Ludum Dare 53: Congo Premiere
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My first game jam was an eye opener! With about 3 months’ worth of game development experience I decided to take on the task of my first game jam. I really didn’t know what to expect going into it. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to come up with a game based on the theme, and I wasn’t sure if I would even have enough time to get something playable together. I had low hopes, but I think that’s what made it easier.
I went into it with the mindset that no matter what happens, that it is only about the experience. Then the game jam started and the theme was announced - “Delivery” - uhhhh, what should I do? Should I take it quite literally or should I try to be clever about that theme? I froze for about an hour while I tried to come up with something clever. After losing an hour I realized, this is about experience, I’m not going out there to win any awards, I only have 3 months’ experience, so I should see if I can just finish a game before time runs out. I figured anything I got out there was a win in and of itself. So I got started.
The first thing that came to mind was Paperboy, one of the first games I can remember playing when I was younger. Then I thought, well how can I update it? I know, delivery drones! I took the inspiration of the controls from Escape Velocity: Nova which was introduced to me by my best friend in the early 00’s, and quickly became one of my favorite space shooters. At the end of the first night I had a basic player controller set up and could move and rotate a square around. Then I had to decide, since drones can also go side-to-side, should I implement that as well? I decided no, if I do that, then nobody will use the rotation, and the controls may become too easy. I have to have some difficulty in the game. Whether that was the right decision or not, I’m not sure, but I had to make a decision.
Saturday morning I got to work nice and early, and I had a big day ahead of me. I placed a bunch of empty objects (spawn points) on the screen, put them into an array, and created a random number generator to randomly select which spawn point the delivery target would spawn on. Then I added an offscreen indicator to point to the target if it was off screen so you knew which direction to head in. The next step was to add a key press when above the target to make the “delivery”, then have another target randomly selected. I then added a counter and a time countdown. I had a start menu, game play, and a game over screen. At this point, I felt I had a game. It was near the end of the day so I decided it was time to at least start some of the art. After playing around in Affinity Designer 2, I found an art style I wanted to go with. I typically lean more towards vector graphics, but it looked a little plain until I decided to use a different brush for the stroke. I loved it. By end of day I had what looked like a basic drone, indicator, and targets. Time for bed.
Sunday I awoke refreshed and excited to continue working on the game. I created a top down view of a neighborhood, I did houses, streets, a box to drop from the drone, and I implemented the same brush on the strokes and overall I was happy with it, but felt it was missing depth. Oh well, no time to play around too much, suddenly I felt I was running out of time, and it was still late morning. There was still a huge list of items I needed to take care of before submitting it. I started recording basic sounds, I used a fan to record the hum of the drone, I recorded a cardboard box dropping on the floor, I recorded myself whistling and then made tweaks in Audacity and combined it with the cardboard box drop sound. I put it all together, and…this is annoying. The sound of the drone was flat. I tried to figure out how to raise the pitch when you started moving, but after spending too much time on it, I dropped it. All that time wasted. I should have gone with my gut and dropped it as soon as I heard it, but I was trying to force myself to use it since I created it. Oh well, maybe I can save it with music! I opened up FL Studio 21 which I had recently started playing around with and then I froze. What can I create that won’t be annoying after a minute of play? I realized I’m not a composer, all I have done is follow some basic tutorials on how to create game music. What was I thinking?!? I went to bed stressed telling myself I just shouldn’t have music, and hopefully the game will be sufficient.
It was probably the best thing I could have done in the moment. After another long day of things feeling hectic, my brain was too fried to force it to make more decisions or be creative. I awoke Monday morning, with about 11 hours until the deadline and got to work again. I played around with the music for a couple hours, before knowing that I was in over my head, I just didn’t have enough experience to expect myself to come up with award winning music, I was going to have to settle with “not annoying”. I’m not sure If I really hit that goal either, but at least there was some music with the game. I spent the rest of the game tweaking game play mechanics to make it more fun and give it more of a challenge. Then I decided I was done about 5 hours before the deadline, knowing that I had real world responsibilities I was going to have to prioritize and I would just have to settle on missing out on the remaining hours that I could have spent with polish.
I give the game one last test play to make sure it all works before uploading. and…hey where is the offscreen indicator? Where am I supposed to go? Uhhh, it was just working. What did I change? I spent an hour trying to figure out what happened, I had to leave for one of those real world priorities and just watch time tick down before racing back to try to figure it out. I had just about given up when I decided, I know maybe I should just quit and restart Unity. BAM! It’s working again.
I then upload everything onto the submittal page, upload to itch.io, and…the game is in the wrong resolution. I look up what resolution everything needs to be in, I upload again, and…still wrong resolution. Unity adds a banner to the bottom of the game when you create it as a webGL game. Time to increase the resolution height, and…BINGO! I finally had something up that I could say I was really happy with!
For the next 3 weeks I played lots of games that had been submitted hoping to hit the target to get scored myself, which I finally hit after about 2 weeks. The feedback was mixed, but very supportive. The major thing missing was further gameplay mechanics that would have made it more interesting. A lot of the suggestions were things I had intended to add if I had the time, so at least I had confirmation I was on the right track.
Things I would add if I continued building out this game:
wind gusts
neighbors coming out to shoot down the drone (my friend’s idea)
having to go back to the warehouse to pick up deliveries
more sounds to add some more comedy to the whole thing
switch it from a restricted time limit, to a restricted delivery goal and timer to see how long it takes to finish
multiplayer mode where your friends could steal your delivery
update the art for more depth, and lengthen the music so it isn’t so repetitive
Things I would add if I continued building out this game:
Overall, I was very happy with the scores I got, as well as the encouragement from the other developers who played and scored my game. Plus, I managed to absolutely nail the Theme!
