Great jam this year. Some really amazing entries! I had hoped to get above 200 so just short of that goal, but also not unhappy with where we landed.

We're thinking of continuing work on our game and making a slightly more fleshed out version. So i'd love to hear some peoples opinions on where we could have gone to improve our rating to have made it to the top 100. My assumption based on some of the comments is our UX could have been a bit better, however I would love to know if there are any other thoughts or opinions on what may have held us back.

Play

"Dateline LD58. I had just ~~jumped in a bottomless pit~~ solved the case of the mayor's missing Porcelain Tricorn. I stopped by Barber's, got something to drink, and decided to review how the case went."

For a while now I've had a growing list of "bad jokes" that I've been wanting to throw in a game. My initial goal was to use as many of them as possible in a single entry, and the format that best suited that goal was a point and click adventure. In hindsight, (and I mean, really I should have seen this coming), a point and click adventure game requires a lot of art. Way more art than I had anticipated. As in, by 24 hours into the compo, I had barely started the programming of the game, because I had mostly (outside of writing some music) just worked on art up to that point.

Let's talk about my game Trivia Hart, and how it came together. I'll follow these bullet points:

• From theme to Concept

• A day worth of art

• Wait- I recorded how many voice lines again?

• The 3 big cutscenes

• We do a little reflecting

• Immediate thoughts on the game

• What's the key takeaway from this game?

• Results

• Final Reflection and Conclusion

From Theme to Concept

In many previous Ludum Dares, I've done some brainstorming before the theme reveal based on the final round theme voting. I like to think it helps to have an idea for each theme before it's announced. Unfortunately, more times than not, what ends up happening is I fall in love with a singular idea that was for a losing theme, and then make that game anyway. This Ludum Dare, my best idea fit the winning theme.

Have you ever played a game on a “Game & Watch”? Every object has fixed positions on screen, and you can see silhouettes of objects that aren’t present. I thought it would be fascinating to make a point-and-click mystery game where you can see objects that aren’t currently present, as a means to gain information and solve puzzles.

My previous LD game dropped the ball with the worst tutorial I've ever made, so I immediately had a plan for the "tutorial" of this game. You need to cross a canal, but the bridge is out. By using the "metagame and watch" you can see a faded silhouette of a wooden plank crossing the gap. Two rooms to the left of you is a wooden plank using the exact same graphic of the silhouette over the canal. This is "Pajama Sam" levels of difficulty (suggesting that even a child could figure it out) and that's the plan. I've made confusing games in the past, and I want to avoid any and all confusion with this one.

A day worth of art

Typically, I spend at most 3 hours on the art to begin with. That gives me time to get character animations and floor tiles set up, where I would then drag the files into Unity and start working on the player movement, followed by the code required for the core mechanic of the game. Trivia Hart did not follow that pattern. At all.

I got to work by drawing the canal scene I had envisioned for the tutorial section. Here what I shared with some friends about 20 minutes after the theme was announced.

And after another 20 minutes, I had this scene put together too:

As rough as it is spending this much time on each room, it gave me plenty time to figure out what the story of the game would be. While drawing one room, I can try imagining the purpose and shape of the next.

The story I was working on involved a stolen hat, and by using the "metagame and watch" your character can see the culprit was singing a song. That caused a bit of trouble, as I wouldn't be happy unless the sheet music was accurate, so after drawing three and a half rooms I already started writing music, which I don't normally do that early.

Since I like adding an acapella track in my LD games, I had the idea that you give the sheet music to an acapella group who can tell you more about the song. The story was coming together, but again, I needed to write more music so the acapella group could have their song in the background of their room. I didn't record the acapella version yet, but putting notes on a timeline was enough to draw their background.

I was honestly on a bit of a groove writing the music, so I continued and put together the first half of the main "outdoors music", though that song doesn't need sheet music drawn anywhere.

I drew a bunch of other rooms in back/white, but it was time to color them in. I was going for a noir detective vibe, night time, rainy street. The process of going from this to this: ...

... was time consuming. But god dang, was it worth every second. I've never drawn light reflecting on wet surfaces like this (thank god for art references) and I honestly impressed myself. "Only like, 20 more rooms to color in. heh heh"

So at this point, I'm already 18 hours into the allotted 48. I still haven't done any programming, and I still haven't recorded any dialogue. It was time to get to work on the audio.

Wait- I recorded how many voice lines again?

At this point, it's about noon (EST, so 18 hours after the jam started). Last night, I wrote most of the story, and now it was time to record it. I do a lot of audio recording/editing for my youtube videos, so I have a pretty good workflow for this. I recorded myself saying every line two or three times, and keep the best recording. A few lines I needed to re-do, as I initially made the mayor have a real scruffy voice, but changed it to be closer to the voice of "Stan" from the Monkey Island games.

