{"author_link":"\/users\/100th-coin","author_name":"100th_Coin","author_uid":"100th-coin","comments":[],"epoch":1761363015,"event":"LD58","format":"md","ldjam_node_id":422513,"likes":7,"metadata":{"p_key":"197344","p_author":"100th_Coin","p_authorkey":"1008715","p_urlkey":"429269","p_title":"My 27th Ludum Dare's Postmortem: \"Trivia Hart: Case of the Porcelain Tricorn\"","p_cat":"LDJam ","p_event":"LD58","p_time":"1761363015","p_likes":"7","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":"1008715","us_name":"blobo","us_username":"blobo","event_start":"1759449600","event_key":"112","event_name":"Ludum Dare 58"},"node":{"_collation":{"body_sanitizer":"TextUtils::SanitizeHTML via existing importer","event":"LD58","removed_author":false},"_superparent":415614,"_trust":15,"author":8715,"body":"*\"Dateline LD58. I had just ~~jumped in a bottomless pit~~ solved the case of the mayor's missing Porcelain Tricorn. I stopped by Barber's, got something to drink, and decided to review how the case went.\"*\n\nFor a while now I've had a growing list of \"bad jokes\" that I've been wanting to throw in a game. My initial goal was to use as many of them as possible in a single entry, and the format that best suited that goal was a point and click adventure. In hindsight, (and I mean, *really* I should have seen this coming), a point and click adventure game requires a lot of art. Way more art than I had anticipated. As in, by 24 hours into the compo, I had barely started the programming of the game, because I had mostly (outside of writing some music) just worked on art up to that point.\n\nLet's talk about my game Trivia Hart, and how it came together. I'll follow these bullet points:\n\n* From theme to Concept\n\n* A day worth of art\n\n* Wait- I recorded how many voice lines again?\n\n* The 3 big cutscenes\n\n* We do a little reflecting\n\n* Immediate thoughts on the game\n\n* What's the key takeaway from this game?\n\n* Results\n\n* Final Reflection and Conclusion\n\n# From Theme to Concept\n\nIn many previous Ludum Dares, I've done some brainstorming before the theme reveal based on the final round theme voting. I like to think it helps to have an idea for each theme before it's announced. Unfortunately, more times than not, what ends up happening is I fall in love with a singular idea that was for a losing theme, and then make that game anyway. This Ludum Dare, my best idea fit the winning theme.\n\nHave you ever played a game on a \u201cGame & Watch\u201d? Every object has fixed positions on screen, and you can see silhouettes of objects that aren\u2019t present. I thought it would be fascinating to make a point-and-click mystery game where you can see objects that aren\u2019t currently present, as a means to gain information and solve puzzles.\n\nMy previous LD game dropped the ball with the worst tutorial I've ever made, so I immediately had a plan for the \"tutorial\" of this game. You need to cross a canal, but the bridge is out. By using the \"metagame and watch\" you can see a faded silhouette of a wooden plank crossing the gap. Two rooms to the left of you is a wooden plank using the exact same graphic of the silhouette over the canal. This is \"Pajama Sam\" levels of difficulty (suggesting that even a child could figure it out) and that's the plan. I've made confusing games in the past, and I want to avoid any and all confusion with this one.\n\n# A day worth of art\n\nTypically, I spend at most 3 hours on the art to begin with. That gives me time to get character animations and floor tiles set up, where I would then drag the files into Unity and start working on the player movement, followed by the code required for the core mechanic of the game. Trivia Hart did not follow that pattern. At all.\n\nI got to work by drawing the canal scene I had envisioned for the tutorial section. Here what I shared with some friends about 20 minutes after the theme was announced.\n\n![CanaStreet_20min.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efbc.png)\n\nAnd after another 20 minutes, I had this scene put together too:\n\n![WestStreet_40min.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efbd.png)\n\nAs rough as it is spending this much time on each room, it gave me plenty time to figure out what the story of the game would be. While drawing one room, I can try imagining the purpose and shape of the next.\n\nThe story I was working on involved a stolen hat, and by using the \"metagame and watch\" your character can see the culprit was singing a song. That caused a bit of trouble, as I wouldn't be happy unless the sheet music was accurate, so after drawing three and a half rooms I already started writing music, which I don't normally do that early.\n\n![Jingle.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efc3.png)\n\nSince I like adding an acapella track in my LD games, I had the idea that you give the sheet music to an acapella group who can tell you more about the song. The story was coming together, but again, I needed to write more music so the acapella group could have their song in the background of their room. I didn't record the acapella version yet, but putting notes on a timeline was enough to draw their background.\n\n![Barbers.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efc4.png)\n\nI was honestly on a bit of a groove writing the music, so I continued and put together the first half of the main \"outdoors music\", though that song doesn't need sheet music drawn anywhere.\n\nI drew a bunch of other rooms in back\/white, but it was time to color them in. I was going for a noir detective vibe, night time, rainy street. The process of going from *this* to *this*: ...\n\n![Transition.