For this LD25 I came up with the game “Crime in the City“. This is a cardgame where you compose a deck of baddies and send them on raids throughout the city to raise the crime level in the city and, ultimately, take control of it.

 

What went wrong

The theme
I wasn’t very fond of this theme, “You are the villain”. Partly because with my partner we had just finished a game that let you play as the villain (Demons vs Fairyland). It made the theme feel somewhat old to me, and made me feel uninspired. All I could think of was the villains in super hero stories.

During these last two weeks, I played and rated about 80 games. I was really impressed by the ones that put the player in the opposite of the role he usually has. I wish I could think of something like that.

Bugs
I used AS3. As soon I do my second compilation, everything is all broken ! My little base code doesn’t work anymore and it’s an error message I never had before. The compiler enumerates all my classes and says they’re undefined or something like that… It wasn’t a good start !
Turns out I had given a class the same name as a package, which was a very bad thing to do. I was lucky it only took me a few minutes to figure it out.

I also made my usual mistakes a few times :
– write “lenght” instead of “length”. Where is auto-completion when you need it !
– write “i < array" instead of "i < array.length" in a for loop…
– instructions happening in a bad order, but at this point the code is too tricky for it to be obvious so you have to go through the long debug session to spot the problem.

What about you, do you have "usual mistakes" ?

The plan
I thought I would have a full day to work on the graphics and the sounds. I had big plans. I wanted to do an interface inspired by Inspector Gadget, with the hand of the villain moving when you push the buttons (It was actually done in a LD game ! Villain OS 8). And instead of a cat, I would have drawn a goat.
But it was highly unrealistic given the amount of options in the game. The number of game design pages should have given me a hint.

What was disturbing was that the features felt almost finished at the end of the first day, only one was missing. But I had worked too much and without breaks on the first day, I was very tired at the beginning of the second. And when I saw it was late and I wouldn’t be able to work on the graphics, I stressed out and it made things worse.

 

 

What went right

Game complete
I finished the game in the 48 hours, which is better than last LD when the game I started as a compo became a jam game (Lucas’s Quest Backwards).

Game complete (bis) !
When I look at the game… it actually has a lot of options ! I’m very happy I could do it in only two days. It’s amazing how jams make you surpass yourself.

Bugs
They weren’t that many. Considering how the code was rushed and how tired I was, it could have been a lot worse.

 

***

 

A second jam

With my partner we decided to participate to Folis’ New Year Game Jam. The result was another cardgame : a team for the job.

 

On paper, it looked a lot simpler. A few different cards, a few interactions, very little procedural content. The game design documents were nothing more than a few notes.
Once again, things didn’t go as expected, and we couldn’t complete the game for the jam, we only released it 2 days later.

 

What went wrong

Bugs
The code was done the first day, but there was two or three very nasty bugs which took a lot of time to fix during the second day. As the IA needs to temporize for the player to understand what’s happening, there are a lot of callbacks in the code, which made debug sessions a lot more painful.

Time
We didn’t have a lot of time to work on the game (the jam was december 31 and january 1st). And anyway, as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t have the motivation to work 16 hours a day like I did for LD25.
In the end, it’s not very surprising that a project that seemed simpler than “Crime in the City” took more days to finish.

 

Next ?

So far, our projects have always taken more time as we thought they would. Jams are a good training to help us get better at evaluating the time needed by a project. That’s why we decided to participate to One Game a Month. You can find us there as StormAlligator. Aside from our regular projects, we’ll try to do a game in jam conditions each month. We publish regular updates on our facebook.

 

Reading back this article, bugs seems to be part of the problem. Bugs are a big time consumer and cannot be planned. A good thing before choosing a game idea for a jam would be to evaluate if it’s likely to attract bugs and if the code will make this bugs easy or hard to remove.

Thanks for reading !

 

Play Crime in the City
Play a team for the job