After cleaning up all the audio and separating each chunk of dialogue into it's own audio file, I had 50 items in that folder. Oh no. So subtitles are absolutely out of the question, and not happening this time around. Whoops!

With the art and audio taken care of, it was finally time to put things in Unity and make a real game.

The 3 Big Cutscenes

The best part about making a point and click adventure is that the programming for it is incredibly easy (in theory). You don't need a physics engine, or tight controls with smooth camera movements... You just need to be able to click on things and have something happen.

My main "Interact.cs" script pretty much works like this: In the unity inspector, I can choose if this object takes you to a new room, or if it plays a voice clip. Then I added logic for locked objects requiring keys, or as I called them "Arbitrary Checks".

You cannot move to the room on the right of the canal until the board is placed. How do I know the board has been placed? I added a script to the audio clip that plays when the board is placed, setting the "arbitrary check".

Then I added the ability to interact with the items in your inventory, which basically works by having an array of voice lines corresponding to each item ID, and if the entry into the array is null, your character just says "Well that didn't do anything."

And that took up pretty much all of Saturday. Sunday would be spent connecting everything together, which was relatively pain-free except for 3 key cutscenes:

Cutscene 1: The code to the safe

Spoilers in case you haven't played it yet, but in this cutscene, the antagonist is revealed. Then they shoot and kill Trivia after she reads the note. You can then respawn with the knowledge of the code.

So here's the issue. Literally every other cutscene up to this point has just been audio. Nothing really happens on screen mid-dialogue. So how do I make this work? The script for this cutscene was basically just a timer that changes the artwork and animations of characters to sync with the audio, then the camera moves to a new screen with a respawn button. Between drawing the villains animations, the bullet animations, and programming all of it, that somehow took like, 3 hours to put together. Oh no. (I now have about 3 hours until the submission deadline.)

Cutscene 2: Dodging the bullet

Before I made this cutscene, I just realized that I hadn't actually implemented the pause menu / title screen stuff. I took maybe 30 minutes to get that all put together, with a really cool visual effect on the title screen where there's a "lens" to see the game & watch alternate texture of the title screen. It's an effect I'm really happy with. I wish I drew a silhoette of a mystery-man with the tricorn though. That would've been cool.

Anyway, back on day 1 I drew this wicked cool animation of Trivia Hart jumping over a bullet:

There is so much with the art of this game that I had never done before, and I'm amazed at how good it looks.

Well, now it was time to implement that cutscene.

I wanted the player to be able to fail to dodge the bullet, causing them to die and respawn, similar to the previous cutscene. Again, the script for this was pretty much just a bunch of timers, and a custom interact-object that causes the player to jump.

I don't know how it went this rough, but there were issues. Making the code for the jump, and the timers for the dialogue and shooting, and second dialogue, and making sure the player can't skip the dialogue... This is the classic "48th hour fatigue". Except it was hitting halfway through the 46th hour. Anyway, I got it working, but I cannot believe how long it took, and how little time I had left. (One hour to go.)

Cutscene 3: The choice at the end of the game

The game ends with you confronting the collector, where he gives you an ultimatum. You could either throw him in prison, or you could jump into a bottomless pit! "Ooh, who knows what sort of cutscene I have planned for that! You could be missing out on content!" I gotta be honest, It's shocking how many people jump into the pit on their first run.

Actually implementing this wasn't too bad, as I didn't need to make custom animations. Just a timer to darken the screen and change the background a bit. But in case you haven't been keeping track of the time, I now have 1 hour before it's time to submit. And I haven't actually programmed a large part of the game's other sections. (The interior of front burger was still unimplemented, and I also had plans for a small cutescene involving the cashier running into the kitchen.)

Scrambling, I program the interactable objects in "Front Burger" and "The Club". At this point, actually testing the full game takes about 3 minutes due to the unskippable cutscenes, so I genuinely don't have time. I removed the "animation" from the game & watch view of the cashier in Front burger running away, and figured he would just instantly disappear instead. Oh well, no time.

And I just realized I never recorded the audio for the ending cutscenes. Both of them, since I decided there would be two.

Did I say three cutscenes? I meant five.

So there was supposed to be more. In the "Spike Pit ending" the collector was going to say "Wow, I can't believe you fell for that. Do you see this button? This button makes this the canon timeline. beep. This is canonically how the story goes now! ... ... ... What do you mean respawning?. OH NO!" and then it would be a similar ending to the "true" ending. I didn't have time, so instead you just fall in the hole and the game ends, HA!

And at this point, I had absolutely no time left. The "true ending" was haphazardly recorded, and the art for it was drawn in about 2 minutes, except of course for the Porcelain Tricorn which I drew back on day 1. That thing looks glorious, and it's funny how the rest of the cutscene looks like trash.

