First timer to Ludum Dare and am I excited to know what it feels like to crunch for a weekend on a game and make some friends along the way.
Theme Suggestions:
Chris and I took it easy and spent most of the first day bouncing ideas off of each other. I drew some mockups of various kinds of games we could make, one of them being a race track building game and another a world-wrapping game (pictured below).
Ultimately we landed on "Overhead shooter where all your projectiles have loop-based movements, like progressively weirder versions of a boomerang" :laughing: Within two hours we got our earliest version of the game:
Thus Boomie the Boomerang was born.
The next morning I created a few character designs and our level tile map and Chris continued work on the logic for throwing boomie. Around the middle of the day we could throw boomie from the player:
We also got switches and several other basic parts of the game working. Also at some point I added more complex boomie looping logic (self-intersection tests for the loop and multi-path creation).
With the Tiled tile map editor, I figured out how to hook up switches to doors:
We finally also landed on our title when one of us said "boomie" out loud during a brainstorm. I went ahead and create a "level 0" to act as the title screen:
One of the big tasks that Chris took on was our "catch on fire mechanic" and the camera swapping between different levels on the map. I built out a destructible box in the meantime and continued to put together puzzles and how things hooked up together. Oh also Chris made some awesome sound fx and music that I really recommend you listen to!
On the final day I took a half vacation day from work to help build out the last 3 levels (and the final "end" level) just in time for submission.
As soon as it went up the game was crashing on lots of browsers. The weirdest crash we had was that AdBlockers blocked boomerang.js from loading, so whenever the player completed their first loop the game would crash :laughing: Live and learn! Luckily, I think we have found all of the soft-locks and hard-locks.
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I had a lot of fun and it was great working with Chris. Now time to rate a BUNCH of other games! Please check out our game and let us know if you like it :smile:
In this post I want to talk about how @chris-hall and I went about crafting and executing the design for our game Boomie. Our goal was to produce something that was "complete" and so we took a pretty good chunk of time (about 5 hours) picking and crafting a game design before we wrote any code.
Some criteria we used during the selection process: - Is this idea interesting and fun for us to implement? :clown: :circus_tent: - How risky is it to pursue this game idea? (can we make it in the 72 hours? is the idea too vague?) - How much work is needed to get to "minimally viable product"? (we could submit and it is something) - Can the game design be easily extended? (we can keep adding new concepts without changing the core mechanic) - How much time do we have for polish? :clock:
We ended up writing around four pages of ideas on our shared Google Doc. Here are a few:
We ultimately picked the Boomerang idea because it seemed to have good answers for all of our criteria. One of the main reasons we went with the idea (other than that it seemed fun enough on it's own for us to implement) was because it seemed like the core mechanic was easily extensible (we had a laundry list of ideas we wanted to attempt to implement).
We roughly broke down our order-of-implementation as follows:
Each concentric ring of features gave us the ability to implement the next ring, as well as complement previous ones. Any time we had a new idea we placed it in this mental model of what needed to be done. Importantly, this framework allowed us to keep focused on that task at hand.
At the end of each night we took a break from feature work and implemented some piece of polish (sounds, music, animations, additional assets, level design). By around 9pm Sunday night of the jam we had implemented all of core features in the above diagram and all that was left was making animations, levels, and rounding out any final bugs we found.
I think part of our success in making Boomie was that we carefully thought out a plan and then executed it. As far as I know, none of work we did went to waste!
Thanks for reading! I have been pleasantly surprised by everyone's games and look forward to playing more during this last week of feedback!
Check out our Game and other blog posts! - Game - Boomie - Blog - First Jam + Dev Log: Wow that was a lot of fun! - Blog - Thoughts about Jam Tools