I posted this game just yesterday, but it’s been nearly a month since the event for which it was created, ended. I wrote this post-mortem on the Ludum Dare website, but thought it’d be a good idea to put it up here too!

I really had a lot of fun participating in the event, got to discover a lot of cool new game developers and amazing concepts. The community is also really great! Overall it’s a great experience I will probably repeat more than once!

Now let’s talk about the game I made.

Or is it actually a game? I made this thing called “the dead rest beneath us”, which is about the fact that death is just unbeatable (that’s right, the game is unbeatable and I did that on purpose! Just saying since some people didn’t get it).

It started with me wondering “so what does lie beneath?”, and after a bit of thinking, coming up with the usual digging or submarine stuff, I thought of dead people. So I thought it might be a good idea to make a game that’d function as a Vanitas. Basically something that makes you reflect upon life and death and such things. I was mainly thinking about death in video games, where killing is pretty much a standard thing to do, and players commonly are subject to dying.

So there I went, on to make a game without even thinking clearly about the game mechanics or even about what is (part of) the core of games: obstacles to overcome.

SO WHAT WENT WELL

The music, the ideas and the art was coming along pretty well during the process. I’m really into creating atmospheric scenes and that was pretty easy for me. Progamming-wise I didn’t do anything very complicated, saving me lots of noob-time.

SO WHAT WENT LESS WELL

Well, I’ve already mentioned the absence of gameplay mechanics. At first, all scenes were following each other, without even going back to the chapter selection menu between each scene. The music actually builds up across the chapters but you won’t notice it since the title screen pops up between each scene. This was done so players get the sense of failing and feel the need to retry many times.

In a similar fashion did I add the ending sequence around three hours before submitting the thing. I wasn’t sure people would understand where I was trying to go with the unbeatable levels, and would experience it as just being frustrating. Turns out some people did et frustrated despite of the over-obvious tacked-on things after all!

So there lies my failure in this 29th Ludum Dare. I learned a lot about incentive and the reaction of players towards my unbeatable little dioramas. I’m probably going to rework this project into something a little bigger once I have enough time, but I’m actually thinking of removing the tacked-on parts that were put there to get the message across as quickly as possible, and expand upon the original concept of an interactive Vanitas. I have quite a few ideas that are more gameplay mechanic-oriented that will be more pertinent than what I have been able to present here. It might not become a game but at least it’ll be a nice interactive experience!

Thanks for reading, please do leave comments or send me tweets (FlorianVltmn" rel="nofollow noopener">@FlorianVltmn) about what you thought of the game, it really helps me out!