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efc9.png)\n\n... was time consuming. But god dang, was it worth every second. I've never drawn light reflecting on wet surfaces like this (thank god for art references) and I honestly impressed myself. \"Only like, 20 more rooms to color in. heh heh\"\n\n![Transition2.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efca.png)\n\n![Transition3.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efcb.png)\n\nSo at this point, I'm already 18 hours into the allotted 48. I still haven't done any programming, and I still haven't recorded any dialogue. It was time to get to work on the audio.\n\n## Wait- I recorded how many voice lines again?\n\nAt this point, it's about noon (EST, so 18 hours after the jam started). Last night, I wrote most of the story, and now it was time to record it. I do a lot of audio recording\/editing for my youtube videos, so I have a pretty good workflow for this. I recorded myself saying every line two or three times, and keep the best recording. A few lines I needed to re-do, as I initially made the mayor have a real scruffy voice, but changed it to be closer to the voice of \"Stan\" from the *Monkey Island* games.\n\nAfter cleaning up all the audio and separating each chunk of dialogue into it's own audio file, I had **50 items** in that folder. Oh no. So subtitles are absolutely out of the question, and not happening this time around. Whoops!\n\nWith the art and audio taken care of, it was finally time to put things in Unity and make a real game.\n\n# The 3 Big Cutscenes\n\nThe best part about making a point and click adventure is that the programming for it is incredibly easy (in theory). You don't need a physics engine, or tight controls with smooth camera movements... You just need to be able to click on things and have something happen.\n\nMy main \"Interact.cs\" script pretty much works like this: In the unity inspector, I can choose if this object takes you to a new room, or if it plays a voice clip. Then I added logic for locked objects requiring keys, or as I called them \"Arbitrary Checks\".\n\nYou cannot move to the room on the right of the canal until the board is placed. How do I know the board has been placed? I added a script to the audio clip that plays when the board is placed, setting the \"arbitrary check\".\n\nThen I added the ability to interact with the items in your inventory, which basically works by having an array of voice lines corresponding to each item ID, and if the entry into the array is null, your character just says \"Well that didn't do anything.\"\n\nAnd that took up pretty much all of Saturday. Sunday would be spent connecting everything together, which was relatively pain-free except for 3 key cutscenes:\n\n### Cutscene 1: The code to the safe\n\nSpoilers in case you haven't played it yet, but in this cutscene, the antagonist is revealed. Then they shoot and kill Trivia after she reads the note. You can then respawn with the knowledge of the code.\n\nSo here's the issue. Literally every other cutscene up to this point has just been audio. Nothing really happens on screen mid-dialogue. So how do I make this work? The script for this cutscene was basically just a timer that changes the artwork and animations of characters to sync with the audio, then the camera moves to a new screen with a respawn button. Between drawing the villains animations, the bullet animations, and programming all of it, that somehow took like, 3 hours to put together. Oh no. (I now have about 3 hours until the submission deadline.)\n\n### Cutscene 2: Dodging the bullet\n\nBefore I made this cutscene, I just realized that I hadn't actually implemented the pause menu \/ title screen stuff. I took maybe 30 minutes to get that all put together, with a really cool visual effect on the title screen where there's a \"lens\" to see the game & watch alternate texture of the title screen. It's an effect I'm really happy with. I wish I drew a silhoette of a mystery-man with the tricorn though. That would've been cool.\n\nAnyway, back on day 1 I drew this wicked cool animation of Trivia Hart jumping over a bullet:\n\n![TriviaDodge.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efe8.gif)\n\nThere is so much with the art of this game that I had never done before, and I'm amazed at how good it looks.\n\nWell, now it was time to implement that cutscene.\n\nI wanted the player to be able to fail to dodge the bullet, causing them to die and respawn, similar to the previous cutscene. Again, the script for this was pretty much just a bunch of timers, and a custom interact-object that causes the player to jump.\n\nI don't know how it went this rough, but there were *issues*. Making the code for the jump, and the timers for the dialogue and shooting, and second dialogue, and making sure the player can't skip the dialogue... This is the classic \"48th hour fatigue\". Except it was hitting halfway through the 46th hour. Anyway, I got it working, but I cannot believe how long it took, and how little time I had left. (One hour to go.)\n\n### Cutscene 3: The choice at the end of the game\n\nThe game ends with you confronting the collector, where he gives you an ultimatum. You could either throw him in prison, or you could jump into a bottomless pit! \"Ooh, who knows what sort of cutscene I have planned for that! *You could be missing out on content!*\" I gotta be honest, It's shocking how many people jump into the pit on their first run.\n\nActually implementing this wasn't too bad, as I didn't need to make custom animations. Just a timer to darken the screen and change the background a bit. But in case you haven't been keeping track of the time, I now have 1 hour before it's time to submit. And I haven't actually programmed a large part of the game's other sections. (The interior of front burger was still unimplemented, and I also had plans for a small cutescene involving the cashier running into the kitchen.)