I've been around games for a long time. A few years building web games early in my career, then years as a server dev. Over a decade reviewing other people's games.
Lighthouse's Vigil, made for Ludum Dare 59, is the first game I've ever shipped by my decision (and the incredible Sasori-san too)!
That sentence took me a while to write down honestly. Saying it out loud makes the gap obvious — a whole career adjacent to the thing, and never the thing itself.
I have a dream game. One I've waited much more than I should to start. I did so last year, it's been in actual production for the past ten months, with all the usual signs of a project that's serious. More than it should for a debut game to be honest. And like most of them, it has the gravitational pull of a small planet. The closer I spend time with it, the bigger it gets.
Every game develop I respect, when I've described that project, has given me a version of the same advice: ship small things first.
Finish something. Let yourself find out what "done" feels like before you stake years on it.
I have mostly refused that advice until now, the jam was me finally taking it.
What a 72-hour deadline does to you
Three days is not enough time for second-guessing. That turned out to be the entire point.
I went in reasonably conservative. The thing I'm best at my day job is (which is also in games) is judgment - looking at a game and feeling what is working, what isn't and what is ready. That muscle is genuinely useful when you're building something. It's also something that stopped me for years from ever calling my own work "good enough".
In a jam, I figured I would assume at face value what I was doing, small experiments - some of which took me 6 hours I regretted - and do whatever I could to make the best experience possible with the simplest idea I could come up with. I had a bunch of personal ideas I would do for smaller games, I just never implemented them, and one of them felt like the best for the current theme, signal - a lighthouse game, where the whole point is controlling the light.
Here, even though I was in a small group, we make a call, we ship the call, and three hours later it is already invisible behind the next one. By the Monday night (JST) I had made thousands of decisions I'd normally have agonized over for weeks like I did in my main game, and the game just existed. I sincerely knew a few of the things that were lacking, much of which people gave precious feedback about, but it got to a moment we decided to stop and call it a release, and push it forward.
The feeling of relief of finishing it was something really odd to me, as I have been in an infinite loop of regret and working on unfinished things for more than half a decade. The other surprise, and that is the part I want to bring forward into the dream project, was how much a small project gives you to be audacious.
We added voice acting in the last 24 hours, 75 voice lines recorded in less than one hour by my beloved wife, Pangami. She reacts to essentially most of the in-game events. We had no plan for it, and it was one of the most commented elements we received, beyond atmosphere, style, and the infamous difficulty. A "real" project, like many of which I have dealt with, with milestones, stakeholders and risk reviewers, would have killed the idea in an instant.
The uncompromised vibe of "let's just try to do it" is the the golden opportunity of a game jam. The cost of trying is bounded by the deadline you're already going to hit anyway. So you try things, and it turns out a surprising number of them land or crash. And a couple weeks later, I'm already applying the feedback into a post-ratings update AND to my main project.
If not for this game jam I would probably still be very conservative on it, and would have lost many opportunities, like the incredible opportunity to work with Sasori-san.
Feedback I didn't expect
I've spent over a decade giving other developers feedback on their games, in my original Brazilian blog, CyberCafe, which will be closing down this June after 13 years operating. Receiving something similar on something I'd actually built was very satisfying, especially the ones that were countering my original proposal here.
Talking specifically about a few of your (the esteemed reviewers and commenters which I cherish personally) points:
- Multiple players complained about the lighthouse rotation speed. I made that deliberately conservative, on the theory that a fast spotlight would feel unrealistic and trivialize the game. The honest answer is that I'd optimized for the wrong battle. The complaint wasn't "this is too hard", more so "I can't act in time". That's a control-agency problem, dressed up as a difficulty problem, and I would have caught it in five seconds in someone else's game.
- A few people suggested a few things I even planned on eventually getting to had I a little more extra time: like upgrades.
- Another point was not knowing how to beat the final boss, and it's essentially the same as beating any other enemy! You focus on its core, but that wasn't clear enough for users, and they got frustrated by the swarm of miasmas going their way (there is no time!!!).
- I made the system of this game with the idea in mind that it was a survival, while players were tending on optimizing scores, and got frustrated by a system with a different goal. I could have, for sure, made something that would satisfy both things, if I had the time (and maybe I can, after the ratings are out).
The biggest takeaways from this game jam for me:
1. Ship small first, even in a massive project
2. Deadlines beat taste
3. Be audacious in bounded contexts
4. Get feedback before you're ready. ASAP.
Sorry for the massive wall of text, and thank you for reading until here. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to participate the Ludum Dare 59 and will likely again.
If you haven't had the opportunity to play Lighthouse's Vigil yet, please do! And let me know in the comments if you'd like me to review yours in the meantime, while ratings are up! I'd be happy to check any that I haven't yet, I really tried to review as most as I could.
Stay safe out there!
Tanjou
Thank you so much for playing, commenting and rating Lighthouse’s Vigil!