Okaaaaay, so here we go. Having skipped the December Ludum Dare, the last time I took part was in August (I really quite liked my entry for that, go check it out).

As with last LD, I’ll be working in Ren’Py. I’m teaming up with my best friend Aryn, who’ll be handling the art (his blog’s here), and I’ll be your resident wordsmith and kinda-sorta coder.

This is also the first time I’m doing an art jam in person rather than over the internet. I got way too excited and dragged out every art book I have and set up a sleeping zone deep with blankets and pillows.

Since we’re in the UK, we powernapped leading up to 2am, when the theme went live. Immediately the whiteboard came out, and STRATEGIES MANIFESTED.

My handwriting is terrible.

Eventually we came up with the following:

• The story will be based around a detective (you) interrogating a witness to a murder (we’re very cheery people)
• The witness is pretty stunned and vaguely emotionless, but as you ask questions emotions will rise to the surface.
• The player has a way to read the emotions of the witness, which affect the outcome of questions asked.
• There will be a notable discord between tone of writing and aesthetic tone
• Secrets uncovered will be both of a traditional mystery and supernatural nature
• Uncovering certain secrets will get your higher-ups involved, which… you don’t want.

Right now we’re doing all the sensible preliminary steps. Off the cuff sketches, planning out what bits of code we might need, brewing cups of tea. A playlist of thematically appropriate music has been made.

It’s happening, people.

Thought Police is done! And is available to play right now!

Arguably ahead of schedule, although I goofed at the very last moment and managed to remove the art from the title screen. It’s been fixed quite quickly though.

I gotta admit, I was seriously not rooting for Beneath the Surface as a theme (funnily enough, I was most looking forward to getting Four Elements and doing a game about hip-hop). But when me and Aryn started brainstorming, we ended up naturally drifting towards digging up deep-seated emotions and uncovering corruption in organisations.

Thought Police ended up being both of those things pretty effectively. Details below the cut.

I’m the kind of person who always has consistent underlying themes in my work. Queerness, fashion, retrofuture. Stories about digging up feelings and subversive mysteries are great for my preferred themes.

Designing the emotion system feels, in retrospect, like it wasn’t that hard. Probably because the coding behind it was horribly basic and inefficient. Still, I put in a lot of effort to make the HUD for the emotions have some skeumorphism, complete with a lot of hunting for appropriate sound effects. I’d love to see what someone could do with it if they had some actual coding knowledge.

I am only, at best, a skilled writer. My coding skills are relatively untapped, and I am terrified of trying to employ my drawing ability into something I’d show to others.

So when it came to doing backgrounds, I cheated a hell of a lot. Lot’s of tracing, lots of photoshop tricks, a lot of being ‘intentionally off kilter but not really’. Some of it worked really well:

Some of it, especially my initial attempts, look like garbage:

Some are so cheap it’s actually kind of amusing to me now:

I guess the major lesson I’d give to others is that the punk approach works really well for visual novels, and interactive fiction in general: Anything you don’t know how to do, do anyway with reckless abandon and confidence. Make your inexperience the aesthetic, and go wild with it.

For Aryn, this jam was the first time he had needed to produce a large amount of artwork in a short period of time. For better or for worse he’s a bit of a perfectionist, and the hours he was putting in to each unique pose means that he ended up pulling an all-nighter to finish up the art, despite my protests.

He was absolutely incredible, turning my fashion suggestions into coherent pieces. Every character has an elaborate pattern or gradient in some way – I love it.

To give a rundown of the cast (Spoilers will follow):

Alexis Brambilla (Bram-BEE-ya) – Detective Inspector, unsmiling, gender ambiguous.

Having protagonists who aren’t the standard for game narratives is very important to me. It gives other people a chance to have a protagonist closer to their own demographic, and they’re more fun to write. Alexis’ design is based partly on Naoto from Persona 4, but over time, a sizeable amount of Phoenix Wright has crept in – probably because of the game’s emotion-reading mechanic. Now they no longer work for the police, they’d probably make a great Private Eye.

Anthony Gentry – Police Chief, silver fox, surprisingly evil.

Gentry’s design gave Aryn the most trouble. All those straight lines didn’t play nice with his inking technique, and drawing ancient runes on his tie and waistcoat got fiddly. Yep, ancient runes. That and the red eyes probably tips him off as evil (and the game as supernatural) pretty quickly. He was to actually grow horns in one cut of the script. Probably for the best that never manifested.

