This year, for the first time ever, I participated in Ludum Dare! I’d always wanted to, but the stars had never aligned (burnout or busy). This year the masses picked the theme Deeper & Deeper, which felt like fertile jam ground to me. Since this wasn't my first jam I made a point of keeping the concept simple and achievable; a submarine piloted by cats who hunt fish, and delve the depths for greater snacks. It was the Spore cell game but instead of a cell you customize and control, it’s just a submarine you don’t customize but still control (must keep the scope under control).

So naturally I wasted 2 hours of the first night trying to make the submarine art look good and scrapped it.

Before going to bed I dredged up an old idea that I’d parked a month or two prior; idle brick breaker. Just put the paddles at the top of the screen and the bricks on the bottom and all of a sudden you’re digging down, instead of breaking up. Game James are Easy.

The rest of the jam was more or less smooth sailing: - Decided on an art style 6 hours before the jam was over - Wasted 4 or 5 hours writing a broken save system that crashed the game constantly - Wrote and recorded the music an hour before the end of the jam - Made my first build of the game after the jam was over and the submission hour had begun - Made most of the icons and upgrade data while the music was being multi-tracked and rendered, in the last 20 minutes - Spent most of the submission hour fixing game crashing bugs - Didn’t catch all of the game crashing bugs

All in all I think the resulting game was really quite good. So I’m going to delve a little deeper and see if I can turn it into a commercial project. Likely on Android, free to play.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/embark

So where do I begin?

First things first, I want to consolidate the feedback on the game. Which basically breaks down into these buckets:

I think I’ve knocked out the two main crash culprits: - I ran into an issue where the SaveManager was creating save data that simply didn’t work - I was trying to destroy balls that couldn’t be destroyed

I’ll go into a little more detail regarding that second one, since it’s kind of interesting.

Basically I didn’t want to work on any visual effects or particle systems, and I wanted to reinforce the “digging” theme of the game, so I decided to spawn the balls above the play area, and drop into frame. This also happens to be where the ball-death-trigger is. So I set up some logic that flags a ball as non-destroyable until it enters the play area. Which is fine until a level is finished, and I want to destroy all the balls in the game and spawn new ones. The game would repeatedly try and destroy any balls that were in the process of falling from above, but couldn’t destroy them due to that “non-destroyable” flag. I feel absolutely foolish that I didn’t catch this, but, that’s jamming.

As for the art direction and audio direction, I’m really happy with the results in the jam and I feel like I have a good foundation to grow from. I want to add a little more visual depth and excitement, and I want to explore doing something more generative with the music, but what the game looks and sounds like today will be the basis of what it looks like when I eventually release a commercial version.

The biggest issue in my eyes is the complete lack of a tutorial, and very poor onboarding experience. I literally drop you into the game loop, with no hand holding. That won’t be acceptable. My plan is to introduce each core element individually (balls, paddles, spells, upgrades). Focus on making the first few levels shorter and more engaging.

Anyways, this is a long way of saying “thank you everyone who left feedback on Embark”, you made it all worth it!