I realized that players had trouble understanding certain concepts in my game, as they were not clearly communicated. Therefore I knocked together some pictures, as they say a thousand words, besides players don't read wall of texts.
Do check out my game here at
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/they-attack-at-night
Here's the game at wave 39, with all power generators activated. I didn't manage to playtest my game fully so wasn't sure if this "win condition" was achievable but glad that I proved that the game was somewhat beatable. Past wave 30 the game gets boring though.
Also a nice surprise that I've gotten 20 ratings. Thanks all who played and rated!
Check out the game at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/they-attack-at-night
Players were having trouble understanding my game.
Those pictures with the text? Failed me as well.
I couldn't take it any longer.
So I released a post jam version!
Hopefully the in-game tutorial text does a better job at conveying the complexities of the game's systems.
This post-jam update also addresses a real usability flaw in the game, where the text on buildings were located too high up, causing players and streamers to miss out on the critical gameplay mechanic of building turrets in the game. Something that a casual playtest would reveal. Lesson learnt: Get a fresh pair of eyes to evaluate the game! Also, designing 3D games is hard as nuts!
Old - too darn high up!
New - not so bad at eye level
I intentionally made the text move upwards though, just because the suspense of looking up while enemies were incoming was just too great to pass up on. Another lesson learnt: Don't be afraid of mistakes, as they can sometimes give inspiration to better ideas!
Check out the game at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/they-attack-at-night
Feedback greatly appreciated!
I haven't got much to say about my game. Not very proud of it, given the short time I had.
Here's what others had to say though.
Check it out here
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/bulletcoin
Another Ludum Dare and the first time doing a post-mortem! Its the third LD for me, and I always tell myself that I don't want to overscope and stress myself out, and still end up doing so.
When the theme landed on a nice 8am saturday morning, I had a few ideas in mind (I like my platformer x breakout idea), but I had always wanted to tackle this idea that was in the back of my mind: what if you could explore the buildings you created in Sim City? The idea was borne out of a friend's lament that there aren't many games like Actraiser which combine two separate genres like simulation and action (technically the sim phase is more bullet hell... but anywhoo) Ignoring all sensibility of scope, I settled on the idea:
A cross between city simulation and first person shooter/exploration it is!
Settled on a downsized version of the idea beforehand, but I certainly underestimated the scope of the work involved. Given the scope, I defaulted to using Unity which I am more familiar with. The gameplay loop would mainly require switching between city planning and first person view. To incentivise first person view and exploration, I knew I wanted buildings to be explorable and have stuff in them, and I also wanted players to somehow relate to the inhabitants of their city, so I settled on income being provided by getting up close and personal to citizens (just like in real life). In terms of buildings, I intentionally limited it to 4 buildings of various sizes. I still had a vague idea of the city sim aspects though, as I didn't want to make it too complicated to understand (and program). Here's a inside slice of the office building:
I didn't intend it to look like Minecraft (well the LD keynote might have influenced it), but I landed on a voxel artstyle as it would be much easier to develop for in 3D, and I planned on using MagicaVoxel for the very first time! It was easy enough to pick up and use and I tested the whole workflow to Unity. Everything was working well. Later on came the challenge though - making transparent windows. (I was misled by those pretty Magicavoxel renders with glass effects...)
After doing a few test builds, I finally settled on the structure for a building as follows
- The full model with windows as the parent - provides the collision, with mesh renderer being turned off
- The cutout model with windows removed as the child - material set to opaque and can be switched to transparent
- The model with only windows as another child - material set to transparent
A wrong turn I took early on - I fixated on the idea of buildings being destructible, although it wasn't really core to the central idea. I really, really wanted to have the voxels collapse like a nice stack of cubes (powered by Unity physics) and explored various solutions:
- I considered procedural generation of the meshes - however without a ready solution I wasn't able to scratch the surface of such an endeavor.
- The next step was to just convert everything into cubes. However I needed to figure out a way to read MagicaVoxel files into sets of 3D arrays for dynamic generation of cubes.There appeared to be some solutions online for converting vox files to integer arrays however I just didn't have the time to explore them in depth.
- An alternative was to specify the array of cubes individually in a data file, but the thought of creating huge arrays manually wasn't very appealing...
