Coucou les jameurs francophones ✨
Je lance un petit stream tranquille de commentaires sur vos jeux dans quelques minutes !
Venez me partager vos création.

Lien du stream : https://www.twitch.tv/dodoot

Hey fellow jammers ✨

I wanted to share a few things on how we designed and built Poda Wants a Statue around prototyping. I love reading post mortems and dev stories here, so here is me giving back to this wonderful community!

The idea

Before starting any prototype, we needed a game idea. Among a lot of out-of-scope or just plain weird ideas, one of them felt cool: a job dating game where you have 10 seconds to say the best corporate bs with an autocomplete interface. It felt a bit too much like something we knew we could do as we already explored the “fun game with silly words that makes funny sentences” in a previous game we made: Welcome Googoo.

Then, in the middle of our ideation session, something happened.
Blibloop ~ looking outside the window with a “woke up 2 hours ago and still sleeping” look on her face and coffee in her hands: “Hey wait wait I have something…”
Me: “… ?”
Blibloop: “Picture this: there is a bear or something, maybe a panda, and every 10 seconds he shakes everything!”
Me: “Ok cool, what’s the game?”
Blibloop: “Oh… Idk 🤷‍♀️”

A few walks around the park later, and me refusing to do a puzzle game because damn puzzle games are so freakin’ hard to make, we settled on something pretty similar to what the game turned out to be in the end: a small god game where you assign workers to either collecting resources or making a statue, and every so often everything gets shuffled. A management game for a jam, nice! That’s definitely easier to do than a puzzle game, right? … right? 🥲

here is a very cool and understandable design scribble by Blibloop.

Technical prototype

Second half of the first day already, let’s start!

Blibloop focused on choosing an art style, Zakku researched references and started a first draft of music, and I worked on a technical prototype: Am I able to code some functional state machines for our workers AI? Can I do a resource and upgrade system? How is the Panda system going to work? How to make drag and drop in Unity?

Here is our Day 1 prototype 🖥️

We tested this one ourselves, and here were the learnings:
- Everything seems doable, but not easy. The workers state machine is already complex, and they don’t have pathfinding yet. - Current drag and drop system with OnMouseDown and OnMouseUp is a nightmare. Leads to a lot of bugs and clunky controls. - 10 seconds for the panda shake seems a bit extreme. in the final version, it's closer to 20 seconds! - Is this understandable by a player? (spoiler - it was NOT)

Feature complete prototype

After a good night of sleep, let’s start day 2!

As with any Ludum Dare we made, this is the day when we want to be able to make other people playtest the game and give us some feedback.

To do that, we needed something that was:
- a bit less buggy and clunky: I had to rework the drag and drop from the ground up. I might explain this in another post later!
- with all the features that we currently intended to put in the game: As you could see in the previous gif, we were still missing upgrades!
- a bit more self-explanatory. Playtesting is a bit useless if playtesters don’t even understand what to do or how to play I guess.

Here is our Day 1.5 prototype 🐼

We had friends at our place in the afternoon for teatime, so we made them test our prototype! Here is what we learned:
- The game is NOT self-explanatory at all yet. A lot of things were misunderstood or not understood: What are the rabbits doing? What’s my resource count? How do upgrades work? How do I get gold? What is the panda doing? Nobody understood they could drag and drop resources too. - Once they understood, the game seems fun but completely unbalanced. Road is busted, building upgrade (they only updated speed and didn’t gave more resources are useless), Poda shaking a random number of bunnies is confusing and unfair. - The game doesn’t seem to have too many bugs! That's at least a success with all those somewhat complex AIs 🏅

Here is an attempt by my brother to break it 🐇

Asset complete prototype

So here we are on the last day, with a game that is impossible to understand! Turns out making a management game is not only hard to code, but mostly hard to design so people understand how to play and what to do!

We started by implementing all the beautiful visuals and sounds Blibloop and Zakku did, and then spent a lot of time working on the clearest possible UI and on adding a lot of visuals to help the player: White indicators for idle bunnies and clickable resources, blue overlays on everything you can interact with, big chunky arrows on were you can drop what you have in hand, game intro and Poda’s prompts to set and remind the goal, small animations on every bunny state, and a lot more!

We kept asking friends to playtest through the day, and their feedback helped a lot!
- They are not sure when a button is clickable? Let’s darken it even more and change text color when it’s not! - Having upgrades available right from the starts makes it information heavy? Let’s push that to a bit later! - They feel let down without a cool ending animation? Ok let’s prioritize that then.

Final jam version

And that’s about how we came up with what we have today ✨

Now it’s time your time to tell us what you feel is great or what could be done better!

Thanks to all the wonderful people who already tried the game, here is what we learned so far: - Everyone seems to love the art and music! Huge congrats to Blibloop (@dodidouda) and Zakku (@zakku) 💖 - It seems like people understand the game quickly enough! That’s something we are really really happy about, since it was the part we spent the most time on ✨ - Not a single bug found! I believe that's a first for me, on my most complex jam game 🧑‍💻 - Some people feel Poda is too annoying during late game. It becomes almost impossible to put all your bunnies back to work and gather all resources again before they throws another tantrum! That was actually a design decision but it seems it's not liked by some, so we are already thinking on solutions. - Dragging a lot of resources is painful. We are thinking on what could make this easier! - There are some small visual things we need to fix, like order layers for the bunnies that is sometimes wrong!

Here is the game if you want to try it and leave your feedback!

Play Poda Wants a Statue here!

How about you? Do you prototype and playtest a lot during game jams?

