{"author_name":"pancakecity","cat":"LD #31","comments":[],"epoch":1418134440,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"22341","p_author":"pancakecity","p_authorkey":"28537","p_urlkey":"57710","p_title":"","p_cat":"LD #31","p_event":"LD31","p_time":"1418134440","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"28537","us_name":"pancakecity","us_username":"pancakecity","event_start":"1417737600","event_key":"26","event_name":"LD31"},"text":"

So I wanted to write a little bit about my game, The Cop Who Killed Batman.<\/a><\/p>\n

It was late Friday night. My partner and I had thought up and vetoed a dozen ideas.<\/p>\n

I kept saying, “We’ve got to make a game that means something<\/em>! I don’t care about game physics or graphics. We must communicate a message from the heart.”<\/p>\n

I’m not sure which one of us thought to come up with a game about police brutality, much less against Batman, but the minute that phrase (that later became our title) came out from one of our mouths I latched on and wouldn’t let go.<\/p>\n

“This is the game we’ll make! This is the game they’ll remember.”<\/p>\n

The next day, the first thing I did was search for our game’s title. Would you believe that I got no results? That’s when I knew that our idea was genius.<\/p>\n

\n \"screenshot\"<\/a><\/p>\n
Pretend that this image says “no results”. I forgot to screencap it before releasing our game.<\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n

We had agreed that a visual novel would be the only sort of game to do justice to this concept. I also thought that doing a visual novel would be easier than a game with physics or point-and-clicky stuff.\u00a0Or you know, whatever other kinds of games there are out there.<\/p>\n

How do I put this? It was very hard. The full script took an hour but scripting the game took a hundred subjective years. It was very tedious and the direction I decided to go in…. you know what a Rube Goldberg device is, I hope. I know what it is too, now. Intimately.<\/p>\n

And the art… how to describe the ash in my mouth when I realized I actually had time to draw characters?<\/p>\n

\n \"characters\"<\/a><\/p>\n
I don’t know how to draw people.<\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n

When I submitted the game, the initial elation upon the birth of our game idea came to me like a memory from long ago. Where was the message from the heart? Lost in a million calls to this.dialogue().<\/p>\n

The music is very good though, becoming more beautiful to me with every loop.<\/p>\n

Advice to future Ludum Dare visual novel creators: don’t roll your own framework!<\/p>","time":"December 9th, 2014 9:14 am","title":""}