- Tried generating cubes on the fly by checking for collisions with the meshcollider - however cubes that were embedded within the mesh didn't collide at all.
- Another idea considered was splitting the chunks in magicavoxel manually. Could have been possible, but the chunks would still be concave.
- Finally, I used blender destructible meshes, which wasn't a pretty solution as that caused havoc with the Magicavoxel textures, and the chunks were in a mess. Running out of precious time, I went for this.
So the end result: buildings are a little chunky (as I wanted them to be destructible and turn into cubes) and when destroyed they look pretty meh. And there's a bunch of junk code sitting in the source now. Ugh
Guess I should've just went for the easy solution right at the start, but I wasted precious hours on something as inane as destruction. *Lesson learnt * - focus on getting to a basic gameplay state ASAP!
I ended the first day without too much gameplay and just a bunch of placeholders strewn about the game. At least I had the city building aspect down. Even had the sweet animation of the building growing up from the ground in a voxel-like fashion (just like in real life).
Also slapped in the Unity first person controller and a voxel gun (modelled after a previous game jam entry!)
Next, its Day 2... roads and finally, some gameplay!
Thanks for reading so far, if you have any great ideas on how to better tackle the above conundrums, comments are more than welcome, oh and do check out the game here!
Yes, I have at least 20 ratings now, thanks to everyone who rated!
However I'm keen to get more plays so I'm doing a shameless plug for my game, featuring a new trailer.
Let me know which levels you get stuck on, and what can be improved, and thanks in advance for your feedback!
When the theme landed, it was another case of "I can't believe this was the winning theme ughhhh".
I had a few game ideas in mind - such as a collapsing land of tiles, a roguelike where tiles kept falling off where you walked and if you fell off you'd get to the next level, walls closing in on you, a shrinking table with items falling off, and a space fitting puzzle where you'd put dancers on stage while hoping they don't bump into each other.
However I had given myself a rule this time: Make a 2D entry - to make it easier for me to complete the game within the compo period without losing much sleep. Even better yet, go with something minimalistic!
I kept gravitating towards the idea in the game of Hundreds, which is a minimalist game on iOS around expanding spheres while making sure that they don't collide. And then thought - why not place a twinstick shooter inside it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM0Vo7neVpw
I also analysed the game of THOTH, which is a minimalist twinstick shooter for some inspiration. I liked its slow introduction of the various mechanics and subsequent subversion, keeping the gameplay fresh. In particular, the creepy mechanical sound effects, the ambient soundscape and the shooting sound which was rather clear but unobtrusive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg4Z8Szhp5o
The choice of going minimalistic and 2D was a real significant move, as I had finished the core mechanic of my game on day 1, and had much more time to add mechanics, apply polish, add stages and even compose a BGM from scratch for my entry this time (although it is kind of a crappy ambient piece!). I still lost some sleep, but kept my sanity.
Here is a trailer for my game, and you can clearly see where I was ~~stealing ideas~~ getting inspiration from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7V2nCTc4MI
Having some time to do some hot rating action. Do post if you are in need of some rating (only if you have <20 ratings though!)
WOW. My first time making it to the top 10, which is still unbelievable!
Here's a short post-mortem, as it went really well, all things considered.
Clearly the decision to go all 2D and minimalistic paid off. Even though graphics still aren't my strong suit and the art in my game was mediocre, going for a strict minimalist style somehow got me into the top 100 for graphics which is a pretty good trade-off. Compared to my previous LD entries where I got tripped up trying to do 3D and did not do too great as a result, 2D really is much more achievable for a compo entry, where I actually had enough time to focus on game mechanics and polish.
The decision to go with a familiar genre - top down shooter - paid off as well. I've always thought that game jams tend to be easy mode if you're doing either a 2D platformer or top down shooter. Not just because its done to death and relatively easy to achieve, but because players just get it, having played so many variants of it. No lengthy tutorials required, its easy to understand, controls are intuitive, everything just clicks. I always trip up on doing tutorials well, and I'm glad that this game was pretty self-explanatory.
The amount of polish matters. A LOT. After having experienced a few jams, I realized its really all about the polish sometimes. I did a lot of tweaking on small matters to make stuff "feel just right", such as the physic impact of bullets, movement of the player character, the death animation. I'm surprised at how well I scored on audio and mood as well, as my ambient soundscape was basically slapping together various pad synths on LMMS, and added reverb to every sound FX. Much better than my past LD entries, where audio was basically an afterthought.
