https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVl0f4VTz9U

I've been participating in the Ludum Dare since the 39th edition. With one Jam entry, one time when I had unfortunately given up on my work and two Compo entries - this is the second time I do it and the first time I do record my work, which is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time.

My last compo game, Dream Roamers, was kind of an improvisational game. It had a procedural generation system... which was a pretty big hack itself, but you know, the CPU is technically a rock that we tricked into thinking, so why worry about some minor hacks? Anyway, the game I released was an ode to the likes of The Binding Of Isaac and Monolith, which presumably I'd be able to execute better than my platformer for the Ludum Dare 39, Burning Low, which was... not very satisfying from my part.

But this time, I took another shot at the platformer style, and this post will try to explain what went through my head while I was doing what you see above in the video.

• First steps

It started with a little brainstorm I had while I was at the bus coming home. Running out of space... why not outer space? Why not make an alien race take over all the planets known to them and have nothing more to explore, and dig a portal to a parallel dimension? So, what are they going to find there? Cthulhu? Or... pans and blenders and food mixers? One thing I like about the idea of brainstorming is that sometimes, "why?" isn't the right question to be asked. Try "why not?" instead, and if you can't come up with a good answer to that, well, you're on the right track.

So I got home, what was the plan, if there's any? Build the player character, the jump mechanics, try to make sure the jump isn't too floaty because that's definitely a problem for me... worry about the art later. Making the graphics is what I hate the most. As for the mechanics, the intention was to create something that resembles Metal Slug or Cuphead (which is a game that I've been playing lately and it's fantastic). Shoot and run. For someone that's spending the day playing >20 jam games, simple mechanics are better.

So, number 1: don't ask why, ask why not. Number 2: always think of the player experience, it's them who are going to tell if the game is good or not.

• The enemies

My first idea for an enemy was the food mixer. The god damn food mixer... it may not seem so in the video because the time span is too short, but it was a hell of a hard thing to draw. Those metal parts... ugh. You never know how hard it is to draw a food mixer until you actually go and try to do it. In the end, it was a little bit crooked, but that did it.

From this point on, I started making the art before the mechanics of the enemies themselves, because you know, what can be worse than the freaking food mixer? The blender was pretty easy, and all it did was throw pieces of food randomly up (which later proved to be pretty OP and I had to nerf it after some player feedback). The pan was something that I did before, all it does is throw bullets at the player.

• Level design

That's when Godot came in big into play. Designing a level using the TileMap node isn't just easy, but it's just... pleasing. You're able to literally paint your way through the level, and it all went well. The Light2D added some pretty good effects (as there were many of them in convenient places, they became checkpoints for the level later). One little "game over" screen sending the player to their last checkpoint and we were good to go. Time for my favorite part of the development:

• The music

Even when I'm sleep deprived and tired of looking at Godot's editor all day, composing music brings me to a whole new level of joy. There is something about finding a good chord progression and making a melody over it which makes it all worth it. And this time, I decide to go for what's been the most successful in my past games, the metal-like piano/organ melodies. One song for the intro part and another for the level were just enough. I had planned to make a different song for the boss fight, but 48 hours isn't a lot of time and I didn't want to strain myself too much.

Between the songs, I was able to get an incredible amount of 6 hours of sleep!

• The intro and a surprise boss battle

Ok, I thought the idea to deliberately omit the skip button for my 45-second intro and joke about it would be well accepted by the players as an expression of good humor and art. It turns out, people hated it. What can I do? You win some, you lose some. Also only one person seemed to get that sneaky Borderlands 2 reference. Sigh... still, a little animation and a pixelated planets background made it all prettier and we were good to go.

That was when I realized I actually had plenty of time left, which is something that doesn't usually happen at the compo. So again, why not add a toaster which rolls at the player and bounces and throws slices of breads and... I was pretty heated, so everything went better than expected.

• Final thoughts

I may not have delivered a game as good as my project had promised, maybe because of technical issues or because I deliberately made bad decisions. But that happens to just about everyone, and either from our own experience or reading player feedback, we're all learning. Today I released a post-compo edition solving issues that I saw players complaining about the most (the skip button, checkpoints that got you stuck into walls, etc.), and it might still get some more updates, depending on how much free time I have left.

But after all, as I said, it's the players who decide if the game is good or not. So, let the ratings speak for themselves, and I hope I make it to the top 100 games again. For everyone reading this, I hope I'm able to give you a good time with my game, and I'm looking forward to see more of what you have to show.

