Last chance to rate + Post Mortem.
Thank you to everybody that played our game and left a nice comment! We appreciate your feedback and we’re thrilled that you all seemed to enjoy it. Neither of us had the willpower for this Ludum Dare but we’re glad we did it, it was loads of fun!
What Did You Make?
How To Cope With Boredom & Loneliness – A Guide For The Isolated – A Documentary Filmmaker Simulator
So, our game is a create your own documentary kind of thing. You play as Nigel Wimble, hard hitting filmmaker. To complete the final episode of your series you must create a film about Harold, a man who has been grounded to his room for the past 30 years.
To do this you must examine items in his room and choose the ones that will elicit the best responses. You then sit back and watch the documentary unravel.
Our game is light on gameplay but we hoped it would be entertaining enough anyway.
How Did You Make it?
A few days before Ludum Dare we had briefly spoke about framing our main project as a mockumentary. We decided against it but thought maybe we could do something similar for Ludum Dare, depending on the theme. Once we saw the theme was One Room an idea popped up for a documentary based on someone who has been grounded to his bedroom for his entire adult life. It seemed like a daft scenario so went with it, as we usually do.
We created ten items of interest which when selected would trigger a short cutscene. We then had to tie the player chosen ones together with an intro and outro which would play once the player confirms their selection.
We added clues to the examinations and a point system based on how relevant the item is but there’s no winning or losing. You enjoy the scenes you’ve picked or you don’t!
Day One
@poffle
I always spend the first morning working on placeholder graphics with music on and a steady stream of tea. At the same time trying to work out what the game actually is. Once Rodo wakes up I bombard him with assets and bad ideas.
Rodo is in charge of scope and can be down right mean with it sometimes, so when I said we needed 10 fully voiced cutscenes I was surprised he went along with it. He even said yes to writing and singing a song too! I spend the rest of the day drawing and writing the examinations for the items.
@rodobodolfo
I always wake up the first morning with a massive list of bad and ridiculous ideas to reject. Mainly due to the fact that most of the time, they would take a lot of coding time to implement just to gain a few seconds of features.
This time, however, I woke up with only a really ridiculous but hilarious idea, and on top of that all the hard work would be on Poffle’s side, so it was a no-brainer for me.I’ve been working on adding speech support on the Unity Adventure Framework for our Vic Raider Trailer so this seemed a perfect time to test it in a real project.
Day 1 for me was setting up the rooms on unity, defining actors, cut-scenes, hotspots. In short, making the game world playable.
Day Two
@poffle
I like to do the writing on Day 2. I take my dogs for a walk in the morning and that seems to help with ideas opposed to staring at a blank text file. I came back and wrote the cutscene scripts and handed them over to Rodo. Then we had the monumental task of recording all the voices and processing the audio for lipsyncing. This went surprisingly well though. I recorded the lines in about an hour, Rodo processed it all and we had a playable build by the end of the night that was pretty funny and surprisingly low on bugs.
@rodobodolfo
I woke up with a lot of hilarious recorded lines to process. We had to process some lines before for the trailer, but now the amount of lines were a lot more, REAPER was a blessing for this task.
Essentially, I would open an objects speech line and then split it into multiple chunks of audio.
Then with the amazing batch/convert tool, I added all chunks and with the $track$itemnumber variables I create a consecutive sequence of audio clips.
Don’t forget to add the FX Chain!!
After that, we needed to add a suffix for all lines that will be dubbed.
::Narrator::I noticed a poster for an old children's movie.
::Narrator::For some, movies are an escape from reality. For Harold, his reality is like a movie.
Becomes
::Narrator::I noticed a poster for an old children's movie.[#beeposter01]
::Narrator::For some, movies are an escape from reality. For Harold, his reality is like a movie,[#beeposter02]
Day Three
@poffle
Day three on a good Ludum Dare is spent on music and polish. On a bad one it can be 60% of your game which is what happened last time for us. This time it was a good one so it was mostly music and polish. There were a few more things we wanted to squeeze in but didn’t want to kill ourselves so polished what we had. I am pleased with what we managed to complete.
@rodobodolfo
Poffle broke all the lip-sync tags and almost had a nervous collapse. Hopefully he managed to re-tag every line!
Meanwhile I had the task of making the score system, the intro and outro scenes, post production effects and tie it all together.The result is this guy making an awesome film.
What Went Wrong?
Nothing too harrowing aside from Rodo having a power cut. If we had more time we would have added an interview with Harold’s mother and extra intro/outro scenes. It was exhausting like every Ludum Dare but it went smoothly and never felt like a grind. It was a fun weekend and we look forward to the next!