A systematic approach to completing the game did pay off as well. I put up my very first build on day 1 for testing, with about 5 test levels. That allowed me time to gather some initial player feedback, and also helped to guide my focus on making sure that the levels are watertight, without any major bugs and to settle on a consistent design. This is the part of the game jam which I usually dread - the "point of no return", where all the possibilities the game could be collapses into a single invariant state. After getting over this point, things were smooth sailing - then it was just coming up with the levels without having to revise or re-do previous levels.
Leaving the part which can be scaled back last. As all the game mechanics were already tried and tested, and it was just a matter of weaving a logical flow through the mechanics, I left level design to the last. Although I ran out of steam in the last few stages (which is why the level design suffers a bit then), I could easily scale back on the the number of levels and the game would still feel no less complete. I recall this talk about an inverted pyramid here - Article on Gamasutra- which is totally applicable for game jams as well.
With that, I'd really like to thank all the players rating my game and providing great feedback, and especially the streamers playing my game! I will be taking all feedback in to refine my game for a post jam release, so stay tuned!
Thanks for the great score! I'm still over the moon, and I still can't believe how I placed highest in Humor, a category that was challenging for me to get right in the past.
When the theme landed, I was absolutely stumped. I didn't want to retread some familiar and obvious ground, so I eventually landed on the trolley problem. Thought to myself that it's probably a unique enough idea - until I saw the numerous LD entries about the trolley problem that eventually spawned from the theme. Oh well. I still hate the theme!
At least there's a twist to the game that's not apparent: The game was inspired by the Good Place: Trolley Problem episode. Not spoiling too much of the episode, but I wanted to introduce a new wrinkle into the good old trolley problem.
By making death as graphical, juicy and visceral as possible. And making it actually possible to kill everyone.
Moral choice in most story based games are usually pretty cut and dried. Choose the good or evil route.
With the premise of the trolley problem, where the "evil option" isn't usually entertained, I wanted to entice players to consider alternatives though: do you do the usual expected utilitarian outcome, if the consequences are vague - or do you explore and play around in a game's space, and what happens when you somehow chance upon "evil"? If you do a max kill, all you get is a scolding from the game, which notices you doing something different. There's also a "hidden ending" if you get max kills for all levels.
The fixed camera was intentional as well, as in later levels you didn't have the luxury of seeing where you were headed and you'd have to make snap decisions which might cause regret later on. Sort of mirroring how moral decisions are made in real life where you don't have complete foresight of the situation. This made for some unintentionally hilarious moments - loved it when a twitch player accidentally steered the trolley into a maximum kill.
The chickens were kind of an afterthought. I've always had the idea that if you wanted to score easy points in a Ludum Dare entry, add a good dose of chickens. They're kooky, lightened the mood, yet introducing another conundrum: which would you place more weight on - a person or a chicken? And in the morally ambiguous space of the game, where there's a clear counter on the number of deaths that goes up regardless of pax or fowl, discovering whats really at stake is part of the "fun".
Putting aside the pretentious philosophical waxing, in terms of the jam, it didn't go as smooth as I hoped though. I spent the first day re-learning Blender, and playing around with the ragdoll physics. On the second day, I spent too much time implementing the rails and the movement of the trolley - not the most optimal solution, but I'm able to put together a level pretty easily.
Finally, the audio was put together in a mad rush at the end. Managed to squeeze in some bad voice acting for sound effects, which worked well and is encouraging for future LD entries. I'm particularly proud with how the BGM ended up fitting the tone that I desired, given the comedic yet sinister nature of the gameplay (was listening to Bonetrousle from Undertale for inspiration)
If there's one thing I didn't like about this - it was too short with just 3 levels, and I would have liked more time to fully develop the puzzles and explore more ethical conundrums. As it is though, I'm pretty satisfied, got to polish my pretty rusty 3D modelling skills and didn't lose much sleep over a entry that was scoped pretty tightly.
Onward to the next LD!
Check out the game if you like
Given the whole precarious situation around the world, I wanted some themes to distract and provide a sense of comfort and normalcy. (Pls no more virus-related themes!)
Oh and #Masks4All and remember to stay safe everyone!