Thank you so much 💖

Thank you to everyone who played our cute little god game!
It was something quite new for us, both in terms of gameplay implementation and art style, and it seems it turned out great. That's the best place we've ever got in a Ludum Dare!

Post Mortem

You can find a small post mortem of our jam here!

Itch page

You can play the game here!

I'm so happy!

Protect your human 🐕‍🦺✨👻

Oh no! Spooky month just started but ghosts are already there!
Protect your human against those sneaky ghosties.
Bark and use your elastic leash to scare them away!

Play it here and leave your compo games in comment for me to try them 💌

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/boo-bark

Cause some of mine were really bad!

Also, I decided to put not only the source code public, but my whole project! Check my github if you wish to tinker with it or reuse some assets.

Hey everyone! This was once again an incredible Ludum Dare, I'm playing a lot of great games and discovering cool indie devs, I love it.

I did a little stream yersterday were I sumed up my experience during this jam, and I thought that some people here might be interested too, so here it is in text version!

Context

This is not my first Ludum Dare, but this is my first compo. I did all the other in the jam category and worked as programmer with talented artists and sometimes sound designer. Now that I have a bit more experience in gamedev (I even released my first commercial game a few months ago!) I felt like I could try this crazy thing that is compo. I streamed almost all my work during the jam.

Overall

• It's hard not to have too much expectations. Since it's the first time I do compo, I thought that the change of context would let me go into the event with not much expectations. I said to myself that finishing anything would already be really great. But during the jam, it was really hard to not to compare what I was doing to previous jams where I got good results. That did gave me energy and pushed me to do the best I could, but I think I will need to work on that if I want to do more "chill" jams someday. I feel writing my expectations before the event can help a bit, but if you have other tips I would gladly hear them.
• I'm even prouder than previous events. Even if that's really not my best game, the fact that I did everything on my own makes me really proud. It's easy for me to dismiss the quality of my work and think the success I get is due to other people work. I still love to work with other people and will continue to do so, but if you are like me, doing some things alone from time to time might be good for self confidence.

Time Management

• Scheduled time slots helped a lot. I started the event by preparing a rough calendar for the 2 days, and I managed to follow it approximately. The most important things were: Art was schedule for day 1 early afternoon, Sound + music for day 2 early afternoon, and I wanted to have a playable prototype mid day 2 so that the end of the day could be spend on finishing touches, polish, and tackling playtest feedbacks. On 3 days jam, I usually keep a whole day for that, but it was hard to find more time for it on a compo.

• Cutting the day with a bloc of asset creations felt great. After big lunch breaks and a nice walk, instead of coming back to what I was doing before, I dedicated 2 hours to do art (day 2) or sounds (day 2). I think this was a good call, since both are domains where I need a lot of energy, and that gave me time to cool down on programming issues or questions I was facing.
• Getting fresh air is really helpful. I know, everyone says it, but omg this is so real. Every time I got outside to walk, I came back with solutions or nice ideas for my game.

Code

• Trash code is good, but not everywhere. I feel like after several jams as a programmer, I know the approximate quality level of code I like to work with on such event. But this time, the core of the game was on character movement, and my doggo.cs script felt heavy to work on the second day. I think that instead of trying to find the "overall best" code quality level, I should have put a bit more effort on crucial parts of my code and rushed the rest.

Art

• A fixed and small color palette is a must. I always feel like 8 colors won't be enough, but it always is and helps so much with consistency. Even if you draw terribly bad, if you use a nice color palette I'm sure your art will look pleasing. I took mine from lospec.com.
• Drawing without line art has a lot of advantages. It's fast, it's easier to animate, and most of all, it works well with rescaling. During prototyping, I often rescale a lot of things, and if I work with visuals that have line art, it create inconsistent line sizes and I find that very visually unpleasing.

Music and sounds

• This was not as hard as expected. I absolutely never made audio before, be it sounds or music. I was a bit scared, but the solutions I chose worked quite well. For the sound, I recorded my voice, which took a bit of time but sounds fun in game, and for the music, I used beepbox and just clicked everywhere. I believe having minimal knowledge in music theory might have helped, because I felt very very unsure of what I was doing and had to thrash my first attempt because it didn't feel right.

Playtests

• Playtests are a life saver for priorization As always, I did playtests but thought I already knew what was wrong with my game. And as always, they were way more useful than what I anticipated. Not only did they show me things I didn't see or didn't want to see, they helped me a lot to make a prioritized todo list for the end of the jam. If you can do playtest during jams, do them. If you can't, find a way, it's so great.

Stream

• Streaming during a big jam gives a nice "community" feeling. Several other devs that were doing Ludum Dare came to chat and that was very motivating.
• A stream is a very good rubber duck. Talking continuously helps a lot to not get stuck on programming problems.
• Streaming is really tiring I wanted to do the whole jam on stream, but decided to do a small time off saturday evening. I thing this was a great idea, since being always live is really taxing (and yup, doing compo is taxing enough on its own).

Well Being

• I am less tired than after a 3 days jam. I don't really know if it's mostly due to the fact that 2 days is less than 3 days, or because working with other people is more tiring, or because I'm getting better at knowing my limits and sleeping well during jams.

Thanks for reading up until there! I would love to hear from you if you have some similar though, disagree with stuff or have tips on how to handle some of those issues better.

Also play my game maybe if you wish too! link here 🐕‍🦺✨👻

In our game, if you give a weapon to a beetle it will become friendly and stop trying to steal your snacks! Does it work the same IRL?

Play in your browser 🪲✨

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/beetle-tower