As I'm working only on the programming part and my mate in the arts, it's nice to see everything together for the first time, in engine.

Hey guys,

As I posted other arts from the game and some people liked it, here is the real deal, now pretty much fixed and working like a charm. It was our first LD and we're definetly excited about the finished game. Certainly we're going to participate in many other Jams.

If you like simulations and narrative games, give it a try and drop a rating ;)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/bob

- BOB (yes, that's the game's name, just BOB)

Hey guys! After some feedback all around, we've decided to list here the possible game endings, so that some of you may go after them, if you wish. As we'd have loved to create an achievement screen in-game, this is our workaround while LD play+rate time doesn't end. We're very excited about this little one and about all the receptive feedback everyone is giving, in and out LD. Maybe we keep working on this one even after the Jam.

If anyone who didn't play yet would want to try it, BOB is right HERE!

But be aware that the rest of this post is SPOILER sensitive, okay?

[FRIENDLY SPOILER WARNING]

So, we'll post a more complete post mortem with our insights, tribulations, justifications, etc., but basically, if you already played the game, maybe you have noticed that it basically runs with 3 attributes, being one of them the visible Energy meter and two other hidden values, Hope and Chaos. This other two keep going up and down following the player's answers, sometimes both changes, sometimes only one, depending on the answer, but one of them always changes. Here is the endings list, as "achievements titles", and how to achieve them. Good luck!

BASIC ENDINGS - New Home - Survive until a certain number of turns. - Powerless - Just let energy run out.

MID-GAME ENDINGS - Spoiled Humans - Keep the Hope attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns. - Hopeless Humans - Keep the Hope attribute at 0% for 3 consecutive turns. - Rage Quit - Keep the Chaos attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns.

QUESTION/ANSWER DEPENDENT ENDINGS - Cold BOB - Let people be sacrificed and keep the Chaos attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns. - Mad Captain - Accept Captain to take command of the ship for a while and keep Energy around 0%~20% and Chaos around 70%~90% for 4 consecutive turns. - Greater Evil - Accept the Alien refugees in the ship and keep the Chaos attribute at 100% for 4 consecutive turns. - Defective Ship - Deny avoiding the asteroid belt, then deny fixing the hull with the machinery and keep Energy around - 0%~20% and around 70%~90% for 4 consecutive turns. - Sick to Death - Accept funding the Doc experiments, then deny the Kid's demand on keeping the lights on, and let the energy runs out.

As we mentioned in other posts and in game's page, here is a brief post mortem about how was the LD44 for us, our creative process through last weekend and what changes we've made mid-project. It's probably not eeeverything we wanted to share, but it's a good barebone if it all.

If you haven't played the game, here is the link, you are very welcome ;)

I and @RodNasca were working at my place. We really believe that working in the same room does really well for the work pipeline, as it does become faster and our "deadlines" felt much more accurate.

At the start, our brainstorm brought some general themes, like: - Life is mana - Time as life - Trade market items as blood - Planet harvesting (profit over planets exploiting) - "Reigns-like" with life meter

We've set a couple of hours as a limit to come with a decision and the conclusion is literally what you can see in the game. As we noticed since before LD time, we were short of design-power, as I'm most of a programmer and RodNasca an artist, so we agreed on doing "time gates" to align expectations, decisions, and design choices, and we'd continue doing our individual work between these hours.

At first iteration, the game was simple and very close to the final one: The AI controlling the ship's energy and choosing the best usage for it, as humans travel to their new planet. And the gameplay was pretty much about it, energy usage by choices and minimum turns to get to the good ending. The energy drop didn't have anything to do with the time and there weren't any optional endings. Just one goal. After this step, we've adopted Google Spreadsheets as the main tool to organize the dialogs and choices, and from that, we've exported it as .csv with the cells separator as tabs. It was then imported to the Unity project and deserialized to populate our Dialogs and Choices models. This table is definitely much larger than this, lol

The first time gate discussion between us was nearly only about it and how it was an empty premise and felt stale and "numb". It was like the player didn't have much weight on his decisions. So we decided to make it change the fate of the ship's crew, even if he only realized that at the end of each run. So this was the birth of the "Hope" and "Chaos" hidden traits around the game run. It felt only natural that we needed other values, aside from the energy one, as the problem was pretty much we had only one value to work around the "win-lose" attribute.

As time went by, the first gameplay prototype was done and working, but we haven't decided on any narrative and characters, just the stage and mood we wanted. So the second time gate discussion was about the narrative among the dialogs and choices. After another brainstorm, we had many pieces of paper scattered on the table, each one containing a dialog, and, after that, many pieces containing characters. It was like a jigsaw to us, getting characters and dialog together as they seem fit. After it was done, we've chosen some characters to have a more developed narrative, like the Alien and the Doctor, and created the unlockable dialogs by previous choices. Many narratives were aligned on the table, like this one (written in Brazilian Portuguese, btw)

At this time we had less than 6 hours and many things that we've planned were lacking: main screen, sound control, these "quality of life" features. So as RodNasca, as he had many characters to create and animate yet. We've decided to create the characters in separate pieces and animate directly in Unity animator, but as the time was short RodNasca resorted to the good old sprite sheet to it, as he finds more simple and free for him to create and animate at the same time. Before sprite-sheets

And so the game was published at the final minutes, with a quick description created in LD website and then replicated to itch.io, with everything uploaded 2 minutes before the LD deadline. Much closer as we expected, taking into consideration the first idea. We've got very excited about the numbers at itch.io and the feedback here and there!