\n\nScrambling, I program the interactable objects in \"Front Burger\" and \"The Club\". At this point, actually testing the full game takes about 3 minutes due to the unskippable cutscenes, so I genuinely don't have time. I removed the \"animation\" from the game & watch view of the cashier in Front burger running away, and figured he would just instantly disappear instead. Oh well, no time.\n\nAnd I just realized I never recorded the audio for the ending cutscenes. Both of them, since I decided there would be two.\n\n### Did I say three cutscenes? I meant five.\n\nSo there was supposed to be more. In the \"Spike Pit ending\" the collector was going to say \"Wow, I can't believe you fell for that. Do you see this button? This button makes *this* the canon timeline. *beep*. This is canonically how the story goes now! ... ... ... What do you mean *respawning?*. OH NO!\" and then it would be a similar ending to the \"true\" ending. I didn't have time, so instead you just fall in the hole and the game ends, HA!\n\nAnd at this point, I had absolutely no time left. The \"true ending\" was haphazardly recorded, and the art for it was drawn in about 2 minutes, except of course for the Porcelain Tricorn which I drew back on day 1. That thing looks glorious, and it's funny how the rest of the cutscene looks like trash.\n\n![Finale.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6eff8.png)\n\nI also just realized I forgot to draw the bottom half of the mayor's tie, so now he just has a black oval on his neck. Oh well.\n\nAnd just like that, the game was ready for submission!\n\n# We do a little reflecting\n\nSomething I've done in my past many Postmortems is write down what went wrong, and I like to have one \"key takeaway\" from each event, and reflect during future events on those notes and how I've either taken them to heart or dropped the ball.\n\nLet's work backwards here:\n\n### LD57: \"Scope Smaller, or break the game into small rooms.\"\n\nLol. Lmao even.\n\nYeah, so I certainly didn't scope small. I thought I did, but foresight isn't my specialty. I did however break the game into small rooms, just in a very different way than I usually do.\n\n### LD56: \u201cBe reasonable with your shader effects.\u201d\n\nThe only shader effect in this game was used on the title screen, which I thought added a lot. Nothing too dramatic, I think I was being reasonable.\n\n### LD55: \u201cMake sure the camera isn\u2019t jank.\u201d\n\nThe camera couldn't possibly be jank if there are only so many fixed positions for it. Makes you think.\n\n### LD54: \u201cFull in-game tutorial for ANY unique mechanics. It must be explained.\u201d\n\nThis is where I dropped the ball many times before, and I will probably do that again in the future, but not today. I had a plan for the tutorial, and so far everybody seems to get it.\n\n### LD53: \u201cGet feedback before the deadline.\u201d\n\nI think I've said this in too many of my postmortems since writing that line down, but (and I'll say it again) I didn't have time to get feedback on this one. Honestly, a skill issue on my part. So- in classic 100th_Coin postmortem fashion, what would this feedback have taught me?\n\n- The \"coupon puzzle\" had a glaring issue. The man who gives you the coupon and tells you what to do with it only says that line once, and you can no longer interact with him. Oh, and this line can be skipped by accident if you click while he's talking. This has lead to a few people getting stuck.\n\n- There were a few hitbox issues with some of the interactable objects. Since clicking on things is (and I cannot stress this enough) *the entire game*, having hitbox issues immediately lead to a few softlocks, as objects would sometimes just not let you click on them.\n\n- The buttons you click at the end of the game to choose \"jump in spike pit\" or \"turn him in\" were in the wrong graphical layer, and could sometimes end up behind the room graphics, displaying neither option, or perhaps only one of them.\n\n### LD52: \u201cFocus on a single mechanic, and let the story come second.\u201d\n\nIn a way, the \"metagame and watch\" mechanic drove the story, so I think this game passes that one. I mean, I did not at all let the story come second in a point-and-click adventure game, where the story is critically important, but the \"metagame and watch\" mechanic was also critically important in designing the puzzles. I think this was the best balance of story and mechanic I've had.\n\nI typically stop there in my postmortems, but you know what? let's keep this train rolling. I'd like to touch on a few of my older notes.\n\n### LD51: \"Voice acting is fun, and I even made an acapella track!\"\n\nThis was my 8th time making an acapella track for a Ludum Dare game, and I don't see myself stopping!\n\n### LD50: \"The exhaustion of the 48th hour is real.\"\n\nI honestly could have used that advice a bit more with this one. I spent pretty much all of sunday rushing and I was feeling it pretty hard when I realized I still needed to make the ending cutscenes.\n\n### LD49: \"The compo rules do not lend themselves well for parody\"\n\nPerhaps not gameplay-wise, but this game was a very subtle parody of *The Maltese Falcon*. One of the ending lines in the true ending is:\n\n\"Say, what's so important about that hat anyway?\"\n\n\"It's the stuff that dreams are made of.\"\n\n... \"What, porcelain?\"\n\nWhere *It's the stuff that dreams are made of* is the final line spoken in *The Maltese Falcon*, referring to the titular item. When I watched that movie, all I could think of was \"What, lead? *Lead* is what dreams are made of???