Potato!
This was my first Ludum Dare 48 hour compo. Originally I was going to do a Jam with my brother, because I felt like my programming skills were not good enough to go solo. After I did two warm-up games I felt like I could do it alone, so we had a game-off to see who could get the best game. Here’s my game and here’s my brother’s game if you’re interested in seeing who won our game developing game-off :P.
What I liked about my game
– The setting
– It’s a point and click game
– I managed to keep the art style somewhat consistent
What I don’t like about my game
– Worst most wonkey controls of LD 26
– Really short
– The ending sucks
I’ve always wanted to create a game that takes place in a dystopian sort of setting. I like how I tried to make the style of drawings match the setting’s urban and dystopian environment I tried to convey. When it comes to point and click games like Machinarium or The Dream Machine I love going through an engaging story with interesting appearance and puzzles, both of those games were obvious inspirations for my first LD game.
When I was making the framework for my game I was just clipping away at it because I wanted lots of time to add content. As a result I made the horrible (and possibly common) mistake of not taking much time to think about what I was really implementing. This ended up with weird controls like the Greater than and Less than buttons being move buttons, and the U and P keys both being use buttons for very awkwardly specific things. I also found content being kind of annoying to add. I was only one person and even though it was all black and white I was trying to keep shading and whatnot consistant. I think I also made the actual act of adding content in the game way too tedious. For an example, an “Interactable door object” had over 10 arguments that were all integers and did not have a smart order to them. I found myself double checking the methods and constructors of my objects a lot to make sure I was implementing things right.
Even though I spend almost half of my productive time drawing I didn’t end up with a whole lot of content. To make it worse I didn’t think of a real story, just a setting I wanted the player to explore and be interested in. I ended up awkwardly stapling an end to the story that I didn’t actually come up with until about 10 hours before the dare was over. Anyways, I’m rambling a lot here, I’ll probably add a TL;DR.
But Ludum Dare newbie! This was suppose to be a learning experience! wat did u lrrn?!
Ok, I know nobody in this community acts like that, but I did learn a lot from this project. These include
– Try to plan out the controls and user interface before implementing stuff
– Plan your story before adding content
– Make tools before hand to help you out. Really, I made an entire framework from scratch and it wasted a lot of time.
– Take breaks! I spend almost 18 hours working on the LD and didn’t take game breaks or anything like that except for eating and looking at a few post on the site. I got a headache about 4 hours before the compo ended and I still was trying to finish my game.
Despite how frustrating it was to make and how much I was disappointing with the result, it feels so good to make something and I’m definitely looking forward to the next compo! Off to play more of the community’s games!
TL;DR – I liked how the game turned out. The game ending sucks though. I should have planned the framework before making it. I underestimated how long it takes to add content. I will participate in the next LD.
