Hey everyone, I just finished. Please check out my game and rate!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/bubbles-n-blood

So my overall rank is 940th-ish and I was just wondering if I made my goal to be in the top 50%.

Does anyone know how many games were submitted for LD45? And how many of those got ranked?

Before starting LD49, I knew I wanted to attempt to make a mini RPG with retro graphics and music at some point in a game jam. When the theme was announced, I got the idea to make a turn based game in the style of Ultima 4-5. As it’s a game jam game, I thought that having a counter where each turn brings you closer to the goal (or to death) would be appropriate.

After an initial first day of creating the sprites using the aptly named Sprite Creator app on my phone during work breaks, I got Unity started and was ready to create a quick and easy procedural maze generator.

PROCEDURALLY GENERATED LEVELS

….it wasn’t quick nor easy. Using a crawler maze algorithm is simple enough until you realize that randomness does not always equal good results. As a matter of fact, most generated levels sucked. I quickly realized that forcing the player to start at 0 on the y axis, and the level exit to be on the very top produced the best results in terms of level layout.. And prevented the Diablo 1 problem where the exit could be spawned right next to the player start. Once that was sorted out, it was fun implementing the three enemy spawn rates based on the level number, so there is an increase in difficulty, and also the ability point power up spawn, based on the player’s Karma stat. After this, I was excited for the next day, when I would work on a quick and simple battle system.

MAKING A BATTLE SYSTEM

….it wasn’t quick nor simple. I knew that I wanted Strength to be directly related to melee damage, but wanted the player to have a base minimum damage, where Karma also played a factor. I knew that I wanted Accuracy to impact chance to hit or miss as well as chance to avoid enemy hits. Getting all those things to work in concert in any kind of balanced way was a bit of a challenge. There were plans for ranged weapons too, but that would have complicated the system a lot more. The only way to increase Karma is to win battles, and Karma actually affects the monster “drops”. So that was another balancing issue. I realized that even in a scaled down RPG like this, all the intertwined systems and numbers can be challenging. The plan was that enemy encounters lock the player in battle mode, but then there would be options to evade enemies. Unfortunately, time constraints and various annoying bugs made that feature a challenge and decided to put that and ranged weapons on hold for now. But it works! And there is that feeling in the game RPGs I like have where you start really weak and by the end you feel very overpowered. Next, there had to be a win/lose condition and some sort of game loop. This is when I decided to quickly turn it into a lightweight Roguelike.

MAKING A GAME LOOP

….except it wasn’t quick. The hardest part really was how much should the death penalty be. My initial try was to have the player lose some Karma, and start over, but keep all the other stats intact upon revival. That wasn’t great, because growing Karma is vital to overall character growth, and that penalty slowed the entire process down. So the only death penalty is having to go back to Level 1. Which works well, because since levels are randomly generated, there is virtually no backtracking. And you have that feeling of power mowing down easier enemies and getting even stronger. The other challenge was figuring out when the game should end. After testing a bit, I came up with the arbitrary number Level 17, as with the current content, it starts feeling very repetitive after that. Calculating the number of turns before the reactor explodes, which is the countdown that persists throughout the game, was a neat experiment too. Just figuring out the average number of turns a player would spend in any given level * 17 + a bit of extra turns as padding. After all this, it was time to quickly make a music track and some sound FX.

MUSIC AND SOUND

….and this actually was quick, because I’m a composer and audio producer as my day job. I used the GENNY synth, which emulates the Sega Genesis sound chip. As my DAW of choice, I always use Reaper when possible. Sound effects created using BFXR. All of this was done in the last 45 mins before submission deadline.

BIGGEST CHALLENGE

Making the game was challenging, but fun and rewarding. What wasn’t fun is not being able to get the HTML build to work. The Unity WebGL player would crash every time after the intro cutscene, spitting out a JS error which means nothing to me. Google was not able to help much with it either. I look forward to the day when HTML builds would just always work , maybe with one-click build and publish to itch from within the editor.

CONCLUSION

Thank you very much for reading if you made it this far. Hope you get a chance to try my game. It was a great learning experience, with a pretty fun LD theme, and I’m now a better game dev for it. Please feel to comment with any thoughts and advice, and I will definitely try out the games of anyone who comments.

If anyone still wants to play and rate The Niland Project. Will try to play a few more danger games too before the deadline.