\" So including my stupid \"What, porcelain?\" joke makes me chuckle.\n\nDigging through ye old archives, I found this note I took...\n\n### LD39: \"If you have a huge list of unique items, add some splash text to explain what each of them are.\"\n\nAnd you know what? I should have done that. This game had a good handful of items you can pick up, and outside of a voice line when doing so, they aren't really explained further.\n\nAnd a classic...\n\n### LD33: \"Perhaps spending only 20 minutes on art wasn't enough.\"\n\nTalk about character growth.\n\n# Immediate thoughts on the game\n\nSo I'm writing this paragraph about a day after submitting. I honestly think this is the best art I have drawn, ever. Not even just for Ludum Dares. I experimented a LOT with the lighting and character designs, and I couldn't be happier. In the week leading up to Ludum Dare, I spent a lot of time just drawing characters trying to improve my art. For the first time, I've actually drawn noses, eyebrows, and exaggerated chins on characters. I was looking forward to having more close-ups with characters in this game, and unfortunately that didn't happen, but perhaps next time.\n\nThis game was a lot. Just the amount of drawings, and the amount of audio I had to put together is so much. I was worried that the gameplay would be lackluster and feel empty. I've never done a point and click adventure before, I typically make platformers. Though, I recall my previous postmortem saying *\"I need to stop making platforming games during Ludum Dare. Remind me during submission hour of LD58 to slap myself if I upload another platformer.\"* And I can proudly say this isn't a platformer. **For the first Ludum Dare in a while, I really think I learned a lot from making this game.**\n\n# What's the key takeaway from this game?\n\nI want to humorously riff off my note from LD33 by saying, \"Perhaps spending 20 hours on art was too much.\", as we now have an upper and lower bound for what I find to be an acceptable range in time to be spent on graphics. \n\nTo be a bit more serious though. I think if there is any singular \"note for next time\" that can be taken from this game, it's that **making a game in a genre you have never made before is exhilarating**. I'm just thinking back to LD55 where I said \"*The majority of this Ludum Dare was spent writing a cutscene engine. That was pretty far from the most fun I\u2019ve had with a game jam.*\" While on the flipside, this time I also made a game that is primarily cutscenes and I had a blast while doing it.\n\nIt was fun to make, it's been fun watching others play it, and I honestly don't know if I ever want to make another game \"in my comfort zone\" during a game jam again. I was about to ask \"Why did it take me so long to realize this?\", But I think it's because the results from my LD53 game, \"Inbox Fool\" skewed my perspective beyond an event horizon. It was the best I had ever done, and it was so far within my \"make-a-platformer\" comfort-zone that I've been trying to replicate its magic by still staying in the platformer comfort zone. It was *the* Ludum Dare that was immediately after I took the note: \"Focus on a single mechanic and let the story come second\", a note that has defined my past 6 games. I think I've been trying too hard to make a unique game, while completely sabotaging myself by limiting the genre. I think that's where I went wrong during LD57, LD56, LD55, and LD54.\n\nDon't get me wrong, I've made some really cool platformers in my decade of Ludum Dare, (most recently: RAMnesia, Stronkey Kong, Watch Out, Inbox Fool, Ribbon 2, Prince Charmony, and The Moon Reconstruction Program) but I seriously need to branch out. Regardless of how this game scores, I had a great time making it, learned a lot, drew some art that I'm really proud of, and made a game in a genre I had very little experience with.\n\nSo yeah. 27 Ludum Dares in a row, 8 Ludum Dare's in a row featuring acapella music... Let's get a streak going of making games out of my comfort zone too. Let's get weird with it.\n\n![Woah!.PNG](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6f9bd.png)\n\nWow! This was my first time getting single digits for Graphics, and also for Mood. I'm really *really* happy with these results. I kinda hyped myself up while writing this, talking about how branching out of my comfort zone was super important for me, and I'm really glad it paid off. I'm taking this as confirmation that everything I wrote about in the \"key takeaways\" is true, and branching out of my comfort zone is the move to make in the future.\n\n# Final Reflection, and Conclusion\n\nThis Ludum Dare I made a point and click adventure game for the first time. It's a genre I probably haven't played since I was 8, and it was honestly really nostalgic for me to make a game inspired by the games I have vague memories of.\n\nGoing in, I had the goal to simply not make a platformer. I'm happy with the game I made, and I learned a lot. Mostly the fact that point and click adventure games require insane amounts of art and voice lines. But the real lesson here was just how much fun it was to create a game in a genre I'm unfamiliar with. I absolutely want to do this again in future Ludum Dares.\n\nAnd I met two goals of mine with this game, being top 10 mood and graphics.\n\nThank you to everyone who played, thank you for all of your feedback. This was a good one. I can't wait for next time.