Hey everyone,

Each year I tell myself I should write a post-mortem for my Ludum Dare game, but each year I am too lazy to do it. This year I finally managed to do it for my game 'Volskdam' :D

This Ludum Dare I decided I wanted to make a more simple game. There were a couple reasons for that, one being that I was a bit busy in the week leading up to Ludum Dare, so I wanted to keep the stress to a minimum. Another reason was that the previous two jams I had a lot of plans at the beginning, which of course I did not have time for. In the end I was proud of what I made during those jams, but in the back of my mind I felt they were not what they could have been. Finally, I wanted to practice art, sound design and polish, which I usually dont make enough time for (especially music). Long story short, for this LD I wanted to make something with simpler mechanics to have more time for other things.

When I saw the theme 'delivery' my mind immediately started coming up with all kinds of wild ideas, but I forced myself to keep the gameplay simple. I thought of the idea for a reaction based delivery game pretty quickly, but for a long time I was afraid that the mechanics would be too boring. While I think this was partially true (I would not want to play my game for hours), I think it was completely okay for a gamejam game. People will not play it for much more than 10 minutes anyways. I also did have much more time for other things, such as art and polish. I don't know if anyone noticed them, but I was very happy with the little birds flying by in the background. It is one of those things that I normally would have skipped, but having added them I think they adds a lot to the cosy feel of the game. The music I also spent a lot more time on than usual and, while it is still not a masterpiece, I think it is already better than my previous attempts at music ^_^

Some of the feedback I got had to do with the readability of the arrows as the game sped up, which was a very fair point. Perhaps I should have playtested the game a bit more with the time I had to make the gameplay experience better, instead of adding some other details. Also the increasing pitch of the delivery sound was annoying to some people, as it was stressfull and did not match well with the background music. Now that people mentioned this, I can see where they are coming from, and it is something I will have to keep in mind for my next games. This kind of sound design feedback was very useful, as that is a part of game making that I would like to be better at.

Anyway, I think that is it! In the end I am very proud of the game I made and of being able to reach the goals I set out with. Thank you very much for reading all the way to the end, and thanks a lot to everyone who already played the game and gave me valuable feedback! I really appreciate it :)

If you have not yet played the game, you can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/volksdam

The current highscore is 1625 by @scum. Come see if you can beat it! ^_^

Kind regards,

Wuppos

Hey everyone,

I would like to get into the habit of analyzing my own work and trying to learn from my mistakes. Hence, this postmortem! I am writing this mostly for myself, but I would be happy to hear any thoughts you have :)

Lately I have been playing Tunic a lot on my switch. I am quite fascinated by the combat in that game, which is super frustrating all the time to me, but at the same time somehow fun? I especially really enjoyed/hated the bosses, so I was curious what it was like to create my own boss battler and what kind of decisions go into that. This is how my Ludum Dare entry 'The Scourge from the Deep' was born! You can play it here if you are interested: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/the-scourge-from-the-deep

Initially I was aiming for a compo submission, but at the end of the first day it was already looking like I might run out of time. Perhaps I should have pivoted to a different game then, but I was still very invested in the idea, so I decided to keep working on it. In the end I indeed ran out of time and submitted for the jam instead, but I think it was the right choice. I am very proud of the results and had a lot of fun in the process :D

Some things that did not go so well this Ludum Dare:

• One of the main reasons that everything took this long was the sprite for the boss. It is quite a large pixel art sprite to animate, which was quite difficult for me. On top of that, it has a lot of small details (like the lava/fire thingies on its body). This all took a long time to draw and animate. I think a simpler sprite with less details would have been better.

• The difficulty of this game turned out to be very hard to balance. For some, the game was very easy, but for others it was impossibly hard. I think the main reason is the extremely short wind-up times of the boss's attacks, which give you very little time to respond. Some people figured out it is actually better to just take the bosses attacks while you keep cutting away at it, because trying to evade them is just really hard and will result in the same amount of damage taken. As some people in the comments have suggested, to fix this I think the boss's attacks should be easier to read but do more damage. This might make it feel more like an actual boss fight.

