One year since my last Ludum and this one turned out to be even tougher than the last one. At least I am happy with the result, I could never imagine we would get such a polished game out in this timeframe. Now - sleep.
And yeah, please check out our game! :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$146155
With one day left I would like to help whoever needs those few extra reviews to over the 20 rating limit. Comment with your game and I'll go have a look! :)
Most of the gameplay loop is in, just need to flesh out some more content. First time making somewhat of a puzzle game so will be interesting to see how my puzzle designing goes.
This was a really fun one, making something completely different to what I have done at previous game jams. Making intuitive puzzles without real room to ramp up difficulty is incredibly hard. I'll post later about some puzzles we scrapped and why. Check out the trailer and have a go at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/pull-the-levers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2j5bvhvsqU
I'll spend the rest of the week doing my favourite post-LD activity: playing everyone's games! Send me your game and I'll have a peek!
We have had two common problems reported so far in the feedback we have received (thanks everyone, you have been lovely) so I figured we could take a look at them and see what could have been done differently.
First one was that wires wind up outside of the camera view in some puzzles which makes it impossible to pick them up. You can see this potentially happening in the lower right corner looking at the top image. The solution for this is for the user to hold right click and move the camera, which will let them pick up those wires. As simple as this solution is for the user, it's not entirely obvious that it's possible! We tried to communicate this feature by having instructions scrolling on the monitor during the first level but it goes by quite fast and lacks any strong visual indicator that drags the player's view there. You can see the text scrolling in the image below and how we tried to focus the player's view on this.
The end result seems to be that a few players end up not seeing the instruction and they get stuck which is understandable, not everyone has the time to fully explore gamejam games! In retrospect I think it might have been worth to have this feature clearly communicated in obvious text, either in the main menu or maybe as a tip while loading the first level.
Second issue seems to stem from our keypad puzzles which are all non-trivial, some quite hard even. We have a few of these but let's look at the "counting puzzle". When this panel breaks, a numeric code is generated, let's say "8501". The number of lights equals the number that the user should input into the keypad and on successful input the lights change, so after inputting "8", 5 lights will be lit instead of 8. Below you can see it first in its working state and then it its broken state.
A few players have had problems solving these and from what we have gathered it is mostly due to poor feedback from the keypad itself! We have a sound queue that plays when the entire code is correctly input and that means the player does not get instant feedback on individual button presses, which makes them question if they input the correct number.
Some players also had problems with not being able to press these buttons at all, not realizing they need to hold down the left mouse button until it "clicks". A sound is played when the button is fully pressed so the player knows when to stop pressing (different from the "code successful" sound) but if the players don't know this they will never get there! This has not been a problem with the big red buttons where you can clearly see it animate towards the fully pressed state and I think this tells us that keypad buttons should probably have a faster pressing speed because they are not big enough to have an easily readable animation.
Overall, I think we did decently for having developed this "in a bubble" without any significant end-user testing. At one point we considered having a significantly slower ramp-up of the difficulty, where the player has to beat variations of individual puzzles but we decided against this because we felt it would be too slow considering how little time is spent by the players for each individual gamejam game. In retrospect it might have been better to collect all the hardest puzzles on day 2 (it's about 2-3 of them) and make sure the player has enough time to learn them before going on to day 3 where the game really starts.
This went on longer than I expected but it's good to take a look at your failures to do bother at the next opportunity. Again, thanks to everyone who played our game so far, all feedback is good feedback! Last time I posted I promised a look at our scrapped puzzles but I felt this was more interesting, next time I promise I'll talk about those ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2j5bvhvsqU
Want to see for yourself? Check it out here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/pull-the-levers
Once again I am reminded about how grueling making puzzle games can be. Base mechanics are almost locked down, just need content and J U I C E, looking forward to tomorrow.
We're on the home stretch now, just fixing up our pages, deploying the game and making a trailer! Looking forward to playing everyone's games.
Our game Among Stars and Robots is done and published! Go check out our page here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/among-stars-and-robots and play it on https://jaoel.itch.io/amongstarsandrobots if you like what you see!
So far I've played around 10 games that have been entered and I am very impressed! I was a bit afraid that the theme would make people go for very similar games but that doesn't seem to be the case at all, which makes it all the more fun to try everything out! If you're worried about not hitting the limit for ratings drop your game in the comments and I'll come play it!
Among Stars and Robots is our third Ludum Dare-entry together but we have been working on games together for almost a decade now. We decided from the start that we wanted to target a WebGL build that would work on as many devices as possible, which meant we had to go low poly and simple materials only. This would also let us bang out a lot of varied content in a short time.
