I’ve participated in game jams before, but this will be my first Ludum Dare and my first time doing a solo competition. Adventure!

Tools

Engine: Probably Construct 2, as I’ve been using it to prototype recently so it’s fresh on the brain. There’s always a chance of Unity, though. It will depend on the game.

Language: If Unity, C#

Graphics: GIMP

Sound: Probably SFXR

Music: This is the one area that will be an adventure for me, as I can art and code it up and design games for a living, but I’ve never written a song in my life. I asked if the Disasterpeace “January” tool was valid for the solo competition but never received a response. Any thoughts on that? Otherwise I’ll give PXTone a try.

Though this was my very first Ludum Dare, and the solo competition at that, I feel like it went really well for me! (My entry can be found here) I ended the weekend happy with my game and with a nice mental tiredness that was not crippling exhaustion. I’m going to write about my process and the things I think helped make this Ludum Dare a pleasant and successful experience…

1. Preparation.

By this I mean knowing your tools and your process and feeling comfortable with them ahead of time. Since I am a professional game designer, some of this was just built-in experience by this point, but I’ve also been recently doing a lot of rapid prototyping at work so I was already in the “make stuff really fast” mindset before the weekend began. I think this just comes with making lots of stuff over time.

2. Rest

Back in grad school I participated in a 48 hour game jam for the XO laptop, and I approached it with the whole “stay awake as long as possible” attitude that I’d done for similar marathons in the past (24 hour comic challenge, 24 hour play festival, etc). It did a terrible number on my health and I swore off game jams at the time, but I’ve been re-introducing them to my life and just taking a more reasonable approach. One thing I’ve always admired about LD is its emphasis on being reasonable with pacing, but I was nervous to try the solo competition. I did it anyway!

This weekend I got a full 8 hours of sleep both nights, and during the day took ample breaks for food, walking my cat, and just getting away from the computer. This was a big help, because the real person doing all the work is subconscious brain, and I needed to get out of her hair on occasion to let her solve all the hard problems I ran into.

3. Planning

Though the majority of working time is spent making the game logic and creating assets, I found it really helpful to set aside time to do some planning, which is why you occasionally see workflowy popping up in my timelapse video. This planning was nothing too extensive, but doing things like outlining the structure and screen flow of the game would help me spot transitions I would need early on that I hadn’t thought about (or allocated time for).

I would also jot out a rough schedule, and revise it after each break. This helped me keep in scope and know when I should take a break from iterating on game structure or bug fixing to write a song. I tried to keep this very lenient with a lot of open room, which worked out as I spent a lot of unplanned time on Saturday night addressing a physics issue that I had not anticipated.

Also, just listing out to-do action items for stuff like “sound effects needed” helped me churn through asset creation without wasting a lot of time figuring out what I needed to do next. So it may not seem intuitive to spend precious work minutes writing out a next-actions list, but I found that it helped me be more efficient on a whole over the entire weekend.

4. Let your Problems Dictate your Design

On Saturday night I ran into an issue with physics syncing. I’d wanted the “preview” mode of my game to simulate the same way each time on any machine, so it would be more of a plan-and-place puzzle. but the pausing and restarting of time was making the play-through part inaccurate and making it framerate dependent caused other issues. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to record the simulation and do playback and how to stop playback and begin recording again when you placed an object on the screen, etc. It was going to be complicated.

After a good night’s sleep, I realized a much easier path would just be to change my design intent. The preview would just show a general possibility of how the ball would behave, and the goal of your placing objects would be to react to what was happening in the moment. I think it ended up being a better choice in the end, too, since one level can potentially play out a different way twice in a row. A friend of mine described it as akin to “turn-based pinball.”

I was able to use the simulation recording work I’d done the previous night to do a simple replay (which had its own bugs) so no work was wasted and I was able to move on from a complicated problem to finish off the game.

5. Music Composition for Noobs

By far the most daunting part of the compo for me was creating my own music. I can code, I can draw, I can spam the “random” button in sfxr until I find something I like, and I design for a living…but music? I’ve never written a song in my life! Fortunately I got some fast, noobish composition tips beforehand.

