This is my second Ludum Dare, and I was fortunate to work with the same great team for both projects. I’m usually on the sidelines of game creation, offering insight or assets or emotional support, and I have greatly enjoyed using Ludum Dare as an excuse to be a bigger part of the project.

We’d be honored if you would give our game a try, and Leave a Comment in our Itch.io board.

The Before:

The last entry we did, back in LD 33, fell apart pretty spectacularly. Despite a reasonable scope and a team that quickly learned the ropes, we were foiled by AutoTileGen not playing nicely with Unity. We were determined not to fall to the same fate again. While our programmer spent the whole week before the Jam getting his workspace in tip-top shape, I spent most of the time reflecting on what worked well before so we could emulate it. Most of that work ended up being handling logistics of where everyone could work and what everyone would eat, de-cluttering the house, and making sure there was enough soda and coffee to keep everyone going. Ah, the glorious unsung hero of a game jam: the coffee gopher.

As a side note, if you’ve never had the pleasure of doing a game jam in the same room as your team mates for the full 72 hours, I highly recommend it. There’s a certain magic to the manic, sleep deprived comradery that evolves as each person goes slowly insane. No seriously, it’s a good thing.

The Jam:

Early on, we divided jobs for the team. Programmer, Artist, Game Designer, and Producer/Audio/Graphic Design/Writer/Supporting Artist. Guess which one I was?

My first third of the time in the Jam was spent working with our Designer on the board game prototype, making sure we had documentation for everything, and getting copies of that to our Artist and Programmer so we all had priorities straight (and I also made sure everyone was remembering to eat).

We finally got a beautiful design document hammered out, and it was time to work. I still feel strongly that this is where things started to go off the rails. A producer can’t be a producer the moment they take on another job, and my Saturday Night through Sunday was taken up by Audio work, writing, and mock-ups for the UI. I lost track of an artist designing beautiful but overly-ambitious 34-frame animations and a programmer who got caught up in procedural generation for two days.

At least I'm very proud of the music that came of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuQR-zoQkA0

By the end of the jam, I felt powerless. We managed to cut our assets down to a reasonably achievable level and had the art finished by the end of Sunday Night. With only one person in charge of implementation, all we could do was wait on Monday.

The bottleneck that formed caused a lot of the game to suffer. The UI couldn’t be tested until we had a minimum viable product to move in. Errors in the Audio Loops weren’t caught until the 11th hour. The design document was full of so much red ink by the end cutting out features to the bare minimum, I was afraid all the heart of the game would be gone.

It’s difficult being the overseer of a project. Each team members’ frustrations have to go through you. You gain an acute appreciation for where things are breaking down. By the end of the game Jam, I felt that we had failed—that I had failed.

If our workflow had been streamlined better, if more team members could take charge of their own implementation to speed things up on the programmer’s end, if we hadn’t had three team members idle for most of the final day----If, if, if…

Our last Game Jam entry failed because of an outside piece of technology. I felt Atlantis had failed due to our own inability to coordinate. I was so depressed that I didn’t notice our game compiled on the first try. I didn’t notice that we had a submission ready to go before the submission hour was half over. Our team post-mortem was somber. We all agreed where the weaknesses were and why.

I still feel very personally responsible for all that is weak in the game. The UI is a disaster, and was my responsibility. The sound effects weren’t properly balanced. A large number of assets created by the rest of the team ended up on the cutting room floor because I had to decide what to prioritize when we hit 3 hours to submission. I wasn’t prepared to wear as many hats as I had to, and my inexperience putting all the pieces that make a game together showed.

The After:

Oh boy Nelly, was I unprepared for what happened after the Jam.

As I mentioned earlier, our last LD attempt was barely playable. Technology integration errors were our downfall, so none of us really participated in the voting and commenting on other games. With a heavy heart, we submitted what little we could cobble together, and walked away.

This time, our programmer decided he wanted to prove to the rest of us that we should be really proud of what we’d made, even if it didn’t meet our expectations. As @OccultSoftworks has embarked on an insane journey of live-streaming, analysis, and word clouds, I found that the job of the Many-Hats continues long after the game is over.

This has been a crash course for me in the difficulties of the Producer. I’ve had to make decisions about what markers do we need to hit to finish the game for release, how many hours is it reasonable to devote to marketing, networking, social media, and our own game updates, and what to prioritize in those updates based on the wild and varied schedules of our team, no longer conveniently stationed 20 feet from each other.

In case you were wondering, we’ve decided to finish Atlantis. This weekend, after the dust has settled, I’ll be sitting down to take another crack at the UI and try to redeem myself as a graphic artist.