As usual we spent the days leading up to the start brainstorming ideas for the various themes that were up for voting in the last round, only to scrap all of them the moment the final theme was revealed. We quickly settled on the idea of programming a robot with a looping set of instructions. After dividing out some tasks we both went to bed to get to work early the next morning. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years is to eat, sleep and shower for a more enjoyable and productive game jam experience.
We are very happy with the end result of this jam. The development process went smoothly without either team member feeling blocked by the other at any time. The first thing we made was a custom level editor inside of Unity. Any waiting time could then be spent brainstorming new levels or iterating on existing ones using this editor.
The biggest contributor to the end result was probably our planning process the first night where we mapped out a Minimum Viable Product and having a strongly established art style to adhere to which really helped us stay focused and keep the scope of the game down.
The code this time around was relatively simple, there are no animations other than simple tweens and no (significant) custom shader magic going on. Instead we focused on making the core mechanic interesting and the presentation really juicy. This is why we put a lot of focus on the level transitions for extra visual flair which from the feedback we got has been one of the most appreciated aspects of the game.
Trying to learn our lesson from our last attempt at Ludum Dare (Pull the Levers from LD46) where a lot of people struggled due to the lack of a tutorial, this time we tried to add better tutorialization in the form of three introduction levels and a simple animation in the first level to explain the controls, as well as an infographic on the itch page. But, as it turns out, this still wasn’t enough.
As mentioned above, the tutorials didn’t manage to help players all the way to success. The first problem was the detector command which is introduced in the third tutorial level. This command is significantly different from other two commands previously introduced (turn and move forward) which are both very simple to understand. Players initially tended to dismiss the detector command as something that would not be needed to complete the level. The level was then solved either by trial and error or by consulting the included infographic. In conclusion, this command definitely required much stronger in-game tutorialization.
The second problem was our difficulty curve. Once players got past the tutorial they were introduced to the hub world. The idea was that the initial position and view direction of the player would guide them to the easier levels but this didn’t work because first and foremost, we messed up the actual ordering of the levels. Second, players did not seem to care and just went to whatever level caught their interest. Many did not even realize they were in a level select world. Luckily we implemented a home button that would let players return to the level select without completing the level so if they got stuck they could try another one instead. The level select definitely needs some kind of indicator for how hard each level is so players can progress in a more logical manner without getting frustrated.
The third problem was some simple but very important UX features we failed to implement. Between levels there is a variable amount of commands allowed in the player’s loop but there is no indicator of that, so many players thought it was the same for all levels and got stuck on the ones that required more commands than normal. The other problem is that you can change the loop while it is running, but changes do not apply until you click stop and start again. Many players tried to change the loop and got confused why the robot kept repeating old commands. Both of these are easily solved and with hindsight it’s obvious that we should have prioritized it a bit more. Fixing these problems solves a lot of headache for the players.
Another mistake we made was including too many patrolling police robots in our levels. Just like the player, the police bots execute commands of their own, but there is no real way of telling which commands they execute. As a result their behavior is very hard to predict and forces the player to resort to trial and error in order to beat the level, which is not something you want in a puzzle game.
So what’s next for Among Stars and Robots and what lessons should we take with us? There’s definitely a point to be made that we need to work even more on our sense for difficulty scaling and progression. There’s a clear improvement just looking at our Ludum entries where our latest game is by far the best in terms of difficulty and tutorialization but there’s still a lot left to do.
Had we done more testing with someone outside the team before release we probably would have been able to catch those few UX problems and prioritize them so that’s definitely something we will look at in the future. As for what else lies in store in the future we will see. We are both overwhelmed with the positive response we have gotten so far and the game feels like it could turn into a really fun full game so it’s definitely on the table to make a full production game out of it.
We hope you enjoyed reading this post-mortem about some of our experiences from this jam, if you want to try our game check it out below and let us know in the comments of some of your own ups and downs from this event!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/among-stars-and-robots
Among Stars and Robots is our third Ludum Dare-entry together but we have been working on games together for almost a decade now. We decided from the start that we wanted to target a WebGL build that would work on as many devices as possible, which meant we had to go low poly and simple materials only. This would also let us bang out a lot of varied content in a short time.
As usual we spent the days leading up to the start brainstorming ideas for the various themes that were up for voting in the last round, only to scrap all of them the moment the final theme was revealed. We quickly settled on the idea of programming a robot with a looping set of instructions. After dividing out some tasks we both went to bed to get to work early the next morning. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years is to eat, sleep and shower for a more enjoyable and productive game jam experience.
We are very happy with the end result of this jam. The development process went smoothly without either team member feeling blocked by the other at any time. The first thing we made was a custom level editor inside of Unity. Any waiting time could then be spent brainstorming new levels or iterating on existing ones using this editor.
