This was the first time that my team was participating, and our GARDEN ROYALE got really positive reviews (thank all of you for that!), so I'll write a couple of articles to highlight some of the learnings we got. You can check it here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/garden-royale

We are aware that the game is lacking on several elements (bulky shooting mechanics, lack of sound…), but some of the info might be interesting to someone. So gere we go:

GAME DESIGN

The very first thing was to brainstorm an overall idea that would guide us through the creation process. We quickly agreed the game was going to be a Battle Royale with a twist:

Instead of just killing others, you would’ve to loot their bases (“gardens”), which would introduce a constant dichotomy between going out for loot and staying nearby to defend your possessions.

The very first question arose: SHOULD WE MAKE THE GAME REAL MULTIPLAYER?

From a technical POV, we were a very strong team and I’m sure we would’ve been able to pull it out, but there were two main problems which ultimately made us choose to just put bots.

The first of the issues was user concurrency, since without a significant amount of players at the same time the matchmaking would’ve been very problematic and take ages. This ultimately would’ve made that you played in rooms full of bots anyway so… why bother about the multiplayer at all?

The second point, was that MP would’ve been hard to reconcile with what I call our “alive game design” paradigm.

WHAT IS "ALIVE GAME DESIGN"?

The classic videogame creation structure relies on the designer thinking the entire game and then the programmer coding it, the artist puts the graphics and that’s it. Most of our most beloved titles of our childhood have been created this way, and it is a great way to create a game fast.

Unfortunately, this model is also a very risky, since by the end of the process you may realize the game is actually not very fun, or something just made sense on the head of the designer. "Alive game design" is the contrary of that.

"Alive game design" means that whenever possible I try to keep the design of my games deliverately soft, and rely on intensive and constant playtesting through the entire process: The critical part of the design is made during the actual phase of gameplay implementation, since that's the moment where you better understand the value or limitations of your mechanics. This allows to pivot fast if at any point the fun is lost, or some of the rules start to lose sense or complexify the game without adding any fun. Fun is the ultimate objective.

Our first iteration of the game was quite complex, as you can see on this core loop. It sure looks cool on paper:

But we quickly realized that the entire layer of managing and customizing your garden wasn’t very fun… you were more worried about the bots stealing your precious water than your plants being arranged making beautiful drawings. Cut.

In order for a weapon purchase system to make sense, matches had to be quite long, and we felt that the people playing games on a jam would prefer a faster product that you could enjoy in 1-2 minutes, rather than a longer experience that – while maybe more rewarding and strategic in the end – would require a bigger time investment.

Finally, the moments where the game was most fun were when a player stole from another the last drop of water and got the last one eliminated, and when you were desperately looking for resources as you were about to be eliminated. Shorter matches based on survival reinforced those moments and made them appear more often than a model based on collecting score (“honey”).

So it evolved into this, which doesn’t look as exciting but – trust us – it’s way more fun:

LEVEL DESIGN

Since you’re all seasoned players, you know that half of the fun on battle royales is to have complex scenarios that you need to learn and master (master where are the best points to hide, to get resources, etc). You know the drill:

Unfortunately, these kind of scenario shapes were uncompatible with the idea of making the game about bases: if the map wasn’t symmetric, then some players would’ve advantage over others. Our first iteration of the map looked like this:

But, again, after testing we saw that this limited a lot the interaction between players, and it wasn’t incentivizing too much stealing water between bases. Instead, players were mostly going to the central pool, stock up water and then defend like hell.

So that early pick was deciding who would win at the end. Not very exciting and few moments of "DAAAMN!! THAT GUY STOLE MY WATER!!". So we made this instead:

Which, while not very fair for the guy on the middle (the human player), it increased the chances of meaningful interactions happening with him.

The last thing that we added, and which created the current "stealth-based" meta, was tons and tons of foliage. At the beginning, the game was like this:

Being able to see enemies from that far away made easy for the player to locate enemy bases... but also made it easy for him to successfully plan a defense, and avoid the risk-reward mechanic by looting enemy bases only when he was sure that his base was not in danger.

Adding foliage created a more confusing situation, and ultimately made the player become more cautious.

