LD page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/circle-of-life

Itch page (with cool pets and WebGL version): https://thespinningsofa.itch.io/circle-of-life

We'd like to shared some thoughts and sneak peeks to our dev process!

Before the jam

For someone in our team it was the 2nd Ludum Dare, while for others it was the 1st jam ever.

We already were waiting for Ludum Dare two months before it started. We participated in LD53 and made a little game called Souls Delivery (unfortunatelly, we didn't stand out that time). So I, being a GD and PM, seeked for some tips, tricks and other sorcery about jams, game design, project management (т.т) and even something useful for team members.

We had quite a big team in this jam (three 2D-artists, sound- and level- desinger in single person, GD and very talented programmer), but even there some problems can appear. Everyone needs to have a role, all of us must have a single and clear vision for the game, everything must be connected and organized well.

And for the first time we nailed it almost perfectly (even though I was a bit anxious about jam before start)! You probably won't believe me, but it's possible to do a game in team with decent organization, with little to no misunderstanding, and with no conflicts between members.

Development milestones

We'd like to share some images and footage of several development milestones:

1. Concepts of chreatures and monsters His name is Pyrik. He's our favourite one.

He's a Freaking Hunter (literally, that's his name).

He's a middle-sized bad guy. Untitled. No name.

2. Magic circle

Um, that's just a test scene. Nothing to see here.

3. Auto-battler and summon animation

First auto-battler and cool summon animation!

*4. First game balance *

With some trial and error we managed to balance game to the playable state... But not on the first try 💀

Bestiary

For those who want to see all available creatures, but who cannot get all of them in-game: A Bestiary!

| Portrait | Name | Stats | Description | | -------- | ---- | ----- | ----------- | | | Ratoroo | Low HP Low ATK Low SPD | Based, has personality of chihuahua. Will bite you without hesitation. | | | Pyrik | Low HP Low ATK High SPD | Very polite, curious and silly. | | | Emo | Low HP High ATK Low SPD | Timid guy who doesn't like violence but does like to eat berries. | | | Freaking Hunter | Low HP High ATK High SPD | Acts like older brother, serious and protective. | | | Bloomba | High HP Low ATK Low SPD | Friend-shaped | | | Mr. Uptight | High HP Low ATK High SPD | Tense fella, has anger issues. | | | Kusok | High HP High ATK Low SPD | Nobody likes him. | | | Just-a-dragon | High HP High ATK High SPD | Looks wise but has not a single thought behind his eyes. |

On Ludum Dare 56 among others appeared a game called Stolen Colors about tiny creatures that try to return, well, stolen colors from angry predators and make the world colorful once again.

For those who forgor or didn't played yet: in this game, you need to draw runes (similar to the pattern lock screen on smartphones), which summon and upgrade the little creatures that the player helps on their adventure. They fight off waves of enemies and gradually bring colors back to the world by collecting orbs at the end of each level.

While most of the players liked the concept, there was a lot of fair critique in its address.

UniOwl here, Stolen Colors' game designer and technical artist. Today I'll tell you, how did we improve our game, why we did some of the decisions, and what we have now.

In-game tutorial

Tutorial often is a big problem not only games that we do with our team, but of a jam games that we see. There's little time for development, and to succeed in gameplay, make a pretty graphics, some of the things must be thrown out, and tutorial is usually got rid of in the first place.

Despite that you can add tutorial on game page, usually players try to play first, and only after that they read everything trying to understand why they can't do anything. And that's very bad, because lack of tutorial and unintuitive gameplay frustrates the player and make its perception of the game worse (remember, no one likes to feel stupid while playing). We handled that, added short hints on how to play the game:

Difficulty

The second most mentioned thing was game's difficulty. Its fix is a lot harder as it requires a lot of hard work fine tuning various parameters.

And while it technically completeable (one of our artist made it to the very end!), it is quite a challenge, and most of the players didn't see colorfullness of the world.

Balance

First on our table was balance of the creatures. We understood how to fix that from the very beginning, but as for the tutorial we just didn't have time for that. We remade base characters stats and their progression over time.

Now one enemy is stronger than one ally (after all, predators are bigger and scarier than our tinies), and you have to counter every enemy with two or three allies.

Warriors beat tanks

Tanks beat mages

Mages beat warriors

Boss atacks were also changed. I accidentally made a mistake, where bosses had powerful attack that dealed a lot of damage to all allies. And if the player is unlucky, boss could use this attack three times in a row and destroy every possible squad. Now it is fixed.

Oh hell nah 💀

Fair random

One of the comments lead us to a thought that too much random in runes cast must be reworked as player's success should not depend on luck. While we tried to avoid random in game (this is why you see the same exact enemies every try), it is difficult to do something with runes. So we tried to make it in such a way that if one of the runes don't spawn now, its spawn chance is raised (as described very well here https://www.charliecleveland.com/types-of-randomness-part-2/).

