Record and summary of Ludum Dare 45

I took part in the game jam activity Ludum Dare 45 last weekend with three friends. Actually this is the second time for us to participate in a jam, we also participated Ludum Dare 44 in April of this year. For me, the main difference between these two jam is my character in the team. In the Ludum Dare 44, we decided to use the Game Maker Studio 2 as our game engine, for I was not very skilled with GMS2, I took more design work, and also did some art related work as auxiliary of our painter(though I was not so skilled with painting, I still could draw some enemies or floors...), while this time I was the main programmer in the team. We used unity this time, which game engine that I think I know it very well.

 Design

At the first we saw the theme "Start with nothing", we thought this theme is easy to be fitted, actually we found that for any rogue-like or rogue-lite game, you can say you "start with nothing" over and over again in this game, but we tried to create some more different and interesting things(also I do not very like rogue-like games for I think the 'felling of loss' always make me upset). After a period of discussion, we listed two possible stories. The first one is to create a protagonist like a missionary, this guy try to preach his religion in different areas, so every time he tries to do his missionary work, he "start with nothing". The second one is to create a protagonist that dying and tries to stay alive. So he make a deal with a demon, he have to forsake some part of his life to get younger. So this guy gave up his money, his house, his offsprings, his wife and his parents...In the end, he become a little baby but have nothing, which means "start with nothing"(I think this story can be a good movie script).

Finally we decided to use the first story as our game script. In order to add some banter and humor to the game, we chose the Flying Spaghetti Monsterism(FSM) as the religion that the protagonist believes in. With this background, we gave the protagonist an image that combines missionary and cook, designed some enemies like rabbits and ninjas(which are the main enemies in the FSM's doctrines), and some pirate elements into the game, for FSM regard pirates as their friends.

Programming

In the programming process, the most impressive part of my work is the hook system design. Our level designer required a hook system that satisfy the following functions: if there is an anchor point nearby, the character can use the hook and the anchor point to swing to another position; if there's no anchor point, the character can also use the hook to drag some boxes. I spent many hours in this system to satisfy those functions. 

But actually I can not say the hook system is well done, for there's still some bugs here. If there is no anchor point near by, and player press "K" very frequently, the sprites of hook would not destroy themselves, and there would be many hooks remain in the scene. Also, if the box needs to be dragged is just on the verge of the hook's range, then the box would be destroyed with the hook's sprite. But in the jam process, we did not have enough time to do quality assurance, so we did not find those bugs then. But I have to admit that I can do better when I was writing those codes, at least if I can be more careful, some bugs can be avoided.

Summary

Our team had a review meeting last night, and concluded some shortcomings of the game, which name is "Travel With Spaghetti". I would record them in this blog post.

1.The theme "Start with nothing" is not reflected directly in our game, though at the beginning of design we thought much about it. It was designed as a 2d act game, which I find that actually it is very hard for it to get over the influence of metroidvania game. We spent many time on act system and level design, which leads to a patterning game play part. I think in a jam activity, we should spend more time on game play design instead of story design, or it would be very hard for players to know what we want to convey through the game. Especially because we did not show our background story to the player directly, it is really hard for players connect the game with the jam theme.

2.We spent little time on quality assurance, which results in many "little bugs". They can be debugged very easily, but for we did not deal with them one by one, finally these bugs would cause a fatal problem to our players' game experience. Even there is a bricks dislocation problem here, so player can not pass through a door to the next room. It's a pity.

3.We gave our protagonist a box collider, so it would been stuck in the walls or floors. USE CAPSULE THE NEXT TIME! Also we spend little time on adjust the parameters of the component rigidbody2D so that our game has a relative bad handle feeling in jump/double jump(we do not want double jump anymore).

Even though with all these shortcomings, we designed and programmed a game completely after all. Also we have a very skilled painter, I think graphic is the best part of the game. With all these experience, I think we can do better in the next time. I would put the game download link at the end of this blog post, and I promise will provide a BIG update to this game. We want to make it more fascinating.

Travel With Spaghetti download link:https://dtfdplus.itch.io/travel-with-spaghetti

(But I do not recommend you to download this game now, for it is a jam game with low completion. I and my friends will update the game soon, and launch a more playable version.)