Jacek (YA-sek) Klimy – Gang minion, pyrokinetic, bundle of inferiority complexes

Jacek made for an interesting foil to Alexis. Even though he’s clearly an emotional person (angry to sad at the drop of a hat!) He’s also trying hard to keep his feeling suppressed – so it’s a surprise to him when Alexis can read him like a book! His relationship with Kayode will hopefully cause some thought. What we know about it is entirely from Jacek’s perspective, so how Kayode actually acts is unknown. Some may think this means their relationship may not be a romantic one, but too bad – they’ve definitely made out at least once.

Julienne Larbalestier – Vengeful, stylish, murderously soft grunge.

It’s maybe a shade cliché to have a French femme fatale, but she quickly became Aryn’s favourite character. Even if she was only on screen for fewer than 10 lines of dialogue. You totally wish you could pull off her look – we all do. Her powers of apportation were bestowed relatively late in the game’s design. Initially she just shanked a motherfucker. Mental resolve comes in all shapes and sizes.

Kayode Mitchell – Seer, dandy, filled with blood.

You thought this was going to be a character description, but it is I, DIO!

Hah, but for real, Kayode is built like an Olympian. A goddamn fabulous Olympian. Inspired in equal parts by Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Sapeurs, and a crippling sense of inferiority, Kayode is as much of a figure of awe for Jacek as he is a source of feelings of insignificance. Then again, the bigger they come, the lager the pool of blood they leave when lanced by a katana.

Okay, so now I’ve had a few days to mull the experience over and got a little feedback on Thought Police (Please go play it if you haven’t!), I feel prepared to go over the experience properly:

What Went Right

The planning stages

What we achieved out of the gate was pretty efficient, all told. A mixture of me and Aryn thinking alike, and having all the resources set up in the hours before meant we could quickly sit down, take out the whiteboard and marker, and come up with a plan. Because we had previously established that we’d work in Ren’Py, it was easy to say whether an idea would be simple or hard to implement with my level of coding knowledge.

Because Ren’Py is purely code-based, there’s no way to see the overarching structure of the story. So when planning the script, I used Twine to shape the story’s structure. This was an absolute godsend, as the story branches and rejoins multiple times. Eventually I just wrote straight to Ren’Py instead of pre-planning. That worked fine for a game this short, but I should definitely plan as I go when crafting more complex stories.

The character design process

Compelling characters are so, so important in anything narrative driven. I like to tell my stories in second person (so the player is put into the protagonist’s shoes, but the protag is their own person), and although that wasn’t the case for this game, it still made me place having a likeable player character quite high. Which, considering Alexis never really smiles, was maybe a challenge!

The moodboard used for Chief Gentry

Outfit design is equally important, I feel. Just like how you express your personality through what you wear, so do characters in fiction. Having a stage where we did mood boards of character body types and clothes (I have a tumblr where I archive clothes I like, so this was easier for me than most, possibly) made the art asset stage more driven, and gave me a better idea of character dialogue style.

The mood

We had initially planned to work around the idea of a black comedy. Aryn likes doing stories with heavy subject matter, where my stories are fluffier and less serious. The PSP/Vita game Dangan Ronpa informed a lot of design choices in this regard – it’s a very visually bright game about murder, with settings that utilise a lot of black and heavy gradients, and objects intentionally being off-kilter in proportions.

Cast Diversity

This went largely right. Because I’m a queer person of colour, having characters that identify with one or both of those things is both important to me, and something that I work in without too much effort. It’s a lot easier than some people claim it to be. I throw so much shade at those people. When a friend played the game, he felt the entire cast was queer in some way, which I have now decided is totally canon.

If I was to be super nitpicky, I would have has Alexis’ skintone a little more obviously Mediterranean, and another female-identifying character other than Julienne, but hey ho.

What Went Wrong

Proofreading, Proofreading, Proofreading.

I work in journalism as a career, and spelling mistakes are like loading a pistol and giving it to a five-year-old who hates your guts. It’s a bad idea, and no one who witnesses it will forget your poor actions for a while. In handling both the script and code, typos had different but equally severe negative effects.

In the time available I did my best to catch errors as I went, but in the final hours of the jam, Aryn had already left for home and was unable to help me proofread – and I was so tired, catching errors became harder and harder. Since uploading my work, I’ve found two typos – and I pray that I don’t find more. I have refrained from correcting them – it feels against the spirit of things.

In future jams, I will export my script as a .txt, and proof it that way, or better yet employ a second set of eyes to proof for me.

