/!\ ALART /!\ If you have not played Murky Mind yet, please play it before reading on! This post contains spoilers! The game is intended to be very vague and full of allusion (though it may in fact be too vague). If you do not mind spoilers, or have played the game, feel free to continue reading!
Murky Mind was an interesting game to make, namely because the game itself changed so much as we progressed through making it. Our initial plan for Ludum Dare 38 was to take the core gameplay from our previous LD game,
"Final Boss", and expand upon it. for LD37, we made a game that revolved around a single boss battle. We wanted to take that concept, improve the fight mechanics and the AI and release some sort of sequel. However, as we were coming up with a "story" for our game, the idea of the boss battle shifted and instead we made a sequel to our LD33 game, "Shark Swimulator".
In Shark Swimulator (You are the monster), you play as a shark who misinterprets the situation as she sees a diver in a shark cage. She believes the diver is trapped in the cage and may drown, so she decides to try and help the diver by ramming the cage, busting it open. Murky Mind takes place approximately two years after the events of Shark Swimulator where you now play as the diver who is suffering from PTSD and has locked himself in his little house, hiding from the world. As the story progresses you start to realise that something bad has happened to our protagonist and that is why he has shut himself in. You get to hear from various people in his life such as his family members, friends, and ex-girlfriend who all try to encourage him to come outside. Meanwhile, our protagonist is having a reoccurring nightmare where he must fight the ghosts of his past in a murky, underwater battlefield.
I had the idea early on that I wanted the game to be split into two sections, one that tells a story and the other that is the meat of the gameplay. I had originally wanted the story mode to be pencil sketches that provoked a very gloomy atmosphere but due to time constraints, we were not able to realise that goal. However, @holo managed to make a really nice aesthetic with the cutscenes by modelling the small house in Blender and rendering out still frames using the Cycles engine and some nice effects. He then took those still frames into Clip Studio Paint and drew some really nice looking stick figures on top. I was originally sceptical of these but so far we've received unanimous praise for the visual design of the cutscene images, so I guess I can't complain. :)
There is a mechanic that we weren't quite able to flesh out in time called "Sanity". Though the mechanic works, it is not very well explained. Basically, every day you are given the option to choose an activity to do that day. Some of them are good (increase your sanity), others are bad (decrease your sanity). The only visual indicator for which activities are good or bad is the colour of the protagonist in the cutscenes after you've chosen the option. If the person is red, his sanity went down. If he is blue, it went up. What sanity ultimately does is affect how much damage you take from the nightmare's attacks, and how much damage your harpoon gun does to the nightmare. Sanity also acts as a metric for the nightmare distortion shader. If your sanity is very low, the world becomes very distorted, darker, etc. If we had more time, we wanted to add a little toast notification to indicate if your sanity went up or down in the cutscene.
As I mentioned above, the game changed a lot while we were building it. One of the major changes was the actual fight mechanics. In "Final Boss", you ran around with a sword and attacked a big scary monster head-on while also trying to dodge his attacks. This was the initial plan for Murky Mind, but we eventually turned it into a ranged game where you were supposed to kite the nightmare around and avoid his various attacks. In the end, the game morphed into a bullet hell. This posed some serious challenges for us since we had to rewrite our AI (which didn't quite work out...) and rewrite our collision code. The collision code ended up being a problem for us because we needed to balance the game's difficulty with actual performance. We did not have enough time to sit down and really optimise our code so we ended up writing a very basic spacial partitioning system and clump the bullets into crude buckets to help cut down on collision checks. This helped performance some, but not really enough that we were happy with it. We were able to increase the number of bullets on screen by about 20% but the low number of bullets meant that our spiral pattern was too sparse and too easy to avoid. Unfortunately, we were unable to fix that issue before LD ended and the spiral pattern is very easy to avoid from afar. The pulse pattern, however, does require you to actually move, so that's a plus.
The music and sfx we ended up getting in our game were absolutely terrific. I was unable to find a musician on short notice and in a desperate attempt, I asked in the Ludum Dare IRC channel if anyone was willing to work with us to create some music. We had a single person respond, and he was absolutely terrific. What I asked him for was a distorted JAWS-like song that gave off a sense of panic and unsettling feelings and I think he nailed it. When the protagonist goes to bed each night, a very unsettling, distorted song begins to play that leads into a fast-paced battle song that, in my opinion, fits perfectly with the game we were trying to make. He also made our down-beat, gloomy ambience for the menus and cutscenes that really expressed the unhappiness that was filling that house. The sfx for the harpoon gun firing and landing shots were very satisfying and I think that all came together very nicely.
In the end, I am happy with the game we were able to produce in 72 hours. There is always something I'd like to go back and revise or fix up, but I think the game we shipped was "good enough". In the future, I think I'd like to take this game idea and expand on the mechanics a bit, flesh it out, and give it a much darker story with more player interactivity within the story. I would also like to note that in my original story pitch, I had a "bad end" that was deemed "going too far" and "crossing the line". I'd like to explore the ideas I had originally come up with, perhaps in a non-LD setting where such concepts can be given more room to breath.
If you haven't played Murky Mind yet, you can do so by clicking here. The game runs on Windows and Linux. You might have some performance issues on lower end hardware, but the game was entirely playable on modern Intel graphics, albeit not a smooth 60fps. We strive to play and rate the games made by those who rate ours, so please try our game! <3 <3
