I've been meaning to participate in one for a long time, just decided it will be this one. Using Unity (C#), Paint.NET for graphics and Bfxr for sounds.

Hi everyone! We decided to talk a little bit about our LD40 game, how was the experience, and what we want to make for the future.

We're a group of 3 people. @jpiolho, @grlira (Programmers) and @SaraFilipa (Artist), with the exception of @jpiolho it was our first Ludum Dare, but first time in a group for all of us. We just woke up Saturday morning and while we had breakfast we just threw silly ideas around, I don't exactly recall how it was but we ended up deciding about an old lady having too many cats. Having cats is nice but as you have more, the more you have to do clean up and take care of them. Early on we decided that the cats would be pooping and peeing around the house and we'd need to clean up after them and later we came up with the idea of having friends coming over for tea parties.

Screen from early in development

There wasn't much game design involved as none of us are good with that sort of thing so the game just kind of evolved as we added more and more things. One of the first challenges was to decide how we'd make the movement style, we ended up going with free look without being tied to a top-down grid like movement. This wasn't so easy as we didn't really know how to do it make feel good in Unity but in the end we got something we were happy with. The lack of game design was a problem, especially when it comes to the losing condition, we only thought about it at the last day and it had to be put in a bit at the last hour. Making the game was a bit like assembling a puzzle, initially it didn't look like much but once we started adding graphics, especially the house, it suddenly started making sense and looking really good for us.

We thought big and we didn't have time to add all the features that we wanted to. These include things like cat pee, upgrades with prestige, a bigger house, more types of cats and old ladies.

Our artist wanted to say a few words about creating the art for this game.

@SaraFilipa Regarding the process of creating the art for this game, this was my first time making (and animating) pixel art, even though I had previous experience with illustration and vector design. But I’ve always loved pixel art (being a gamer since the 90s), and wanted to challenge myself. I made a lot of newbie mistakes, such as using the completely wrong software and not being very wary of the different proportions, and of course I didn’t have time to fix anything.

And finally some screenshots of the build we did for LD40:

As for the future, we're looking into continuing this game and develop it further and finish it properly. It was quite fun for us and we're definitely coming back for the new LD.

@SaraFilipa thank you ALL for playing (and rating, and commenting) our game! And of course, thank you so much for all of the lovely compliments and constructive criticism on the graphics, which is what I worked on. But since finishing LD40, I’ve been making some research and educating myself and for version 2.0 of Kittea Party, you can expect: - 100% redesigned character sprites and animations; - New background art; - New (and a lot bigger) map; - New and updated UX/UI; - New logo + title menu + new game over / victory screens; - Some cut-scenes and illustrated instruction screens

For a teaser, here is the concept art of our main character and cat lady overlord, Gertrude:

Link for our game entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/kittea-party

It has become a habit for us to join Ludum Dare in the past few years, whenever we have the availability to do so. For the programmer and the artist, it is our fourth game together. Out of all our Ludum Dare entries so far, we have even finished and published a previous entry on Steam, which we are very proud of. This time, we wanted to add someone to our team with writing chops and develop a narrative game, which has always been our weakness. We got lucky with the theme “Deeper and Deeper”, as it’s the kind of theme that lends itself to the sort of game mechanics we wanted to explore.

We are here to talk a bit about the challenges we’ve faced and also invite you to try our game: The Plot Chickens

How the development went

For some reason, whenever there's a Ludum Dare, we have a "bad" habit of doing things in a way that we haven't tried before. In the end, it pushes us to figure out how to use the new things.

There were a bunch of firsts for all of us in the team.

Writer: The first Ludum Dare. Artist: The first time creating voxel/3D art in the context of game development. Programmer: The first time using Unity's Visual Scripting and making a dialog tree system.

All of these had a bit of challenge which we'll talk in more detail below.

Making the dialog system

Having never worked on a dialog system like this, this presented as a new challenge. Recently having heard of Unity Visual Scripting it seemed to make sense to use this to build dialog trees in a simple and visual way.

Although the tool served the purpose, the execution wasn't as smooth as we'd like. We found it to be a bit rough and hard to work with. Well, it works quite nicely if you intend to do everything in your game using only visual scripting however for our case we intended to only use it to script the interactions with NPCs and entities. Interaction between this system and C# wasn't as easy as expected and it also made the Unity editor quite a lot slower when developing.

Almost a whole day was spent trying to get this system to work. In the end the result is acceptable.

Dialog tree for Gertrude

Time

All of us work full-time jobs, and in previous jams we always aim to have the game almost done by the end of Sunday and then Monday evening after work we do some finishing touches.

This time it was a bit different in which we did not have to work Monday and this ended up being quite needed. In the programming side, the struggle with Unity Visual Scripting system delayed the gameplay implementation by a lot. And on the art side, getting used to do voxels also delayed the whole process. However all of us were working up until late on Monday.

We don’t necessarily keep a time table of all things but this is roughly how it went:

Music & Sounds

In our team we have a lack of music / sound artists so this is something that we always have issue with in previous games. We decided to spend some time trying to find some music and sounds that we could use to make it more lively, and of course we opted out of the audio rating.

The only sound in the game that we made ourselves was the talking sound. Our programmer made some weird noise and then playing with some random pitch while talking made it pretty nice.

Progress

Finally we'd like to share some screenshots of early in development.

How the town started

Early movement testing

Dialog testing with UI before art pass