\n\n# \u2603","comments":0,"created":"2025-10-08T18:23:44Z","files":[],"files-timestamp":0,"id":422513,"love":7,"love-timestamp":"2026-04-12T15:57:23Z","meta":[],"modified":"2026-04-12T15:57:23Z","name":"My 27th Ludum Dare's Postmortem: \"Trivia Hart: Case of the Porcelain Tricorn\"","node-timestamp":"2025-10-25T03:36:26Z","parent":420855,"parents":[1,5,9,415614,420855],"path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/58\/trivia-hart\/my-27th-ludum-dares-postmortem-trivia-hart-case-of-the-porcelain-tricorn","published":"2025-10-25T03:30:15Z","scope":"public","slug":"my-27th-ludum-dares-postmortem-trivia-hart-case-of-the-porcelain-tricorn","subsubtype":"","subtype":"","type":"post","version":1341800},"node_metadata":{"n_key":"422513","n_urlkey":"429269","n_parent":"420855","n_path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/58\/trivia-hart\/my-27th-ludum-dares-postmortem-trivia-hart-case-of-the-porcelain-tricorn","n_slug":"my-27th-ludum-dares-postmortem-t","n_type":"post","n_subtype":"","n_subsubtype":"","n_author":"8715","n_created":"1759947824","n_modified":"1776009443","n_version":"1341800","n_status":"WAYBACK"},"source_url":"https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/58\/trivia-hart\/my-27th-ludum-dares-postmortem-trivia-hart-case-of-the-porcelain-tricorn","text":"*\"Dateline LD58. I had just ~~jumped in a bottomless pit~~ solved the case of the mayor's missing Porcelain Tricorn. I stopped by Barber's, got something to drink, and decided to review how the case went.\"*\n\nFor a while now I've had a growing list of \"bad jokes\" that I've been wanting to throw in a game. My initial goal was to use as many of them as possible in a single entry, and the format that best suited that goal was a point and click adventure. In hindsight, (and I mean, *really* I should have seen this coming), a point and click adventure game requires a lot of art. Way more art than I had anticipated. As in, by 24 hours into the compo, I had barely started the programming of the game, because I had mostly (outside of writing some music) just worked on art up to that point.\n\nLet's talk about my game Trivia Hart, and how it came together. I'll follow these bullet points:\n\n* From theme to Concept\n\n* A day worth of art\n\n* Wait- I recorded how many voice lines again?\n\n* The 3 big cutscenes\n\n* We do a little reflecting\n\n* Immediate thoughts on the game\n\n* What's the key takeaway from this game?\n\n* Results\n\n* Final Reflection and Conclusion\n\n# From Theme to Concept\n\nIn many previous Ludum Dares, I've done some brainstorming before the theme reveal based on the final round theme voting. I like to think it helps to have an idea for each theme before it's announced. Unfortunately, more times than not, what ends up happening is I fall in love with a singular idea that was for a losing theme, and then make that game anyway. This Ludum Dare, my best idea fit the winning theme.\n\nHave you ever played a game on a \u201cGame & Watch\u201d? Every object has fixed positions on screen, and you can see silhouettes of objects that aren\u2019t present. I thought it would be fascinating to make a point-and-click mystery game where you can see objects that aren\u2019t currently present, as a means to gain information and solve puzzles.\n\nMy previous LD game dropped the ball with the worst tutorial I've ever made, so I immediately had a plan for the \"tutorial\" of this game. You need to cross a canal, but the bridge is out. By using the \"metagame and watch\" you can see a faded silhouette of a wooden plank crossing the gap. Two rooms to the left of you is a wooden plank using the exact same graphic of the silhouette over the canal. This is \"Pajama Sam\" levels of difficulty (suggesting that even a child could figure it out) and that's the plan. I've made confusing games in the past, and I want to avoid any and all confusion with this one.\n\n# A day worth of art\n\nTypically, I spend at most 3 hours on the art to begin with. That gives me time to get character animations and floor tiles set up, where I would then drag the files into Unity and start working on the player movement, followed by the code required for the core mechanic of the game. Trivia Hart did not follow that pattern. At all.\n\nI got to work by drawing the canal scene I had envisioned for the tutorial section. Here what I shared with some friends about 20 minutes after the theme was announced.\n\n![CanaStreet_20min.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efbc.png)\n\nAnd after another 20 minutes, I had this scene put together too:\n\n![WestStreet_40min.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efbd.png)\n\nAs rough as it is spending this much time on each room, it gave me plenty time to figure out what the story of the game would be. While drawing one room, I can try imagining the purpose and shape of the next.\n\nThe story I was working on involved a stolen hat, and by using the \"metagame and watch\" your character can see the culprit was singing a song. That caused a bit of trouble, as I wouldn't be happy unless the sheet music was accurate, so after drawing three and a half rooms I already started writing music, which I don't normally do that early.\n\n![Jingle.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efc3.png)\n\nSince I like adding an acapella track in my LD games, I had the idea that you give the sheet music to an acapella group who can tell you more about the song. The story was coming together, but again, I needed to write more music so the acapella group could have their song in the background of their room. I didn't record the acapella version yet, but putting notes on a timeline was enough to draw their background.\n\n![Barbers.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efc4.png)\n\nI was honestly on a bit of a groove writing the music, so I continued and put together the first half of the main \"outdoors music\", though that song doesn't need sheet music drawn anywhere.