Iris's Scrappy Rumble - A Ludum Dare 52 Post Mortem

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/iriss-scrappy-rumble

Day 1 - Programming

Well, developing this game was quite fun.  On the first day of development, I spent a lot of time planning and writing out ideas. Eventually, I finalized my design document and got to work on making this thing. Funnily enough, Iris is actually a pre-existing character of mine, however, she never had a proper home yet. So, I decided this would be the perfect time to use her!

There were two other ideas I had before landing on this one, feel free to use them, as I have no plans for them!

• Class Clown - A roguelike where you play as a clown in a classroom setting, your main weapon is a spitball and the objective is to harvest smiles from children. Adventure from classroom to classroom and try to harvest all the smiles before you’re defeated by the administration.
• Hellhole - A roguelike in which you constantly fall down a hole. Your goal is to get to the bottom of the hole to harvest a rare treasure. During the fall, you encounter several enemies and you have a basic kick attack. After an enemy dies, it leaves behind several pickups that can be harvested to craft new attacks. Rinse and repeat until you reach the boss and win. The physics alone would make this challenging.

However, they were both scrapped for being too large in scope. There was no way I was going to be able to finish those games in roughly 24 hours. Yes, the jam is 48 hours long, but I only develop the game jam in the time that I have available. I make sure that  I get proper sleep, eat, and everything else, etc. So, ultimately, I only have about 24 hours to make something.

I split my development up like this. For the first 1-2 or so hours, after the theme was announced, I'd jot down ideas until I found one I really liked. With this theme in particular, I wanted to make sure I stood out. So I tried to not have anything to do with the farming aesthetic, while still adhering to the theme of harvesting. This hurt my placement a lot in the long run, but I still did very well. Funnily enough, there was a very easy way I could've scored way higher in theme. All I would've had to do is have the harvested resources visibility growing on the ground before you collected them. This was honestly originally planned, I don't know why it wasn't implemented.

Anyways, on day one, I purely programmed the game. I had a really long programming session with no testing until the session was over. Thankfully, all the code worked on the first try and there were no bugs to fix! Yes, this is not a joke, it did work flawlessly. Usually, there are a ton of issues I run into when doing things this way, but I guess I've just gotten better. This was very nice to see :) 

Of course, you can view the source code at https://github.com/sscolon/ludum-dare-52-game. The game was developed in the Unity Engine and I took a lot of programming shortcuts since this is a jam game. There are a lot of pieces of code that could easily be optimized and most of the systems are very tightly coupled, so it would be a bit difficult to expand the game if I wanted to continue it. If I do continue this project in the future, I'm definitely rewriting the codebase. 

Day 2 - Art

The game was fully playable from start to finish at the end of day one, so on day two I purely focused on polishing and creating art for the game. I made sure I scoped really small so I could do a dev cycle like this. As a result, day two was very relaxing. I also spent some time looking at what other people were creating. I saw some really promising works, I knew this was going to be quite fun.

The game's art style took a lot of inspiration from games like **Paper Mario**, while still having its own unique spin on things inspired by my own usual art style. Characters flip like pieces of paper, and the pixel-perfect aspects make the effects look quite cool in my opinion. There are still a lot of brush-ups and polishes I would've liked to do with this, but it got the job done!

Day 3 - Music, UI & Wrap-Up

Nothing else really happened on day two, but at the start of day three, I realized I had no music for the game yet. It usually takes me quite a while to create an OST so this was a huge problem. So, I did what any normal human being would do and speedrun the music-making process to the best of my ability. All the music in the game was created in under an hour, so I knew it wasn't going to be that good. However, I still liked how it turned out.

I also created the title screen art for the game today and started working on the UI. Unfortunately, the game faltered a bit in the UI. I didn't have much time left so I just threw together whatever I could cook up in the shortest period of time. The font also ended up being very difficult to read as I just grabbed the quickest thing I could find. I probably should've spent a bit more time working here, even if I didn't have time to do the music, the UI could've turned out a lot better.

So how was the game in the end? As I said, it turned out quite well. Maybe I'll return to this project in the future to add the scrapped content and brush up on all the rough edges. However, for now, I'm content with leaving this game as is. The game placed 15th overall and 5th in fun, which is an outstanding improvement from the last time I entered. Not to mention the top 15! I'll definitely try to outdo that next time, I already have a few ideas for what I can do differently.

Key Takeaways & Problems

1. The balance was slightly off, though this was due to a lack of time to properly tune the game. There was no way to restore your HP, the 3 hearts you got at the beginning were all that you had. So even if you did start playing really well in the late game you could just as easily die. This did keep the stakes really, high, but I definitely should've had some sort of healing system.
2. Some sort of progression or permanent upgrades to your character would've benefitted the game massively. There were plans to have permanent upgrades fall from the sky after every 3-5 waves, but again, there was not enough time to implement this. Next time, I'll try to implement all of the core mechanics, and expansions of it on the first day.
3. Finally, people did have some issues with the pacing, as it did take a while to get to the more difficult stages of the game, new waves/content took a while to come so each run was a bit slow to startup. This could easily be fixed if I allocated time for tuning the game.

Despite all of that, people still had a lot of fun with the game! So what did I learn from this jam? Well, I think I'm on the right track. I'm going to keep simplifying my games (in ways that make sense), while also designing them in ways that allow for a high level of replayability and mastery, I should make sure to put a heavier focus on quality-of-life features and ensure that there is no aspect of the game's design that is confusing. Basically, simplicity is key.

Next time, I'm going to try to develop a bit faster so I can put more work into aspects of my games that people find really engaging!