So I finally finished a Ludum Dare without having any issues, and ended up with a game I’m pretty proud of. I worked with Cameron Erickson (art) and Mike LeRoy (music).
Slow start
The jam started off for us pretty slow. At first, we had no idea what to make, but I saw a video of a man helping a dead shark give birth to its three babies. I instantly knew that our game should be underwater, and I continued thinking about it. The original idea Cameron and I brainstormed together was to make a game revolving around a similar mechanic to Lost Woods in the original Zelda, minus the screen transition. So you’d wrap around the screen and the rooms would morph slightly and new enemies would spawn. We wanted enemies, bosses, and puzzles. We ended up only being able to fit in enemies and bosses.
Cameron and I continued trying to come up with ideas for enemies, and what the game was even going to be. Cameron worked on the background and character art while I tried getting character movement in. It took me a few hours to get all the math right, and that was about all we got done the first night. However, it already felt smooth and polished. I tried making the code easy to expand and overused the glorious coroutines that are available in the Otter engine.
Day two
I didn’t get a chance to start on Saturday until 3:30 PM, so we were already out a bunch of hours. I had interviewed Florian Himsl (Binding of Isaac) on indie(Radio); Broadcast #50 and that took up a majority of my morning. So we were already pretty far behind, since the jam was nearly 1/3 over at that time and all we had was this jellyfish moving around. The rest of the night consisted of me programming the start of the squid enemy, getting lighting effects working, and learning how surfaces in Otter work. This was one of our major downfalls, that we tried to do a lot of things we didn’t know how to do. Cameron had never done this art style before, and he isn’t experienced with animating (more about this later). I had only tried doing lighting once, and it was awful. The way I was doing certain physics were also different than I had done before, and ended up giving me a lot of trouble at first until I completely wrapped my head around what I was trying to do. Another huge time waster for me was all the special features I added to the lights; you can (in code) specify a series of colors, intensities, and sizes, as well as timespans for each, and the light will loop through these. It is used a little bit, but there were features that weren’t used that could have saved me programming time had I not gotten carried away. We had a lot more effects we had originally planned on putting in the game, but ended up not adding them because everything little thing takes a lot of time when you put it all together. I also should have brushed up on vector maths before the jam, because I’m a bit rusty with them. Before I went to sleep, I hit a friend of mine, Mike LeRoy, and left him a build, asking if he’d be interested in making some tunes for us.
Sunny Sunday
Cameron and I spent a good chunk of the day looking at pictures of fish, trying to come up with some ideas for new ones. We added the huge fish in our game (the flying gurnard), but didn’t finish it completely. Cameron had a lot of troubles with the animation, and just couldn’t get it right. After fiddling for an hour or so, I took the first frame and tried lerping its y-scale back and forth between two values, and it ended up looking really good. Surprisingly good. Cameron, however, wasn’t bummed that he had lost that time, but rather re-energized by seeing that we finally got the boss to look good. That hit me, and completely changed the way I looked at working on this game.
We decided to do a cool enemy based on these sea creatures called salp. They look like a chain of nodes, sometimes luminescent, sometimes transparent, and sometimes just a simple solid color. The concept was to make it so they’re connected, and you can kill a node in the middle, making the chain break into two distinct chains. Pretty cool! While the squid was the most interesting to program, I really got a kick out of how I organized the code for the salp nodes.
Finish Strong
I woke up earlier than I expected on Monday, and stayed in bed for a good 40 minutes before jumping out and working on the game yet again. The entire day was a blur, but I got enemy spawning/a wave system implemented. It was also essential for enemies to fade in and out upon spawn/death, which ended up being kind of buggy. I never quite got it working 100%, and if you kill an enemy just right, you can crash the game. I finished programming the squid and boss, and then the rest of the day was adding menus, getting animations in, polishing, fixing bugs/crashes, etc. We just barely finished on time, with about half an hour left before we had to submit. We fixed a few more things and then waited for the game to upload!
Looking back
Overall, I really enjoyed this jam. Cameron and I made a great team, and it was super exhilarating writing code for his assets. It was also a great pressure of mine to try to make everything as polished and smooth as possible, because I felt I owed it to Cameron after making such fantastic looking visuals. We wasted a lot of time trying to do things we weren’t experienced with, and it ended up killing us a bit in the end. While I think jams are a great time to try new things, if possible, research a bit before the jam or make sure these new things you have a fairly good idea of before you jump in. Of course, you don’t always know what you want to make, so it’s not possible to research every time. Also, keep my golden jam rule in your head: don’t add things to the game unless it absolutely needs them. Once you have all the bare stuff in, then add more. I got a little carried away this time with all the lighting and special effects, and spent way too much time working on that when I could have been making enemies. We did have two more enemies planned, with the artwork already done for one, but it didn’t make it in.
This jam has renewed faith in my game development skills. I once again feel like I can create something substantial and interesting. I can’t wait for April’s Ludum Dare, and most likely will be joining it again with Cameron, and Mike as well if he’s available. There’s some great games I’ve seen so far, and can’t wait to see how the rest of the event turns out!
Timelapse
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