Background
This game was created for Ludum Dare 30: Connecting worlds. This theme wasn’t my favorite one, because it didn’t really fit my style. I mean I don’t get many ideas out of this kind of theme. After about two hours of thinking I came up with an idea and the asylum is the outcome. My primary inspiration was the cheese puzzle of the neverhood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5F4MBMPbao . I know, similar puzzles have occurred in other games too, but I found this particular one fun and challenging.
Stuff to improve
Couple of testers reported that they got motion sickness from the room transition. I found this very suprising, because the transition is very short and slow, but in turn I don’t get motion sickness so how would I know. I had two hours time left of the jam at that point so I didn’t want to make any major changes anymore.
Other issues of the room transition: gfx glitches, clumsiness …
I wanted to add AAA style hand animation when a player opens a door, but that’s just too fancy and time consuming to do in a game jam.
Should add more decoration. It was a challenge to fill 16 different rooms with unique decoration, many rooms were left empty.
Needs more hints. Same as with the decoration, it was just too much work to fill 16 rooms with hints so I had time to add only some in last hours.
Stuff that was alright
The soundtrack. I made it with Audacity and online piano player.I recorded the piano track first try without practice, basically improvising without any knowledge how to play piano properly, turned out to be quite fine. The ambient track is just me making random noise by kicking and punching things in my living room and then I just applied some effects in audacity like paul scretch, reverb, noise removal, generate etc. Then I just mixed the piano track and the ambient noise track together and voilà , I have a dark ambient track. People liked it.
The textures created with NeoTextureEdit, they look cool!
Lux physically based shaders. They made the textures look even more cool! Though I still need to figure out how to use it properly but it was fine.
The horse, that creepy one without eyes.
The mood. This one is important for me. A game should have a good mood to make the game more immersive.
The landscapes. This was one of the most important goals from the beginning. Because without 16 different landscapes I would fail the theme. Also it’s an important factor to improve mood and make game feel more fresh.
The challenge is balanced I think. Finishing the game takes about 30minutes (I don’t have any exact analytics about this atm)
What next
Currently i’m making a prototype game that is similar to this entry. So if you enjoyed this game then you should totally follow me on twitter for updates www.twitter.com/samoojam
Play and rate at LudumDare.com!
The Asylum
1 comment