\n\nI drew a bunch of other rooms in back\/white, but it was time to color them in. I was going for a noir detective vibe, night time, rainy street. The process of going from *this* to *this*: ...\n\n![Transition.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efc9.png)\n\n... was time consuming. But god dang, was it worth every second. I've never drawn light reflecting on wet surfaces like this (thank god for art references) and I honestly impressed myself. \"Only like, 20 more rooms to color in. heh heh\"\n\n![Transition2.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efca.png)\n\n![Transition3.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efcb.png)\n\nSo at this point, I'm already 18 hours into the allotted 48. I still haven't done any programming, and I still haven't recorded any dialogue. It was time to get to work on the audio.\n\n## Wait- I recorded how many voice lines again?\n\nAt this point, it's about noon (EST, so 18 hours after the jam started). Last night, I wrote most of the story, and now it was time to record it. I do a lot of audio recording\/editing for my youtube videos, so I have a pretty good workflow for this. I recorded myself saying every line two or three times, and keep the best recording. A few lines I needed to re-do, as I initially made the mayor have a real scruffy voice, but changed it to be closer to the voice of \"Stan\" from the *Monkey Island* games.\n\nAfter cleaning up all the audio and separating each chunk of dialogue into it's own audio file, I had **50 items** in that folder. Oh no. So subtitles are absolutely out of the question, and not happening this time around. Whoops!\n\nWith the art and audio taken care of, it was finally time to put things in Unity and make a real game.\n\n# The 3 Big Cutscenes\n\nThe best part about making a point and click adventure is that the programming for it is incredibly easy (in theory). You don't need a physics engine, or tight controls with smooth camera movements... You just need to be able to click on things and have something happen.\n\nMy main \"Interact.cs\" script pretty much works like this: In the unity inspector, I can choose if this object takes you to a new room, or if it plays a voice clip. Then I added logic for locked objects requiring keys, or as I called them \"Arbitrary Checks\".\n\nYou cannot move to the room on the right of the canal until the board is placed. How do I know the board has been placed? I added a script to the audio clip that plays when the board is placed, setting the \"arbitrary check\".\n\nThen I added the ability to interact with the items in your inventory, which basically works by having an array of voice lines corresponding to each item ID, and if the entry into the array is null, your character just says \"Well that didn't do anything.\"\n\nAnd that took up pretty much all of Saturday. Sunday would be spent connecting everything together, which was relatively pain-free except for 3 key cutscenes:\n\n### Cutscene 1: The code to the safe\n\nSpoilers in case you haven't played it yet, but in this cutscene, the antagonist is revealed. Then they shoot and kill Trivia after she reads the note. You can then respawn with the knowledge of the code.\n\nSo here's the issue. Literally every other cutscene up to this point has just been audio. Nothing really happens on screen mid-dialogue. So how do I make this work? The script for this cutscene was basically just a timer that changes the artwork and animations of characters to sync with the audio, then the camera moves to a new screen with a respawn button. Between drawing the villains animations, the bullet animations, and programming all of it, that somehow took like, 3 hours to put together. Oh no. (I now have about 3 hours until the submission deadline.)\n\n### Cutscene 2: Dodging the bullet\n\nBefore I made this cutscene, I just realized that I hadn't actually implemented the pause menu \/ title screen stuff. I took maybe 30 minutes to get that all put together, with a really cool visual effect on the title screen where there's a \"lens\" to see the game & watch alternate texture of the title screen. It's an effect I'm really happy with. I wish I drew a silhoette of a mystery-man with the tricorn though. That would've been cool.\n\nAnyway, back on day 1 I drew this wicked cool animation of Trivia Hart jumping over a bullet:\n\n![TriviaDodge.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6efe8.gif)\n\nThere is so much with the art of this game that I had never done before, and I'm amazed at how good it looks.\n\nWell, now it was time to implement that cutscene.\n\nI wanted the player to be able to fail to dodge the bullet, causing them to die and respawn, similar to the previous cutscene. Again, the script for this was pretty much just a bunch of timers, and a custom interact-object that causes the player to jump.\n\nI don't know how it went this rough, but there were *issues*. Making the code for the jump, and the timers for the dialogue and shooting, and second dialogue, and making sure the player can't skip the dialogue... This is the classic \"48th hour fatigue\". Except it was hitting halfway through the 46th hour. Anyway, I got it working, but I cannot believe how long it took, and how little time I had left. (One hour to go.)\n\n### Cutscene 3: The choice at the end of the game\n\nThe game ends with you confronting the collector, where he gives you an ultimatum. You could either throw him in prison, or you could jump into a bottomless pit! \"Ooh, who knows what sort of cutscene I have planned for that! *You could be missing out on content!*\" I gotta be honest, It's shocking how many people jump into the pit on their first run.