Scale and Asset Creation

Drawing sprites took a lot of time. While the end result was some absolutely immaculate character art, the inking process for a pose took up to three hours to produce.

For me, I sometimes ran into walls of coding issues, where the method of doing something I thought was simple became an hour of scrabbling through Ren’Py documentation, screaming inwardly.

While I did use Warmup Weekend to discover a few coding techniques (that I went on to use in the jam, no less), there were still things I didn’t think to research first. For the emotion system, although it all looks synched up and seamless when you play the game; the code behind it is pretty heavily jury-rigged and inefficient. Maybe there’s a way to reduce the lines of code needed for it, who knows.

Humour

This is something I didn’t really think about until we started getting feedback on the game (and I definitely appreciate the feedback). Some players said that the humour took away from the mood; which I can understand – but I just couldn’t bring myself to follow through on the heavier topics the game brings up.

I mean, police corruption is a pretty major and serious issue that my “Fuck the Police” Bad Ends don’t appropriately broach, nor would I ever intend them to. Alexis was initially written to straight up slap Jacek as a dialogue option, which I changed because that felt far too real. Kayode and Julienne get really cruel deaths if you stop to think about them, but that flashback is injected with extra melodrama to offset that. Jacek is an unreliable narrator, at that.

But maybe I was wrong for doing that. By using a lighter tone, it’s fair argument that I’m being trivialising. I could talk myself in circles about this – but so far no one has found the game problematic, which, considering the subject matter, I’m going to take with pride.

Final Thoughts

I’m super happy this all came together. I was a lot more ambitious in this game than my last, and it shows (A lot of people have said the story is surprisingly large for an LD game, and that makes me incredibly happy)! My next personal target is efficiency – know the ins and outs of Ren’Py a little better, schedule in proofreading time, and work out more efficient ways to get the assets together.

Thank you to everyone who has played the game so far! We love you.

Whoops I wanted to do this earlier, but at least I’m still timely.

I absolutely love mystery and crime-solving games. I was delighted when I realised the Below The Surface theme allowed me to make a mystery game of my very own; and during the voting process I was magnetically drawn to other games that eschewed ‘Surface’ as a physical location, and took it to more metaphorical places.

These five games are my favourite of those that I’ve come across, and I’ve awarded them all the It’s A Mystery Award!

Agent Thursday
Really solid noir interrogator. Is both closely tied to and cheerfully ribs the genre, with some amusing characters to grill for info.

Beneath the Surface (Spaceship Edition)*
Features a delicate balance between finding out about the true intentions of your space exploration crew and pissing them off (with fatal consequences). Incredibly solid atmosphere.

*Subtitle mine, for clarity’s sake.

They Beep.
Who’s the robot? Is they guy in the toilet a robot? Will you use your terrifying robot powers to increase company morale? Who the hell broke the photocopier again?!

Cases
A randomly-generated murder mystery system! I love logic puzzles like these – with enough detail for me to need to take notes, but not enough to have things feel obfuscated. The way characters are presented (and that the main character reminds me of Agent York from Deadly Premonition) are bonus points.

Sub Rosa
Gothic mystery! The atmosphere is thick and heavy, and the generated cases mixes things up. Could show some awesome potential with new clues and extra sound design.

Beneath The Surface: A detective story of video game conspiracies
Noir detectives meets video game meta humour. Definitely worth a play to see where it goes with its graphical style.

And, of course, there’s my wonderful and sexy neon-noir visual novel, Thought Police. Check it out, if you haven’t yet!

I’m sure there are many more awesome mystery games submitted that I’ve not seen, so if you know of any, please tell me in the comments – I’ll definitely check them out.

Nathan here. I just spent a pretty long time putting together the clickable map for Crisis Culture:

I’m teaching myself to use a graphics tablet at the same time, so while my cheesy-as-hell photomanipulations have definitely improved, I could have spent way less time on this.

Still, I’m quite happy with how parts turned out, and Visual Novels live and die by the amount of polish they get. Scripting-wise we’re still on target to finish on time, so I’m pretty hopeful.

HELL YEAH, WE’RE FINISHED

It took some desperate staring at code, some wild scribbles in Photoshop and communication over the Atlantic Ocean, but Crisis Culture is now finished!

It’s playable here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=26423

I look forward to playing other entries! (I personally really love playing other Visual Novels and Point ‘n’ Click games, so if you’ve made one of those please do let me know, I’ll be all over that business.

Good luck in the ratings, darlings. <3

Okay, I’ve let this sit for a while, and I think I’m ready to unpack how this jam (and my entry, which you can play here) went.