Step 1: Pick a chord, any chord A-G. Look it up on the internet to find out what the notes are in the chord.

Step 2: Lay out those notes in music program of choice (I used LMMS).

Step 3: Grab the notes and reorder them and spread them all around, just keep the notes themselves the same

Step 4: Hit play. Hey that kind of sounds like it could be a thing! Adjust until it’s a thing.

Step 5: Layer on top of a base track of just 1 or 2 of the notes repeating. Add in a few more layers of the same process. Pull things all around until the timing sounds like it’s something.

Step 6. Put the song in your game and turn the volume down super low so even if your song is terrible, it won’t be too distracting. Success!

Closing Thoughts

Again, I was really happy with what I was able to accomplish this weekend. I felt challenged and the tiredness of good mental exertion. I was even confronted with an unexpected and difficult problem during the course of my work and was able to conquer it. Overall, a fine experience!

I think my biggest thing is that I get very caught up in tuning game feedback at the expense of making more elaborate art that I know is within my abilities. I don’t think that’s necessarily a terrible thing, though.

Will I do Ludum Dare again? Most likely!

Tags: postmortem

I’m not sure if I’ll reach my goal of playing at least 100 games from Ludum Dare 27, but I’m getting pretty close. All the same, I figured it would be a good time to give a shout out to some of my favorite games that I’ve come across so far. Here they are!

Keg Quest (Jam Entry)

I thought this game pulled off the whole “simultaneous actions performed asynchronously” mechanic in a brilliant way. I had seen several other games that played around with a similar thing, but Keg Quest framed it in a way that was easy to work out the puzzle through trial and error and then easily reset everything to “perform” correctly once you had mentally solved the puzzle.

The Exploratite Mitae (Jam Entry)

This was a great moody piece. The mechanic is simple enough to be represented without UI, so they were able to focus on the beautiful art and use that to convey all the critical game information. I think the storytelling moments in this game are absolutely fantastic, especially (SPOILERS) the moment at the end when you start encountering dead mites near the surface. If you had just reached the top without them it would have been kind of frustrating, but that tiny detail gave juuuust enough of a foreshadowing moment that reaching the surface nailed that sense of despair.

ONEMOC: 1 MINUTE OF COLORS (48 hour comp)

I thought the mechanic in this one was very clever (and very simple). It wasn’t quite like anything I’d encountered before, though something about the “walking” feeling from square to square reminded me a little bit of InnerCube. The interface for how the desired color changed over time merged with a timer bar was really nice.

The Ones You Love (48 hour comp)

This was like a fast-form adventure game. I enjoyed it because it had nice puzzle and story elements without all the extra fuss you have to deal with in a standard adventure game (I’m not normally a fan of point-and-click adventures). Like, there is still trial and error with things, but the framing around 10 seconds really makes it efficient and fun. Plus it’s a nice, touching story.

So, there you have it, my favorite 4 of LD27. Even still, I’ve played a ton of other games that have done impressive work, so fantastic job, everybody!

Lastly, if you want to check out my own 48 hour compo entry, 10 Second Dragon Feeder, you can view it here:

Thanks All!

My official “I’m in” post for LD29!

I’m doing the jam this time around with my good friend, Will White (of Willmanda Games). I’m super pumped because it’s been years since we collaborated on anything, and I was getting pretty lonely with my recent solo jams. We will be streaming development at http://www.twitch.tv/willmanda

I had hopes of switching up my tools this time around and having a go at Gamemaker instead of my fallback jam-and-prototype-tool, Construct 2, but some busy times came up that makes me not quiiiite confident with Gamemaker just yet, but we’ll see. And there’s always Unity as an option, I suppose.

I also have an additional personal constraint this jam. I’ve been taking an Information Theory class with Mike Acton, our Engine Director at work, and my “final” homework is to apply something I’ve learned in the class while doing the jam. Hopefully I can pull it off!

Tags: im in

This was my second Ludum Dare, and my first one as part of a jam team. I had great fun working with my good friend, Will White. It’s been ages since we collaborated on anything, so it was a blast to meld creative minds once again (fun fact, Will was one of my team members on my very first game jam ever).

