Ludum Dare 43 Postmortem - Penance

LD43 Postmortem - Penance

Getting our game idea

The Ludum Dare jam is always really difficult and takes a lot of work to finish anything. Developers have to go through the already arduous process of making a game, but while conforming with a set theme and time constraints. The theme this time for Ludum Dare was Sacrifices Must Be Made, and the three of us decided to take part in it. Our first game idea had to do with the player racing against a countdown timer, though they could buy more time with money they earn by defeating enemies. While sacrificing time to explore and experiment in the game would fit the theme idea, it didn’t seem to fit it right enough for us. So we took it one step up, the currency in the game would be blood. You get blood by defeating enemies and the more humanoid in size and anatomy(also the more difficult they are to kill), the more blood you would be able to grab from their corpses.

The Game

Our game ended up being a top-down action game where the player travels around the map fighting various enemies and collecting their blood. The player can use their blood as currency and talk to NPCs to purchase items, like more time, health, and weapons. The goal of the game is to reach the demon lord and defeat him.

Working in a team

For this project we had 2 programmers work on different versions of the same game using Github, which we luckily got the hang of in the first night of the game jam. We figured out how to push and pull from the main file and fix merge errors(kinda frustrating at first but we figured out an easy way to fix those pretty fast, luckily.) For most of the jam we tried to stay in a Discord call while we worked on the game. Our third member was in charge of sound effects such as the music and NPC voices. While working on the game, we realized quickly that our schedules did not always line up, but luckily we were able to utilize conference calls whenever possible. While this was mostly done between the two programmers, our third teammate was able to check in between shifts at work.

Game Design

We had to center our game design around the theme of sacrifice. For the shop keepers we made one male and one female. The players aren’t told this but they have the option to kill the shop keepers and take their blood(to be used to purchase weapons, health, or time) at the cost of not being able to buy the item that current shop keeper has for sale. We also randomized which shop keeper sells what in order for each game state to be different(albeit slightly). We had to program the shop keepers to prompt text and buttons displaying what the player can purchase and whether or not they can afford it. The team liked the idea of blood sacrifices so we centered the game around collecting blood from monsters scattered around the map. There are enemies ranging from rats to goblins to cultists, each with their own amounts of blood able to be siphoned from their corpses. The enemies AI is set up using basic state machines. They have an idle state, a chase state, and an attack state. They start in their idle state, and when the player gets close enough they switch to their chase state and close in on the player. Once they are close enough, they enter their attack state, after which they revert back to their chase state with a slight cooldown to avoid them attacking the player indefinitely.

Audio development

When deciding to add music to a game, we first had to nail down the genre and musical styles we wanted to utilize. As we narrowed down our genre of game, we felt a medieval/fantasy style of instrumentation was needed. The music score started with just strings and generic percussion instruments, but then we added electronic instruments like a synthesizer and electric guitar in order to combine the fantasy feel with the time honored electronic sound of a typical 2D retro game. Much of the sound that comes out of the synthesizer patch relies on triangle, sawtooth, and square waves, and the various combinations of these were great for blending the two musical styles. The software we used was Finale, a music notation software that allows us to write out notes on a score, play the audio for what we write out, and then export the project as a .wav file when complete. While this program has helped us write music for years, but it has a long way to go to compete with the natural sounds of more modern music writing softwares/patches. In the future, we may look into utilizing different softwares to export music.

Sound effects were done in a number of ways, including foley art, a number of sound effects/patch generators, and audio editors. For the collection of blood, we filled a bathtub with water and dropped a water-resistant cell phone into it. Different combinations of drops, water splashes, and bubbling were used to nail down just the sound we wanted for the “blood collect” audio. The other sounds like attack/hit sounds were a bit less exciting and were simply done with trial and error with different combinations of wave patches and modifying them as needed once we found a timbre we liked.

Final Notes

We were pretty happy with what we ended up with this Ludum Dare. We got a working game and all its parts up without too much trouble. We’re excited seeing all the feedback we’ve gotten so far for this game and are looking forward to making more in the future. If you’ve read this far then thanks for your time, and hopefully you look forward to what we end up making next!