5 days have passed since we submitted our Ludum Dare #28 entry, better known as “The sidekicks”. Now it’s time to sit back, relax and do some thinking about the jam, what we did and what we learnt.
This time I was going for the jam instead of the compo(first time for me). I find myself completely unable to compose even a basic loop, but at the same time I value this aspect quite a lot and pay a lot of attention to soundtracks in games. So I teamed up with @franklinwebber to use some of his tracks.
Let’s talk about the first day, I got up early, checked the theme, had a hot shower and made some tea, nothing odd for a jam. I began with the brainstorming, but my mind went blank(more than the usual); I came up with a few ways I could use the theme, “You only get one earth/life/bullet/chance/button”, none of them felt right. So I started thinking less about how to use the theme and more about what I felt like doing.
I remembered “lovers in a dangerous spacetime”, an upcoming indie game which looks pretty neat. I haven’t seen any actual gameplay, just the trailer they released some months ago. But just from watching that trailer my mind imagined the gameplay I thought it should have. I went for it, I’d care about the theme later. I pondered about some mechanics for an hour and started prototyping.
I posted my first working stuff on twitter(still using placeholders) and got a message from @aquilicoco, another spanish developer I met during my first Ludum Dare; he happens to be a great pixel artist. We worked together for the GBJAM and that didn’t go out too well. He proposed me to join forces once again and I agreed.
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We worked very hard for 72 houras, though a great mistake was focusing too hard on coding and art rather than spending more time designing the concept itself. There’s not really that much to say about the development, we worked a lot and we worked hard. We wanted to achieve many things and there wasn’t enough time, so we ended up with just a few hours left, no tutorial and no real gameplay. We had the coop mode with the ship working and everything, but there wasn’t really anything else to do. So I coded the fireballs that appear in the game and made a tutorial, I didn’t have time to balance the difficulty so I thought of a cool feature that would allow people to create their own rules and customize the experience from the settings menu. Unfortunately, a lot of players are missing this two things, which are some of the best stuff our game can offer right now.
Here’s a message to the players: “Every time you skip the setting menu and say that the game is very easy you’re making me sad :( You can say that the game isn’t fun and that’s not well-designed, but you can set it to be as hard as you want”
The other great issue was music, the composer had a lot of amazing tracks and composed a few more but I had some tech issues and could only use one.
We submitted the entry and wondered if we should work on a post-jam version. I wanted a lot of feedback from the players so I uploaded another version to Gamejolt and waited for the comments. People are having fun, lots of them are missing the settings menu and the tutorial and some players saw the same design flaws I saw. I wanted more feedback and opinions and we sent the game to some indie websites that chose to feature others games instead of ours.
If we end up making a post-jam version the gameplay will change drastically, we’ll keep the main ideas(the managment of the ship) but we might borrow some ideas from FTL or from some other games. I’d like to make it a fast-paced game keeping the focus on the multiplayer mode. Maybe add some kind of campaign and ship customization or turn it into an arena-based game where you have to defeat the enemy ship.
I’ve got some thinking to do but people seem to enjoy the game and we have amazing graphics and art. I’m likely to make a post jam-version after going trough the design issues. But first I want to see our final Ludum Dare rating and some more feedback. Then I’ll decide if I should upgrade it or go for a new project.
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