I’m in

LD33LD #33 21. Aug 2015 · 20:00 UTC · 20 hours after compo start by dancingmad · 1

For my second Ludum Dare, I will use again my favorite framework C#/XNA, maybe with TiledEditor (depending if we’ll have tile based levels). I’m part of a team that includes:

1 programmer (me)
2 artists
2 sound/music composer

Hope we’ll do well!

for everyone: dancingmad

Internship Adventure postmortem

LD33LD #33 27. Aug 2015 · 17:01 UTC · 6 days after compo start by dancingmad · 2

It was my 2nd time taking part in a Ludum Dare, and I was pretty excited by the theme! The idea of playing a guy in a costume whose job is to play the monster in a video game popped during the initial meeting with the team, and everyone thought it was cool! I think it fits the them well. Without further explanations, I present you “Internship Adventure”:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=39644

The biggest challenge for me was to make something funny, with catchy dialogs, and a good gameplay on top of that. Would we have time to do all that in only 3 days? Also, being the only programmer in the team, I was worried that I wouldn’t have the time to integrate all the assets from the artists, because that’s was happened during my last LD. (play “Effraction” here).

Before the Jam

We gathered at my place on Friday evening to discuss many things before the jam starts. What kind of tools we will be using, do we want to make a 2D game, or a 3D game? What would the game look like ? What do the music composers want to do? We also created a SVN repository and installed the communication tools (Skype, etc.). We’re located in Europe, so for us, the theme would be announced at 3am on Saturday morning. Time to go to sleep early! Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep well due to excitement (also… it was 10pm).

Day 1

Got up at 7:30, made coffee and had a breakfast with the team. It was composed of 2 artists, 2 music composers and myself (coding). When we agreed on the theme, everyone has to install the tools, checkout the SVN repo, and so on. It tooks almost 3 hours before everyone could start working for real.

Here’s what we had after a full day of work (we went to sleep at 1am):

the basic gameplay was working. The player could move, attack, jump and play dead. The hero behavior was almost completely done. I has spent an awful time to make it work but I was glad of the result.
we had the first version of the forest graphics
the jazzy music and the forest music were almost done!
some of the animations of the Hero were done
the player was still a placeholder red square

It was good, but the whole dialog/mission system was not started at all. I panicked a little since I had only 2 days left to program it, for the 3 levels! Yeah we initially planned to make 3 levels.

Day 2

Got up at 7:30 and worked until 1am. This day was quite stressful for me, because I had to write a lot of code and dialogs while everyone asked me to integrate their assets into the game

What was the game progress after this second day?

The mission system was working, the first 2 missions were almost complete, the 3rd one was coded but there was no dialogs…
All the songs were almost finished and the voices were recorded and integrated into the game
We had all the animations for the Hero, almost all for the caterpillar. the second monster was in progress but not integrated
The day/night animation was functional!
The level 2 was barely started…

We decided to drop level 3 and focus on level 2 for the last day.

Day 3

Got up at 8:00 and worked until the final submission at 3am. What can I say about this day ? To my surprise, it wasn’t hell I mean less than my previous jam. We really focused on making things right instead of making a lot of stuff, so we had to cut a lot of features. I didn’t have time to write all the dialogs I wanted, and level 2 had only 2 missions (the first one has 3).

Around 23pm-00pm we stopped adding things and just polished the game. I finished writing all the dialogs while the artists made a lot of enhancement on the graphics.

A lot of testing and balancing were done too. Some missions were too easy, some were too hard, and we really didn’t want players to quit the game before the end because a mission was too difficult. I think it went pretty right.

What went right

This is my best jam so far, and I’m proud of it! Let me thanks everyone in the team for their incredible work: Pascal, Roxane, Louis and Victor! A few things went right:

The teamwork. It’s hard to define, but when everyone manage to work together efficiently, it is really motivating
The art, the music, the gameplay, the humor. I was very concerned that my dialogs were not funny enough and that people would just say “dude, that was a poor attempt to make something fun”.
The general polishing of the game. As I said before, we spent a lot of time testing and improving all the aspects of the game. It is a little short, but seems pro.
We had enough sleep and didn’t eat so much junk food (we even ate vegetables!)

What went wrong

As always during a game jam, you plan features but there’s never really enough time to implement all of them..
We used XNA to build the game, and it doesn’t come with an editor. Every time an artist wants to improve something, he had to ask me to add it in the game, and everyone lose time. Maybe next time we’ll go with Unity, but I’ll have to learn it first!

Conclusion

That was a long piece of text, hope it wasn’t boring :p To finish, here’s some statistics about our game.