Hey there!
So it's been a while since I've written a Post Mortem for one of my entries, but this one went so swimmingly I wanted to write it up.
As for the last two Ludum Dares that I participated in, I was working with Cameron, my good Canadian friend. We would use Unity, that much was certain, but anything else would all depend on the theme. Funnily enough, one of my themes actually made it right to the final round! That being Decay, though I had no idea what I would do for it, I thought it would make for a really varied theme.
So usually it starts at 2AM for me, and some nice comfortable time for Cameron, but this earlier start meant that we could brainstorm for some time before I needed sleep. It took a while actually. We kept coming up with vague ideas that the other one wasn't a huge fan of. After two hours though, we managed to come up with something with real potential. A combination of our ideas: one of those god-game crafting things, and the concept of being a shopkeeper NPC in a fantasy world.
Potion Seller! I require your finest potions!
That accidentally became the backbone meme of the entire game, and so by the time I had woken up the next day, Cameron had added the first rudimentary steps to craft:
I went about adding new assets (we had decided on using MagicaVoxel for the style, because I am really poor with UV unwrapping in Blender, and making assets was super simple and fast in MV. And it looks alright!), then went about adding a tooltip system, as well as the first steps toward a recipe book.
Each process got overhauled several times, but it didn't take long before we had such a nice system for adding new items to the game that 90% of it was automated, including the recipe book. We added some coins that you could get paid when you provided the right ingredient, and just hardcoded the customer himself for a placeholder. The customer management system was my responsibility in the main.
End of day 1 was looking good! We had only a few assets, and no working recipe book, but it looked really nice. We had scoped the project specifically to allow for at least an entire day to polish and content creation, ideally two days. Either way, by the end of the night for me, we had all the basic gameplay features added:
When I woke up the next day, Cameron had added the one thing I had left room for but wasn't any good with doing: animations! The customer would now walk in and out, with the thought bubble coming down, and I loved it!
We spent basically the entire day adding items and balancing and bugfixing. However, despite our intent to scope properly, neither of us could quite agree on a win condition. Cameron wanted to keep it casual and have them be able to play at their own pace, I preferred to give them only a certain amount of time with each customer before they would get annoyed and leave. We realised they would fit perfectly as two separate game modes, and that we had the time to implement it! So I set about adding a timer system to the customers, and some rudimentary GUI. No GIF for this because at this point it was just taking too long for me to make them haha.
By the end of day 2, we had everything we needed for release, save for menu, sounds, and a proper algorithm for choosing what item the customer wanted crafted next, as well as ideally more than two visuals for customers.
Day 3 was all about that. The win conditions and balancing the timer were number one priority. The problem now was the amount of time it took to playtest. That, and our rapid addiction to playtesting it! It was a fun time. With those done, and Cameron having recorded some awesome foley, I overhauled our character voice lines system to instead be a bit more object oriented. I made a character Class, which had its own assigned visual and set of voice lines. That way we could make specific characters with their own specific voice lines!
Now came the fun part. Can't really give any gifs for it, but it was so much fun, modelling new characters and making silly voice lines for them, then adding them within minutes. It was a great idea, and gave the game sooo much more depth and character. At this point we were nearing the submission deadline, and so just had fun making as many characters as we could before submitting.
This was the end flowcharty thing of all of our recipes! It got pretty crazy!
The result of such a fun and smooth ride was a game we both really enjoy, and hope you'll enjoy too! We're definitely going to port this to Android as well and release to the Play Store, and maybe consider further development for a PC release also.
I'm really struggling to have gifs <4MB now so I'm afraid there's no final gif. You'll just have to play it for yourslef ;)
Keep on keeping on, guys, it's been a blast, and I can't wait to play more of your awesome entries!
Try out Potion Seller here!
Taha
