Prior Jams

Last Friday, Ludum Dare 54 started, and I couldn't just not participate, since I have all the free time in the world now, there's simply no excuse to pass up on a good old game jam to hone my skills. I'm definitely going to write up a little post-mortem to publish some time this week, but for now, I decided to take a look at my other, previous experiences with game jams.

What's in the past

Sluggish Grind

My very first participation was in Ludum Dare 45, where I made Sluggish Grind, here's the page for it in the Ludum Dare site. The original Jam version was pretty lacking, it didn't have music, the design was not finalized, there were no such niceties as hit feedback on enemies and there were no prompts to guide the player in the right direction. I fixed most of these issues in the post-jam version that is available to play on my site. Despite the many flaws with the game I submit, the comments I got were generally positive, it was a fun little game, especially if you could figure out the hidden mechanic I snuck in where you could make your little sluggy glide around at warp speeds.

And then... it would take a long time before I actually finished anything for Ludum Dare again.

Keep it alive

That was the theme for Ludum Dare 46, for which I had started on a project, but I had no idea where I wanted it to go. I made a snowscape and a foggy main scene, but it didn't go much further than that. A low-poly snowscape

And this is what player.tscn looks like... A weird low-poly dog-like creature

Cyber Bird

The theme for Ludum Dare 48 was "Deeper and deeper."

This was my first attempt at a Ludum Dare in a team, I got together with Floralope (CW: Twitter), and he did some lovely little sprites for our main character.

A spritesheet containing many sprites of a white robotic bird-like creature with blue holographic wings

I was also very satisfied with the movement for this game...

Unfortunately, we overscoped, and our workflow wasn't efficient enough, so we couldn't have possibly finished the game in time.

The Axolotl Magician

This wasn't for Ludum Dare, but rather for Mini Jam. Regardless, it was another failed project. I had designed a cute little axolotl magician and wanted to incorporate the suits as gameplay significant symbols

A spritesheet for a cute little pink axolotl magician with a top hat, tuxedo and bowtie

I didn't make much progress on this one either. I saw the theme, made a cute character and noticed afterwards I had no idea what sort of game I wanted to make. While that had worked for Sluggish Grind, it is clearly not a very sustainable mindset for this kind of challenge.

If I want to get something done, I need to know what I want to be done. Doing things aimlessly as I had done for all these prior projects was not going to work, and it took several failures to realize that.

These files are dated November 2019, and it was shortly after this that I got a job and found myself unmotivated and unwilling to take part in game jams again for a long time afterwards.

Bunpacking

This was the first time I took part in a jam not as the programmer, but as artist and designer, Chai (CW: Mastodon) and I got together and we had agreed almost instantly on what our game should be and were in sync for the whole duration of the jam.

It was Ludum Dare 53, and the theme was "Delivery," so we went for something simple and cute that very overtly made use of the theme.

We went for a Paper Mario-esque aesthetic, featuring 2D character sprites in a 3D environment, and I did all the art and animations for this project.

Sprite sheet for a white postbunny with a light blue dress and a cap with a circular emblem, player character for the game Bunpacking

Spritesheet for the Nabber, a raccoon with a constant devious grin on its face, the enemy in Bunpacking

I designed those characters to be very easy to draw repeatedly (notice the noodle limbs,) since I was supposed to animate them and there was no way around it, and I believe I pulled it off in a way that doesn't make it seem like I was taking an easy route. It was definitely deliberate in the sense I wanted to make it easier for myself, but it still worked in favor of the game's aesthetic.

I also designed a little house model for the locations the player had to deliver items to. There are 4 different textures for the model that are applied in engine to differentiate the four houses.

A pink-purple house, a very simple model with hand-drawn textures, giving it a childish look

The UV mapping is a complete mess, but nobody is gonna pay attention to that while playing the game.

In short, this was a resounding success and to this day I am very happy with the result. Bunpacking came out a very fun game.

Hindsight

For a lot of these jams, especially the failed attempts, I've noticed that I took more of an art-first approach, rather than one focusing on mechanics, or any real gameplay aspect that would be more substantial for a finished product than aesthetics.

And, in fact, with my newest entry, COSMOSTRIDE, made for Ludum Dare 54, I focused on the game first, I had an idea, I laid it out, and all I had to do was execute it.

I think that was a very important step, and something very important to find out about myself.

Keeping that in mind for the future, I aim to make even more projects soon.