Hello! Frank’s New Job was a compo entry for this ld31! This was our first game together, and a”complete” game at that!
We are both incredibly inexperienced in games development. We have just recently picked it up, I (Jannick) have just recently dropped out of school and decided to try and puruse my dreams of being a successful game developer, Aleksander being quite similar but the other way around, being in a hiatus for school work until the next semester.
Having just been learning Unity and C# for about 3 months, it was time for ludum dare, and we decided that we would do this together as a team. Keep in mind, he (Aleksander) is about as inexperienced as I. Having no real clue what role we should have, we just let time decide that matter. So, this is a chronological summary of what happened:
He came to my appartment at 4 am in the morning, this is one hour after ld31 started in CET time. We live in Norway! I had no sleep, but I battled through (so brave).
We planned the game for around 2 hours, before agreeing on a start point and developing and planning as we go. We were happy about how we’d decided to go about the theme, and thought that it would not only add depth to our game, but be a bit innovative in the use of the theme. Realization in post: Many developers have been a lot more clever than us. So we realized that we now rather look like a three-year-old breaking apart a kids toy claiming superiority over the human race for the act that was made.
I ended up doing all the programming and we worked off with the art design together.
First day I ended up staying awake for 37 hours altogether. That’s the longest I’ve ever been up. I still had some adrenaline to waste as well, haha!
At a point we realized that we will never have time to put in all our funny bits into the game. And our whole event-system had to be left behind in a trail of wasted dreams, which was a real blow to us, because this is what separates this game from being a “real gamey game”. Meaning that, in the current state, this game has no lose/failure mechanism. Basically, we were too ambitious for our own good.
The last hours we had to have something funny incorporated, not just the art being goofy-looking. So we sat down and wrote the script (dialogues) in about 30minutes. The last hours I was blazing in Unity programming in the entire dialogue tree, being awfully stressed out, in a weirdly focused manner. Aleksander was working on reworking some art to make it more esthetically pleasing, and perspectively correct.
After publishing, we thought that we had messed up on the planning, because we weren’t able to implement about 4/5 of what we had planned. And these 4 out 5 parts were things that would drastically add to the humor and fun of the game. We didn’t expect any good reviews at this point. We’re both individuals that don’t like when something ‘isn’t perfect’. This is why ludum dare is a very great exercise for us. Having to scrap minor details for the bigger picture, is a hard thing to do for us.
We’d love for you to play the game and just give us an honest opinion about what you thought about this game. We tried to make it adventure gamey, but it just wasn’t enough time to add “game” to this, haha!
Play the game here:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=47205
These are some examples of retouching that we made time for (old/new):