We ended up making Rosa Neurosa, a weird sort of digging improv game. The idea actually started as a basic sort of digging game with the theme of rooting around someone’s mind to find the real cause of an issue, but during our walk to get dinner on Friday night, the bit about having players just make up stories relating the memories came up. It got us a both excited, as I love improv games and had been wanting to make somewhat of a “toy” at some point, and it took a lot of the heavy lifting off trying to do something like think up a bunch of content and connections between memories ahead of time.

Figuring out how to let people share their stories really made it fun, and it was great to have people trying out early builds of the game in our developer stream and then share their silly stories back with us. I also was pleased that after many jams using Construct 2, I finally managed to do something that actually used some things that are specific strengths of html5.

There are some issues I’d like to address post-jam:

1. A lot of the objects don’t stand out over the drillable ground and on the ending screen in the office, I’d like to make borders for them or backgrounds that they can sit on, since they’re pretty key to the stories making sense
2. I’d like to fiddle more with my spawning rules, right now things can spawn behind rocks and sometimes there just aren’t that many items that show up
3. We’d been hoping to at least get a palette shift on the environment to convey different levels, but ran out of time, like you do
4. We only tested this in Chrome, and as such there are a lot of bugs in Firefox that I’d like to address
5. I set up the input so that it would be easy to add alternate controls and gamepad support later, but didn’t have time to get those in
6. More patients! The patients featured are me, Will, Will’s wife and streaming partner (Amanda), and a random bear. It makes it 10 times more fun to send Amanda or Will a link of my story when I happen to get them as patients. It would be really funny if we had a way of letting people incorporate their friends as patients (maybe randomly pulling from facebook photos?) but then it wouldn’t have Will’s charming character animation.
7. One of my goals for the game was to incorporate what I’ve been learning in an Information Theory class I’m taking with Mike Acton. I barely got one thing implemented from it, and figured out how a lot of things I was doing could be done in a more information-efficient way, but it turns out that sort of math is really hard under time pressure!

Lastly, this was my first experience with doing a live developer stream. I loved it! It was fun that Will and I were in the same room so our audio could be on one another’s stream. It definitely kept me focused and was great fun responding to stream visitors. Thanks to everyone who stopped by!

All in all, I call this a successful jam

Tags: postmortem

Third LD, second time doing 48 hour compo, ADVENTURE! I’m swamped at work so I’m gonna try and keep this weekend way more down-scoped than usual.

Engine/Tools: Construct 2

Graphics: Gimp

Sound: sfxr

Music: maybe inudge?

Not sure if I’m gonna stream this time (http://www.twitch.tv/wertle), but if I don’t I’ll time lapse for sure. Weee!

-Wertle

This was my third Ludum Dare, and although I did Afterlife Dance Party within 48 hours and mostly solo, I decided on the last day to switch to the jam so I could have someone help me with music (John Fio to the rescue!) Now, goals and lessons learned and stuff…

I went into this jam with some very specific personal goals, which I think helped a lot as self-imposed constraints which lead me to come up with an idea relatively quickly.

1) I knew I didn’t have my usual levels of energy for this LD as I’ve been swamped at work, so I wanted to do something around a very simple mechanic that would not involve worrying about the camera, complex input or creating levels.

2) I felt like drawing, so I wanted to do something where I got to make some animations

3) Past game jams have always had me tooling with mechanic balancing, tutorials, and feedback until the very end, which usually leaves the art super rough. This time I wanted to leave myself some time to do a pass of cleanup on my art. Fortunately, this constraint worked rather will with #1.

So how did I do?

Well on all fronts I think I accomplished my goals. The mechanic in the game is incredibly simple 4-arrow key input and a goal of “dodge the things.” Instead of having to create levels I just created a set of spawn rules that got progressively harder, so the core of the game was pretty much finished on Friday night. I had a blast drawing all the animations, and actually left some time to color things, so goals succeeded there as well.

