Link : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/sonder-a-story

Hello everyone my name is Jonathan Jennings and I was one of the software engineers who worked on Sonder : A Story for Ludum Dare 48 ! For over half of of our team ( 3 /5) this was our first game jam EVER and we had a blast! I feel so fortunate I got to make something so cool with such awesome people ! We hope you can feel the love and joy we had making it !

Please play Sonder and rate us and we can't wait to dive into the awesome plethora of other games we see popping up in the Ludum Dare 48 news stream !!!! Thank you for reading !

Play Sonder here! : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/sonder-a-story

A big part of our game Sonder: A story is time travel , which can get messy really quickly from both a narrative and programmatic perspective.

on this past Friday when were first doing our brainstorm meetings Our basic takeaways were we'd found an emotional thread we wanted to travel along and we wanted to use time and memories as an avenue to go deeper and deeper into a characters past.

In a technical sense what that told me was we needed individual ecosystems, environments, eras, and ultimately I decided on a term " Time Scenes" for the environments which encapsulated certain objects ( I call them selectable tokens such as the pictured clock) which were relevant to our main characters life at different stages of her life.

Basically buckets, buckets of time in which our user could navigate forward or backward ( we hadn't fleshed out the extent of the time travel friday night ).

When we got started Saturday I was a little bit nervous but the two most important parts of our structure from my perspective programmatically were the selectable tokens the users could open, learn more about, and then close , and then having a core resolve function so if those items had a specific affect or ability to move our character forward along the narrative thread we would handle and "resolve" whatever those special implementation circumstances were.

It was actually really simple we had a few different item designations , items which were just normal observable items, items which "teleported", and items which revealed more about the time scenes or other items.

This was my first point and click type game and I'm super happy on a technical level how we handled it , I think if I had to do it all over again the only change I would make is making the object pool a little more flexible, it was relatively easy to add or remove items to each time scene but I feel like with a few more days we could have made a tool that was even more designer friendly to generate a base " Selectable token" item which had a myriad of effects but the system we had in place was good enough that the other software engineer and Technical designer to the project ( Mark Lacroix) was able to handle and adjust the items as needed !

This was such an awesome experience, thanks for reading !

Sonder : A Story was my first time programming a point and Click Styled game and it gave me a newfound appreciation for the genre in both their simplicity and the more nuanced complexities of game systems like those. The final look we came up with was the product of our brilliant technical designer and artists vision, they found a way to aesthetically express the emotional tones the rest of us were trying to push forward. My first deliverable for the project was to give the team a simple clickthrough, create an object class that had various unique properties and could be noted as having special abilities ,Some items did nothing but offer more story, some items unlocked / revealed other items within the room, and other items moved the plot forward . The click through gave me a chance to build a simple time traveling system of opening different Time Scenes and build the basic functionality to allow items to reveal more about the characters room. It also allowed us a chance to start visualizing some of the On Hover affects which make exploring the space moe intuitive and really help the player feel like they too are digging deeper and deeper through memories. The initial diagram I worked from was excellent too I've played a few point and click adventure games but had never built one so it felt theoretically simple but how often is something theoretically simple in game development CTUALLY simple to get implemented and working well. IT gave a me a great starting point though essentially having buckets of objects that show up when specific parent objects are activated, by simplifying the concept it made it a lot easier to build the core functionality of Sonders exploration system.