I also just realized I forgot to draw the bottom half of the mayor's tie, so now he just has a black oval on his neck. Oh well.

And just like that, the game was ready for submission!

We do a little reflecting

Something I've done in my past many Postmortems is write down what went wrong, and I like to have one "key takeaway" from each event, and reflect during future events on those notes and how I've either taken them to heart or dropped the ball.

Let's work backwards here:

LD57: "Scope Smaller, or break the game into small rooms."

Lol. Lmao even.

Yeah, so I certainly didn't scope small. I thought I did, but foresight isn't my specialty. I did however break the game into small rooms, just in a very different way than I usually do.

LD56: “Be reasonable with your shader effects.”

The only shader effect in this game was used on the title screen, which I thought added a lot. Nothing too dramatic, I think I was being reasonable.

LD55: “Make sure the camera isn’t jank.”

The camera couldn't possibly be jank if there are only so many fixed positions for it. Makes you think.

LD54: “Full in-game tutorial for ANY unique mechanics. It must be explained.”

This is where I dropped the ball many times before, and I will probably do that again in the future, but not today. I had a plan for the tutorial, and so far everybody seems to get it.

LD53: “Get feedback before the deadline.”

I think I've said this in too many of my postmortems since writing that line down, but (and I'll say it again) I didn't have time to get feedback on this one. Honestly, a skill issue on my part. So- in classic 100th_Coin postmortem fashion, what would this feedback have taught me?

• The "coupon puzzle" had a glaring issue. The man who gives you the coupon and tells you what to do with it only says that line once, and you can no longer interact with him. Oh, and this line can be skipped by accident if you click while he's talking. This has lead to a few people getting stuck.

• There were a few hitbox issues with some of the interactable objects. Since clicking on things is (and I cannot stress this enough) the entire game, having hitbox issues immediately lead to a few softlocks, as objects would sometimes just not let you click on them.

• The buttons you click at the end of the game to choose "jump in spike pit" or "turn him in" were in the wrong graphical layer, and could sometimes end up behind the room graphics, displaying neither option, or perhaps only one of them.

LD52: “Focus on a single mechanic, and let the story come second.”

In a way, the "metagame and watch" mechanic drove the story, so I think this game passes that one. I mean, I did not at all let the story come second in a point-and-click adventure game, where the story is critically important, but the "metagame and watch" mechanic was also critically important in designing the puzzles. I think this was the best balance of story and mechanic I've had.

I typically stop there in my postmortems, but you know what? let's keep this train rolling. I'd like to touch on a few of my older notes.

LD51: "Voice acting is fun, and I even made an acapella track!"

This was my 8th time making an acapella track for a Ludum Dare game, and I don't see myself stopping!

LD50: "The exhaustion of the 48th hour is real."

I honestly could have used that advice a bit more with this one. I spent pretty much all of sunday rushing and I was feeling it pretty hard when I realized I still needed to make the ending cutscenes.

LD49: "The compo rules do not lend themselves well for parody"

Perhaps not gameplay-wise, but this game was a very subtle parody of The Maltese Falcon. One of the ending lines in the true ending is:

"Say, what's so important about that hat anyway?"

"It's the stuff that dreams are made of."

... "What, porcelain?"

Where It's the stuff that dreams are made of is the final line spoken in The Maltese Falcon, referring to the titular item. When I watched that movie, all I could think of was "What, lead? Lead is what dreams are made of???" So including my stupid "What, porcelain?" joke makes me chuckle.

Digging through ye old archives, I found this note I took...

LD39: "If you have a huge list of unique items, add some splash text to explain what each of them are."

And you know what? I should have done that. This game had a good handful of items you can pick up, and outside of a voice line when doing so, they aren't really explained further.

And a classic...

LD33: "Perhaps spending only 20 minutes on art wasn't enough."

Talk about character growth.

Immediate thoughts on the game

So I'm writing this paragraph about a day after submitting. I honestly think this is the best art I have drawn, ever. Not even just for Ludum Dares. I experimented a LOT with the lighting and character designs, and I couldn't be happier. In the week leading up to Ludum Dare, I spent a lot of time just drawing characters trying to improve my art. For the first time, I've actually drawn noses, eyebrows, and exaggerated chins on characters. I was looking forward to having more close-ups with characters in this game, and unfortunately that didn't happen, but perhaps next time.

This game was a lot. Just the amount of drawings, and the amount of audio I had to put together is so much. I was worried that the gameplay would be lackluster and feel empty. I've never done a point and click adventure before, I typically make platformers. Though, I recall my previous postmortem saying "I need to stop making platforming games during Ludum Dare. Remind me during submission hour of LD58 to slap myself if I upload another platformer." And I can proudly say this isn't a platformer. For the first Ludum Dare in a while, I really think I learned a lot from making this game.

