I have to say I’m pretty excited about the theme this time. Legend of Zelda was the game that originally got me interested in game development, and I’ve been wanting to make a Zelda-like game ever since. Making a Zelda “clone” might not be the most inspired choice, but, well, at least it will be fun!
(And yes, it’s going to have a twist to it)
It’s that time of the year again, and this time I have ideas for each of the themes on the final round, which should help getting the game done.
Tools of trade: Unity, Pixelmator, Blender and SFXR. Maybe Garage Band for the music if I actually get that far..
For once I’m feeling quite good about my idea. It may not be the most original, but it’s based on something I’d like to make for years.
Start of the first script!
Here’s how my task list looks currently:
X Battle placement
X Win/Lose floater
X Notificator
X Crew
X Random events base
X Portals
X Doom track
X Game win / lose
X Inventory
X Items to battles
X Enemy types
X Battle Rewards
X Crew
X Item requirements for events
* New ships / shipyard
* Enemies should get more difficult over time
* Enemy special effects
* Item special effects
– After attack/hit
– After battle
* Rest of the random events
The ones marked with X are done.
Coding and pulled pork.
It’s about time to post a screen, me thinks.
I decided to continue working on the game since the LD version was pretty far from what I planned to do. Here’s the updated build that addresses a number of issues mentioned on the comments and adds features missing from the original.
One of the issues addressed is balance, as the original version was pretty much impossible to beat. The new one might be a bit too easy, or at least it feels like that to me.
Alpha2 Release Notes
– Modified game balancing, now the game should be completable.
– Added missions. They can be acquired from planets and yield rewards upon completion. You always start with a ‘Build Portal’ mission.
– Added a clear notification when the Horde Strength grows.
– Added an end of turn summary.
– Added a battle end summary.
– Added a particle effect to planets that already have portals.
– Navigation buttons now hidden when inventory is open.
– Added a button to view instructions during play.
– Added an exploration panel for choosing whether to explore or end turn.
– Added end of turn events, which can yield good or bad things.
– Added a menu (press ESC to access) for quitting / restarting.
– Normal enemies do not generate Horde Strength anymore (except if they defeat you).
– Types of enemies spawned are now tied to how many portals you have.
– Lots of small fixes.
Future Releases
I still have a lot of ideas on how to improve the game, including new events, randomised planets, new scenarios (meaning different win/lose conditions), explaining the backstory, etc. Whether or not I will continue working on the game depends a lot on the feedback I get, if there are people who’d actually want to see a further refined versions, I’ll have some motivation to keep on making them (so let me know!).
Another thing I want to do is take the game further away from the Arkham Horror design, as it currently feels a bit too much of a clone.
Downloads Links
We’re slowly getting there. All the main features are in place, and it’s time to polish and add new (crazy) stuff!
Overall, we’re quite happy with the game. We went for a small enough scope and had time to polish things a bit too.
Play the game HERE.
It's been over a year since I last participated due to life getting in the way. Nice to be finally back.
It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you've done something enough times, you'll somehow be good at making estimates about it. SurviFarm was our 7th Ludum Dare game, so we were pretty confident that we could pull of the survival game/farming hybrid -- and mostly we did -- but I can't help thinking a bit smaller scope would have lead into a more polished product.
I'm happy with the overall design of the game. In the context of a stone age hunter-gatherer transitioning to a farmer, the genre hybrid makes a lot of sense. The exploration and collecting resources is fun enough, and the mood is suitably whimsical.
The art style choice was spot on and made a lot of sense timewise, as for the most part, it was very fast to produce. The player character and the boar were the most time consuming due to the number of animations, and that's something we have to take into account in future Dares: animating even a very low-poly character is a long process. Other than that, I think we nailed the indie low-poly style very well, and the game looks pretty good.
The Neolithic theme turned out to be a bit too ascetic on the art side and in retrospect a more fantastical setting might perhaps have inspired more visible conflicts between the two incompatible genres.
The part of the game most suffering from the lack of time was the farming and crafting. We didn't have enough time to actually make it worth your while, or add any continuity to it (although farming actually made little sense to the Neolithic hunter-gatherers in the short term, so I guess it's realistic in a way).
