Hello everyone! This is Jacob, and I’m one of four developers that worked on our latest game RollingFlames. Last time I was involved in LD33 with a game called P-Type, where I also did a post-mortem high level analysis of what went right and wrong.  I was mainly involved in scripting and design this project. Logan was involved in scripting and spritework, Alex primarily worked on growth and conceptual design and Brandon worked on scripting related to the music.

One of the biggest issues we ran into right off the bat is that we had trouble coming up with a game that we all agreed that would be both fun to develop and fun to play. We spent most of the first day going through various ideas, ways to fit to the theme and so forth. The end result was that by the second day we came up with RollingFlames, a simple Katamari-like game where you would grow by burning various objects and eventually take over the world!

Simplistic Design: We ran into a few cases while brainstorming that, while interesting would lead to a lot of time setting up background mechanics. The result is that by the end of LD we likely would’ve had various systems not in place or not working. This game was much simpler to work with and as a result we could easily add new concepts on top without worrying that we might miss a major part of it by the end.

Simplistic Gameplay: You run around and bump into things to absorb them, and by doing so you grow larger. This gives immediate feedback to the player that they’re doing something right, and it’s hard to do something wrong. This makes the flow of the game easy to track and ensures everyone can see the whole game.

What didn’t?

…Perhaps too simplistic: The game being so simple meant that there wasn’t much challenging ourselves in terms of what to create or how to create it. This made this project a bit more of a chore than our previous, which segues into my next point.

Motivation: This time all of us snagged into motivational problems at one point or another. Part of it was the discussions we had on the first day, part of it was the above and more of it was just real life circumstances. While I’m very happy with what we got done, I think the next game will turn out even better.

Conclusion

Because we spent so long discussing what we should do as well as the motivational stuff, we ended up not spending as much time working on this project as we did in P-Type (just compare the amount of commits between the two!). Despite that, I still feel it was fun and a great experience. Bring on the next Ludum Dare!

If you would like to play our current game RollingFlames, click here, or click here to play our LD33 entry P-Type.