This is basically a post compo dev update, if you don't like these, you can skip this one.

It is getting closer to how I wanted the game to look when I started it! Feedback is appreciated! Decided to learn Aseprite to draw the tiles, pretty cool tool. Even if I still have a lot to learn on pixel arting, getting happy with what I got so far, but still need to redraw the buildings, these are still placeholdy.

How it was:
How it is now:

Added graphics, particles, even smoke builds up on the foreground, made the cars transit the way I wanted (note how they can pass side by side on the street now huh huh pretty cool - I just translated the sprite to the right a little bit while keeping the center and let the rotation magic work :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:)

Big things missing: Feedbacks in general (points, deaths, etc), better menus, HUDs, and SOUND which I'm saving for last

You can play both versions here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/canals

(If you are on a Mac, the game will take ages to load, and will freeze your browser for a couple of minutes, sorry about that, this is a Browser + Engine interaction issue I could not fix)

I’ve beaten randomness this time, no random elements used at all! However, it turns out I made the game super hard 😬.

While I can't change it now (that would be unfair), I’ve added a post-compo feature: an analytics screen for everyone to see. Within this screen, there’s a button that allows you to start with the most powerful turret ever created in the released game. Just remember not to rate the game based on this.

Can you create a better one and help your fellow LDers? Here’s how the current champion looks: a group of 10 yellow and 4 blue powerups (non-groups are ignored, and yes, it exceeds the perceived limit of 10!):
.

Turret queen LD page.
Turret queen Html5 itch.io

Here lies Analytics

Hey everyone! I’ve been analyzing game data from Turret Queen (from players that didn't opt-out) and wanted to share:

Tough Spots

I plotted where and when players tend to lose their lives. It’s interesting to try to make sense of it!
Here is where people die the first, second, and third times: Here I broke it down into the time of death as well: This one is a bit weird, but I ranked the top 5 moments of the game where people lost, by grouping every death timer into 5-second splits, counted, ranked, then cross-referenced it with the positions, and got this: (Now I notice it is kind of hard to see the colors here, I'm sensing a pattern with me :confused:)

Enemy Fire vs. Collisions

It turns out that enemy shots are a bigger threat than running into them. Total deaths caused by enemy shots: 102.0 Total deaths caused by collisions with enemies: 70.0

Turrets!

I found out which powerups are grabbed the most (which is basically a tie). That kind of confirms the fact that they are hard to see and identify. But also that I was able to balance the powerups that appeared without using any random function. Total of Powerup 1: 427 Total of Powerup 2: 432 Total of Powerup 3: 406 The strongest turret ever built had a total sequence of 22 Powerups!!!
Specifically:
Powerup1: 3, Powerup2: 15, Powerup3: 4 Worthy of note, the ship only holds 10 powerups at once, and the game only counts the same consecutive powerup But if you are fast enough, you can grab more powerups during the turret assembly.

Top 5 constructed turrets:

| powerup1| powerup2 | powerup3 | how many | | -------- | ------- | -------- | -------- | | 1 | 1 | 1 | 195 | | 1 | 2 | 1 | 32 | | 1 | 1 | 2 | 25 | | 2 | 1 | 1 | 23 | | 3 | 1 | 1 | 17 |

When Players Quit

I looked at how many times players die before they decide to quit or restart.

| Deaths | Session Count | |---|---| | 3 | 22 | | 1 | 15 | | 2 | 8 | | 6 | 3 | | 21 | 1 | | 10 | 1 | | 13 | 1 |

Average deaths per session: 3.057 Average victories per session: 0.076 The game was only beat 4 times.
Maaaybe I need to fix something. (sarcasm)

Death Maps

Cool heatmaps: Game over man, game over

A bit on how this was done: - Data was sent via a AWS lambda - Saved on a dynamoDB instance - Exported the whole thing to a few csv files - Used some magic python libs on jupyter to plot these graphs

Anyway, from the data and feedback, it is apparent that the moment the first enemy shot appears is way too punitive. Also the time between losing the first life and then the 3rd is way to short, also confirming the feedback of multiple players, that the game becomes very hard after the first life is lost.

Thanks for playing. I hope you all enjoy looking at tables and graphs as much as I do! If anyone wants to know more, let me know, I would love to share.

PS: I was writing this and inadvertently closed the tab and lost the whole thing, had to write it all over again (its 2AM) so please forgive any weirdness. (I could not find the draft on my user page even thought I saved it)

After my last post regarding game data from Turret Queen (from players that didn't opt-out), things changed a bit. The game had at least 10 more plays, and 4 of them beat the game!
Clearly mentioning only for out of 40 had completed it triggered some people! I deeply appreciate you all for that!! :heart:

The updated statistics now are Average deaths per session: 3.016 Average victories per session: 0.116 And who made this turret? :joy: :joy:

Thanks everyone, I had a blast this time around (as usual), lots of awesome games (and players).
I will finish with 2 more gifs, all the deaths and death screens this LD!

.

.
See you all again in October, and good luck!

Going for mood this time. Good luck everyone! Have fun!