I actually think switching to the jam was also a sort of success. I can do ambient music or very mild stuff if it doesn’t matter if the music is disconnected from the gameplay, but once this idea developed I realized that my skills were just not up to par to write something that would accompany a dance party. Since the initial reason for doing the compo was that I didn’t have energy to spend on more than 48 hours, it was no issue for me to switch over and get help with music. Afterall, the goal was to not spend too much stress that weekend.

Gameplay-wise, there were a few things I was a little sad I didn’t get to. Mostly I wanted to do a pass on spawn rules and tracking to prevent “impossible” dodges, such as if something spawns in the center and on the bottom layer at the same time. I also really wanted to implement diagonal transitions, which would have also helped with this issue, but they proved too scopey for the weekend. I think those would have helped me end up with something that could have been played for a lot longer with a more satisfying ramp up in challenge.

Between now and December I have a couple of goals for myself to prepare for next Ludum Dare:

1. Get more music practice in, and find a tool that I can get comfortable with.

2. I want to do next LD in something other than Construct 2, so get some practice in with Gamemaker or something. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Construct 2, but I want to expand my tools knowledge and learn some different applications.

That’s all for now, thanks to everyone who played my game!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z98rd5i8vx4

Tags: jam, LD30, post-mortem, postmortem, timelapse

2014 has been the year of many game jams (for me, relatively), and one consistent trend has been that each jam gets more and more chill than the last. LD31 is probably the most low-key, easy-going jam I’ve done to date. All the same, I’m quite pleased with our game, One Does Not Simply Walk Into More Doors.

Looking back on why this jam felt so relaxed,  I think most of it came down to experience and attitude and how that shaped our process. Also, figuring out a jam workflow between two designers who have different game-making tool preferences ended up being really efficient…

For the attitude part, I was on vacation visiting Adriel under strict orders from my boss to relax, so we knew up front that we wouldn’t be killing ourselves over this and that the intent was to just have fun and make a game together with very little pressure. Experience-wise, we had a lot of weaponry to wield. Besides just doing a bunch of other jams this year, it also marks 5 1/2 years of me working in the games industry. Adriel of course just wrapped up making a game a week for an entire year. Joonas is such an experienced sound designer that he whipped up all his sounds for our game in 45 minutes on the last day, because that’s how he rolls.  The experience thing comes into play not just in implementation, but in understanding scope control.

Process Observations

We spent a loooong time turning ideas over before picking one and actually getting started. When the theme was announced, we spent about an hour with general brainstorming, then slept (we were in CET). In the morning I spent several hours just making little prototypes of mechanics we’d discussed, and fleshing out logistics for some bigger ideas. We didn’t go anywhere with these ideas but it let us filter things out early before picking something and getting a good ways in before realizing the idea wasn’t great. (I should note that this first morning of prototypes was very focused and efficient because I didn’t have internet access for several hours)

A key was landing on an idea that we were both excited to explore. I feel like we each had a few that we were individually quite interested in, but were good about yielding when we saw the other person was a bit “meh” on them. It can be very easy, in a jam setting, to jump in on the first idea that springs up out of fear of time ticking away, but I really believe it’s worthwhile to give a lot of time in the idea phase before jumping in. Anyway, we eventually both were excited about this prospect of screen-wrap where you exited it at unpredictable locations, and ran with that.

We didn’t figure out the whole ghost theme thing until quite a ways in, though, and had a second brainstorming and idea hashing session midway through to try and work out what the character was, what these doors were, what the setting was, what you were trying to collect, etc. The ghost thing is pretty weird but it solved a bunch of problems for us (ghosts just go straight through doors so no need for a door open/close animation. And the doors fly around because it’s a haunted house. Logic! Ship it!)

I feel that it is important to re-iterate the low-stress nature of this jam. We both got plenty of sleep and took many breaks, and made sure to still devote a lot of time to my vacation (there were many hours spent just lazing and watching American Horror Story, and we took most of the last day to go on a Dutch food tour). When I say this was a low-key jam I really mean it.

Double Designer Workflow

Working with Adriel was interesting and different from pretty much any group jam I’ve ever done. We are both designers, but have different tools-of-choice when it comes to jams (I love Construct 2 for jamming whereas she is a Unity wizard), so one challenge was figuring out how we were going to divide our workflow. It would be trickier than just someone doing programming, someone doing art, etc.

