LD51 Jam Postmortem

by Allen Lambert

Oct 5, 2022

Well it’s over. I think I’ve finally recovered two whole days after my first Ludum Dare (or any) game jam! Woo! Sure, I’ve developed a few small projects before this one, but the capacity at which I embraced this jam may have been a little much.

To recap, the jam theme was “Every 10 Seconds. Not my favorite, but it worked. My team met on the night of announcement. The other team members were some friends and their acquaintances. They had zero experience with game development, which left it to me to organize everything and do a little teaching. Not that I’m a pro, but I was certainly designated team lead. The other members did great when they were active, but unfortunately they were not very active at all. In retrospect, I could have done the jam solo and applied my project to the comp instead of the more casual jam. I’m not at all upset by this though. I sharpened my management skills. I run a business so it’s not difficult for me to manage people, but this experience was my first time in GIT and task-based goals.

Summary

Highlights

Project: Find The Cure

Goal: Finish a polished product in 72 hours

Style: 2D Platformer, Action, Lite Horror, Fast Paced

We started discussion on what type of game to make and landed on four options based on the theme “Every 10 Seconds”. My suggestion was first, as most of the team looked to me for a decision. I thought of a puzzle room game which teleports you between two puzzle rooms every 10 seconds and swaps solved rooms with new rooms. Another suggestion was for a memory card game, and the third was for a Simon game clone. Ultimately, we landed on our fourth idea, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde inspired, 2D platformer. We all unanimously loved this idea and ran with it. After dancing around with different character types, we decided a human turning werewolf each cycle just made the most sense. I encouraged the group to keep design and art as simple as possible moving forward and we parted ways. We were now in prototype and design.

During the design phase I made sure to lay out a rigid task list. It was not followed very well, but it was fun putting it together and I do think the team got some level of task comprehension out of it. I quickly moved to type as much code and toss as many Unity assets into the game as possible. I used my handy programmer art skills at first and eventually got serious about art once the proto was fully finished. No, I’m not a great artist, but yes I feel proud of what I made work. Ricky, our artist, put together a nice draft of the werewolf for us, which I traced in Procreate to animate. I tested the game, built the game, had my kids play test, and looked to the group for advice all about a hundred times each. I still managed to find time to go to my sons basketball game Friday night and have a prolonged lunch and dinner with my grandparents Saturday evening, but I was definitely worn thin by Monday evening.

Complications

The biggest hurdle I had in development was level design. That and the speed of my character(s) being probably a little too fast. The biggest feedback I received was that the character speed for the werewolf was just too fast. I also had upload issues with ldjam.com, but itch.io worked fine. I don’t think I was alone in this. As for the level design, I had to make sure the collectables and eatable NPCs were disbursed in a way that made the game challenging, but not so frustrating it couldn’t be beaten. My son and I each beat the game once and that was good enough for me.

Reflection

Would I do it again? HECK YEAH! This is my passion. I mentioned I’m a business owner, but did you know I’m planning an exit strategy to start my own game development studio? Well experiences like this just solidify proof of concept for me. I’m a game developer at heart and I’ll die this way!

That escalated quickly… Really though, I loved every minute of it and it was so rewarding. I think I would have liked more time to prepare myself and my team. They were rookies more than me, but still I was very much a rookie too. We could have communicated better and built a better product, but we worked well with what game dev experience we had and we did it! We finished a decent jam game within 72 hours or less.

Next time, I would like to make sure everyone is well prepared going into the jam and has all of the resources needed. This project goal was 100% achieved and I feel great about it. Even though this game was highly ridiculous and silly, it was nice fulfilling the role of team lead and it was great working with others to build a functional, hopefully fun, finished game.

Thanks for reading if you got this far and see my links below to follow. I’m not sure about devlogs. I have been thinking about doing these, but I’m afraid they might take too long and no one will see them, so if you are there… let me know! I will respond according to the level of interest you produce.

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