Sadly it also meant that there are a lot of "surprise" kills because the AI is fairly good at detecting you, sometimes without letting you know until it's too late and you're already dead.

A kill cam or replay is a common technique used in FPS to show that, but it never made it on time.

I hope you had as much fun reading this article as I had writing it! If you did, please give it some love and check out GARDEN ROYALE (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/garden-royale).

It would be great also to have feedback on the article itself, since I want to get better at writing so that I can start a blog on my experiences in game creation : )

Salut! @JBDev, Nyameh and Tebayoso.

This is the second part of a series or posts based on our project GARDEN ROYALE, which got a bunch of positive reviews (many thanks!). You can read the previous article here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/garden-royale/garden-royale-making-off-part-1

And play and rate the game on this link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/garden-royale

On this particular article, I will explation the technique I use for creating the GARDEN ROYALE graphics, which hopefully can help you to accelerate when doing of pixel art or placeholder visuals for your games.

MY TECHNIQUE: PIXEL COLLAGE

The core of the technique can be summarized as "creating a photographic collage, and then pixelizing it through a filter".

Since this methodology skips a lot of work of drawing and coloring, it allows create graphics really fast and it allows to get a passable quality even if you have low art skills (like me: I can't draw...).

The main handicaps is that it's a bit limited on what you can achieve, specially if you don't want to invest tons of time.

Usually, I divide the creation of an asset in 3 stages: COLLAGE, FILTERING AND CLEANUP.

STEP 1: COLLAGE

Usually, photo editing tends to take a lot of time and you've to be quite skilled at it to avoid it looking fake.

Fortunately, since the collage is going to go through an agressive process of loss of quality, you can get away with really bad photo collages, as long as the shapes are clearly readable.

As an example of what kind of things you can pull of, check how I just pasted a blanket on top of a picture of an abandoned hospital near my city... and it kind of worked:

Another example: a picture of a dragon toy, a photo from a friend on a medieval recreation and a shutterstock background... and you've got a very basic set of rpg assets in less than 15 minutes:

STEP 2: PIXELIZATION

There is a wide range of commercial and freeware tools that you can use transform your pictures to pixel art, though I personally recommend Pixelator (http://pixelatorapp.com/) and PixaTool (https://kronbits.itch.io/pixatool).

In my own experience, Pixelator is way faster to get results of a decent quality. On the other hand, PixaTools has a bigger amount of customization options and you can get some amazing results as well if you spend some time, even though I've never been able to make them feel as any other thing than pixelated photos.

On both tools, you will want to focus primarily on the pixelization factor and amount of colors in the palette, which will determine how big the pixels will be, and how much chromatic info will be removed.

Some best practices I've found while using these tools are:

---> Use the same parameter presets for all pictures of the same kind, so they look of a similar style. I usually create one configuration for the characters, another for objects, and another for backgrounds.

---> For characters and items, I find that a black outline improves a lot the overall readability.

---> If you are going to do multiple variations of the same element (i.e. animations, facial expressions) save the palette so the program doesn't start modifying the colors.

---> These filters manage really bad pictures that have small elements with a very different color. you can break that picture down in several pictures, and then later patch them together.

---> In my humble opinnion, anything with more than ~40 colors on the palette starts to look like an edited photo rather than pixel art.

Here's some examples (on Pixelator), so you see what I'm talking about:

STEP 3: CLEAN UP

Manually reviewing the assets and polishing them is the most repetitive and time-consuming part of the entire process, but the only way to make those low quality abominations become truly unique and appealing, and remove any trace of them looking like a photo.

I've found it's particularly hard to obtain quality character faces without spending quite some time on this stage, but if you do it they really get personality. (Original pics from shutterstock):

Another cool thing that can be achieved, is that you can generate sprites that look similar to famous or recognizable characters. A satiric magazine wanted to do a boxing minigame about a famous politician from my country... so I granted them their wish:

I hope this has been helpful for you. Let me know if you experiment with this technique or if you have advices on how I could get the same (or better) results faster.

Salut!

@JBDev, Nyameh and Tebayoso.