• Some people also complained about not being able to move while you are attacking. I think this is a matter of taste to some extent, but I agree that the gameplay feels a bit static because of it. Perhaps if your attacks actually moved the player character a bit the attack would have felt better. Kind of like a lunge attack or something.

• Music is always a weakpoint for me and it also was in this game. I think the music was okay, but it did not really fit the style of gameplay. This happens because I do not really know yet how to make music that evokes a specific kind of feeling. All I can do right now is just make some music by putting together some sounds that sound nice together, and hope that the feeling matches. I do really like to make the music though, so I would love to learn how to do it better :)

Overall I am still really happy how the game turned out! There were definitely flaws, but a lot went well too. People complimented my art, which I really appreciate (since I absolutely dont have an art background). It also seemed that noone was confused about how to play. This jam I furthermore played around with shaders for the first time, and I am very happy with what I managed to do with them. Things like the healthbars, or the white flash effects when you (get) hit were done with shaders.

I think that is about it! Thanks a lot for your interest if you are still reading :) I already have my 20 ratings, but you are of course very welcome to still play my game and give some feedback here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/the-scourge-from-the-deep

Wuppos

I try to make a postmortem of my game each Ludum Dare, so here it is for our game Mailbox mania! :D You can still play and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/mailbox-mania

This is the first ludum dare that I have done in a team. I was joined by the wonderfull @pastry-chef :D While I still really enjoy the solo jamming experience, I learned that working in a team is a different experience. I enjoyed brainstorming and thinking/reflecting on the game together a lot. A team is also so much more productive than one person, especially when you divide the tasks and make a bit of a plan. Doing a git pull and seeing a bunch of new stuff added to the game without having to do any of it was a lot of fun ;) I did however notice that my personal productivity went down a bit. Normally, when I work alone, I like to jump around from task to task a lot. So I might finish a sprite, jump to programming, then sound effects, and back to drawing. Being in a team meant I had to focus a bit more, to avoid doing double work and to avoid the git merges becoming a mess >_<

This jam was also a first in another aspect, namely the engine! We used godot this time, which I didn't have any experience with (besides tinkering a little bit and following the brackeys tutorial the weeks before LD). I was afraid that it would take a lot of time to get used to it, but fortunately it was a very pleasant experience! It is in many ways very similar to unity. I especially appreciated how easy it was to render crisp and properly scaled pixel art essentially out of the box, while this has caused me a lot of headaches in other engines. :D

Now, about the game itself. I am really proud of how it came out. We really made something that I myself am having a lot of fun playing. Others have mentioned that the controls are frustratingly hard though, and I can completely see where they are coming from 😅 I think this is a classic case where we should have done some playtesting during the jam. Having my brother play the game afterwards immediately showed me that the difficulty curve is indeed very steep. Still, once you learn the controls, I think it is very satisfying to drift around the map. Perhaps some tutorial or introductory stages could help with these onboarding problems.

With @pastry-chef on board, we agreed that he would mostly be in charge of programming the gameplay. This meant I had a bit more time to experiment and try new stuff with art! :D So when we decided we were making a racing game, I immediately thought of this technique called 'sprite stacking' that I have been wanting to try. It is a method for making a fake 3D effect by rendering a stack of 2D sprites on top of each other. I started on the first day by modelling a simple voxel van using this nifty program called magica voxel. This was a first time for me, but I think it came out quite cute! :D

Magica voxel has an option to export the flat layers of the 3D model as a 2D sprite sheet, which looks something like this

Then, all you have to do is make a bunch of sprite renderers to render these layers on top of one another, starting with the bottom one. The trick is to offset each layer upwards a couple pixels with respect to the layer below it. By then just rotating each layer around their own center, you get a pretty convincing 3D effect

I was very impressed with the result and with how easy it was to implement. It meant that steering looks pretty good in the game, since you can essentially rotate the car continuously, which is usually quite tricky to do with pixel art. I also tried my hand at isometric pixel art for the first time, which was a lot of fun! I think these buildings came out quite well, although I would have loved to add more shadows to make them more grounded in the world.

