Vox Regis is a game about a king who uses his voice to provoke conflict between the groups that are forming in his kingdom. For if a group were to grow too big, it could overthrow him. This is my game for the Ludum Dare #56 compo. Welcome to its post-mortem.

The idea

The worst part about Ludum Dare is coming up with an idea. As long as you don't have an idea, you can't start working on it. And as the clock is ticking you are getting more stressed, which often obstructs the process of coming up with a good idea. Last Ludum Dare I was lucky, and instantly knew what I wanted to make. This Ludum Dare I decided to try something new. Half an hour before the reveal of the theme I started meditating. Then, after I read what the theme was, I again meditated for half an hour. When I say meditating I mean sitting on my couch with my eyes closed. There is no meditation app or thought exercises involved. Just sitting, and let the mind do its work.

Did it work? Definitely! It's hard to describe, but my mind went places I doubt I would have considered had I been sitting behind my PC and looking up words related to the theme. I remember how my mind took me high onto a tower. "What does this have to do with the theme?" I asked myself."Look down," I answered, and so I did. There I saw them walking around, the tiny creatures. ...Okay, I might have romanticized this thought process a little bit, but I distinctly remember standing on the tower before I realized how this could relate to the theme. Anyway, as soon as I got this vision I was already sold. The visual of the POV of someone looking down from a high tower looked so cool, that I knew this is the game I will have to make.

But that's only a visual. What is the gameplay gonna be? There were some ideas:

• You are a cult leader, and you need to increase your following by saying the correct things. These followers could then be used to attack others, or to raid buildings.
• You are a boss, and you are looking over at your employees. Search for those who slack off, and fire them.
• You are a guard, and you need to track people who conspire against the king. Person A talks to person B, person B walks into building X. Person C walks out of building X, etc. Could work with a daily routine, trying to figure everything out in a certain number of days.
• You are a king, and you use populism tricks to stay in power.

That last idea is the eventual idea of the game, but there were still many questions left unanswered. Should I go for a completely different idea after all? I decided to go to bed (it was like 06:00 AM), and to figure it out after I woke up. The next morning I again meditated for half an hour, but no luck. I basically had two options:

1. Start working on the game, even though I haven't had the gameplay worked out yet.
2. Let it go, and try to come up with a completely new idea.

Starting a game where you haven't had the idea fleshed out yet is risky. Because that fleshing out might never happen, and you end up with something unplayable that you wasted precious hours on. I've had this happen before multiple times, and it's not fun. But I took the risk, because I believed in this idea, the visual.

The art

I can't even remembering thinking about the art style for the game. I just straight up started taking pictures of my hand with the goal to pixelize it. This is done in Aseprite, by setting the color mode to indexing while having a limited color palette. Though that doesn't always lead to favorable results, and often you need to do some color tweaking. One trick that I like to do is to simply pick some colors in the picture (normal, bright, shadow) for the palette before I apply the indexing. It also helps to improve the constrast and brightness of the picture.

Creating art like this is quick and easy, but if you use it for something, you'll have to use it for basically everything. If I were to try to pixel a balustrade, then it would probably look weird in combination with the hands. Unfortunately I don't have a balustrade near me that I can take a picture of, so I went for a search on the world wide web. Finding a picture of a balustrade from the exact angle that I need would be quite a search, if such picture exists on the internet at all. Luckily I had another trick up my sleeve. On the website Sketchfab you can view, buy, and download 3D models. Sidenote: This is also a great way to find references when you want to draw something from a particular angle. Just search for a 3D model and rotate the camera to get the angle you need. That's what I did for the balustrade. Whether I should have paid for the 3D model is up for debate. The same question goes for whether this should be allowed in the compo, where you are supposed to make your own art. But I believe I have made enough changes to the original work. Anyhow, with my hands and the balustrade I achieved half of the visual that I had in mind. The other half is the town to look down upon.

I needed a town with a big open spot where the people would be. A village square. Again, I searched the internet to find something that I could use, but with no luck. Even Sketchfab wasn't able to help me this time, as I wasn't able to find a town with a big open spot that I could use. So now what? I could attempt to draw it myself, but again I can only assume it would look weird in comparison with the detailed hands and balustrade. Not to mention my artistic capabilities are not that great. No, I needed something different. Something that allows me to build my own town. I laugh to myself as I come up with a plan. "This is so stupid," I say on my stream, as I open up Townscaper.

Townscaper is a sandbox game where you can build your own town. It's similar to the recently released Tiny Glade. I didn't go for the latter because I'm unfamiliar with the tool. Not that I have a lot of experience with Townscaper, but at least I know how it works. I spent a little more than an hour building a town. Every time when I thought that I was done, I zoomed out and decided that another empty spot should be filled. I still wasn't sure what the game was gonna be like, and I considered that the camera might have to move around. When I was done I made much more town than I ended up using in the final game. Like with the balustrade you can ask yourself the question whether it's valid for me to use Townscaper for my game in the compo. Sure, I made that town, but I didn't make the art style of the buildings. But again I'd say that because I use no more than a screenshot with color indexing that it's fine. And because it's a sandbox game. If I took a screenshot from a town in Skyrim, then it would be weird, but I made this town myself. I've also stated that I used Townscaper on my game's page.

