Hey, folks. Thought I'd write down various thoughts and musings related to the making of "Oh, It's Nothing", our jam entry for LD45.

How it all began

As a preface, I've been vaguely aware of the jam's existence for a long while, but the idea of actually taking part never came close to crossing my mind. Without @ein grabbing me along for the ride out of the blue, I suspect it never would have.

It all began with brainstorming, of course, and this is where we encountered our very first issue: LD45 started well past midnight for both of us on the account of accursed time zones, and while ultimately we managed to push drowsiness aside, I can't help but look back and think that the whole thing could've gone smoother and been more fruitful overall.

On top of this, we were affected by tunnel vision: right off the bat we established that the word "nothing" can be treated in a literal, abstract sense... and that's what we stuck with. We tried to move away from this take a few times, but it was definitely a "too little, too late" kind of situation. One concept I'm still fond of did pop up as a result, though, one of a game based on the Straw Millionaire tale. Alas, it was not to be.

Tentative prototyping

The very first draft of the game featured nothing but randomly generated text strings appearing on the screen, and frankly, at this point I don't even remember what was the exact idea this "sketch" was based on. That's assuming there was one to begin with.

For a while we kept pursuing the following idea: "nothing" is both what you start with and the desired state of things, and yet certain external forces keep tainting the pristine void, something the player has to prevent. This is where we came up with the gameplay: you begin with a black screen containing a single word, you click on it in order to banish it, yet more words emerge, and so it goes. However, while this concept may sound intriguing enough, we weren't sure what sort of conclusion would be the most sensible here.

If it was possible to win, would preserving the nothingness feel satisfying? I'm not convinced. And if defeat was inevitable, wouldn't it be unpleasant to discover you were doomed from the start? Not saying something like this can't be pulled off, and conceptually the inevitable victory of matter over nothingness is at the very least workable, but the idea of going down this path strongly felt like shooting ourselves in our collective feet for no good reason.

Thus it was written, thus it shall be

Eventually the final concept of the game emerged: we decided to go for an interactive tale of creation of sorts. To accommodate this shift, the gameplay had to be changed as well: while you still could remove words, it also became possible to preserve them, and that became the point.

So, "nothing" stopped being both the destination and the starting point of the journey, and getting rid of this duality vastly simplified things for me, the writer. I can't say everything became crystal clear at once, but I've finally found myself able to move forward without having to keep migrating from one semi-coherent, woefully incomplete draft to another. A welcome change, as you can imagine.

And so we return again to the holy void. Some say this is simply our destiny, but I would have you remember always that the void EXISTS, just as surely as you or I. Is nothingness any less a miracle than substance?

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We must Dissent" (Accompanies discovery of the "Advanced Spaceflight" tech)

With the concept set in stone, we had to figure out the structure of the game. We had some narrative followed by one "dose" of gameplay... and that was it. As if that wasn't bad enough, the gameplay bit in question was the one that's currently used for the finale. We were going from 0 to 100 in the blink of an eye, and I guess in some way this was cool, but also incoherent. This had to change, and it did: we inserted a couple of extra "levels" in front of the finale, each with slightly different mechanics, and that filled the void nicely, I'd say.

The narrative and the gameplay weren't quite enough on their own, though. Something else was needed in order to cultivate a proper mood for the game. This is where Sleeping Dragon Forever Radio came in, a piece of music-generating software. We didn't have to spend lots of time "fishing" for the right tracks, luckily: the very first two that we got felt like a perfect fit after some minor editing. This is probably the most unusual thing about the way this game was made, and, surprisingly, the end result turned out to be fantastic.

Some ideas on how to make the game beefier didn't make it, sadly. For instance, we were thinking of implementing a "bonus stage", something that's detached from the main game to some degree and only becomes available after beating it. If you know how the game ends, it should be easy enough to guess that this hypothetical extra level would be featuring something... different, whatever that means. In the end we chose to spend more time polishing what was there instead of hastily trying to add something new, and personally I'm pleased with the outcome.

When the music's over

And that's all I have to say about the development process. Being rather cautious with the game's scope and culling overly ambitious and grand designs on sight certainly helped with avoiding any major issues during the jam. Playing it safe is rarely an exciting approach, I suppose, but hey, it gets the job done.

LD45 has definitely been a positive experience for us. I don't know for sure whether we'll be back for more or not, but the idea of taking part in LD46 is agreeable, this much I can tell without a shadow of a doubt.

Thanks for ~~all the fish~~ reading! Feel free to ask any questions if you have any.

(Link to the game in question: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/oh-its-nothing. Playable in browser and works on mobile platforms, shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to beat.)