And that's a wrap on my first completed gamejam!
Well, this took a turn.
With LD47's judging period well underway, it's fun digging through the ashes of the absolute madness that was proceed. From its predecessors, to its original ship in a slightly-on-fire state, to the hotfixes that finally caught up to all of the crashes and removed the half-implemented features bringing it down, the final game is... it's okay. I kinda like it.
More than anything though, I've enjoyed bringing my own project to the table and seeing all the wildly different interpretations others have come up with. I just want to pause my stream-of-consciousness post to give some special mentions. I was blown away by TRiXiT, Looper-3, and Recursion. These games are exceptional, especially as compo titles. Go give them a look!
Right, right, my game.
Before we get into the details, you can play the final game here:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/proceed
Now, let's get started...
We Gotta Talk about Sustained Notes
proceed was not my first idea for LD47. Heck, it wasn't even my second. It took me FOUR tries to start a project this time around.
The timeline looks something like this:
Friday, just after LD47 began: I opened up a Unity folder called Achilles. My mind was racing with ideas for Death is Not the End, and I had a great idea. I was going to make a shooter where you die to go into a no-clip mode and respawn, and--and you fight the robot things, because you have to defend the big elevator, and---and...
Then I checked the theme again. "Stuck in a Loop." Well, uh... huh.
Hopeful beginnings
The idea I instead pursued was Sustained Notes, a tower defense with a musical twist. This idea featured hand-drawn musical notes that would fire away at a horde of square monsters that would slowly march up a single lane. I wanted to render out a turntable and room in Blender, which I would put in the world through a video player. I had no idea how Unity's video player support worked, but I was going to try it one way or another!
The core idea was simple: it's a tower defense game with this musical twist where a series of four splash zones would divide up the platform. You can use these areas once a round to wash away all enemies on the space with a prerecorded loop. In other words, they get stuck in a loop... tee hee.
Enemies that are washed away, as opposed to being destroyed, will be carried into next wave as deferred enemies that spawn at quarter the normal speed IN ADDITION to the normal horde (to be balanced as necessary).
I spent roughly a day programming incredibly basic tower defense characters that could move left and right (which would later be scrapped), enemies that linearly marched right, and bullets that moved left at a decent-ish rate. I had 3D colliders that were all close enough to collide/trigger from their Z coordinates, but I would later go back to replace all my 3D objects with sprite renderers. That was the intention, anyway.
Fortunate Featurecreep
Bugs began to crop up, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with them, my music wasn't sounding all that great, and in general I was having a bad time working on it. Doubling down on the idea, I refused to drop it. I spiced up the game with two big powerups (one of which immediately got dropped as an idea). The one that stayed was a Vaporwave powerup that would rip a hole into the background, peering into the vaporwave dimension as all enemies froze in place.
I'm proud to say this ability was implemented so well that it outlived the rest of the project... more on that later.
I spent a whole night on that animation, I'M GONNA USE IT!
The vaporwave powerup is really worth a mention because I spent a great long while putting it together-- I knew that it was going to be my favorite part of the game by far. I rendered out an animation for this ability in Blender overnight while I wrote a very quick placeholder audio track for the animation that I could replace later.
Anyway, this music track and video shipped with the game unmodified.
--
I was upset because this rendered video ultimately became nothing but trouble. It took three attempts to actually render the thing correctly, and it was constantly running in the background of my project. I was unsatisfied with the final outcome and kept wanting to polish what was supposed to be a minor powerup with a neat visual effect. I am especially glad that I used Eevee; a Cycles render would have taken way too long for even one of those.
The frustration between prioritizing this joke gadget and seeing my primary game fall apart horribly was ultimately what made me realize I had to face the music with this idea. (Ha, Ha.)
Despair and Farmland
I went through two very quick idea phases. It was Saturday around 12 PM, and I knew that Sustained Notes was doomed. Opening up blank Unity projects and trying to make... something, one idea was too ambitious to make in time. The other I tried was passionless, and I had no interest in seeing it to the finish line despite its simplicity.
All I have of this concept to show is a little tune I wrote in about two minutes. It's cute, I guess.
https://soundcloud.com/anchorlightforge/the-looper-saturday-jam-track/s-sZ38tcf7uId
Frustrated and exhausted from hours of fruitlessly trying to make Sustained Notes happen, I took a nap. Waking up in the late afternoon, I mindlessly threw open Unity and threw down a cube to sit on, a ball to roll around. I locked it to 2D because I'd already been dead-set on a 2D game since the jam started.
I was frustrated. I decided on an idea that I had just before collapsing a few hours earlier: "I'm just gonna make a really basic platformer, but if you don't do it exactly like I say you have to do it again. You'll get all angry at the game because it's being petty and stupid about every little thing you do."
