, so I settled for a single "start" button) - Some things I personally want to fix: I hard coded every single voice blip because soft coding wasn't working out (technically I wanted them to appear continuously Phoenix Wright style, but for the atmosphere of the game a single blip seemed to work as well). I'm also not sure why the title screen won't play music despite implementing it in the GUI builder. For the next Ludum Dare game, I'd also like to learn how to embed directly on the website (this time around, I kept getting error messages).
Big fixes: - While I did regret not being able to add in more branches due to time constraints, I'm not sure why it came as a surprise to me that people strongly desire a sense of agency in their gameplay. I suppose I just thought that for a self-contained story like this it would work out, but in retrospect the comments helped me see that the story COULD take on a few different turns and lead to different endings. - Personally, I would really like to redraw the art, add illustrations to the parts that are missing it, and possibly add short animations in some parts as well. I'd also like to use better sound effects not made by me, especially a real heartbeat sound.
Altogether I felt like a complete hack during the entire process, and was forced to give up on a lot of things I would have liked to put in, but it ended up being exactly what I wanted it to be: a good learning experience, an opportunity for me to prove to myself that I CAN create something if I set my mind to it, and a motivator to create more in the future!
I'll round this off with some of the amazing works of art that helped make my first game possible (and some additional ones, because a few days after releasing the game I sometimes went "huh... that's actually a lot like X when you think about it"): - mili's songs, especially Between Two Worlds and Extension of You - Serial Experiments Lain - Welcome to Nightvale episode 220 - A Radio Jupiter Holiday Special - lots and lots of indie games (including Victim Doll, Greaser, everything by etherane, We Know the Devil, Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk)
It's lovely to see people getting set up for LD55 and sharing their workspace, tips and goals. I'm looking forward to riding the high of having a bunch of ideas and the passion to work towards a single goal together with everyone!!
LD55 Day 1/3 progress report:
Regarding the music, I fiddled around a bit with beepbox and BoscaCeoil but nothing's sticking so far. Day 1 is usually the slowest for me because I have to get comfortable with the story and rough ideas. So I'm not too concerned, but hope to make a lot of progress tomorrow!!
Congrats to the compo participants who have already finished their game, and good luck to everyone still chugging along!! I'm not confident I'll have anything playable within in the next day, but I did make a little progress on (very rudimentary) background music, a few images and the GUI. Let's see how far I can get tomorrow!
Currently aiming to have something playable eventually to upload to the extra category. I wildly underestimated the work that goes into asset making for a more traditional game -- my previous entries were mostly narrative. Now that I've started making different facial expressions, I want to complete them all though...! 