In the end I think we came up with a system that worked really well. We decided the final game would be in Unity, and Adriel got started implementing systems we *knew* we were going to have (like the doors). Meanwhile, I jumped into Construct 2 and built a prototype to do some fast iteration on mechanics. By the time she had some baseline stuff implemented, I had tried a bunch of things in the prototype that she could play, and together we figured out what was going to be fun and what the overall game structure should be.

The Prototype

This initial process is what I think kept our scope waaaay down. We’d talked about a bunch of ideas for mechanics and features, but since I was slamming a prototype while she was setting up base functionality, we were able to see what the minimum necessary features were to make what felt like a complete game, and cut a bunch of stuff up front. Meanwhile there wasn’t that worrying sense of spending too much time on the prototype, because in that time work on the final game was still getting done.

Once Adriel started in on the heavy implementation, I spent most of my time making art and placeholder sounds, but there were still several times where I revisited the Construct 2 prototype and worked in there to solve design problems while Adriel was busy programming and working on game-feel-type-stuff. This was stuff like “okay, what does a good wave structure feel like? What things need to be taught and what is the order we should teach them? What are the one-off wave segments going to need to be before we get into standard waves?” This proved to be a good way for two designers to work in parallel. Meanwhile, there were still times when I could jump into Unity and help out on implementation as well (I was super jetlagged, so kept waking up stupid early. I’d spend several hours implementing stuff before Adriel got up and then passed things back off to her).

One-off state flow

Figuring out this workflow for working with a teammate with a lot of overlapping skillsets may have been the most valuable thing I learned from the jam.

Observations about the game itself

• I was really happy with the sort of frantic, vulnerable feel that we got in with the poor little ghost and the fact that you had to constantly be escaping through doors to stay alive.
• We were both surprised and delighted with how much more depth Joonas’s sound effects gave to the personality of the game. He really made that little ghost come alive! (HAHAHAHA…ahem…hm)
• The one little mechanic thing I wish we’d gotten in was a delay on input after you go through a door. We had this in the Construct 2 prototype and it helped you mentally remap which door you had just come out of before moving again, which helped prevent accidental movement into doom or into another door when you teleported. We didn’t have time to get that into the Unity version (someone suggested another way of getting this effect would be to just reset movement through the door so that you would have to lift your finger and press again to move)
• Finding that kazoo music really solidified the tone of the whole game for us. I was just browsing through things and stumbled upon it, and couldn’t stop laughing. Then I showed it to Adriel and she couldn’t stop laughing either. The tune still gets stuck in my head sometimes.
• Permadeath was a harsh choice, but we went with it anyway because Adriel wanted to explore that balance of challenge and frustration. I think the biggest challenge with this is getting someone back into the game quickly (someone suggested that after a certain score threshold, restarting would just throw you in at the standard wave part and skip all the intro. This sounds intriguing in theory but may have some problems in practice.)
• Just a funny note, in the prototype I made the main enemy a random chompy monster, but after we picked the ghost theme for awhile it was a big dude with a pin running around trying to poke you. We were having some problems with the rotation of the sprite looking terrible, though, and realized that fixing it so it felt good via code or doing a bunch of animations for his facings would be time-consuming, so we went back to a chompy monster that looks okay when rotated (which I randomly colored the same as the candy. So she became mama candy, protecting her young). Adriel notes that this is a good example of picking your battles in a jam setting.

Conclusion

I enjoyed working on this jam immensely. Adriel is one of my closest friends and though we have had endless design conversations for months and months, this was the first time we actually made a game together, and so it is quite special to me. Having Joonas lend us his sound sorcery was also amazing, because he is one of my all-time favorite sound designers. I learned new insights about working with teammates who have overlapping skillsets. We made a game in a relaxed way that shows how jams don’t have to be about killing yourself to get something done. But overall I’m happy that this was a low-stress end to my year of jamming!