Now its time for some personalized flavor tray'and sleep (almost 4 AM)

Here it is
This time, the last-minute deployment issues happened 9 hours before the deadline... happy coder noises.

Man... telling stories is hard.
I really hope you enjoy it... especially since I couldn’t resist making yet another anti-game.

For LD57, I tried something I usually avoid: story.

I made a narrative game. It’s pretty minimal (because... compo), cold, and intentionally a bit uncomfortable (because apparently that’s what came out easier😅).

In CLOCK IN, you judge emotions. You follow the routine. You do your job. Until things start feeling... thinner.

It’s about loops, losing control, and slowly becoming less relevant. Not depth like a cave or ocean, but the kind that goes inward.

I was really unsure about this one. So when I saw someone pick it up on YouTube, I watched with a ton of stress. Not the usual "will it crash?" kind of stress, I was just waiting for them to hate it.

But... they didn’t. They kind of liked it, even. Almost as if the story worked.

Try it out. It’s pretty short.

I actually enjoyed making this one more than I expected. I approached it the way I do when I DM: think about the world first, then shove a story into it.

It was pretty fun to spend a few days living in that world, not sure I left it though😅

Play CLOCK IN

...and that might be just why it worked.
(A CLOCK IN post-mortem and a story on telling stories or is it deep to tell a deep story?)

How it started:
How it ended:
It ended up ranking #3 in Mood. (Bragging, I know, but I'm proud that for once I succeeded on what I tried to succeed)

:whitecheckmark: What Went Right: Taking Away Control (At the Worst Possible Time)

For most Jams, I like to take a few hours (or a whole night) just thinking about the theme, no rush, no pressure, just letting ideas brew while I walk around, talk to family or even sleep on it.
It's honestly one of my favorite parts of the jam: wasting time on weird, probably (likely) bad ideas that only sound good in my head 😅.

This time, the idea came a little faster (for reasons I will discuss a bit downwards) and I spent half a day building it out.
It became one of my favorite memories from this jam: brainstorming a slow, invisible way to break the player.

At some point, the perfectly cruel mechanic clicked:

Spoilers ahead:
If you plan to play the game, go now, it's pretty short, runs in the browser, can even be played from your mobile, one of the feedbacks I got from my wife is that the text was small on the phone, so if you click the post-its, the text enlarges.
Come back here later.

Continuing:

What if the moment the player finally got how the system works, right at that satisfying peak where you're just starting to master it, the game would start taking it away?
Without warning.

One day, the first click happens for you, with an odd subtle sound, minimal feedback. The first one, so you are not sure what happens. It does not happen again, until...
Next day, two clicks.
Until you're just... there.
Present, but no longer necessary.

I wanted players to feel a tiny sting of unfairness.
And then realize:
that’s the point.

There are plenty of small little things that I think add to it:
Hidden visual cues: crosses growing on buildings... the city itself quietly turning into a graveyard for obedient drones.
Post-it notes that come back (depending on the answer you gave, hinting at something darker).
Your base salary just sort of continues...
And even the way the game ends is cryptic: wtf happens?
Well, only you know.

It is possible to end the game on the 3 screens, it's pretty hard to trigger on some (and time-consuming).
I was kind of hoping someone would eventually stumble on them accidentally (some hints on the comments made me think some did).

:whitecheckmark: Minimalism Helped the Story

Well, as usual, drawing takes me FOREVER, does not matter if I try to rush it, I always take way too long to make one button look right (Not a perfectionist, I just suck at it, there is always something weird I many times fix with some lucky pixel I forget to erase).
And well, compo timing being short, and I had even less time with family visiting, so, minimalist art style was not a design choice, it was basically survival.

But it ended up helping the game a lot...
The static screens, muted colors, black screen transitions, and limited interactions made the world feel colder, flatter... drained.
Which is exactly what the story needed.

Instead of showing a bustling city full of life, what we got was that 2 shades of gray 6 shapes of squares kind of city.
Instead of celebrating progress, everything around you just sat there, grey.
The way the city faded into grayscale as you commuted, the old computer screen (with PERFECT buttons), the dead, boring apartment...

Almost like I found a cheat code for making bad art work (I amazingly got 82 in graphics).

:whitecheckmark: Its fun thinking about story telling.

Instead of explaining how the game works, I was thinking on foreshadowing things, and how to add them.. etc.. I don't have much to say on that, except that I had a blast doing it (even if only thinking about it).
Recommend.

Also pretty nice to try to just tell enough of something, and later hope someone gets it.. and when some one does? Oh boy, that feels coooooooool. Also Recommend.

:whitecheckmark: Building the World First (And the "Game" Second)

One thing that helped a lot was thinking about the world first, before even worrying about the game.

"What kind of world would this exist in?"
"What would someone do there?"

Judging emotions "evolved" from Judging reputation in the ideas realm. Then it became a work game, and rest just came.

You are just categorizing human feelings on acceptable or not acceptable, sort of reducing people 0s and 1s (the reports also sort of devolve in that way). It felt fun to me, but I think that if the game had been longer, it probably would have gotten boring. (Maybe I also found a cheat code for bad mechanic)

This ideas could only come from building the world first. I will definitely try that again, even if I make a dumb flying-armored-tree-bird-killing game once more.