What went right:

Execution of style

When we decided the plot of the game (which I’ll talk about later), it didn’t really take much discussion to find out how we wanted the game to look. Our pixel artist, Gordon, has a very distinct, angular, heavily-stylised look to his illustrations, perfect for a game that is heavily about style and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

The artwork I produced for the game was a bunch of photomontages. For a game about bringing separate realms together, I liked the idea of my pieces being all kinds of stock photos smashed together and those montages juxtaposed against much cleaner and precise pixel art.

The hexagon motif kind of just… emerged. It started when I made the graphic for the item window, which was initially square until I started using that rad hexagon font for the text. And soon it was everywhere. Even Akachi’s wallpaper at his house is made of hexagons!

More of this post under the cut.

Coding aims

This is the most complicated Visual Novel I’ve coded yet. While a lot of people who played said that the game is rather simple (or at least straightforward), the inner workings was actually a lot of new territory for me.

After my last game, Thought Police, I wanted to learn more efficient code than the hackjob I did to get some parts of that game working, and new concepts, like map screens and inventory.

The inventory ended up being a hyper-simple system designed to only hold one item at a time, and the map screen had no sound effects, but they were a solid start that I can build on in the future.

What went wrong:

Time management

This is partly unavoidable circumstance, partly my fault. Because our artist was overseas, communication was entirely limited to when we were both online – and even then our connection wasn’t great (and that lead to us not having all the graphics ready for the official Jam entry).

On my side, I actually took a large chunk of Sunday off to entertain guests, which I could have used to do much more complex pathing. One idea was to have the conversations with each character have their own branches, that increased/decreased relationship values. And then at the end of the game, that would dictate what ending you get.

As things stand, conversations don’t branch (although the characters all have something new to say if you ask them the same question twice), and you just choose the ending you want. That kind of downsizing is definitely not unusual for Ludum Dare, but I was pretty bummed out over not making that system work.

Minority factor

I make a (rather strong) point of having characters in things I write be diverse – mostly because that’s the only way I can see people of colour and people of different sexualities/genders in my gaming at the moment.

We, uh, sort of managed that. Manuel is the character that I had the most involvement in designing and writing, and people who know me well could probably tell that easily.

That rad dress-suit is by Jean Paul Gaultier, by the way.

He’s the only character who even vaguely flirts with the (gender ambiguous but with a West African name) main character (and since the dialogue is linear, Akachi reciprocates). But it could also easily be misinterpreted as being platonic, and I ain’t really about ‘will-they-won’t-they’ romances.

On the other hand, we got a good mix of genders and races up in there, so I can’t be too hard on myself.

Plot concept

Okay, that’s harsh, the plot worked out pretty damn well. But I can’t help but be a little mad at myself for making a game about space. After turning my nose up a little about all the underwater/underground games in the Beneath The Surface jam last time, I figured I could do better than that. The plot was also decided upon three-ways, which is not a problem inherently (with a team size so small it would be shitty if someone didn’t get a say!) but it meant that a lot of ideas were more neutral that I would have liked, or sounded like they’d be a nightmare to work in properly.

As you might guess if you’ve played the game, the GALAXY CAT is one of those latter things. I think it was at the point we had that in the game, I decided to write the game in a SCUMMVM/LucasArts way. Ridiculous and off-beat with no fail state. A rollercoaster ride more than a hedge maze. This gave the game a very unique tone (which I’m definitely happy with), but I’m a little sad that I didn’t get to write something more intimate and personal.

Oh, and typos. Typos are the bane of my life. (And because there’s a lot of incidental and hidden dialogue, some parts were consistently skipped over. Shit.)

Future goals:

I always can push my skills in Ren’Py further. I do recognise that most other LDers tend to diversify in the platform and genre they work in, but I’m the kind of person who likes to hone a single skill (and I never want to have to deal with things like collision detection because hahahafuck that.). I’d like to make a more complex inventory system, and maybe a beastiary-style menu.

I got a tablet for this LD, with the intention of doing more in the way of digital art. It really helped make the photomontages better and faster to produce, but that’s about all I did with it – I shall have a more hands-on approach to drawing next time.

I want to learn how to use a basic music program, too. Kevin MacLeod has saved my bacon for three games in a row, and it’s time that changed. I’ve heard that Famitracker… exists, and that Frooty Loops is good for arranging building blocks of riffs like that old PS1 game, Music, but other than that I dunno what would be a good fit for a not-especially-musically-trained beginner.

Tags: post-mortem