Lately, I've been playing a lot of mystery and detective games. My gateway drug was the Danganronpa series, which I already fell in love with at my first Class Trial. I'm already a sucker for good character design, even if the characters' personalities seem a little bit over the top (and if you played DR: Trigger Happy Havoc, you've got to agree with me on that), but the trials were when the game shines the most: the animated next, presentation, the expressions, plot twist after plot twist. I can't overstate how hooked I was.

Ever since, as a long time game jammer, I was waiting for the opportunity to make my own detective adventure. This compo was when I finally gave a shot at detective games, but with my own twists.

Why "Bloody Baron"?

The general setting of the game is a kingdom where a political assassination has happened. And pretty much all the possibilities point to someone who's a noble. The king, very upset, decides to lock out all the suspects in a building with no escape, until the killer themselves is executed.

Therefore, Bloody Baron alludes to one of the most famous serial killers in history, the Bloody Baron of Brittany.

The game design

My main inspiration for this game was Werewolf/Mafia, a party game that is the bane of my existence, because I love it so much, yet I'm absolutely terrible at it.

Detective games are complex. There must be a mystery and it must be engaging. There must be barriers towards solving this mystery, but they shouldn't be too overwhelming. There must be a motivation to do it. When it comes to Danganronpa, the motivation is pretty clear, you want to survive. And that's true, in general, the most basic motives are the ones the player is most likely to go with.

Because I already needed to handle this complexity, I decided to put everything else out of the way. Literally. Everything else.

And that's when the idea of text adventure came to mind. I had played some good ones in the past and wondered, this could work.

Some concepts were borrowed from the DR design, indeed, like the nighttime. The nighttime is supposed to make you approach it in a different way, you can't always be as careless, but maybe, exploring during nighttime could give you important hints to whom the killer is!

As for procedural generation, I'm no stranger to it. I attempted it at my first compo entry, Dream Roamers, in 2017, with a fairly good result. It can get cheeky to promote your game on the premise of procedural generation, though, even when it's something like generating the map, so we can put that aside, and focus on what the game needs to be: an exciting and dangerous mystery.

Character designs

I'm a big fan of the guideline "show, don't tell". So instead of going with a huge lore dump at the start, the plan was to give the player the pieces to glue together and find out the story behind Bloody Baron. Even though that was the plan, showing and not telling is sometimes not as easy as it sounds.

Characters were designed on the run. Even if I'm kinda proud of my work, it could've gone so much better. Many of them had potential and were underdeveloped simply because I ran out of time. Chio, as a war criminal, should be the prime suspect right off the bat, but maybe he isn't really the murderer. But I couldn't get that across simply because time ran out and I had to ship the compo entry without anything on his description. Same for Odette, and Larissa, which were characters I was proud of designing but the players probably won't see them shine for what they are.

Since this is a game by me, catgirls are necessary. Luna, the catgirl, was actually the first character that came to mind, as some kind of comic relief to the whole situation.

I can't help but make lore and characters for my jam entries, and that has thrown me on the dirt, too many times. It happened in the Ludum Dare before, it happened in the GMTK game jam this year (yes, there were catgirls there too) and it will happen again.

Finishing the game at the very last hour, and the first feedback I got.

This game had plenty of breaking bugs when I first submitted it. You couldn't reach nighttime without the main thread panicking. Inserting out of bounds input caused the IO to hang indefinitely. Voting in the trials had a chance to crash. Those were the first things I've heard from players, and frankly, after spending my weekend locked down in my room doing one thing and barely leaving to go to the bathroom, it is just a little bit disappointing.

The process of bouncing back was mainly using debuggers and trackers and finally doing some play testing, which I didn't do much before. After I tightened up some screws, people actually seemed to like the game. I got a lot of positive comments after that.

About Among Us and my other inspirations

Among Us was definitely a factor in building the hype for my game. I can't really say it was a direct influence, because I never really played Among Us. Even then, I always liked the concept, and have been looking forward to give it a go for some time.

While Among Us and Werewolf were so much about the mind games between people, and Danganronpa is about concrete clues that the murderer lefts behind when committing a murder, the intention of my game was to be about logical thinking and building trust among the people that are there locked with you. I can say for certain that all of these games played a part in my decision to make this entry, but they aren't the same as my entry. I feel like I succeeded in making something that bears its own flavor.

TL:DR, and advice for new jammers

In general, I managed to make a game that had an interesting concept, and people will agree that it was fun indeed, but was buggy as hell at first. What I learned with that was to spare more time to play testing. It's just as important as polishing.

As for the things I got right, I think my choice to remove everything out of my way and make a text adventure so I could focus on building the mystery was definitely a factor. So, it's not always about making the scope simple, but picking your fights. And don't pick them all, or you're gonna get smashed.