What's the key takeaway from this game?

I want to humorously riff off my note from LD33 by saying, "Perhaps spending 20 hours on art was too much.", as we now have an upper and lower bound for what I find to be an acceptable range in time to be spent on graphics.

To be a bit more serious though. I think if there is any singular "note for next time" that can be taken from this game, it's that making a game in a genre you have never made before is exhilarating. I'm just thinking back to LD55 where I said "The majority of this Ludum Dare was spent writing a cutscene engine. That was pretty far from the most fun I’ve had with a game jam." While on the flipside, this time I also made a game that is primarily cutscenes and I had a blast while doing it.

It was fun to make, it's been fun watching others play it, and I honestly don't know if I ever want to make another game "in my comfort zone" during a game jam again. I was about to ask "Why did it take me so long to realize this?", But I think it's because the results from my LD53 game, "Inbox Fool" skewed my perspective beyond an event horizon. It was the best I had ever done, and it was so far within my "make-a-platformer" comfort-zone that I've been trying to replicate its magic by still staying in the platformer comfort zone. It was the Ludum Dare that was immediately after I took the note: "Focus on a single mechanic and let the story come second", a note that has defined my past 6 games. I think I've been trying too hard to make a unique game, while completely sabotaging myself by limiting the genre. I think that's where I went wrong during LD57, LD56, LD55, and LD54.

Don't get me wrong, I've made some really cool platformers in my decade of Ludum Dare, (most recently: RAMnesia, Stronkey Kong, Watch Out, Inbox Fool, Ribbon 2, Prince Charmony, and The Moon Reconstruction Program) but I seriously need to branch out. Regardless of how this game scores, I had a great time making it, learned a lot, drew some art that I'm really proud of, and made a game in a genre I had very little experience with.

So yeah. 27 Ludum Dares in a row, 8 Ludum Dare's in a row featuring acapella music... Let's get a streak going of making games out of my comfort zone too. Let's get weird with it.

Wow! This was my first time getting single digits for Graphics, and also for Mood. I'm really really happy with these results. I kinda hyped myself up while writing this, talking about how branching out of my comfort zone was super important for me, and I'm really glad it paid off. I'm taking this as confirmation that everything I wrote about in the "key takeaways" is true, and branching out of my comfort zone is the move to make in the future.

Final Reflection, and Conclusion

This Ludum Dare I made a point and click adventure game for the first time. It's a genre I probably haven't played since I was 8, and it was honestly really nostalgic for me to make a game inspired by the games I have vague memories of.

Going in, I had the goal to simply not make a platformer. I'm happy with the game I made, and I learned a lot. Mostly the fact that point and click adventure games require insane amounts of art and voice lines. But the real lesson here was just how much fun it was to create a game in a genre I'm unfamiliar with. I absolutely want to do this again in future Ludum Dares.

And I met two goals of mine with this game, being top 10 mood and graphics.

Thank you to everyone who played, thank you for all of your feedback. This was a good one. I can't wait for next time.

☃

It was fun this time! And I know a lot! My path with this game now.

1. Develops this game for half of day

2. Knows, that viral game makes viral vibes

3. Knows, that top-grades games generate more grades

4. I try to make pitch presentation to publishers (en: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vpXS3Q6L5Boyi5PdNas5RG3VOoHhJyCsEpLUEsVprWQ/edit?usp=sharing, ru: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14hp7R_s91tvTtgk2UZ0kHDMEqhQaY74ZvqDP6I3eKsc/edit?usp=sharing)

5. Send pitch to stream with publishers, and get some hate from normies.

6. Start develop post-JAM version for trying tiktoks

7. Get first wishlist! (Like, "I will buy you game, if it will be released in steam" message in discord chat)

----YOU ARE HERE NOW ------

1. FUTURE PLAN: try to makes tiktoks with this postJAM game

2. Try to makes some reddit posts

3. See results, and try to develops 1-1.5 hour version of my game for STEAM!

Be cool and have fun on LD, in as many aspects as you can!!!

It was my first ever game jam, and here are my results:

Honestly, I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, but I’m really happy I took part in it. Participating in Ludum Dare was an incredible experience, and I learned a lot throughout the process. Regardless of the scores, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished and can’t wait to apply what I’ve learned in 174 days!

It was supposed to be the calm today, I think I misunderstood the timers 😁 Our man Mike has been tallying up the results and just released them 8 hours ago. I will check with @lizz later today, so I don't know what our results are. no spoilers please!