As the weekend went along, the genres started to feel maybe a bit too compatible, so we decided to throw in another curveball: the trivia mechanic. It was fast and easy to implement, even if the number of questions ended up lacking. It gives the game an edugamish feel, which I think suits the theme very well. I mean, what's a more incompatible genre with anything than an educational game?
On Monday night, we ran into a wall of build problems. Getting the WebGL build out of Unity took over an hour and in the end, the culprit ended up being a water shader. Curiously enough, we'd been able to make working builds with the same shader multiple times during the weekend -- it was just the actual, final build that didn't work. Due to this and some other issues, the final build ended up looking a bit less good as the development versions. We will upload Windows and Mac builds, which look more like the game is actually supposed to look.
Overall, I'm a little conflicted about the result. It has a lot of potential and the core gameplay works well enough. It's not the best game we've done on Ludum Dare, but it stands on its own and we had fun making it.
You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/survifarm
All in all, the 43rd Ludum Dare was relatively smooth sailing for us. The theme was a bit harder than usual (more on that below), but we had already decided on some things: namely the general art style. We knew we were going 2D with some anime inspiration, so we got off the ground with our ideas quite quickly.
At first, we played around with very concrete sacrifices but ultimately landed on a dialogue-driven mystery game. We really haven't made two similar games for a Ludum Dare, nor did we this time either. The more story-driven approach was a bit risky, especially since there wasn't that much time to dedicate on the writing, but judging from the comments so far it seems to have paid off. The short, linear nature and simple controls saved us some time on the programming side to concentrate on the story and actually even do a bit of testing.
We decided on having a small number of characters and locations early on. The art & storytelling style was inspired by various games, including VA-11 HALL-A, 2064: Read Only Memories and old text adventures. The final style we ended up with was something that looked nice and was fast enough to produce. In retrospect, the number of characters and/or locations could have been a bit smaller to save time to add a bit more animation and polish.
The story itself was basically Agatha Christie in space, with a dash of Firefly and A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet thrown in.
The reason the characters don't react to the clues you find is also down to scope. Having them react to one thing would make then not noticing another thing feel incohesive, so with the time constraints, it made for a more consistent experience to not have them react to anything.
Overall, the scoping worked out pretty well on both the development and the gameplay side. A short story that can be completed in minutes works very well in Ludum Dare where you're usually trying to play as many games as possible in a limited time, and most players got to experience the whole narrative.
On the code side, a lot was relying on a very simple parser written from the ground up during the weekend. It was a quick and dirty solution, but it enabled me to concentrate on writing the dialogue as efficiently as possible. It's also handy that in a jam you don't need to future proof at all, so adding new features was only a matter of figuring out a new character to represent a command.
One of the riskiest features was probably the scorekeeping for the ending. I hadn't done any web programming in ages, let alone a WebGL trinket that called web pages, so there was a lot I had to either learn or relearn. Ultimately, it turned out the game couldn't contact the server from the Itch.io page (HTTPS vs HTTP), so I put it on my own server which also housed the PHP page.
I also regret not having time to implement a clue window, where you could view a summary of all the clues found so far. I actually wrote down all the clues and even started with the UI, but figured that I didn't have time to come up with a good enough UI and implement it.
I have played around 40 different games so far and my impression is that this was a difficult theme. There have been plenty of good and excellent games, but few with really interesting takes on the theme. A very common take seems to be giving the player a bunch of actions and then removing them one by one, or just having some resource as a visible character on the screen.
The theme seems to have inspired a bit darker games than usual, which is not really surprising. There was some very interesting narrative takes on the theme, which made me think of substituting the Humor category with more general Story. It would still include humour but would serve as a broader category where the more serious story-driven games could also compete.
A short list of some of our favourites:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/zoe-and-the-polypantheon
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/total-party-kill
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/keyboard-twister
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/dropboy
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/silent-whisper
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/junkstar
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/burn-out
Here's the link to our game if you haven't played it yet:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/room44
So, there was the ending.
Many have correctly deduced that there wasn't a concrete confirmation on who the actual murderer was. That was completely intentional, even if we knew it might not work out, as Ludum Dare seemed like a fit place to do some experimentation. Also, I think the way you're not sure if you did the "right" thing makes it feel more like a sacrifice.