The biggest contributor to the end result was probably our planning process the first night where we mapped out a Minimum Viable Product and having a strongly established art style to adhere to which really helped us stay focused and keep the scope of the game down.
The code this time around was relatively simple, there are no animations other than simple tweens and no (significant) custom shader magic going on. Instead we focused on making the core mechanic interesting and the presentation really juicy. This is why we put a lot of focus on the level transitions for extra visual flair which from the feedback we got has been one of the most appreciated aspects of the game.
Trying to learn our lesson from our last attempt at Ludum Dare (Pull the Levers from LD46) where a lot of people struggled due to the lack of a tutorial, this time we tried to add better tutorialization in the form of three introduction levels and a simple animation in the first level to explain the controls, as well as an infographic on the itch page. But, as it turns out, this still wasn’t enough.
As mentioned above, the tutorials didn’t manage to help players all the way to success. The first problem was the detector command which is introduced in the third tutorial level. This command is significantly different from other two commands previously introduced (turn and move forward) which are both very simple to understand. Players initially tended to dismiss the detector command as something that would not be needed to complete the level. The level was then solved either by trial and error or by consulting the included infographic. In conclusion, this command definitely required much stronger in-game tutorialization.
The second problem was our difficulty curve. Once players got past the tutorial they were introduced to the hub world. The idea was that the initial position and view direction of the player would guide them to the easier levels but this didn’t work because first and foremost, we messed up the actual ordering of the levels. Second, players did not seem to care and just went to whatever level caught their interest. Many did not even realize they were in a level select world. Luckily we implemented a home button that would let players return to the level select without completing the level so if they got stuck they could try another one instead. The level select definitely needs some kind of indicator for how hard each level is so players can progress in a more logical manner without getting frustrated.
The third problem was some simple but very important UX features we failed to implement. Between levels there is a variable amount of commands allowed in the player’s loop but there is no indicator of that, so many players thought it was the same for all levels and got stuck on the ones that required more commands than normal. The other problem is that you can change the loop while it is running, but changes do not apply until you click stop and start again. Many players tried to change the loop and got confused why the robot kept repeating old commands. Both of these are easily solved and with hindsight it’s obvious that we should have prioritized it a bit more. Fixing these problems solves a lot of headache for the players.
Another mistake we made was including too many patrolling police robots in our levels. Just like the player, the police bots execute commands of their own, but there is no real way of telling which commands they execute. As a result their behavior is very hard to predict and forces the player to resort to trial and error in order to beat the level, which is not something you want in a puzzle game.
So what’s next for Among Stars and Robots and what lessons should we take with us? There’s definitely a point to be made that we need to work even more on our sense for difficulty scaling and progression. There’s a clear improvement just looking at our Ludum entries where our latest game is by far the best in terms of difficulty and tutorialization but there’s still a lot left to do.
Had we done more testing with someone outside the team before release we probably would have been able to catch those few UX problems and prioritize them so that’s definitely something we will look at in the future. As for what else lies in store in the future we will see. We are both overwhelmed with the positive response we have gotten so far and the game feels like it could turn into a really fun full game so it’s definitely on the table to make a full production game out of it.
We hope you enjoyed reading this post-mortem about some of our experiences from this jam, if you want to try our game check it out below and let us know in the comments of some of your own ups and downs from this event!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/among-stars-and-robots
Is that Cubot getting some air time? We are having fun implementing new commands and making new levels, releasing Soon™ in a post-jam version perhaps? In the meantime, check out the actual jam release here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/among-stars-and-robots
I've had a lot of fun trying all your games so far and seeing our own game being played by you guys! Here comes a friendly reminder, go check out the games in danger to get the last few over the line!
Also, have a teaser of things to come in Among Stars and Robots!
So the results are in and I am incredibly happy from all the feedback we've been given. The scoring feels fair and mirrors my own perceptions that we had a not-so-original concept that we managed to execute quite well. I wish we could have rated a bit higher in fun but it's no surprise since our game is a bit barebones in places. You can read more about my thoughts on how we did in our post-mortem!
Until next time, have another sneak peek at some more fun™ that is coming to Among Stars and Robots, soon!
Also, you're all in our game!
I'm super proud that over the work we've put in over the last 3 months to take our LD47 entry all the way to Steam. Releasing in January go checkout the Steam page and wishlist it! Big thanks to everyone for their awesome feedback that helped us make this game into the best it could be.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1474840/AmongStarsand_Robots/
Looking for games that plays straight in my browser, hit me! And while you're at it, check out our game Restroom Rampage!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/restroom-rampage
