I try to make a postmortem of my game each Ludum Dare, so here it is for our game Mailbox mania! :D You can still play and rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/mailbox-mania

This is the first ludum dare that I have done in a team. I was joined by the wonderfull @pastry-chef :D While I still really enjoy the solo jamming experience, I learned that working in a team is a different experience. I enjoyed brainstorming and thinking/reflecting on the game together a lot. A team is also so much more productive than one person, especially when you divide the tasks and make a bit of a plan. Doing a git pull and seeing a bunch of new stuff added to the game without having to do any of it was a lot of fun ;) I did however notice that my personal productivity went down a bit. Normally, when I work alone, I like to jump around from task to task a lot. So I might finish a sprite, jump to programming, then sound effects, and back to drawing. Being in a team meant I had to focus a bit more, to avoid doing double work and to avoid the git merges becoming a mess >_<

This jam was also a first in another aspect, namely the engine! We used godot this time, which I didn't have any experience with (besides tinkering a little bit and following the brackeys tutorial the weeks before LD). I was afraid that it would take a lot of time to get used to it, but fortunately it was a very pleasant experience! It is in many ways very similar to unity. I especially appreciated how easy it was to render crisp and properly scaled pixel art essentially out of the box, while this has caused me a lot of headaches in other engines. :D

Now, about the game itself. I am really proud of how it came out. We really made something that I myself am having a lot of fun playing. Others have mentioned that the controls are frustratingly hard though, and I can completely see where they are coming from 😅 I think this is a classic case where we should have done some playtesting during the jam. Having my brother play the game afterwards immediately showed me that the difficulty curve is indeed very steep. Still, once you learn the controls, I think it is very satisfying to drift around the map. Perhaps some tutorial or introductory stages could help with these onboarding problems.

With @pastry-chef on board, we agreed that he would mostly be in charge of programming the gameplay. This meant I had a bit more time to experiment and try new stuff with art! :D So when we decided we were making a racing game, I immediately thought of this technique called 'sprite stacking' that I have been wanting to try. It is a method for making a fake 3D effect by rendering a stack of 2D sprites on top of each other. I started on the first day by modelling a simple voxel van using this nifty program called magica voxel. This was a first time for me, but I think it came out quite cute! :D

Magica voxel has an option to export the flat layers of the 3D model as a 2D sprite sheet, which looks something like this

Then, all you have to do is make a bunch of sprite renderers to render these layers on top of one another, starting with the bottom one. The trick is to offset each layer upwards a couple pixels with respect to the layer below it. By then just rotating each layer around their own center, you get a pretty convincing 3D effect

I was very impressed with the result and with how easy it was to implement. It meant that steering looks pretty good in the game, since you can essentially rotate the car continuously, which is usually quite tricky to do with pixel art. I also tried my hand at isometric pixel art for the first time, which was a lot of fun! I think these buildings came out quite well, although I would have loved to add more shadows to make them more grounded in the world.

With the extra help I also had a bit more time to make the music for the game. I have written before about how I feel this is one part of game development that I would love to get better at. While the music here is still not perfect, I actually quite liked what I managed to compose this time! It fits the theme and feel of the game pretty well, and it has some catchy elements, so I am pretty happy how it turned out :D

All in all, I am very proud of what we managed to make. Especially the amount of polish we managed to get in there makes it feel like a proper game, instead of just a little project. I also learned a lot this jam and have grown as a game developer, which just feels great overall :D Thanks a lot to @pastry-chef for sharing this experience with me and for being a wonderful teammate ^_^

If you have read through this whole thing, thanks a lot! Please try our game if you are interested. Your feedback would mean a lot and maybe you can secure yourself a top position on our leaderboard :D You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/mailbox-mania