#ld35

With the next Ludum Dare in 8 weeks, I thought I would showcase the top 10 compo games of the previous iteration of Ludum Dare.

Today I am playing Endless Paperchase by DragonXVI.

You play as a character made out of paper that can transform itself into four different shapes, each with its own uses.

In April I was able to participate in Ludum Dare for the second time, after making Compass in December for LD34. I'm happy that once again, I learned some valuable lessons. This time around it's less about tools, as it was with my previous LD experience (you can find my write-up about that experience here), and more about game design.

If you've read any book on game design (I recommend A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell), you'll have read in some form or another that one of the basic principles is not forcing your ideas onto the game, but letting the game speak to you about what it wants to become. In other words, if you pay close enough attention, you’ll notice what works for a particular game and what doesn't. It sounds simple enough, and having read A Book of Lenses, I thought I knew this, but still I caught myself violating this deceptively simple principle. Here's how that happened.

Brainstorming

My natural reaction when thinking what a game will be about, is what meaning I’ll give it. This usually gets quite personal, such as “overcoming fears” in Compass. For this edition's theme “Shapeshift”, which reminded me of “metamorphosis”, I again went in that direction and wanted it to be about growing and gaining experience, about becoming a “fuller”, and well-rounded person. Metamorphosis. The visuals I had in mind involved an abstract creature collecting colour in a 2D space, the creature itself becoming more colourful and beautiful, yet flawed, as it went on (I seem to have a thing for abstract representations!). So to start this, I set out to experiment with particle systems. It seemed that it would work well to achieve the visualisation I had in mind. This time around I used Unity instead of Construct 2, you can read more about that decision here.

Day 1: successful experimentation

Day 1 of the jam was great, I did a lot of experimentation and learned more about using particle systems in Unity. Even though it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind (in retrospect, it was very far from what I had in mind), I was still very happy with the day's results:

[GIF]: https://twitter.com/linsey_ray/status/721414721707094017

The movement felt incredibly smooth, the visual style and colours appealed to me. I wasn't quite sure what kind of actual gameplay to implement, other than popping the coloured bubbles I'd put into place, which in itself felt satisfying.

Initially there was only one creature, but in the evening a neat bug happened while I was fiddling around making a trail for the creature, and poof, I saw it fit to include a 2nd creature! The colours and aesthetics of the double creature setup really spoke to me, and the movement felt even more satisfying. It was then also that my tendency to have games be about something cropped up: I decided the game would now actually be about relationships; finding a partner and becoming close to them, being together, and then the inevitable part of parting ways and being alone again but still being reminded of the other.

Day 2: the mistake of enforcing meaning

Day 2 was quite a different experience. After spending a tad too much time on getting (sub-par) sound into the game, I started working on implementing the meaning part of the game. I had several visual transitions in mind that would convey the above message in a way that made sense in my head, and spent most of the day coding these transitions. 

At the end of the day, the transitions were in place. But… it felt incredibly empty. It did nothing to me, and even though I knew what was happening and why, through a friend playtesting I realized no one else would get this message unless I explained what those transitions meant and what the game was about. They were just incredibly confused, especially about why such a soothing, relaxing game suddenly turned all creepy. I realized I had made the mistake of forcing the game into something it wasn't. Looking back it’s so obvious I shouldn’t have done this, but at the time I was blindly sticking to my initial idea, which prevented me from shifting my focus to what was clearly working well.

Day 3: cutting what wasn’t working

So on the 3rd evening after spending a day at work, I decided to scrap the transitions altogether and let go of my need to enforce meaning onto the game. I decided to keep the game to what it was on the first evening: relaxing, smooth, and satisfying to play. I coded in a frenzy to have some kind of experience that still felt complete. I settled for submitting it as a 2D space in which you simply exist and move about, popping bubbles as you go. I salvaged the code I'd written for automatic sticking/releasing of the second creature by giving the player the ability to call/release a twin creature at will, and made the different appearances I'd toyed with using particle systems available by making it possible to change appearance any time. This felt like the right thing to do.

You can check out the final submission here: https://linseyray.itch.io/splash-n-shift

Lessons internalised

1) Don't push a game into a direction that doesn’t suit it; pay close attention to what works and what doesn't. I should have noticed on the first evening that the game worked best as a soothing and relaxing experience.

I’m feeling very honored... After many years, this is definitely my best score so far: #47 for the Humor category (out of 1,118 entries). Thanks to everyone who played my game and rated me!

See the list for the 50 best humorous compo games

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=41865 1594 games total #89 Graphics(Jam) 4.29 Top 5.5% #121 Theme(Jam) 3.95 Top 7.6% #199 Overall(Jam) 3.64 Top 12% #423 Fun(Jam) 3.27 Top 27% #459 Audio(Jam) 3.00 Top 29% #502 Humor(Jam) 2.52 Top 31% #552 Mood(Jam) 3.10 Top 35% #565 Innovation(Jam) 3.03 Top 35%

Scores are slowly but surely improving! Overall is waaay higher this time, so at least I can brag about a 300 point improvement there! @markusmianiart​ gets MVP for the graphics :)

For comparison, here’s the LD34 results: #143 Audio(Jam) 3.74 - Top 8% #254 Innovation(Jam) 3.50 - Top 15% #343 Graphics(Jam) 3.75 - Top 21% #426 Mood(Jam) 3.32 - Top 26% #508 Overall(Jam) 3.33 - Top 31% #701 Fun(Jam) 2.92 - Top 42% #892 Theme(Jam) 3.11 - Top 54%

Greg Green: Let’s Play

First off! ... Some nice people on the YouTubes, by the name of 8BitBrigade, played a demo of Greg Green :)

Altruism

This was my first official Ludum Dare Jam that I entered. You can watch the progress in this video:

Check Out the Entry Here

Checkout the Game’s Current Progress Here

Advanced Tactics: Mini RTS Expanded

So working more on Advanced Tactics definitely has been fun but I don’t think I am going to dedicate as much time to the project as I expected. I do want to make it more enjoyable and feel more complete, but I don’t find myself pursuing it as a year+ project. 

So after the mLD version of “Advanced Tactics: Mini RTS”, I uploaded an updated version of the title called “Advanced Tactics: Mini RTS Expanded” {You can play it here}, which I mentioned that I was working on while I wrote last month’s Re-Cap. Here is the changelog: 

v0.8: (The More Playable Version) -Structure Details Displayed (Name, HP, Info) -Better UI -Colored HP Text -Takes half as much memory (512MB > 256MB) -Units can now stop for battle, attack, and then continue it’s path after battle. -Some other things -Structures are now pathfinding obsticals -Fixed bug where selected unit's info won't be displayed unless u manually deselect the prior selected unit -Fixed A LOT more bugs

I am currently working on v0.9 as I am writing this. All I can promise right now is that the map will be slightly bigger, there will be better new features besides that but they aren’t fully implemented yet to talk about.

CHax 2

I started development on the sequel to a previous successor. This is something I have been wanting to do for a while now.

Sooo Ludum Dare Game Jam 35 started off a bit late for us. We had a ruff beginning because we were struggling with idea for game, theme was SHAPESHIFTING. Since nothing sounded too good for us, we got into panic mode that we might not make anything, and more than half a day passed already. So after crash ._. we decided to make something really simple, something that is maybe not that creative but is better than nothing at all. It was our first LDGJ so it was important to us to finish it. And we did! So happy we didn’t quit and pushed ourselves trough hard hours, we learned a lot! o/