Here is the score as of 10th of December (around midnight in Finland):
Total votes: 138
Kate: 39
Fiona: 40
Mack: 30
Lucifer: 29
What's interesting here, is that during the first few days, it seemed clear that Lucifer would gain the most votes and Fiona the least, but not the results have practically flipped. There were no changes made to the game during this time.
Honestly, one thing I like about Ludum Dare that you can go overboard with things quite easily, which is something I can rarely do in my actual job as a game designer. One of those things is referencing the stuff I like! How many references can YOU find in our game?
We're probably not the first Ludum Dare game to have merchandise, but I haven't so far heard of others either.
Never the less, these are pretty awesome :)
And here's the obligatory link to the game if you haven't played it already: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/ignis-universia-eternal-sister-saga
Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/ignis-universia-eternal-sister-saga
Overall, I'd say Ludum Dare went quite smoothly this year. We struggled with the theme a bit in the beginning and I still feel it's a bit of an "anti-theme" as most games tend to start with the player having nothing or very little. This was also reflected in the other games I played this time, as they were generally very varied and not that thematic in the usual Ludum Dare sense.
We met on Friday night and discussed ideas for most of the themes that were on the last round, but "Start with Nothing" was one we didn't get many ideas for. As the theme was announced early enough (1 AM compared to 4 AM previously), we also tried coming up with ideas immediately after the announcement. Even though (or because?) beer was involved, we pretty much failed to come up with anything that felt inspiring enough during the night.
I guess you could say that the answer came to me in a dream as I woke up with the line "You are nothing" ringing in my head, with the rest of the intro text pretty much flowing in naturally. We discussed a few ideas on Saturday but decided to go with what we felt as our strong suit: a visual novel with some light JRPG mechanics. The idea was basically that you had to recruit the girls in the right order to beat all the enemies. We wanted the game to be completable in 10 to 15 minutes, acknowledging how hectic the Play & Rate gets.
While the game could have benefited from a round of polish to make everything fit together, the art came together very nicely. We had Tonzuko working on the art with Toge for the first time and process went smoothly overall. As usual, we left the splash for the last and had to do it in quite a hurry, but I guess that's unavoidable :) Compared to Room44 a year ago, we had time to also have multiple emotion variants for the characters which did a lot to bring them to life. As the writer, I could have also used a sad emotion, but that was ultimately a small problem in otherwise very cute characters.
The writing received a lot of praise in the comments, something I'm personally very happy about. The characters were fun to write and the stereotypes worked well in the context of a short jam game. I do wish I would have had time to write more variable dialogues when entering location with different parties and add a few more dialogue trees.
I mentioned already after the LD43, but I feel that a story category would make a lot of sense. This time we happened to have a lot of humour too, but generally, and especially after playing some very good story-driven games by others, a dedicated category would work better.
I'm not saying the code for the game is in any way good, but the dialogue system got to a pretty good shape where I could do the text, emotions and even dialogue trees quite easily (though it's probably completely unusable to anyone else). The JRPG style combat took a lot of time, mostly for the effects and flow. With the only exception of the particle effects, the game uses 100% Unity's UI, though sprites might have been a better fit for the battle.
Probably due to the jab at the end, we got several comments asking for a sequel. While it would certainly be cool to make a sequel for an LD game, I'm not entirely sure how or what it would be. I am playing with the idea of making a bit longer (20-30 min) version of the game which would extend the story from the current ending. It would need to make the combat mechanics a bit more involved, which needs some design effort, and some additional art. For the story, I have some ideas on how to take it further, though it would still need a lot more thought.
At the very least, I'm hoping to at least add some writing in the form of the previously mentioned variants and extended dialogue trees to the game after the rating is over. I guess the rest depends a lot on how we actually do in the ratings.
I've been saying this for at least a couple of jams now, but I'll say it again: I think we need a category for rating a game's story. There's plenty of interactive fiction and other very story-driven games that are hard to judge in other categories.
Easiest way would be replacing one of the existing categories, namely Humour or Mood, as they are both quite specific and fit only a fraction of games. Especially humour could be easily enveloped in a wider 'story' rating.
