After carefully reading the embedding instructions I managed to embed "pigment of your Imagination" on the second try, for ease of access!

Art is always early for me. Inspired by the outros of The Rising of the Shield Hero (if anybody with colourblindness has issues let me know!).

This is almost it for the art, except for the aircraft - seeing them head-on is a little bit easier than the whole thing in profile - , now it's figuring out points and pose sequences.

... as a last-minute addition to the aircraft in my game. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/marshaller-of-inalpla I managed most things on the list; sadly not the polished animations I wanted, but there is always next time. Jams are fun! I hadn't had time for any since Nov '25 when I took a jam break to work on my first commercial release A Thousand Bees (released this April cough - self promo - cough).

Marshaller of Inalpla

• What's a marshaller? You know those guys in coloured suits with glowy sticks on airports or famously in action films on aircraft carriers. Their job is to direct pilots when they can't see past their plane. • What is Inalpla? It's an acronym. Short for: interdimensionary aircraft landing platform - InALPla!

When the theme for Ludum Dare jam 59 became "Signal" - and announced at jam start, in my middle of the night - the first order of business was to figure out the meaning for my game. The LD crowd likes games to stick fairly closely to the theme, so I tried to not go around too many corners when considering a game design. Among my first rough ideas was one about Flight Line Marshallers. The mechanic was of course to give the right signals. A quick and shallow internet search showed not too many games featuring it, and most were sims trying to be real and featuring more or less detailed real-life symbols to flag. Not only because one of the voting categories of LD is Humour, I wanted something that required little research and had some whimsy to it, which became: being a marshaller at a fantasy airport! Which made the aircraft not just the odd passenger plane, but also dragons, flying saucers (complete with cup), and moth-winged blimps.

My time was pertty stretched. On Saturday, I had game night. Felt wrong to call it off just for my jam, but we did play online so I could be a little more absent than usual, and lay the groundwork: general scripts, UI work, and a bunch of graphics assets. Being an illustrator means I can do those, no sweat. For short projects I am often inspired by some odd artstyle or another I saw recently; this time it was the outro artworks of the anime series Rising of the Shield Hero. It also inspired a colour palette - always good to have for cohesion of all visuals - and sketch style that I followed with some more of my own voice for the brushstrokes. When time is scarce, stylised is the way to go! I only needed a quick background of sky and landing strip, and a player character I could somewhat sensibly cut into pieces for animation. Then I could spend the remaining art time on whacky aircraft.

I do my coding in Defold. A blank project with some placeholders for start menus etc. is always good to have around. This time around I heavily used the messaging system. Telling all sorts of objects and scripts what to do and when from somewhere else, hoping that it might require fewer flags and state changes to listen for. It was... okay. Due to the hectic nature of jams, it soon became difficult to remember where I was sending messages from, what the messages contained, and where scripts were getting messages from. My biggest gripe was, and not for the first time (I gotta remember this), that disabling GUI nodes makes them not play animations and not render, but they can still take input. So placing a New Mission button on screen middle makes for a lot of new missions that nobody needs. I kept hunting this one button misbehaving, until with some effort, I found out the real cuplrit was in another collection altogether. It would have been awesome to have a leaderboard, but implementing it was simply too much and I figured if that's off the table, then a local highscore was also useless. There's alwas next time.

All animations are done in code. The aircraft slightly sway while flying in, the PC uses a very simple animation and setting combination for the arm movement. My point of interest, its USP if you will, for this game was the controls. I have toyed with the idea of games that use mulit-button input resembling symbols projected onto the keyboard. Those thoughts were stopped by the physical fact that most keyboards take only a small limited numbers of inputs at once, and making a game for only the precious few that use specialised, hardcore keyboards seemed pointless. But that's where jams shine! I came close in MoI by assigning each upper arm one key to cycle through three positions, and then the three outwards keys for the lower arms. I am not entirely convinced it's particularly sensible to do it this way, but I like the effect nonetheless. It did make the accessibility... low. I wondered which keys to use, but the obvious choice are F and J as base keys because of their ten-finger-typing start positions. Many keyboards have haptic marks on them, too.

The signals of course had to match the humorous setting's idea - even if we see almost nothing of it. There are regular signals like levelling out, dropping, or bringing out the wheels. There is also the Egyptian landing (all together: fly liiike an e-gyp-tiaaaan!), or dropping the invisibility cloak. I imagined very short timers for the individual missions, during which players have to manage an increasing number of signals before landing, but it turned out that even a restricted set of only a few signals takes much longer than anticipated, especially for new players. When confronted with twice as many signals in the same time, it became a real challenge. The chosen time in the submission is more than double what I first assigned. It's not exactly well-tested, yet I felt the sense of progression wasn't half bad (at time of writing I'd gotten feedback that it is just to much to deal with and the progression would need work).

When I am not lucky enough to find a composer, I take my sounds from freesound. I find most sounds easy enough to scrounge up. Finding fitting music that also loops is tad trickier, but entirely manageable. Mostly it takes time to sift through the sounds available. I expect that I will eventually have a library big enough to handle many use cases. Naturally I opt out of the audio voting category then.

This time I truly worked until half an hour to deadline - completely forgetting that there is an hour assigned for just uploading - only to encounter upload issues left and right. Then of course messed up the embedding function of the LD site (zipping the folder instead of the content so there was no index.html at root level after all). But a first commenter corrected that, then there were some more finding other bugs that made the game barely playable - blasted time constraints making testing so hard. And I even had my SO test from Sunday afternoon! - but for now I find that for a three-day jam game, it is stable and playable enough, even if there are still some minor bugs in there, like going back to menu ruining the game. Ahem. Minor, I say.

This game idea is fun for sure. It's too small to become a full game, but it might be a neat little basis to expand outward with for any sort of wacky fantasy setting or as minigame in any urban fantasy environment. LD59 was my first jam in a few months after working diligently on a commercial release and I enjoyed myself a great deal as always. In every jam game I try to add a tiny bit more polish, more content, or more complex system. It's cool to see the many interpretations of a theme, the skills people can muster in short time, and being inspired to get better at something with the proof that it can indeed be done quickly.