\n\nActually implementing this wasn't too bad, as I didn't need to make custom animations. Just a timer to darken the screen and change the background a bit. But in case you haven't been keeping track of the time, I now have 1 hour before it's time to submit. And I haven't actually programmed a large part of the game's other sections. (The interior of front burger was still unimplemented, and I also had plans for a small cutescene involving the cashier running into the kitchen.)\n\nScrambling, I program the interactable objects in \"Front Burger\" and \"The Club\". At this point, actually testing the full game takes about 3 minutes due to the unskippable cutscenes, so I genuinely don't have time. I removed the \"animation\" from the game & watch view of the cashier in Front burger running away, and figured he would just instantly disappear instead. Oh well, no time.\n\nAnd I just realized I never recorded the audio for the ending cutscenes. Both of them, since I decided there would be two.\n\n### Did I say three cutscenes? I meant five.\n\nSo there was supposed to be more. In the \"Spike Pit ending\" the collector was going to say \"Wow, I can't believe you fell for that. Do you see this button? This button makes *this* the canon timeline. *beep*. This is canonically how the story goes now! ... ... ... What do you mean *respawning?*. OH NO!\" and then it would be a similar ending to the \"true\" ending. I didn't have time, so instead you just fall in the hole and the game ends, HA!\n\nAnd at this point, I had absolutely no time left. The \"true ending\" was haphazardly recorded, and the art for it was drawn in about 2 minutes, except of course for the Porcelain Tricorn which I drew back on day 1. That thing looks glorious, and it's funny how the rest of the cutscene looks like trash.\n\n![Finale.png](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6eff8.png)\n\nI also just realized I forgot to draw the bottom half of the mayor's tie, so now he just has a black oval on his neck. Oh well.\n\nAnd just like that, the game was ready for submission!\n\n# We do a little reflecting\n\nSomething I've done in my past many Postmortems is write down what went wrong, and I like to have one \"key takeaway\" from each event, and reflect during future events on those notes and how I've either taken them to heart or dropped the ball.\n\nLet's work backwards here:\n\n### LD57: \"Scope Smaller, or break the game into small rooms.\"\n\nLol. Lmao even.\n\nYeah, so I certainly didn't scope small. I thought I did, but foresight isn't my specialty. I did however break the game into small rooms, just in a very different way than I usually do.\n\n### LD56: \u201cBe reasonable with your shader effects.\u201d\n\nThe only shader effect in this game was used on the title screen, which I thought added a lot. Nothing too dramatic, I think I was being reasonable.\n\n### LD55: \u201cMake sure the camera isn\u2019t jank.\u201d\n\nThe camera couldn't possibly be jank if there are only so many fixed positions for it. Makes you think.\n\n### LD54: \u201cFull in-game tutorial for ANY unique mechanics. It must be explained.\u201d\n\nThis is where I dropped the ball many times before, and I will probably do that again in the future, but not today. I had a plan for the tutorial, and so far everybody seems to get it.\n\n### LD53: \u201cGet feedback before the deadline.\u201d\n\nI think I've said this in too many of my postmortems since writing that line down, but (and I'll say it again) I didn't have time to get feedback on this one. Honestly, a skill issue on my part. So- in classic 100th_Coin postmortem fashion, what would this feedback have taught me?\n\n- The \"coupon puzzle\" had a glaring issue. The man who gives you the coupon and tells you what to do with it only says that line once, and you can no longer interact with him. Oh, and this line can be skipped by accident if you click while he's talking. This has lead to a few people getting stuck.\n\n- There were a few hitbox issues with some of the interactable objects. Since clicking on things is (and I cannot stress this enough) *the entire game*, having hitbox issues immediately lead to a few softlocks, as objects would sometimes just not let you click on them.\n\n- The buttons you click at the end of the game to choose \"jump in spike pit\" or \"turn him in\" were in the wrong graphical layer, and could sometimes end up behind the room graphics, displaying neither option, or perhaps only one of them.\n\n### LD52: \u201cFocus on a single mechanic, and let the story come second.\u201d\n\nIn a way, the \"metagame and watch\" mechanic drove the story, so I think this game passes that one. I mean, I did not at all let the story come second in a point-and-click adventure game, where the story is critically important, but the \"metagame and watch\" mechanic was also critically important in designing the puzzles. I think this was the best balance of story and mechanic I've had.\n\nI typically stop there in my postmortems, but you know what? let's keep this train rolling. I'd like to touch on a few of my older notes.\n\n### LD51: \"Voice acting is fun, and I even made an acapella track!\"\n\nThis was my 8th time making an acapella track for a Ludum Dare game, and I don't see myself stopping!\n\n### LD50: \"The exhaustion of the 48th hour is real.\"\n\nI honestly could have used that advice a bit more with this one. I spent pretty much all of sunday rushing and I was feeling it pretty hard when I realized I still needed to make the ending cutscenes.\n\n### LD49: \"The compo rules do not lend themselves well for parody\"\n\nPerhaps not gameplay-wise, but this game was a very subtle parody of *The Maltese Falcon*. One of the ending lines in the true ending is:\n\n\"Say, what's so important about that hat anyway?\"\n\n\"It's the stuff that dreams are made of.\"\n\n... \"What, porcelain?