So... A perfect time for me to do a retrospective, as my mood is not affected by the results yet. 😇

This LudumDare went pretty well for us! I have had worse weekends to be honest. Why? Well: - Lizz and I reached our goal of making people go back to their childhood memories while playing our game - The development went very smooth for an LD entry. It was almost sus to be honest - We ended up with a stable game without major compromises. - The game collected a lot of unique drawings and that brought a big smile to our faces

Maybe.. This time it went a bit too smooth. You see, every jam entry of mine had good, bad and sometimes ugly sides.

| | The Good 👍🏾 | The Bad 👎🏾 | The Ugly 🚽 | |---|---|---|---|---| | LD47 | Set up entire basecode for future LudumDares to come. This one is my first one and holds a special place in my heart | Game was 'just a game', it did not have juice, the theme was not really interestingly implemented | The collision system was really time consuming and in the end the physics were mediocre to say the least. Also, I ripped textures from the internet, changed the heu and called it a day. I disabled ratings for that | | LD48 | The character creator and the results of other player's outcome on my website was very well received | The music was ripped from youtube and was very badly implemented. I disabled audio ratings ofcourse. | Oh man.... I spent soooo many hours creating a branching dialog tree. I did not enjoy that 😅🙊 | | LD49 | My first time working together with my friend. We had a big laugh about the idea of a mentally unstable person trying to keep it together in a resteaurant | The game was not very intuitive to play | We did not have a clear vision. This game was not finished. | | LD50 | My first ~~3D~~ 2,5D game! I love raycasters so this one has a special place in my heart | It was a hard game to play. The balancing could have been better. We had to release some post-jam versions | - | | LD51 | We had a working prototype pretty early on | Brave and Firefox have some advanced technologies which don't play well with colliders in this game. This is a problem that gradually became more prominent. | - | | LD52 | I had lots of fun making this one. As a programmer I just smiled the whole way when programming the 'DNA' systems for the plants | Game was a bit hard to understand I feel | - | | LD53 | My first colab with my gf. People felt the frantic energy we wanted to go for | Lots of dialog was lost, as it was too much. We had to scrap a lot. | Stitching all the dialog to the puzzle elements for later was a nightmare. Dialog is not my strongest skill I feel | | LD54 | We had a prototype veeeery early on. Development went smooth | Brave and Firefox have some advanced technologies which don't play well with colliders in this game. We had to change the scope constantly. Our original idea was compromised | - | | LD55 | We experimented with graphics and paralaxing and that went pretty well I think! | We wanted more levels, the whole game was prepaired for that. It was beautiful, and then the deadline was like right around the corner 🙊 | - | | LD56 | We had a base idea in mind, so we could build right away. There was even boilerplate code. We had a prototype right away. | We had a base idea in mind, so we could build right away. We had to shoehorn the time into the intended gameplay | We had a base idea in mind, so we could build right away. There were lots of problems trying to balance this thing. Oh my.. It was difficult. People did not seem to have lots of fun with this one | | LD57 | The graphics were very good in this one I feel. The boilerplate code was var enough along that I could focus on other aspects. The music was a placeholder but ended up in the game anyway and people went crazy about it~! The scope was not compromised, despite it having 7 levels :o | There were collision problems. I fixed that in the post-jam version. It wrecked playtroughs | - | | LD58 | Development went pretty smooth! All our goals were reached. We had a comfortable time. | - | - |

And that is what I will do diffrent next time. I want to feel pain.

Yes, you heard me right. I don't like it when a game feels perfect. When everything went right. Its like sports; "did you even do it right if you don't feel muscle pain aferwards?" . I want to feel pain and suffering during gamejams. It's an indicator of growth. All I did now was making a game (a pretty fun game 😁) and not learning anything from it. Ofcourse, it's nice to have a good time once in a while. But at this point, I feel like this jamming is becomming second nature. Every jam I ask myself: what could I do better next time?

Right now I ask myself the same question. The awnser? Don't make it better, try harder to expand my knowledge and skills! So next gamejam could be a disaster, but hopefully I will learn. Things I can grow in? - 3D work, - Creating non-pixel-art graphics, - Proper music mixing - Learning the program "pixel composer"

Regarding PelPurrfect:

The boilerplate code I made is called PelPurrfect. I intend to release it to alpha / beta for everyone to try out before next LD starts. I have developed it pretty extensively the last couple of months and this time was a testrun. It worked nice, but had some major flaws I will fix. I also wrote a whole dialog system for it this LD, with timers and subtitle support and all! These are the things that need to change: - The whole thing works with scenes. Assets are loaded when a scene is loaded. So some assets are loaded multiple times. There needs to be a global asset loader-thingy. - Every scene needs to have some kind of reset function, so levels can get reset when the player dies for instance - When the game starts, all assets are loaded in. Our game had 50MB of audio files. It was slow. I want to make a loading indicator for players to see that the game does not freeze - Utility functions need to be more clear. Stuff like converting colors, getting random numbers, splitting color channels, etc. - GUI handling needs to be much better. - I need to write documentation. The tooling is already there, so that should not be a problem.