It was so much faster to make everything connect... I usually take forever to be satisfied with an idea.. .

:x: What Could Have Been Better - Balancing BOREDOM

Well, I got BORED testing the game.
By the end of the compo, I wasn’t proud anymore, I genuinely felt bad... all that gray, hidding crosses, heavy messaging and all that thinking on "how to make this darker" eventually DOES GET INTO YOU.
I even started cutting things out: the commute home gets shorter after the first day because I literally couldn’t stand playing through it anymore.

One commenter suggested clicking to stop the alarm clock.. well.. I had a starting thought on that (alarm sound was probably the last thing I added).. but that thought was interrupted by another th.... NO

The game actually has an internal apathy system: some stuff you do (or don't) slowly build it up, and if it reaches a limit, the game ends.
It was extra challenging fiddling with it, because... how do you measure "enough" boredom for someone that will play it only once when you played the DARN THING 200 TIMES?

Another thing: how do you make a boring game on purpose without just making... a boring game?
One of the commenters very cleverly pointed it out that If you succeed at making a boring game on purpose, well... you end up with a boring game:

I think the trouble with making a game exploring a “bleak” or “boring” situation is that if your work succeeds (and I think this does) then it just feels bleak and depressing

And... yeah.
The Fun score kind of reflects that. 😅
(Heh. Maybe I found yet another cheat code.)

:x: There is No Way to Win

I wish I had found (and had time for) a way to let players beat CALM, or at least reach a hidden "happy" ending.
But honestly... I just didn’t have the energy left to do it.
Even though I stopped working on the game with 9 hours to spare, a miracle for me, since I always finish in a mad cursing rush fixing last minute deployment issues (does not matter the engine... amazing, I always f... something up)

GOOD ENOUGH.

I couldn’t even think of a way to beat it.
Now, some ideas are floating around... maybe for a post-compo version.

I think that even if I added, and ended up cutting the happy ending later, just knowing it existed might have made the whole experience lighter for me while making the game.
Instead, it was like I sorta believed the thing I was trying to build. Goddamm weak minded fool, game is not even that good. (funny thing: vacation ended today and I go back to work tomorrow)

:thinking: Lessons Learned

• Building the world first helps a lot.
  Even if you don't have a full gameplay loop yet, understanding the vibe and rules of the world makes every design decision faster and more natural later.

• Emotional games hit you too.
  Making a bleak game will bleed into your mood after a while. Plan for that. Hide an happy ending? Take breaks? I did take a few walks outside during development, it was sunny.. helped a bit.

• It's FUN telling stories"
  Even though it has an expiration date on some cases, it can be fun to tell a story as it is to build a fun mechanic. Will definitely try that again.

One of the things I love most about here is that people actually play our strange little games.

Anywhere else, I'd have to ask friends (or beg strangers) to even try clicking "Start" and even if I succeeded, I'd need hundreds of plays just to maybe get a few comments.

Here you dive into our broken builds, forgive our weird UIs, mash every key on the keyboard trying to figure out how to jump and still leave feedback!

That's amazing, and why I keep coming back.

So, thank you to everyone who played, rated, commented, cared.

See you next time.

Colector huh, that's gonna be interesting

Wasted a full day yesterday, had to completely scrap the first project, that ended up just becoming a failed tech demo. Had to revert to the first idea, which I had rejected. But oh well, it was simple and I could sort of finish in one day.

Anyways, good luck all, see you in the comments.

TL;DR: Tried to make a poetic game about rain. Accidentally made a chaotic thing about data. Remember to reject all.

From this:

To this:

The initial idea was to make a calm little game about collecting rain. You'd guide the wind, bring clouds together, and when enough gathered, it would rain into a collector. The wind system worked "fine". But the clouds... oh boy, since I've been trying to fiddle with shaders, I thought, "lets make the clouds using shaders".

Let's just say that was a very very humbling experience. Whole first day was gone, and the above gif was the best it ever looked (notice there are no clouds)

After almost giving up on the Jam completely, I dropped it and started over with a new idea that was simpler, but also riskier.

That's how Crumbs happened. A game about data, and how all those harmless little bits, when combined, can reveal a lot more than you would expect.

Even when you reject cookies, you’re still leaking information. I wanted to somehow show that you can still be identified. I just couldn't really prove it without sending data to a server, which would’ve crossed a line. So I stopped there, everything stays local and the game only demonstrates what could be collected and let the player connect the dots.

(FYI: According to GDPR and similar laws, even this "harmless" info can count as personal data if used for tracking).

The gameplay itself was part of the joke. Rejecting cookies over and over again, annoying, sometimes misleading, and repetitive.

Also, I believe it turns out a cookie consent popup as a thumbnail doesn't exactly attract players. I rated almost 30 other games, got 13 coolness, and got exactly 20 ratings.

And I learned that jumping straight into chaos doesn’t always work. It needed some foreshadowing before the storm.

Next time you click “Reject All,” remember the crumbs might be still watching you.