Tags: ld31, post-mortem, postmortem

In for my something-somethingth Ludum Dare! (I lost count). This year I’m going to be traveling a bunch during the jam weekend, so I’m keeping it simple and portable.

I figured it would be a good opportunity to give Twine a try, since I have never made a Twine game before, nor have I ever made any interactive fiction!

(Well, unless you count that TI-83 choose-your-own-adventure game I made in Pre-calculus in high school)

So, Twine it is. Twine 2, I guess?

Hey all! I’m streaming Warmup Weekend, and am going to try and hit a bunch of different engines (Unity, Construct 2, Unreal, Twine, Puzzlescript…).

My goal is to go through the process with engines that I’m both familiar with and completely new to, so it should be…interesting.

Feel free to stop by!

http://www.twitch.tv/wertle

Tags: warmup

Ludum Dare 33 was a little rough for me, as I had to stop my game early for illness. However, I did a fair amount of streaming and played some great games! Here were my favorites, followed by a postmortem for my own entry at the end.

Cruelty Free

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=38961

My favorite thing about this game is how the team focused the polish on all the bits that totally sold the fantasy of running around as a rat. The camera angle made me feel anxious about what was above. The animations on the rat were adorable and believable. The animations on the scientists were elegantly done – the same animation over a counter looked like “working” while out in the open looked like “searching for rat.” All the details that they pushed compelled me to hide in nooks and scurry around corners and believe that I was a rat. The payoff at the end was also nicely done – a simple solution with big impact.

Tenebrous Expanse

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=54258

This was a game built on mechanics (essentially a cross between minigolf and billiards with a rubber band attached) but did an excellent job of layering compelling mood and atmosphere on top of that. It very simply made the game feel like a complete whole while sticking with minimalist visuals and effects. The ramp-up in levels and how they slowly constrained elements until it became about making perfect shots was nicely done (and the spiraling level select menu was certainly something I’d never seen before!)

Beast of the Woods

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=12468

It looks like a common theme with my favorites this Ludum Dare is “elegance” and completeness of the package, and here’s another one that does a great job of that. There are so many wonderful touches that totally make me buy into this world – how the music intensifies with proximity to your prey, how your monster hands creep onto screen when you get within lunging range, how your victim whips around to see you just before you strike. Every effort spent in this entry works together towards a common experience, and that is no easy feat in the compo!

Sick Sick Solitaire Postmortem

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=22452

Now for my sickly little entry. I had never made a digital card game before, so that’s the idea I decided to tackle. In the game, the black cards are “bad” but you are forced to use them to advance play, so the result is a tricky, brain-stretchy sort of solitaire.

It was inspired by a few things:

1. Four Seasons Solitaire, which was always my favorite type growing up
2. Cooperative games where you have to play for “the game’s” turn, like Eldritch Horror (which I have been playing a ton of lately). I wanted to see if there was a way of getting that feel of you having to play “for” the bad deck in a simple card game.
3. Once Upon A Time, my favorite card game, specifically for its elements of being cooperative and competitive at the same time. I liked that tension of having to use the “bad” cards to advance play. I also had plans to incorporate this more into the theme, but was unable to finish.

For the curious, my plan to theme this game was to make it about two monsters that had made a mess of the knight’s prized plate collection, and were trying to clean it up before he showed up. You played little sister monster and big brother monster was trying to pin the blame on you. You were trying to finish cleaning up your stack before him, so you could accuse HIM of being the monster who made the mess when the night showed up. I had some pretty cute monster sketches all planned out, but alas, it was not meant to be.

When I woke up on Sunday and realized I was too ill to finish, I was pretty disappointed.  I mulled about scoping down and pushing through it, but health woes have been stacking up on me and I knew I had to choose to take it easy. I’m glad I at least had something playable to put up, but it was hard to have my first Ludum Dare where I wasn’t able to properly finish.

However, the ability to choose not to finish something is a life skill all the same! There is always next Ludum Dare

Tags: ld33 postmortem

I had a delightful time making this game with Will White and Tony Manfredoria. This game was inspired by a childhood of anxiety from playing Perfection. I hope you enjoy it!

Play it here