Slowly I started to get a better idea of what the game was gonna be like, and I started spriting icons for factions and complaints. Originally I had the idea that the fourth complaint was going to be injustice, which is what the scale was for, but that didn't make much sense as a thing to blame a faction for. I changed it to criminiality. Using the scale as an icon for it is a bit of a reach, but it works. For the factions I started with a lion, because don't all kingdoms, fiction or non-fiction, have a house with lion heraldry? So what about the other three? I couldn't do a fish, because I already drew a fish for the complaint icon. So what other blue animal? A bird perhaps? And how about a green snake, and oops, I just copied Harry Potter. So I went for less conventional animals in the heraldry world (to my knowledge). The hare was originally supposed to be a wolf or a fox, but it started looking like a hare, and I went with it.

On the start of day #2, and the final day of the compo, I decided to make a menu screen. Why so early into the compo, when the main gameplay is far from done? Well here's a bit of silly advice: do things that are low on your priority list early, because you might not have time to do them later. That sounds counter-intuitive, but I believe it to be true. Because let's say I started with the gameplay. Because of how much time I still have left, I take my time to tweak and perfect it. It's high priority after all. But before I know it, there is too little time left to do the low priority things. And just because something is low priority doesn't mean it can't enhance your game big time.

So like I said, I started working on the menu. I thought it would be cool to get the other perspective, from the people on the ground. This time I needed a picture of a tower, again from a certain angle. And why search on the internet, when a perfectly good tower is at a few minutes walking distance? In the middle of the compo I went outside to take pictures of a tower from a church near me. The tower is not perfect though. The king is leaning on a balustrade, so where is it? Again Sketchfab comes to the rescue, where I take a screenshot from the angle that I need. Finally, it needs a king. A bearded man would fit the role, and thus I took a picture of myself from a low angle. Draw some simple colors on top, indexing, scaling, and there you have it. A king at the top of a tower leaning on a balustrade. A picture of my fist, and an image of a blue sky found online, and the menu is done.

Finally, I had to make a logo. For this I used the font Augusta. A simple border, and I'm done. Not much more to say about that, but how did I come up with that name?

The Latin

For the name I wanted something related to the saying Vox Populi, because I think it sounds cool, and it was relevant to the game. But it's not the people's voice you hear, it's that of the king. So the name became Vox Regis (The king's voice). Because of this title I decided to use more Latin in the game. The factions also have Latin names ([Animal] [Color]), and at the end of the written speech something is written in Latin.

In rege veritas, et ego sum rex.

The text means "Truth is in the king, and I am the king." In other words: The king always speaks the truth, so believe me when I say that a faction is the cause of this problem. Shoutout to my Ludum Dare colleague @AlexRose for helping out with that one. When you see him, pronounce Ludum Dare the Latin way for me, will ya?

Finally, we hear Latin spoken whenever the king gives a speech.

The audio

Originally I just wanted to make my voice sound mumbly and distant, so that you couldn't clearly hear what was being said. But that was weird, because you play as the king, so you should hear your own voice loud and clear. I tried pronouncing the Latin phrase, or the names of the factions, but I just couldn't. It sounded horrible, and I wasn't sure what to do. I figured I should use a placeholder, and what better to use as a Latin placeholder than Lorem Ipsum? What followed was the idea to use common Latin phrases. This way I give the game a bit of humor. I was afraid that it might feel out of place, people have said that they think it's funny, and that it lightens the mood a bit. It was very tempting to pronounce Ludum Dare they wrong way, but Alex would have rated this game, and all my future games, all 1 stars for it, I am sure.

The audio of the town I took from Youtube. I did consider going to the city to record my own sound, but I'm fairly sure that it would have sounded shit. Now, officially the rule is that you are not allowed to use third party assets, unless you heavily edit those like I did with the art (see derivative work in the rules). In my case it was more a lack of resources rather than a lack of skill. Being bad at music is not a good excuse to use 3rd party music instead. But if you have a game with a chainsaw, and you have no chainsaw, what should one do? Mimic the sound with something else? Simply don't have a sound for it? Compo is a test of skill in multiple areas, but lacking resources is not the same as lacking skill. I would find it silly if we were to punish participants for it by forcing them to make their game worse. Though I will say I could have done an attempt at mixing multiple sounds. That's how the audio that I copied came to be. Instead, I opted out of the audio category.

The gameplay

I'm not interested in making a post-jam version of the game. I don't think there's much to scale. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things to improve. The game is really easy in that you can keep spamming the speeches without problem. An easy game isn't necessarily unwelcome in Ludum Dare, as games often tend to be too difficult as a result of bad balancing. And an easy game can be fun as well. The problem with my game, however, is that the easier you make it for yourself, the longer the game takes to beat. The game pauses during a speech and fight, so if you have lots of speeches, the game's duration can extend to over 10 minutes, instead of the expected 7 minutes. You can challenge yourself by trying to beat the game with as few speeches as possible, but perhaps I should've made it so that you can do no more than 10 speeches. That way you don't need to make up the challenge yourself; The game gives you a challenge to beat. Post-jam I've also checked what it would be like if you can destroy factions. Meaning that if a faction has no members anymore, it is removed. It makes it more difficult, as the other factions will grow faster, if it weren't for the fact that you could still just spam your speeches. So perhaps a combination of the two is what is needed. Another problem is that you lose on the exact moment a faction hits 30 members. This makes it very dangerous to wait for a faction to grow, as they could suddenly gain a bunch of members. It would have been better if there was a minimum time of like 5 seconds before you are actually game over. So definitely not perfect, but not enough to motivate me to make a post-jam version.

Final thoughts

I'm really a happy with this game. I'm happy that I was able to come up with this idea, and that I took the gamble of continuing this game even though I wasn't sure how it was gonna play out. I still think it's a great visual for a videogame, and I find it to be a creative use of the theme. The graphics were a matter of improvise, adapt, overcome, and I overcame.

In ove veritas, et ego sum ovis.

Vox Regis