Even with the numerous grammar and spelling mistakes, many because the text being written in a hurry and English not being our native language, and the limited narrative we were able to do, it's wonderful to have that many people playing the game.

[TL;DR FINAL THOUGHTS AND LEARNINGS]

• Start with the game's final goal and how to reach it. Always. It's a basic step that we didn't take and would've made a difference.
• It's a good thing to start with the algorithms that you think you will need. It was a great deal and demanded many hours and debugging into it when we improved the dialog system with more attributes to consider.
• We've had a wonderful time working on it during the Jam and was very refreshing to watch other people streaming their works while we were at it.
• The "fun" and "ending" experience should be taken more into consideration before starting the programming and art, but as there was no time for more robust prototypes, we are happy with the final result and we think that we've taken good design choices by the end of it.
• We're learning many things from the after-jam feedback and considering many changes on the game before improving on it. It's a good practice to iterate with all jams ideas and projects, and literally every game here has the potential to become the best version of itself :)

Hey people, here to thank everyone for all the feedback about BOB, and to notice that we are very close to reach over 1000 views on itch.io! Come and play BOB to help us reach this mark and, if possible, leave feedback here on Ludum Dare, or on the game's page on itch.io. You can play it on Android, Windows and even on your browser. Every comment counts, wherever is possible!

Hello people!

I've felt so guilty for not being able to post something here during the LD, but this one was a reeeeally awesome for me and my friends here in Brazil.

I'm here to show you

Nobody's Journey, a deckbuilding adventure!

Come to our page for more info and to play it! We have Web and Android versions!

We're making a post-mortem later, just like we did for BOB last jam.

Once again, as we did with BOB last Ludum Dare we'll try to show some of the process of how we came to idealize Nobody's Journey and what decisions we've made along the jam, what worked and what didn't, because jams are about learning and sharing as well. I will try to keep it simple as I can and maybe share some useful insights about prototyping this kind of game.

If you haven't played the game, here is the link once again :v:

This time we had @drkdavis by our side to give us a hand in Game Design, Balancing and Content stuff, and to help me in some insights on the programming of it all. We managed to meet at my place since we agreed that it's much more efficient to work physically beside our partners. We didn't want to "waste" much time thinking about the idea since none of us was that excited about the theme this time, so we came to the "final" idea fast enough to DrkDavis get deep into the mechanics' design and @RodNasca decide which art style he would do as a benchmark. We didn't do much of a brainstorm and all the other ideas were pretty "obvious", so we don't regret rushing it.

After some hours we've already discussed many of the game aspects, like the game loop (cards taking effect on revealing, activation and leaving), art style and programming architecture. I think these three topics can summarize the rest of the post mortem.

The art style was defined early and was the least affected by the design changes. Some of the icons and images changed some times, but the base style was the same all the way. RodNasca was inspired by other "digital casual boardgame", that was Dicey Dungeons.

Talking about the design changes, that was quite a ride. As the weekend went through, the design flaws of the game became clearer and we had to make choices, fast. We still think the card effects system and card colors aren't ideal, but it was the easy way out for it during the jam time. Because of that, we tried many card types, effects, and combinations, among the quest system as well. At the end of the day, we've settled it as it is now. So sorry for not having the past iterations of the cards now to show you guys.

So we had embraced an idea that was very dependant on content. With this in mind, we've used the first 5 to 6 hours just to settle and polish as much as we could what would later be the base of the system which the Game Designer would use to create all sorts of things and behaviors. After minor experiments, we've come to this ScriptableObject system based in UnityEvents which are responsible for the cards' core mechanics.

We could then assign whatever event we might want each card to run in specific points of the game loop. It was just a matter of time for us to think about whatever behavior that came to our minds, just to experiment and use it later.

And with some organizing skills, we could just create as many cards as we wanted, and experiment in runtime any of it. It was the most well used time we've could ask for and we could even listen any of us thanking ourselves for this concept lol.

I think it sums up the key points for us in this game jam. It got even longer than expected, so if there were any points of interest or anything that wasn't well explained, reach to me at @phyrophyro on Instagram, @rod.nasca, @davisnery or comment below.

Just to be a real TL;DR, let me just put some final thoughts:

• When you are unsure of the theme or how to think about it, just choose a convenient idea and make it good later. I assure you that ideas get better with time and it's the most common thing in the world.
• Think about the tools and usability of who is going to plan the feature. We can't stress enough how great was to prioritize tools this way. Even if you are the designer and will think about a feature for the artist to make, I'm certain that you can think about how he'll do it in the best and efficient way possible.
• Try to make it possible to prototype, fast. The more you prototype in the shortest timespan possible, the sooner you will get to the best version of it, so prototyping it might be the first thing of all.

We're making a isometric digging game with traps and enemies with dice rolling mechanics! For now, this is how it looks in unity, but by the concepts from our artist, it's gonna be gorgeous :x

We're very excited about the progress we've made, let's go into the final day to polish it!

And we finally have a name... Die in the Mine!

We're proud to post here that Die In The Mine is finaly out! Come dig some gold and leave some feedback!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/die-in-the-mine