Chance for comeback

As we initially planned, after losing a wave, player is thrown back, which reminds a bit of tug-of-war game. And if enemies managed to capture all the castles or player is defeated in boss battle, level restarts. Instead, in jam version, player get sent to the main menu (uh-oh), and enemy capture raises the error, after what player gets stuck.

All of that were fixed, and now player also has two castles intead of one, which allows him to make a comeback on the beginning.

Feel of progression and available information

In jam version player sees drawing board and field where creatures spawn and fight. That's it! What should he expect from the wave? How much actually he gains from the bonuses?

There were no answers... Till now! Now player sees tinies' current stats and enemies on the following wave. Despite this, game doesn't show all of the info (for example, he doesn't know the strength of the enemies or what to expect from reinforcements).

Drawing phase

At first, player is given with some time to draw the runes. There's very big drawback: player's success depends not only his strategic and conscious decisions but on how fast can he draw.

Fun fact: our another, somewhat similar game, Circle of Life, suffers from the same flaw. Why I didn’t fix this issue right away is a mystery to me.

We removed the timer entirely. Now, instead of being rushed, the player is given a set number of drawings they need to complete before each wave.

Narrative and Visuals

Even the narrative got a small but interesting change. The game’s page tells a short story about how evil predators stole all the colors, leaving the world dim black and white. At the end of each of the three levels, the player returns one of the colors to the world.

To better illustrate the conflict between the creatures and the game feel, we decided to make the predators and the boss always colorful. They didn’t just steal the colors — they kept them for themselves, refusing to share with others (how mean of them!). We wanted to implement this idea during the game jam, but modifying the effect for this turned out to be technically challenging (Unity works in quite a peculiar way sometimes). It took a lot of time after the jam, so we probably wouldn’t have been able to finish this feature within the short three days anyway.

Predators that stole the red color are now always red themselves.

Mages now actually fire their projectiles, as you saw earlier. And we replaced the locks with crosses so that players wouldn’t mistake them with something unlockable. Additionally, we played around with the bonus colors to make them more distinguishable.

Technical Challenges

All this didn’t come without technical difficulties. We were told that in one browser the game wouldn’t launch at all. Also, there were some bugs in the original version (luckily, no one seems to have noticed yet, or at least no one’s mentioned them), and we fixed those.

A lot of time went into refining the effects (and our genuine confusion about why the game behaves differently across platforms), as well as dealing with the jam site, which refused to play the music for some reason.

However, now all those issues are behind us, and you can try out the new version on the jam site or on itch. We’re very happy with the result and hope to delight you with more interesting games in the future! We’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’ve created.

Game on ldjam: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/stolen-colors

Game on itch: https://thespinningsofa.itch.io/stolen-colors

It'll be my 5th LD entry, and 17th game jam participation overall (and still a lot of room for improvement)

Whether it is your 1st participation or 10th, don't give up, don't forget to have fun in your project (that is the most important thing for me in jams at least), sleep and eat well, and good luck!!! Let's make cool things

Some people in the comments liked the way our game looks, so I thought it will be cool to break down some aspects on our graphical setup that should be fairly easy to implement even in a jam games.

Our entry: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/ld-58-1

This is how our game looks like:

There are two main techniques that we use:

2D lights/masks

This is the scene without any lighting, only sprites:

Thanks to our artists, it already looks nice, but we can make it better.

Look at the flowers and butterflies: they are not affected by sun at all. Our artist hand painted the field with the lighting directly on background. We asked him to draw one special mask, where white color = the pixel is "lit" by sun, and black = "shadow":

Then we overlayed this mask on our butterflies and flowers. Unity specifically has 2D sprite-shaped lights, so we added one global ambient light (to make shadows anything but black) and one sprite light with bright yellow color. The result looks like so:

Color grading / LUTs

Then, we added one simple postprocessing effect that essentially works like so: it takes an image, a special palette (LookUp Textures, or LUTs), and changes color of an image to that palette. Almost like photoshoping!

Our another artist took screenshot of the game, and did a quick color adjustments for different times of day. Then, those adjustments were applied to "default palette" to create a modified ones.

Then the game every frame takes those LUTs and, based on time of day, calculates current and next time of day, and blends their LUTs together smoothly.

And with this effect we can drastically change the mood of the scene easily!

Last words...

That is all the major effects we used. There are also some animations and butterfly effects. You should check out our sick holographic effect!!! (maybe I'll explain how it works later)

Overall, those little things can greatly improve looks and feel of the game. Don't underestimate contribution of game polishing, and, if you have time, ask yourself "How can I make my game more believable? More complete and fleshed out?" Maybe, it would be better to make the most out of your not-so-big game rather than trying to squeeze a lot of things in 48h/72h development?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Mx9eBroFw