Ludum Dare 54: My First Game Jam

The game jam I chose to join was Ludum Dare 54. This online game jam is one of the biggest and oldest. It runs every six months and counts around 2000 submissions each iteration. There are two competitions. "The Compo" , which is 48 hours long, requires you to join alone, and make everything yourself, and "The Jam", which is 72 hours long, allows teams and re-used or 3rd party assets. Using assets that are not created by you during the jam means that you are not able to participate in certain voting categories.

I joined "The Jam" together with a friend of mine by the name of Tron. Although he had no previous experience making games, he does have something I don't: musical ability! So I put him in charge of audio. He took some time beforehand to learn audio tools like Reaper and bfxr, and we were off to the races!

The Theme and Idea Generation

1. Create a mind map together with as many different ways to interpret the theme as possible.
2. Write down game ideas for yourself on sticky notes. Don't overthink them; try to make them clear in one or two sentences.
3. One by one, place the sticky notes on the board and provide additional explanation for the game ideas as needed.
4. Together, choose the three best ideas. This can be done by eliminating ideas until three remain.
5. Expand upon the three ideas further. This should give a better idea of their potential and feasibility.
6. Together, select the most enjoyable game idea based on fun and feasibility.
7. Develop the chosen game idea further. Consider the number of levels, characters, etc.
8. Create a rough plan for implementing features. Begin by creating a quick prototype to test how enjoyable the game is.

The Development Process and Submitting

Right after the brainstorm we started prototyping the game. We got off to a quick start and within two hours a somewhat playable prototype of the game was born. It was a great way for us to gauge the potential and fun of the game. Implementing the features was going at a rapid pace, but this came at the expense of orderliness and cleanliness of the code.

The afternoon of the first day was spent trying to make the physics of the luggage feel good. I was using the build in Unity physics, and struggled to get it to behave the way I wanted. I did briefly play around with softbody physics, but encountered too many issues to continue that venture.

During the first day we also tried our hand at making the art for the game and this turned out to be difficult. Getting things to look the way we wanted them to look was hard and we lost quite a few hours trying to get it to work. I ended up going to bed after the first day with some doubts on the art direction and if we were going to be able to get things to look good.

Another thing that happened at the end of the first day was something wild! My Unity crashed and I lost a lot of progress, luckily I knew how everything worked and in about an hour I was back where we were before the crash.

The next day we had a breakthrough regarding art. The most helpful step we took was choosing the color palette and working from there. Tron created a background which helped me by having something to base the tileset and other components on. This brought back the confidence that things would come together in the end.

One of the best features of the game is the winning animation of the horse speeding off. This idea was born from a problem I was facing. Initially I planned on fully animating the horse, but realizing this would take a lot of time, which frankly, we did not have, I came up with the horse and wagon racing off as a joke. But it ended up working perfectly and I think it is a big factor for the scores we ended up getting! More on that later!

The Community and Feedback During Ludum Dare, after three days of creating games, everyone has the opportunity to play and rate other peoples games. This process takes about two and a half weeks. The games are rated on the following categories:

Some of these are optional, for example you were asked to opt out of graphic and audio if you did not make your own assets. Humor, mood, and theme were also optional if they were not applicable for your game. For our game we allowed people to vote on all categories, as all were applicable.

The process of playing and rating games was a lot of fun. Some games were absolutely amazing, and made me wonder how one would even make something like that in such a short time. For the competition to work the idea is that everyone rates at least twenty games and gets rated at least twenty times to be eligible for a ranking. Rating more games means your game gets recommended to more people, which is the best way to ensure those twenties in both rated and ratings.

We ended up rating 38 games and got rated 28 times. Looking at the stats from the ratings we gave to other games it looks like we ended up with something close to a normal distribution when looking at the distribution of stars given. Which makes me feel like we rated fairly and made great use of the full range of possible ratings!

Some of my favorites games from the ones I came across were:

The Result

Going into this Game Jam Tron and I discussed our goals. We weren't necessarily looking for a high ranking. We wanted to see if we could create a cool project in very little time, just as a challenge. When discussing ratings we did want to be at least in the top 50% of games. Top 25% would be an awesome achievement and top 10% would be unbelievable. But we didn't dare to dream that high. During those weeks of rating games we receive very positive feedback on our game. This is to be expected as it is the nature of the jam to be positive, supportive, and overall a fun experience. But we still felt humbled by the comments! Here are some examples:

Very polished game! I laughed so hard when the horse left for the first time, why the struggle of animating a horse when IT CAN BE A RACING CAR x) Great gameplay, great variations between levels, I kept being engaged until the end. Ludum is also about choosing a reasonable scope and I have the feeling you succed in that too, congrats for your game!

Pikario

Came back to say that it's incredible this was made by 2 people! Thank you 😀

FloTheSnitchy

Pretty sneaky with that last level there! While the style of the graphics is on the more simplistic end, everything fit well together. Audio wasn't too loud (thank you!) and fit the gameplay well. I must say though, the main character has some oddly shaped luggage…

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And then for the actual result. We were eagerly waiting, refreshing the page to see the result. When they were finally released we were absolutely shocked… blown away!! We placed 64th overall… out of 1600 games! That puts us in the top 4%! And in the humor category we placed 33th! I guess a horse acting like a racing car gets people going!

Reflection and Lessons Learned

This experience taught me a lot. From time management to quick prototyping, my game development skills sure have improved. Some points I would like to reflect on:

• Taking a theme and turning it into a game idea can be a challenge. The approach we took to come up with our idea worked great and is definitely something I would do again!
• Being able to make a quick prototype after coming up with the idea is a great way to get a feel for the game and gauge the fun. That went great!
• When making a quick prototype, still prioritize decent programming and project management. This is something that got a little out of hand and resulted in me having to use some time to refactor the code. Not ideal!
• Make frequent back-ups. Losing our progress after the first day was scary. In the end it didn’t have a big impact because I was able to recreate everything relatively quickly, but this could have been much worse!
• Teamwork is difficult. A big challenge we faced was how to divide the work. Tron having next to no experience in the development and art department, dividing work after he completed the audio was difficult. Definitely something to plan for beforehand next time.
• Something I regret is not taking enough time to provide feedback on Tron’s work. Not because his work needed the feedback, but because only giving feedback like “Yes sounds great” and “I think that works!” is not very helpful and also not very fun. Even though there is a time pressure, taking time to listen to what he created and try to see how it fits the bigger picture, is super valuable and definitely something I’ll do more next time.

Conclusion

I’m super happy with the experience and the result. I didn’t even dare to dream that this result would be possible. I look forward to joining more game jams in the future! As for the game: We might look into ideas on how we would change and expand it in the future to see if possibly releasing a full version is something we would like to do. Thanks for reading and playing the game!

Thanks for reading and playing the game!