Fellow Ludum Dare participants, I present proceed.
The proceed story
Building a House on Sand
I have no doubt that a huge inspiration for proceed was from many of the games I've played as of late. Just recently, I played through both Oxenfree and Inside, 2D Unity platformers that try to tell cryptic stories through gameplay and surreal atmosphere.
While not consciously thinking about it, this ultimately formed the basis for my game. You do basic platforming, you get told that you did it wrong, you get sent back to do it again. I scripted a series of objectives that I could be as petty as possible about-- a box that you may not push, a window with curtains that needs to be closed. I threw these assets together in Blender as fast as possible; cube, bevel, inset, call it a day. I did manually drag a few points for the curtains, but the emphasis was just having something. I didn't even use the materials; I ended up shading objects entirely in Unity, and ultimately never implemented any textures.
As the game came together, I decided that my big reset should be foreboding and spooky.
My instrument of choice was ambient soundscapes. I found a VST I liked as a cold and foreboding sound, and bitcrushed it beyond recognition. I held down a basic C note for a whole measure.
Combined with the black background and post processing... this was working! I really liked this! Still, it's too light. I need something stronger.
So, I took a Revolta 2 VST, the most aggressive one I could find. I pumped out pure bass, disgusting amounts of bass. Max attack, heavy distortion. I want this note to punch you in the ears! ...I ended up turning it down a little bit.
I tried playing this in the background of my deep C note, transposed said note to be higher, and rebalanced things a bit. The end result: a proper ''WHOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMBOMBOMBOMBOMBOMBOMVVVVVVVVVRRR'' to be proud of! Well, maybe not proud of... but basic satisfaction was achieved.
On this first day of development, from Saturday until 5 AM, I put together the core logic loop of the game. I would run a check if the player fell or entered the final room, and the code was all basically the same. I would run a script that tracked different ways the player could mess it up. These functions would start the video script, change the world elements as appropriate, increment the loop counter by one, reset any win conditions, and clean up any disturbed objects with fresh prefabs. This is ultimately the same logic loop that would ship, though with some tidying up and bugfixing along the way.
This is totally working!
It's Sunday. Submission is at 6 PM... but I think I have this.
The time frame from 1:30PM to 3:45PM was nothing short of blissful. I got my panic under control and put my nose to the grindstone, churning out function after function. I didn't want to animate my crude Blender curtains, so I replaced them with a light switch. I made the light switch turn on a light. Angrily remembering that I made the platform entirely unlit to keep it a secret, I hastily threw a default particle plane on top of the object to simulate a big overhead light. This particle could receive light, so I had no problem throwing my warehouse lights into a new area. One rename and scripting later, I had my lights hooked up to the switch. All that was left was the Evil Ball.
I was in high enough spirits that I looked at my bridge, horribly broken and written out of my level design entirely. I also disliked how the push box could get stuck on this bridge. So, I shrank the bridge and wrote a new script that instantly tweaked the scale back and forth on click. Borrowing materials I just wrote for the lightswitch, I basked in glory as the now-defunct curtainsScript saved my game piece by piece.
So, um... this is where it all spirals horribly out of control.
This isn't working at all!
My final encounter. I had big hopes, big dreams. An enemy would spawn where you normally do, and chase you! You would jump away, and the box would destroy the enemy, showing you why it was so important.
So, uh, that didn't happen.
There just wasn't enough space in the level. The only room large enough to properly house the red ball and give it room to maneuver was the warehouse. So, I stacked boxes in front of it. I colored the ball a bright red, letting the player know that they can click it.
I was disappointed to find that Red was horribly acting up. I kept fixing it, and it kept breaking! It would trigger too early, it wouldn't push through the boxes like I wanted. It couldn't hurt the player, couldn't even REACH the player. I was incredibly disappointed, as I knew that I kept fixing the problem only for it to crop up again. I looked with disappointment at my playtest and quietly decided... I wasn't going to submit the game. I can't. This is embarrassing. I failed.
-- Anyway, I submitted at 5:50 PM.
Red, that's not how you--
I ultimately decided that I had to ship it. The other 80% of the game was working. The broken enemy was goofy, but I had already made sure that the ball returns to its position when respawning in case players tried to outwit the ball. Players would definitely be able to finish the game, and I'd have to just take this as a learning experience.
