Oh boy, what a Ludum Dare that was. 😛
Firstly, the LD page is here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=28661
So, this is my third time participating in the Ludum Dare, but my first time being in the Jam, and being with a team!

My team was somewhat unorthodox, with me (Josh) being the programmer/designer/artist/writer, my friend Kelton doing the music (and he did an amazing job!) and last, but not least my friend Matt, who tagged along last second to basically fill the gaps and help out where he can (we gave him the title “Voice Acting Director” in the end. 😛 ).

The start of it all

We screwed up. Almost immediately.

BASICALLY, Connected Worlds is the one theme we did not want. It is so open-ended, and I didn’t want to take it literally and make a game about space or planets or anything like that.

So we spent the first fourteen hours developing a military side-scrolling shooter where the player is actually just a guy controlling the soldier, and at the end of the game the soldier kills the guy. It was meant to be this big “Woah, I didn’t see that coming!” moment, but as it ticked over to the fourteenth hour, I realised we won’t have time to actully implement the “Connected Worlds” part of the game.

So I made the hardest decision I’ve made in a jam so far. After fourteen hours of animating, art, programming and designing, we completely scrapped the idea.
A working functioning prototype tossed to the side. It was honestly painful.
Here is a quick screenshot of what could have been our LD entry:

So basically here we are, sitting in our rooms at 2 A.M trying to come up with a new idea after wasting our first day, and then the idea hits me.

THE CHANGE

We possiblt had the biggest change in game possible.
We went from a side-scrolling 2D linear military shooter TO a 3D fully voice acted non-violent game based around exploration.
Talk about a pivot. 😛

The above GIF was an early prototype of the game world and Orbs.

ORB

Orb was the game. We knew it. I pitched it as a game thats only job is to immerse the player so much that they believe they are interacting with this real living world, through their computer.
Then while discussing immersion I had the idea that will change First-Person games forver.
THE NODDING MECHANIC

I decided this game, that we are voice acting, needs to have the option to choose yes or no kind of answers, which result in different dialogs, but I didn’t want to break the immersion.
Thus the game’s main mechanic was born, nodding.
Giving the player the chance to respond to in-game NPC’s via nodding/shaking their head increased immersion so much!
Watching people play-test my game I could tell that the connection between them and these little floating orbs was so much stronger simply because they were there. The Orbs were there.

Final gameplay screenshot.

PROBLEMS

Well, having those first 14 hours back would have been nice, but as that seemed impossible, time very quickly became an issue.
You would think we had the foresight to realise making a huge fully voice-acted 3D exploration game in just 58 hours was stupid, but we thought “Screw it, we can handle this”.
The other issue was not having a real artist or 3D moddeler. This led to me doing any “Art” and I just used Unity for all 3D level design (I believe this is like the biggest Unity sin ever, but I was desperate).

OVERALL

I am so happy with what we achieved. Kelton smashed out some awesome music (Buy the album here: http://keltonhallomusic.bandcamp.com/), Matt did some awesome work editing the voice clips, and I showed myself what is possible when I push myself to my limits. 😛
Kelton also produced this cover photo for the game and its soundtrack:

WHATS NEXT?

Someone told me, if this was bigger project with more to explore and mor people to talk to etc, they would kickstart it. That is by far the best compliment I have recieved as a game developer, so I figured, seeing how I go in the near-future, I may take this and turn it into a much bigger project, with a small world to explore instead of a very small area.

Anyway, if you have read this far, you are awesome. Thanks to the LD community for being awesome as per usual, and I will see you all here for LD31!