#ld42

Hello Gamers me and some friends made a game in 72 hours for Ludum Dare 42 where you’re an aspiring young prodigy who has just too many trophies.

Check It Out Here!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/vupu

https://limitiv.itch.io/vupu

Not too bad.

Results only came out last week, so I haven’t had too much time to think about it, but at the same time I’m not really sure there’s that much to say. This time around I feel like we made a mistake that is both insightful and stupid at the same time. It can be summed up well in the following picture.

As you can see, we shoved all the important (narrative wise) information into a corner. As you’re probably thinking, and we somehow missed, this is a bad idea. If you haven’t played our entry for this year, these objects shown in the corner are meant to represent the more personal details of the patient, which side of the war they’re fighting on or whether they have a family. This was then intended to be a factor in the player deciding what level of care to give the patient. Because of its position outside the central area of play, the player was essentially required to go out of their way to interact with the part of the game which we cared most about.

This can work in some cases, especially in games where the wonder and lore of the world are its main attraction, so interacting with the more niche out of the way elements of the game is the aim rather than a detour, however in our case we also had a timer involved, so the player was very much encouraged to completely skip interacting with the narrative aspect in favour of processing the patients as fast as possible.

So really our mistake was accidentally including two mutually exclusive elements in our design. On the one hand we to put the player in environment where they were free to examine and learn about different aspects of the world on their own time. In direct contradiction to this however, we had a time limit restricting the players freedom.

The solution to this would have been to either have the narrative elements mixed indistinguishably with the gameplay, that of examining and determining wound severity, or to simply remove the clock and have the player restricted in a different way (like how many beds/doctors they have, which is what we were aiming for the whole time anyway, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

I guess Hindsight’s a bitch though.

Okay - calculated the correlation of each category to the Overall rating for the top 20 games of the last 5 #LDJAM . The percent column refers to how much of your effort you should focus towards each category if you want to emulate the previous top 20s. 

Take this with a GRAIN OF SALT.