The Confines by DestroyerTech
Story
You're a lifer. Over the years, cellmates have come and gone, but you've come to prefer solitude. This new one, however, is different - not your run-of-the-mill thug, thief or murderer - but blood is on his hands nonetheless. Did he deserve to find himself in the confines of this prison?
Instructions
- Note: Game may take 20-30 seconds to load, until which time the canvas will be blank. It isn't a big game at all, but there seem to be some weird errors that delay the loading. (Sorry I haven't worked out how to fix this).
- Dialogue-heavy (or dialogue-only) game. Use the slider to adjust the speed of dialogue (slide all the way to the left to pause the game). Use the number keys on the keyboard to make choices.
- Two main endings (it's also possible to achieve an 'earlier' ending before the two main endings).
- If you see any bugs/typos/weird behaviour, please let me know!
Tools used
Reflection
Beginning the game jam
At the start, as many people did, I thought 'hmm... space' and pretty quickly started leaning towards some kind of space setting, possibly about smuggling goodies between various destinations. But I quickly ran into a problem: artistic skill (or an extreme lack thereof). I tried doing some pixel art in GIMP but (a) it took me ages to even come up with a few assets, and (b) they really weren't... good. At all. (see below)
Shelved space game
The other big problem was that I was pretty sure even if I was able to create reasonable art for it, my ideas for making the game halfway engaging just weren't possible in the time constraints (I was pretty sure I was overscoping).
Beginning again, and getting to the end
So after the first 6 hours or so, I pushed that aside and turned to my alternative idea: a narrative, dialogue based game set inside a prison cell - which ticked the boxes: not much art required (1 static background, static furniture, 1 or 2 animated human silhouettes); and hopefully something "complete" might be achievable, even taking into account my level of skill and experience (none to extremely low).
Programmer art: 1 animated human silhouette coming up :white_check_mark:
In the end of it, honestly I'm pretty happy. The dialogue tree is a fair bit more linear than I'd have liked (even with me spending 5 hours on the final night to write 70% of it), but I still managed to get done almost the amount of content I was hoping for. Also a small victory: my 'programmer art' actually looks almost moderately passable (obviously has nothing on 90% of entrants, but a huge step up from my last LD, where the 'characters' were... pixellated circles). One thing it's definitely missing is audio - I would also have liked to add music, since composing music to go with a story/setting is absolutely something I enjoy, just didn't have time to do it this time around sadly.
What have I learnt?
There were a lot of 'firsts' in this LD for me, including: - First time using Godot 4 (or any mainstream game engine for that matter) - First time making a UI for a game - First time making a dialogue tree - Pretty much my first time making any sort of graphics
And, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but since LD49 (where I submitted my first ever 'game') - I've pretty much done... nothing in the game dev space - making this my second attempt at a game, ever. Honestly, I'm well aware that my entry is poor quality in relative terms - but I learnt last time that, particularly when you're just starting out, results don't matter that much. This time around, I've once again learnt a huge amount in one weekend, and unlike last time, I like to think that I actually came out of this LD with something possibly resembling a 'minimum viable product', so I feel like this has been a really rewarding experience overall.
| Link | https://destroyertech.com/games/the-confines |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/the-confines |
Ratings
| Overall | 375th | 3.771⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 684th | 3.292⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 712th | 3.188⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 337th | 3.979⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 678th | 3.417⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 140th | 4.063⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
Even with the small drawback of the distance and relief relationships of the stage not being quite right, it looks perfectly good and the animations are considerably fluid.
@draekdude funny to hear that, I'm glad you got it working though. On sound - definitely agree, sound would have been pretty much at the top of my 'extra features' wishlist - I'm not that experienced with sound effects but I do enjoy composing music, particularly when it's to complement a story or setting. On the speed of the words - I know I should probably add a label, but did you try the slider at the bottom?
