I have a question like this. I am participating in Ludum Dare for the first time.

If you’ve already played, I’d love to hear if you used it and what you learned from it.

It will be very interesting for me, thank you.

And how relevant is English for you? I would also like to know which language is native for you and which languages the game should be translated into

This was my first Ludum Dare, but далеко not my first jam overall. And, strangely enough, this one turned out to be one of the easiest.

Usually I participate with a team and friends, but this time I worked solo (yes, using assets - thank god for Sketchfab), and I expected it to be harder. But in the end, I finished the game about 16 hours before the deadline. And I even slept relatively нормально - about 6 hours per day. Honestly, I thought I wouldn’t make it, but everything turned out pretty smooth. And I’m actually happy with the result. The game turned out cool.

For comparison: once I participated in a two-week jam and slept a total of about 50–60 hours over the whole period. That was really hard.

Actually, I noticed this amazing little rat a long time ago and wanted to do something with it, but the idea came together during the jam. Rats are associated with mazes for me, and I also wanted to experiment with unusual controls and with deception - and voilà: Rat Signal.

Of course, there are always some problems. The main one, especially in Unreal Engine, is the build size. No matter how you optimize, getting below ~500 MB is almost impossible. Well, I mean, you can - if you convert everything to 128×128 textures and that’s it.

On top of that, it tends to increase audio file sizes several times. To reduce everything, you need to compress things in a very specific way, but that’s definitely not something you want to deal with during a 3-day jam.

And yeah - this time I probably broke all the rules of OOP 😄 I tried to encapsulate almost all the logic in one place so I wouldn’t get confused.

And surprisingly - it worked. About 70% of the logic fits on this one screen.

So yeah, that’s my experience. Not the most stressful jam in my life - and maybe that’s why it’s one of the most enjoyable ones. And if you want to make games for fun, feel free to reach out, we can come up with something

Well, you spend a little time, go through this game. Thank you

How important is build size to you?

I noticed something: about one third of the people who visit my page download the game. Why is that? The obvious answer is that this is normal, or the page presentation isn’t engaging enough, but almost all traffic comes from Ludum Dare. So that likely isn’t the reason, and the next assumption is that the build size is the issue.

I work in Unreal Engine, and it has this thing where builds can’t really be small. Even an empty project weighs around 300 MB. When trying to reduce the build size, you have to use some tricks (besides standard settings like built-in compression and packaging only necessary maps without engine content).

For example, compressing textures. Their size can be reduced almost without noticeable quality loss. Since lighting is volumetric, most of the visual appearance is created not by the texture itself but by its normal map, so you can reduce the size of all textures except normals up to a certain point without losing quality. But even that has a limit you don’t really want to cross.

There’s also a thing with audio: for example, the size of an audio file inside the engine increases almost 4 times (because the engine converts it into a special format so it can process it faster at runtime).

I can reduce the build further - smaller textures, simpler audio, more aggressive compression. But will that start hurting immersion for you? Especially considering I won’t be able to get the archive size below 400 MB anyway (compared to the current 600 MB).

So the question is - is it even worth it? How important is build size to you? How much does environment quality breaking down affect your immersion?

And also, I’m curious: what is your view-to-download ratio?

▶ RAT SIGNAL