Hi all!

Here we are, in the wet, warming late-spring night air of Nanjing, turning off our lights, hopping on a time travel to the curtain-up of LD55.

We are a team of four creators (@jupiterintardis, @persepolis, @suan, and me) gathering in a guesthouse for the jamming session. All of us expect to find themselves participating in multiple facets of video game development. For the technical part, we'll be working with LÖVE (as well as, well, love). We will work in the open at GitHub: https://github.com/ayuusweetfish/LD55 .

We've been having fun with Stardew Valley for the past whole day; thanks to that, we now have a perfect standard of healthy sleeping schedule to follow. See you on the venue! We wish everyone a fulfilling and fruitful jam*! (*no pun intended)

Hi all! A guesthouse team of four here.

The theme spun quite a few interesting ideas in us. We even went as far as looking at Papers, Please — but we eventually settled in the puzzle genre and got lost in a mystical land of flowers and butterflies.

We're putting together our ideas and finding ourselves exploring an intricate design space. We are looking forward to the second day, when we prune the extending branches and focus our work in a pinned-down scope.

Today we received our rice cooker and visited several food markets nearby. I can't wait for tomorrow's cookery ^ ^

Wish everyone a rewarding experience ahead!

饭来，饭从四面八方来

The birds sing, the golden hour arrives, and we're finally concluding our second 24-hour out of three.

As our pieces of work accumulate, this turns out to be a hard puzzle for us, but we think if we manage to find a way, it will be tremendously rewarding — isn't game design a puzzle game itself?

Each one of us has brought at least one specific point into the design that contributes to its originality — a set of intricate puzzles, an audacious visual style, a bold attempt at designing an artistic puzzle selection screen… Yet when everything comes together, incompatibilities arise: this is just what happens in many, if not all, design tasks. How does Matisse-style decoration and composition fit onto a grid-cells puzzle game, where all elements need to stay distinct and identifiable? That might well be an inspiring problem no one has tackled before, and we think we've spotted some glittering gems around this inquiry.

It's the norm in jams to narrow down the scope, but this time we set out to explore a lot, and are finding it very pleasurable. We try not to be overwhelmed by the remaining work ahead, and as always, are looking forward to tomorrow's home cooking!

It’s time! A postmortem ^ ^ This is a personal note dump, not on behalf of our entire team.

Recap

We, in a team of four, crafted a puzzle game about bees in porcelain gardens spreading pollen. It’s titled Nectar Nexus.

It ranked at ~10% in Graphics, Innovation, and Mood, ~1/3 in Fun, and ~1/4 overall. It’s nothing shining impressive, but I crunched them together with everything I’ve run into during the past two weeks, and I think I now have turned nectar into honey — and here’s my food for thought.

Key Takeaway, or TL;DR

It’s understanding. Look through the eyes of players, of a specific person since even before they play the game, and most importantly, look into one’s own vision. What kind of game do you intend to offer? “Qualem ludum vis dare?” That may not be as apparent as it sounds in LD.

If you’re interested, the string of thought continues. To avoid occupying excessive space, it continues in the comments section.

Table of contents - Tutorial, or How to Have Others Understand - Feedback, or How Others Understand - Intent, or How You Understand - Murmurs, or How I Understand

And we forced flames out of more than 50 random heads around the world, what’s not to like! ^ ^