Well done! :D
@fatemperor thanks for playing, yes I tried to think out of the box somewhat :smile:
@deaglan-murphy tyvm :D
@wouterk12 Glad you liked it - also for my first time making an animated sprite I think it went pretty well - confining (no pun intended!) myself to a simple silhouette with no colour definitely helped me achieve my goal. Thanks for the comments :)
@nicekot haha I see that, no it isn't meant to be political commentary and I didn't intend any allegory to actual political figures (current or historic) - I essentially just started thinking about how I could make a conversation between 'cellmates' interesting, and let my mind wander from there to generate a story. Gradually I guess I wanted it to end up being kind of an encouragement to think about the ways we perceive and respond to crimes - not in any attempt to justify heinous acts or lawbreaking, just to remind the audience that nothing is ever as black-and-white as it's sometimes made out to be and to always think critically.
@kanity thanks so much for your comments :) It seems you found the 'good' main ending (there is also a 'not so good' main ending as well as an earlier 'insane' ending). I think you're right, a final choice at the very end might have been an interesting thing as well, but sadly I was really quite time pressed towards the end so it worked out with less choices than I would maybe have liked :sweat_smile: I take your point about the lack of a final screen - but actually I also enjoy the simplicity of a concise (and even possibly ambiguous) ending so I think there's a valid argument for both sides. I tried to make the characters somewhat relatable - definitely there may be some parallels to certain persons, living or dead, but I doubt these real-life people have the same story or motives as my character (it's true I wanted to stimulate a bit of thought on how not everything is black and white, but even while saying that, some people really unequivocally do deserve to be imprisoned!)
Sound and music would have been excellent additions but given the time crunch and all, I can certainly understand why you decided to drop those.
I hope you come back to the next Ludum Dare, I eagerly await your new entry then!
@fannevada @dk-game-labs thanks for your kind comments :)
It was very interesting to have the conversation -> dialogue options -> internal thoughts. The interplay of these last two really made the story work for me, especially in the end (I got the main 'bad' ending, if you want to call it that). I'll admit, the writing at times felt a bit flat to me, maybe because there was hardly any reference in the story that both characters were opening up a lot in a short time, so there were times where Anton as a character felt more like a backstory container than a person, even if his personality was supposed to be bold and up front. I totally understand the difficulty of writing during the jam, so this is more a point of feedback if you continue the game or make another game like it. Perhaps if you develop this game out to last a couple of hours (as someone suggested above) you'd have space to slow down and move through the story's arc more gradually.
My only other issue was that I didn't see how to play in full screen, if I could at all. I played on my laptop, and that made the text box on the side very small indeed! Maybe I missed it, but if there was a way, maybe you could indicate it on the title screen?
At least that's what works for me, but I'm still pretty new at this so I definitely don't have it all figured out :sweat_smile:
Also, as someone whose also incredibly self conscious about art, I think you did a really good job. Even the screen shot from the beginning of the jam section looked good, because I could tell what I was looking at. I think, especially for game jams, as long as the art communicates what it is the player is looking at, then it is good enough.
@oter Really appreciate the sincere feedback. I absolutely understand what you mean about Anton being a backstory container - actually I think both characters suffered from this problem of spilling juicy info pertinent to the story almost unprompted, and I would have liked to make that feel a lot more realistic if I had had the time. As you mention, getting started on the writing earlier would definitely help with this; as it is I'm just happy I managed to make something coherent and complete-ish.
Also duly noted about the lack of fullscreen - I had more troubles than I'd anticipated while exporting to just get the canvas to behave and not weirdly fill up half the website with a completely wrong aspect ratio, so I completely forgot that fullscreen would be a useful thing particularly on small screens - so definitely something I'll try to do in the future. Thanks for playing and leaving your honest thoughts!
@gary-the-enchanter Thanks for your comments! I take your point about expectations needing to be met - although to be quite honest, I don't think it's fair to call this a 'visual novel' either, not because it completely lacks visuals but because the visuals are so non-varied that the 'visual' half of 'visual novel' just isn't really there. I'm surprised you would have preferred something even faster than the max speed - I'm a relatively fast reader and I can barely keep up with the current max speed :P Also, thanks for the kind comment on art - I guess it's a step above using simple shapes (*cough - my last LD entry*) to represent characters and other objects, although definitely still falls into the class of programmer art!