I hadn't done a ludum dare in years! Glad to be finally be able to make something for it, even if it's super janky and the sound got completely changed during exporting for some mysterious reason.
But still!
I made a thing!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/every-10-seconds-i-find-new-and-exciting-ways-to-hate-myself
For a bit of shameless self promotion, now that the RATING PHASE has started... this is what I made for the Jam this ludum dare. It's super janky but I had fun making it, and it helped me learn a bunch of useful stuff about rpg maker! It's mainly a little puzzle game about moving boxes... and depression. Fun times!
Anyhow please play and rate :D
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/every-10-seconds-i-find-new-and-exciting-ways-to-hate-myself
Wooooo! Celebration! etc. etc.
But seriously, thank y'all for the ratings! :D
Every 10 Seconds I Find new and exciting ways to hate myself: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/every-10-seconds-i-find-new-and-exciting-ways-to-hate-myself
I see everyone writing well curated and well written post mortems on the main page to promote their entries, and while on one hand I Do want to get in on that, cause i love to see the little numbers on my game's stats go up, on the other the development of the game, I feel, was fundamentally less interesting than most of the other entries. Still, more than a full post-mortem I can go ahead and just deliver some fun facts and lessons I got from making this thing.
Honestly, my first thought when reading the theme was "Ah! I can do Dream Drop Distance!". My original idea was just to have four characters solving four different sokoban levels, and the player would just continuously switch between them, making the experience more frustrating. Thing is... that just wasn't fun, so I started implementing different tasks for each character... and while doing that I thought "Oh you know what happens every ten seconds and makes boring tasks really hard? Depressive intrusive thoughts!", so I ended up shifting the whole design and making yet another emo-ass game.
Thing is I don't do many jams nowadays, and when I do it's mostly as an excuse to get off my ass and make something. The thought that this might have been a bit of a heavy topic for a jam never even crossed my mind. I just tend to make sort of sad games lately, and I really didn't question the theming once during development. But now that everyone commented about how it's a bit of a heavy thing for a game jam... yeah... i can definitely see it... sorry :sweat_smile:
A lot of people praised the art-style of my Ludum Dare entry, which made me very happy, because most of the assets I used for this jam are from another game that I have been in the process of developing for a couple of months!
It will probably take a bunch more time for me to release this project, since I mostly work on it in my free time. It was originally named "All We Have Ever Known is Death" but I recently changed its placeholder name to "When I Said That Now It's Ok To Be Cringe I Didn't Mean Like That", and it's basically the original NES The Legend of Zelda but as a millennial mumblecore drama. Either that or a post-game without a main game to be a post-game of. Basically you walk around and talk to people and sometimes things happen. It's a project I'm very excited about and I'm happy to know people dig my assets for it. If anything it will probably be less aggressively depressing than this Jam game (still sort of depressing, just, like, in a different way).
Anyhow if you like my Jam's game art style you can follow me on itch at https://actuallythemoon.itch.io/ and when my other game releases you'll probably get a notification or something.
It's super weird right? Most streamers try to keep this bubbly entertainer persona going and then you barge into their stream being all like "pls play this game about depression" and everyone gets really uncomfortable. I eventually just stopped posting the game to Ludum Dare streams because... yeah, it both felt off-tone and hearing all that trauma dump dialogue read live was a bit uncomfortable for me too. That said, kudos to the one dude who did funny streamer voices throughout the game for offering me the most surreal thing I've experienced in months.
Seriously. I love RPG Maker. It lets me bypass the most odious parts of making a game (mainly making up a dude and having them walk around), but as someone who previously had mainly worked in Unity, it's sometime incredibly frustrating to realize how unwieldy and complicated it is to implement things that in a more regular engine would be incredibly straightforward.
Above you can see what my code for switching characters looks like, and it basically took me a whole day and a half to figure it out, leaving very little time for polish and level design.
That said, I also feel like working on this definitely levelled up my ability to make complex stuff happen in Rpg Maker, so that's a plus!
For some reason, if you rewind time during the second half of the box-moving tutorial, boxes become immovable, leaving no way for the player to progress. I have literally zero idea why that happens (and why it only happens on the "exported" version of the game, not in-engine). It makes literally no sense. I'm currently in the process of moving so it's probably not gonna be fixed anytime soon, so... y'know... just don't do that.
I dunno, there's definitely a bunch of things I wish I could have done better design-wise (specifically the different abilities need some tweaking -not letting the characters step on the target tiles made puzzle design hell-, the puzzle design could have been widely improved and all of the timers need to be tested and re-adjusted), but still, I feel pretty happy with the result. I learned a bunch of new stuff about RPG Maker, got a lot of nice comments about my gameboy assets and made a game that ultimately I feel is resonant and a good expression of a specific experience I struggle with. Making games is ok sometimes!
Anyhow if you want to play and rate and comment Every 10 Seconds I Find New And Exciting Ways To Hate Myself you can do so here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/every-10-seconds-i-find-new-and-exciting-ways-to-hate-myself