\"\n\nWhere *It's the stuff that dreams are made of* is the final line spoken in *The Maltese Falcon*, referring to the titular item. When I watched that movie, all I could think of was \"What, lead? *Lead* is what dreams are made of???\" So including my stupid \"What, porcelain?\" joke makes me chuckle.\n\nDigging through ye old archives, I found this note I took...\n\n### LD39: \"If you have a huge list of unique items, add some splash text to explain what each of them are.\"\n\nAnd you know what? I should have done that. This game had a good handful of items you can pick up, and outside of a voice line when doing so, they aren't really explained further.\n\nAnd a classic...\n\n### LD33: \"Perhaps spending only 20 minutes on art wasn't enough.\"\n\nTalk about character growth.\n\n# Immediate thoughts on the game\n\nSo I'm writing this paragraph about a day after submitting. I honestly think this is the best art I have drawn, ever. Not even just for Ludum Dares. I experimented a LOT with the lighting and character designs, and I couldn't be happier. In the week leading up to Ludum Dare, I spent a lot of time just drawing characters trying to improve my art. For the first time, I've actually drawn noses, eyebrows, and exaggerated chins on characters. I was looking forward to having more close-ups with characters in this game, and unfortunately that didn't happen, but perhaps next time.\n\nThis game was a lot. Just the amount of drawings, and the amount of audio I had to put together is so much. I was worried that the gameplay would be lackluster and feel empty. I've never done a point and click adventure before, I typically make platformers. Though, I recall my previous postmortem saying *\"I need to stop making platforming games during Ludum Dare. Remind me during submission hour of LD58 to slap myself if I upload another platformer.\"* And I can proudly say this isn't a platformer. **For the first Ludum Dare in a while, I really think I learned a lot from making this game.**\n\n# What's the key takeaway from this game?\n\nI want to humorously riff off my note from LD33 by saying, \"Perhaps spending 20 hours on art was too much.\", as we now have an upper and lower bound for what I find to be an acceptable range in time to be spent on graphics. \n\nTo be a bit more serious though. I think if there is any singular \"note for next time\" that can be taken from this game, it's that **making a game in a genre you have never made before is exhilarating**. I'm just thinking back to LD55 where I said \"*The majority of this Ludum Dare was spent writing a cutscene engine. That was pretty far from the most fun I\u2019ve had with a game jam.*\" While on the flipside, this time I also made a game that is primarily cutscenes and I had a blast while doing it.\n\nIt was fun to make, it's been fun watching others play it, and I honestly don't know if I ever want to make another game \"in my comfort zone\" during a game jam again. I was about to ask \"Why did it take me so long to realize this?\", But I think it's because the results from my LD53 game, \"Inbox Fool\" skewed my perspective beyond an event horizon. It was the best I had ever done, and it was so far within my \"make-a-platformer\" comfort-zone that I've been trying to replicate its magic by still staying in the platformer comfort zone. It was *the* Ludum Dare that was immediately after I took the note: \"Focus on a single mechanic and let the story come second\", a note that has defined my past 6 games. I think I've been trying too hard to make a unique game, while completely sabotaging myself by limiting the genre. I think that's where I went wrong during LD57, LD56, LD55, and LD54.\n\nDon't get me wrong, I've made some really cool platformers in my decade of Ludum Dare, (most recently: RAMnesia, Stronkey Kong, Watch Out, Inbox Fool, Ribbon 2, Prince Charmony, and The Moon Reconstruction Program) but I seriously need to branch out. Regardless of how this game scores, I had a great time making it, learned a lot, drew some art that I'm really proud of, and made a game in a genre I had very little experience with.\n\nSo yeah. 27 Ludum Dares in a row, 8 Ludum Dare's in a row featuring acapella music... Let's get a streak going of making games out of my comfort zone too. Let's get weird with it.\n\n![Woah!.PNG](\/\/\/raw\/b02\/2\/z\/6f9bd.png)\n\nWow! This was my first time getting single digits for Graphics, and also for Mood. I'm really *really* happy with these results. I kinda hyped myself up while writing this, talking about how branching out of my comfort zone was super important for me, and I'm really glad it paid off. I'm taking this as confirmation that everything I wrote about in the \"key takeaways\" is true, and branching out of my comfort zone is the move to make in the future.\n\n# Final Reflection, and Conclusion\n\nThis Ludum Dare I made a point and click adventure game for the first time. It's a genre I probably haven't played since I was 8, and it was honestly really nostalgic for me to make a game inspired by the games I have vague memories of.\n\nGoing in, I had the goal to simply not make a platformer. I'm happy with the game I made, and I learned a lot. Mostly the fact that point and click adventure games require insane amounts of art and voice lines. But the real lesson here was just how much fun it was to create a game in a genre I'm unfamiliar with. I absolutely want to do this again in future Ludum Dares.\n\nAnd I met two goals of mine with this game, being top 10 mood and graphics.\n\nThank you to everyone who played, thank you for all of your feedback. This was a good one. I can't wait for next time.\n\n# \u2603","title":"My 27th Ludum Dare's Postmortem: \"Trivia Hart: Case of the Porcelain Tricorn\"","wayback_source":[]}