Conculsion

I learned a lot the past couple of years, to the point gamejamming feels like second nature. Which was nice for once, but I want to feel the pain of growth. PelPurrfect had a good testrun, but needs some work until I can release it for testing.

Later today I will see the results and depending on that I will either: complain, be satisfied, or post a picture of a cake if I feel very happy!

... OK bye!

That's... better than I was expecting, to be honest. In terms of both scores and percentile rankings, it's comparable to my previous two entries, which are among my best. (Looking at pure ranking position isn't a reliable indicator because Ludum Dare is getting fewer and fewer entries with each edition.) Graphics is once again my best category, so I'm glad that the effort I put into them has paid off.

See you next time around, I guess!

Thanks a lot to everyone who enjoyed our game, it means a lot :)

We have made a post jam version of Achievements: Unlock all Achievements, available in browser on itch-io, now with: - Cats (you have to find them) - You, playing a game in a game in a game

the link: https://pandalk.itch.io/achievement-unlock-all-achievements

See you in the next one!

...at least from my perspective. I truly failed as a game designer here. I have focused on one thing and we hahe outdid ourselves in the Mood category, but in such I have neglected all the other parts of our "game". And so we haven't even made a game. We made something that was theoretically good in my head only. I neglected the ending, I neglected the "monster", I neglected the player experience. Because I was inexperienced. And so I will learn and I will adapt. I will expand on this, I will become more effective. Not just as an artist, not just as a programmer or sound designer, or whatever is needed, but as a person who can direct myself and anyone who makes the game with me. We will make a better game next game jam, you can bet.

Now to the good part: holy moly did I manage to create an atmosphere with simple filters and free assets. I set a goal to make a game that looks like I wanted it to in 3 days and I almost completed it. Yes, I did not manage to fully translate my vision to the screen, but what I did net us 163th place in the Mood category and that is quite a bit better than what we managed to achieve before. Yay! Is this gonna reinforce my desire to create the atmosphere for the game more than the actual gameplay? Most likely. What am I gonna do about it? I am gonna find a way to translate that passion into the gameplay features.

In conclusion: some personal problems and shortcomings were revealed and will be addressed in the future. I do not know how much I will be able to do but progress is already being made.

Great vegetables!

Turbo-powered Cow Milker will be getting better every jam stay tuned!!!

Hooray! First place in the humor category!

I was hoping to make it into the top 10, but it turned out even better.

Next time, I'll have to aim for victory in other categories, but that will be more difficult.

Until the next Ludum Dare

Wow! I'm pretty stunned to get 1st and 3rd in two categories, thank you for such amazing ratings! I need to let that sink in a little. In the meantime I've got a bunch of news!

Post Jam Update

I've been working on a post-jam update for The Tooth Fae and now it's live! Here's a run down of the additions and improvements:

• Collection progress and abandoned houses are now saved between sessions.
• Anesthesia now only applies to the upper or lower mouth where it was injected.
• Cracking teeth is now more obvious.
• Cracking a tooth now consumes anesthetic for that side of the mouth.
• Added tooltips to tools.
• Added pause menus to the town and mouth screens.
• Added quick access to toggling full screen from the pause menu.
• Added ability to reset progress on the title screen.
• Added visual highlight when collecting a new type of tooth.
• Added and improved sprites.
• Added and improved sound effects.
• Added a 100% completion screen.
• Bedroom cutscenes can now be skipped with escape or left click.
• Sped up transitions between screens.
• Townsfolk can no longer be both brave and cowardly.
• Improved hit areas for lips and gums.
• Fixed being able to swap to pliers while they're unusable.
• Fixed lips suddenly snapping up or down when entering the mouth screen.
• Fixed web version always starting with the same RNG seed.
• Lots of other minor tweaks.
• Added a secret to discover after 100% completion...

Play the update in your browser!

Wishlist the Full Version on Steam!

The Steam page for The Tooth Fae is now live! The full version will introduce new mechanics, progression, lore and secrets to uncover. If you enjoyed playing the jam version or are curious to see what gets added, be sure to wishlist! I also put together a little in-universe teaser trailer to celebrate the page going up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9arV-ApxLo

It sure has been a busy few weeks, I hope everyone else had a blast taking part!

Thank you guys so much for playing and rating Claim thy Land!

Seeing a lot of positive feedback under our entry is nothing short of a miracle for us! To all people who enjoyed this small little prototype — we have good news! We're looking forward to improve this project and bring it to Steam!

Our current goal is to prepare a well-polished demo with much more content and replay value. And to properly test all the stuff, we might need your help! If you want to be aware of future playtests happening, feel free to join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/8pKP8Nss9b

We're already sketching our new concepts and can't wait to share them with you!