With the extra help I also had a bit more time to make the music for the game. I have written before about how I feel this is one part of game development that I would love to get better at. While the music here is still not perfect, I actually quite liked what I managed to compose this time! It fits the theme and feel of the game pretty well, and it has some catchy elements, so I am pretty happy how it turned out :D

All in all, I am very proud of what we managed to make. Especially the amount of polish we managed to get in there makes it feel like a proper game, instead of just a little project. I also learned a lot this jam and have grown as a game developer, which just feels great overall :D Thanks a lot to @pastry-chef for sharing this experience with me and for being a wonderful teammate ^_^

If you have read through this whole thing, thanks a lot! Please try our game if you are interested. Your feedback would mean a lot and maybe you can secure yourself a top position on our leaderboard :D You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/mailbox-mania

Hey everyone,

This is my post-mortem for our Ludum Dare game this time around, Robo Phone Home! You can still play and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/robo-phone-home
Also take a look at the post of @pastry-chef if you are curious about the game-design side of things :)

Like last time, I teamed up with @pastry-chef. This was our second Ludum Dare together and I do feel like our teamwork was again very smooth. This time we also met IRL for most of the jam, which definitely made the teamwork more efficient and also just a lot more fun. Whenever either of us ran into a small problem or into a decision that needed to be made, we could just quickly chat about it and move on. This just worked very well I feel.

As for the game itself, we had the idea of sending movement instructions as 'signals' pretty quickly and it became our 'safe' option. We also had some other ideas that were more ambitious afterwards, so we asked ourselves whether we wanted to make a simple but polished game, or a more ambitious but rough game. We went for for the simple but polished option and I think we made the right call! We had a basic version of the game up and running that same day. While it was still very rough, it already felt very unique and it made for fun gameplay. The rest of the jam we essentially used to polish the experience and add additional mechanics on top :) I hope you agree that the polish is definitely noticeable when you play the game. Not only did I have a lot of time for the art, so that I could put more time into 'unnecessary' level-intro animations, but also the gameplay feels very smooth and there are not that many bugs. Overall, the game came out really well and I am super proud of what we managed to make.

Like last time, I was mostly in charge of the art side of things, so let me talk about a couple decisions on that front. I started by drawing Robo itself. The first version turned out pretty cute, so I decided to lean into that and make all its animations extra cute. This was mainly possible because of the two antennas on its head, which I could make bouncy for a kind of rabbit-like feel. A little jump on collecting items also drove the vibe home nicely I think ^_^ From the very beginning I wanted to also included some cutesy aliens. These were originally inspired by the little green plant characters in a game Death's Door, which I am still playing through at the moment. In that game they dont seem to do much, but just the fact that they curiously follow you around for a bit made me fall in love with them. Unfortunately we did not have time to implement the aliens following Robo around, but I still think that their presence added to the vibe of the game. They at least do a little jump sometimes :D

We also agreed I would be in charge of the music again. Not because I am particularly skilled at making music, but just because I really enjoy doing it and I would love to slowly get better at it. For out last game, Mailbox Mania, I think I hit the mark pretty well. This time around I am not so sure. It does not not fit I guess, but I was aiming for a bit more spacey/cute/whimsical vibe. I also run into the problem where all my game music kind of sounds similar in a way. My hypothesis is that it is because I used BeepBox for all of them, which only has a limited set of instruments and options, such that you unavoidably get some overlap. I really want to try out FL studio at some point, but for this jam it was still too daunting of a software >_< If you have some advice for a beginner in music making, I would love to hear it!

Well, that is all for the moment! I want to thank @pastry-chef for being a wonderfull LD partner and friend, as well as for the amazing hospitality. I had a great time ^_^ If you are curious about our cute puzzle/dextery game, please take a look here!