Good luck to everyone in the final push to the end! Even if you’re not happy with your end product, be proud of your work. We can learn a lot from failing.

Game Description

Genres mixed: Fishing/Fish Simulator + Horror

Premise: Don’t get caught by the net and become dinner.

What Went Well?

1. First Jam in 3D - This is our 3rd game jam as a team, and all our previous games used pixel art exclusively. We’ve only started doing 3D work in the past year, and the team turned out some amazing graphics.
2. Ambiance - The tank is suitably unsettling to exist in, and sits right where I wanted it between “oddly calming” and “indie horror” while the danger net is not in play. When the net DOES come down, it’s a wonderfully terrifying experience. Having our lead programmer dedicate a whole day to lighting and Shaders was well worth it.
3. Scope - I think we started with a really good appreciation for exactly how much we could get done. We knew going in that the team was losing almost all of Monday, that our Game Designer had a real job that needed attention throughout the weekend, and planned in advance to make this a more leisurely jam than our previous two. This was especially evident when, five hours to go, we had a brief talk of “Okay, so right now we have a really awesome horror tank simulator. Do we have time to make it a game? If not, that’s okay.”
4. Teamwork & Pipeline - At the end of the last two jams, our team was almost not friends anymore from the stress and panic. We tried to take ourselves less seriously this time, and it was well worth it. The last hour was full of cooperative handing of scripts and image files back and forth, rather than quiet resentment and waiting for the programmer to finish implementation of something we knew was a little broken. I think a lot of that is thanks to ensuring that every member had access to the Unity Build from the very beginning, rather than segregating our art team to pass assets to the Programmer to implement. Each jam we’ve done has helped our members individually refine their crafts, but I felt like this go-round we refined our pipeline, and got some much needed practice interfacing with other people.
5. Audio - I’m going to toot my own horn here. This was my first game where I really got to focus on sound design, and the sound came out perfect. I’ve watched several people’s faces pass through exactly the emotions I intended from ‘happy swimming’ to ‘what was that!?’ to ‘OH GOD IT’S RIGHT BEHIND ME’ https://youtu.be/iiIUhd8TzUk

What Didn’t Go Well?

1. The “Game” part of the game - At 5 hours to jam end, we had a really pretty fish tank, a character controller that didn’t suck, and fish that milled about on their own. There were paper pads of design notes for making it actually a game, but none of the scripting had been touched, largely due to our Game Designer needing to be on hand for other real-life issues. I’m still really proud of what we put out, knowing that it was closer to a 50 hour jam for us, but I also know that the “game” part never got implemented. There was supposed to be a fish food mechanic that drove the player to go explore the tank, to give you a marker of success, and a more dynamic interaction with fleeing the net.
2. Occupying our 2D artist - We have a wonderfully talented dedicated 2D sprite artist on our team. She painted some lovely textures for our fish and models, but all of her work relied on someone else having something finished to have her paint. I think this was the biggest hiccup in our pipeline, which I think is a vote in our favor.
3. Animations are hard - We had this fantastic cut scene planned with a beautiful soundscape, some delightfully horrific graphics, and a whole room for the Kitchen that would play when you are taken from the tank. No one on the team has done work like this before, and the whole thing had to get chopped (hah).
4. Audio Implementation - This is a personal frustration. Since our last Jam, I’ve spent some time trying to learn Unity and light scripting. While I’ve improved leaps and bounds, it wasn’t quite enough to be able to take control of managing and playing the sound effects I lovingly crafted. It meant I had to write detailed instructions to pass to our two programmers, and just... hope it came out well. I can’t play the game without being disappointed at the attack of a Sound Stab, or the balance of a bubble ambiance, or the too-abrupt-fade of a tension ring, or the failure of the damned bubble track to cut when the cleaver comes down. Our programmers did AMAZING work, and my audio nit-picks were so not the priority of the last hour, but I’m frustrated that I wasn’t able to make sure my work was well executed in the final product. Something for me to work on for next time.
5. Post-Mortems are Hard - No, seriously. I had a hard time populating “what went wrong”.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m really proud of the lovely terrible thing we created. This jam experience left me re-energized and ready to leap back in and make another, rather than burned and disappointed. I couldn’t be more proud of how far my team has come since our last entry. After the team gets a chance to sit and discuss what we can do better as a whole next time, I think I’ll make another of these posts revisiting my LD38: Atlantis postmortem.

I’m still sad some of our more off-the-wall concepts didn’t quite make it in. Evil Fish was my favorite character:

Play Our Game!

Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/off-the-hook