Oh, and did I mention we made a Steam page? We'll update it with more content and a trailer later, but you can already follow us if you want!

31th on theme !!!
293th overall !!!
Tanks all for playing and these incredible notes !

Wow: Xenolith took second place in Innovation! Thank you so much to everyone who played, rated and commented on my game - especially those who shared their passwords and contributed to the communal experience! I think there's still plenty of mileage in the concept, so over the past couple of weeks, I've been sketching out ideas for a Steam release. If you'd like to stay in the loop about that, please feel free to follow me on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Thank you everyone for rating & playing our game :grin:

If you want to play our game "Super Sucker", here it is: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/super-sucker

Pleasantly surprised that our little mental stuff got pretty high in ranking! Also I kinda missed that the source code was private the whole time and fixed it like yesterday I think, sorry ahahha

Glad to see that my music gets into top-100 again, I'm pretty nooby at it and have a poor knowledge base but I try my best

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/blank

Have also made the usual timelapse now that we have results: https://youtu.be/kfHMqiYPZXc

Wow! Thank you everyone who played and rated Cut to Pieces! To be #1 among the competition that Ludum Dare has to offer is a great honor. I'm also really happy that we won innovation as well, which is the category I value the most. And I'm happy for our artist, who's skill has been recognized with a bronze trophy.

So, time to tell you how this game was developed in 72 hours.

Idea

Like last year, I tried my method of meditating half an hour before and after the theme was announced. The idea is to empty the mind, to make it bored in a sense, which then results in more creative ideas. Last year that got me to come up with Vox Regis, this time that was less successful. One idea that came to mind during this session is a game about someone who bought fake paintings, and where you need to go back in time to change history, in such a way so that your painting is accurate. A bizarre idea, of which I wasn't sure how to implement it. I quickly decided to let that idea go, but I liked the idea of doing something with art forgery.

There were a few ideas with asynchronized multiplayer. That, for example, you need to redraw a paiting, and that other players need to guess which painting you drew. There's definitely potential there for some great ideas, but we already made a similar game last Ludum Dare, with Captain Peggles: That Man's Chest. And there's nothing wrong with using a similar idea, but Ludum Dare is also a way to experiment, and to challenge myself. I don't want to be the asynchronous multiplayer guy. I want to see if I can come up with a new innovative and fun idea.

Later on I got this idea of stealing paintings in a museum. But, to prevent the security guard from noticing that the paintings were gone, you would have to replace them with similar looking paintings. You would do so by using stamps or stickers. My older Ludum Dare entry Harvest Heist came to mind, where three bandits need to steal vegetables, while avoiding the farmer. I was actually considering to make it a sequal. But it would be a lot of work, and I wasn't sure if it would be fun. I considered what the game could be like if I took away the walking, where it's just the painting, the stamps, and the canvas. It was then that I came up with the cutout mechanic. What if there aren't stickers, but you need to create your own "stickers" from pictures in a newspaper?

Every Ludum Dare I start with a big question: Will I be able to come up with something fun and unique? In my opinion, for the past five Ludum Dare jams, the answer is yes. That's a very good feeling. Even though I won before in the past, I've always had self doubt about myself as a game developer. Imposter syndrome is very real. But, with three Ludum Dare victories, and the innovative types of games I produce, I feel confident in saying that I am, in fact, a good game developer. That doesn't mean it's easy for me to come up with these types of games, but I should trust myself that I am capable of doing so.

Cutting

To make the game work, the player needed to be able to cut out image. The first part was easy, where I keep track of the mouse coordinates as it makes the cut. I then draw the line using these coordinates. The challenging part was the cutout. How do I figure out which part to cut out of the newspaper. The inside of the circle, of course, but how to figure out what the inside of the circle is? I asked for help in the LÖVE Discord, and got the suggestion to do a floodfill on the outside of the circle. Because, while you might not know the inside of the circle, you can know for certain which part is on the outside. By starting a floodfill from that position, it will fill all but the closed circle. By using the non-filled pixels, you now have the cutout.

At first this floodfill happened over the whole screen, but this gave the game a subtle lag each cutout. So I optimized it. While drawing the cutout, the game keeps tracks of the boundaries of where the mouse has been. By using this rectangle, with an increase of 1 pixel on each side, I have the box in which this floodfill should happen. Because of the 1 pixel increase, I know for certain that the upper left corner will not be inside the cutout.

Cutting out the image is done using LÖVE's ImageData API. Using the mapPixel method you can go through each pixel, and return what the new pixel color should be. Using this method it's a matter of checking if the pixel in the cutout canvas is transparent, and if so to copy that pixel to a new canvas, and to return a transparent color.