I'm glad that I chose to ship it, and incredibly thankful that I somehow scratched together a project to show. This is of course my first full submission to Ludum Dare. I don't think it's mind-blowing, no... but under the circumstances, I'm happy that it turned out well enough. It's truly been a pleasure to play other compo/jam titles and seeing how their authors grappled with the same time constraints. Sometimes, you can see that they're onto something cool, and with a little more time beyond Ludum Dare they'll have something truly special. Sometimes, they go all-out with an idea that you normally wouldn't see ship, and regardless of the outcome the project stands out as something cool and unique. Other times, something like Recursion comes out... A+. Absolutely brilliant.
My game, on the other hand... well, it was a little bit bizarre. Before I get into more whining about all the different ways the red ball broke my game and ruined my cereal, I'm going to instead focus down on the more constructive long-term feedback I've received about my game.
Failings
There are definitely a few things to pick apart about my game design.
For one, the idea of presenting all info in-world was interesting, but saving these little tooltips for the final room and ONLY changing them on loop was a poorly thought out plan. It means that players only get feedback for things they already weren't thinking about. Nearly every comment I have received remarks on this problem-- they just hear about things they did wrong last time without any info.
The soft crashes weren't nice either, but at least they're patched now. I put out ~~two~~ ~~three~~ four daily hotfixes for the game that addressed the most critical problems-- Red's AI wasn't great, but I was more concerned with a few soft crashes that slipped into the game logic. Thankfully, mostly dealt with. I'm sure there's more issues somewhere in there. They just haven't come up yet.
I do think that this game was very easy to misunderstand. I expected players to loop again and again, slowly learning how to get through the game as the directions became more clear. Unfortunately, "more clear" is a lot less useful than it sounds, and the accidental red herrings only added fuel to this dumpster fire. Lessons were learned.
Not-Failings and Succeedenings
Well, look at the thing. It EXISTS! I do wish I'd taken a moment to fine tune the post-processing a little more. Believe it or not, it was even more aggressive at one point. The camera was also more zoomed-in before.
I think it's safe to say that the strongest part of my game was the intermission video. It does look rather nice. There's truly some delicious irony in the fact that it was made for a completely different game idea on the opposite end of intended tone.
...what now, then?
I didn't expect to enjoy proceed. I expected to make something basic and soulless, and be done with it. I'll fix this mess, then I'll move on and do better next jam.
When I was going through my Blender file and looking through the animations, and fixing bugs, though, I realized that I genuinely enjoyed a lot of the core ideas that I had put together in proceed. So, on a whim, I decided that... hey, maybe I could make this a thing!
It's tough to say what the future will hold, especially nowadays, but in the short term I plan to work on a post-jam branch of proceed. After cleaning up my code for efficiency and modularity, I plan on adding a new stage, overhauling the gameplay, fine-tuning the visuals, and putting together a solid proof of concept to explore what this game could be.
I originally aimed to release this immediately after Ludum Dare as the "Disqualified Edition," but life things™ forced me to reevaluate the release date for this little project. I'm aiming for early 2021 now, with the bulk of that work taking place late in December. Hope to see you then!
This isn't really planned yet, but I also really want to finish a prototype of Sustained Notes at some point, because... I mean, look at this! Can you say no to this?
==
Thanks for reading through my little postmortem on baby's first gamejam! It's been a wild ride. Now, I need to get my sleep schedule back in order. I'll stick around for the duration of the month to see how things go, and of course check out as many peer submissions as I can. Beyond that... see you in April!
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| https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/crysterra | Crysterra by @ciaranw and @teto | Crysterra is a turn based defense strategy game where the world warps and shifts as you play. Keep your crystal stable, despite its best efforts! There's some highly ambitious and interesting gameplay mechanics for show here. |
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| https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/osaka-usa | Osaka, USA by @crashmusashi, @olima, and @moritz-jaeger | A promising prototype for a Crazy Taxi successor. Somebody's gotta deliver all this ramen while it's still hot! There's potential here for a fantastic arcade game. |
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|https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/geckos-chronicles-the-miserable-men|Gecko's Chronicles: The Miserable Men by @justmars, @jokku, @eleeve, @happytomato, and @raffe | A story-based 3D platformer entirely set in photoscanned and distorted environments. The unique approach to level design alone makes this game worth a look. |
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|https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/balancing-act |Balancing Act by @Madbeagle|A Tetris-esque casual game where your goal is to keep the system balanced by value. Placement is important! (not to be confused with BALANCING ACT, our own submission :joy: )|
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|https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/wayward-warlock|Wayward Warlock by @reya-wallace, @sabrina-palmer, @stupatchap, and @bradjste | An open environment where you collect elements to boost your potions' potency. |
|https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/wobbly-pagoda|Wobbly Pagoda by @clickmark-ryan and @ramble-house-games|A 2D platformer where a disciplined use of shurikens are your only hope of climbing a shaking tower of invasive foxes.
