First time in

# Engine
Godot

# GFX
PyxelEdit / Gimp or Paint.NET

# Sound
Audacity and BFXR or LabChirp

# Platform
OSX for development and maybe Windows if i need to use Paint.NET

It was my first Ludum Dare and besides some technical problems, it went pretty well.

I knew upfront that I couldn’t work the full time, because a good friend celebrated his birthday at saturday evening. Also this was my first Godot project and I am not very experienced with game engines in general. So I set my goals pretty low because I really wanted to have the game done after the two days (that’s what we all want, don’t we?).

Breathless

Day 1:

I brainstormed for around one hour and came up with this simple puzzle idea. I did not plan every mechanic in detail, the only thing I knew was that there are some air bubbles under the water that the player has to bring up to the surface. In my first idea there were no pipes at all, the basic idea was that the bubbles will move up (as they naturally do) and are blocked by some walls and stuff, the player would have to shift around that walls to open up the way for the bubbles.

I started doing some basic tile artwork with Pyxel Edit, which I learned to use one day before. I am a programmer and I really have nearly no experience with this. After around 4 hours I had some basic tiles done and already implemented elements that you could drag around horizontally. During that work, I had the ideas with the pipes and since the artwork for those tiles was very easy to do I added them next.

Day 2:

I started adding the bubbles and valve animations. I knew I should really start implementing the main game logic, the only thing I had done so far were some parts that I could move around. I underestimated that part hard! It took my around 5 hours to add the logic to detect when the puzzle is solved correclty and for the move-bubbles-through-pipe animation. I thought I just use the physics engine and add an area (sensor) at every pipe link, which would me allow to easily detect when the pipe is connected, however I just could not find out how to detect collisions on two areas in Godots physics engine. So I ended up doing that stuff on my own.

Now it was sunday evening, and I finally had one working level. I only had a few hours left to finish the content, because I had to go to work at monday. So I made a checklist with all final tasks I needed to finish, and some tasks that would be nice to have. I estimated the time required for each task and worked on them. During the work I had to kick all nice-to-have tasks. However I made it just in time! I even made it to record some sounds and had 8 finished levels. I had the game finished at 1:30 am CET, at least I thought so …

The Release:

1:30 PM CET, 1:30h till the end. Time to submit, time to go to bed. I exported the game and then it happend Instead of playing the sounds, that exported version just started to lag everytime a sound should have been played back (as it turned out later, I was using the wrong player type for small sound effects). It was so late, I was not concentrated anymore, I just wanted to have the game done and when it was arond 2:30 PM ( 30 minutes before LD ended ) I decided to remove all sounds and create a final build, uploaded it. But that was not the end of that story, the next problem arised: I noticed a few typos in my start-screen, so I fixed those and reuploaded the binaries, but when I downloaded the game again, it was still the old version. I tried over and over again, but the text did still appear like the old version. As it turned out later on, bitbucket seems to do some strange caching of the files, however so tired and unconcentrated I did not really know what went wrong (and would never expect such a thing btw ^^). I tried it until time went out and uploaded my last version, around 2:59 PM and gave up. But the result was good, anyways.

Final thoughts:

I learned a lot, it made a lot of fun and I am really proud about the results I will definitly attend Ludum Dare again.

Thank you for this great experience!!

For the next LD, I hope to know my tools better and hope I can improve my artistic skills.

Breathless can be downloaded here.

Have not much time though I hope I find 4-8 hours to create something tiny.

Engine: Unity 2D

Graphics: Affinity Designer / Pyxel

Music/Sound: Garage Band, Audacity, bfxr