Solving

The second problem was to figure out whether the player beat the level. Somehow I had to keep track of the cutouts and their placements, and whether this was good enough to consider the level solved. It was already getting late on the first day of the jam, but I really wanted to get this done early. The way I solved this is by giving both the newspaper and the empty canvas an invisible colored layer. When you cut out part of the newspaper, you also cut out part of this invisible layer. The apple of the first level, for example, has a brownish color. Then, on the canvas, the apple also has the same color. When you submit your painting, the game checks how much of each object's color is being overlapped by something of the same color. All objects have a purple border, which is the safe neutral color. Cutting this out gives you neither good points nor penalty points. Around the border is red, which does give you penalty points.

This system works great. Using Aseprite's spritesheet and JSON, I could export the colored layer in the same image, and then easily figure out what part of that spritesheet is the colored layer. Luckily, exporting and utilizing separate layers with Aseprite was something I looked into recently. The system is not perfect though, and the expanded game will require a system that allows for more options. Some newspaper images were smaller than what was visible in the painting, and therefore would never be able to cover the whole image. You could solve this by creating a smaller area, but then depending on where the player places the image, which should be considered correct, could miss that small area and fail. In this case, a better solution would be that a certain percentage of the available color is part of the cutout, and that the entire cutout is covered by the color on the canvas.

If we didn't have a solution mechanic, the game would still be fun. Players, unaware of this lack of solution system, would still try their best to do well. A lot of players were very careful when making the cutout, and were worried that their slightly wrong cutout might give them a penalty, even though they didn't have to be so perfect. The problem is that if a player beats the game without failing a single time, they can wonder whether it was even possible to lose at all. In an expanded game I would add a percentage, or a 5 star system, to show the player how well they recreated the painting.

Paintings

There wasn't really a plan as to what the paintings would be. I also didn't have time to direct our artist, so I let him do his thing, with sometimes giving him an idea of what to implement. One such idea was the mermaid. A combination of two cutouts to form a single subject was not something I considered when we started making the game, but upon realizing this is something we could do, I saw the true potential in this game mechanic.

I've seen multiple comments praising our artist, and rightfully so. They love the character design, think the paintings look amazing, but mostly think it's very impressive that he was able to draw all of this in 72 hours. All those newspaper articles and cutscenes as well. But to Shores this was business as usual. He's fast, he's experienced, and most of all, this is his comfort zone. He just drew what he wanted to draw, which resulted in fun newspapers, cool paintings, and silly characters.

The game has four different type of solutions.

1. Two items of the same subject. Example: The apple in the first painting, and the apple in the newspaper.
2. Two items of the same category of subject. Example: The old ship in Mermaid, and the modern ship.
3. Two different but similar looking items. Example: The mountains in Hood, and the icecream cones.
4. Two items with similar properties. Example: Medusa's hair, and the spaghetti.

When thinking of the game mechanic, I was mostly considering 1 and 3. It was therefore that I protested when Shores came with the suggestion to use spaghetti as the replacement of Medusa's hair. I figured it was too vague, and people wouldn't figure it out. Shores thought it would be more than obvious. We compromised by adding the handle of a fork, which mimics one of the snakes on Medusa's head, and making it partially a type 3 solution. It turns out that I was completely mistaken. In the far majority of the playthroughs I watched, people quickly figured out that it was the spaghetti they needed, and often ignored the fork.

Steam?

Yes, we are going to expand the game. It's something I didn't want to do at first, but after reading the comments, and watching people play, I realize how much people enjoy this game, and the potential it has. We don't have a Steam page yet, but you can follow me on Bluesky to get updates.

Thanks again everyone who played the game, and thank you Mike for hosting Ludum Dare among all your financial troubles. I hope you will find a job soon. I'll be there for Ludum Dare #59.

Well, Ludum Dare 58 results are in, and I went...

Look it was better than last time where I got no results in anything. Everything was better this time. And ending with 302nd in audio is pretty good. Thanks to everyone who participated, and huge thanks to everyone who played Isle Of The Orbs. I hope to see all of you again in 174 days from Ludum Dare 59.

The Future

I might work on Isle Of The Orbs a bit more, maybe package it into a bit of a larger, stronger game. Not sure yet. Tell me if you think I should.

This is the first time I'm this enthusiastic to continue with a project post-jam. But I also planned my COMPO-entry to become a basis for a bigger prototype to begin with.

I made a rudimentary test of a decay/spoilage-mechanic I've been cooking up in my head. The RGB-coefficient of the fruit is tied to its spoilage-value that in turn is affected by collisions. Obviously in the future it would be affected by a lot of different factors, like time.

I liked the vivid colors of fall that appeared by accident when I ranked up the values to excessive amounts as a test. :fallenleaf: :mapleleaf: :leaves:

I'm quite happy with my score and all your encouraging feedback!

Thanks to everyone who came by!

Till we jam again! :wave: