Ludum Dare: A Grimm Journey - Post-Mortem

Last week saw me participate in my first ever game jam! Ludum Dare organise one monthly, and teams or solo participants have to make a game in 72 hours. What could possibly go wrong?

The team we had comprised of:

Rob de Jager - Programming (team lead)
Rob Best - Programming
Stacy Lovage - Art
Laura Mitchell (Me!) - Design 

At the start of the jam, we were given the following theme: 

Everything on One Screen

You can see the fruits of our labour here.

Shadow puppets trapped on a single projector screen...

I will largely go through the project from a design point of view; needless to say, the game artwork was amazing and what got coded in 72 hours would have taken me weeks.



The Game
In this local co-op beat’em up platformer, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf have formed an uneasy alliance. The duo have to traverse a spooky, projector-screen world to escape the deadly encroaching Darkness that seeps up from below, but there’s a catch. They are magically linked – if either of them die, then they both die. This leaves the Big Bad Wolf deprived of a tasty human snack, and instead the sole protector of one. 

For the player controlling the Big Bad Wolf, they have a number of attacks at their disposal; they can huff and puff to hit their enemies at long range, or claw and bite them to inflict more damage at close range. While they can wipe out the Woodcutters, Witches and Trolls that hunt them down, they cannot ascend the level to escape the deadly darkness. 

The player controlling Little Red Riding Hood cannot fight, and has much lower health than the Big Bad Wolf. However, they have one skill the Big Bad Wolf does not – they can jump, and when they are in close proximity with the Big Bad Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood can help them jump. And in a world full of platforms, that is crucial. Both characters need the other to survive. 


Design Process
The starting point was for me to  come up with a core game idea. Rob dJ had already decided he wanted to do a beat 'em up style game, so that gave me a focal point for my initial brainstorming. I simply threw as many ideas as possible together, and fed them back to the team to see which garnered the most enthusiasm, and what other ideas came out of those initial thoughts.

Once an idea was formulated, I had to come up with a series of rules for our game world, playable characters and enemies. Alongside this, there were physical levels to design. With only 72 hours, there were a few moments where I had to hastily let the team know I'd omitted a crucial part of a rule from my written list.

A screenshot of part of the design spec - this covers the initial player characteristics.

What Went Well
Project Management/Collaboration - The project seemed to go relatively smoothly; I was able to get most of my parts done within the first 24 hours of the jam, which gave everyone more time to work on the design plan, and me the time to do any other tasks that needed taking care of. Project decisions were made fairly quickly; we didn't dwell too much on conflicting ideas and reached compromises to move the project along. 

Concept - The team agreed the concept fairly quickly, based on the theme and the skills we had available. Being able to think outside the box and use the theme to dictate our setting, rather than our mechanics, was fun and drove us towards a unique art aesthetic. Instead of restricting our game to a single game screen, we set it on a single projector screen, and made our world, player characters and enemies shadow puppets.

Mechanics - The overall mechanic worked pretty nicely (because we knew how it worked - see below); it had a balance of allowing players to do different things, and switch up the experience when they felt like it. The mix of deft platforming character and strong fighter allows for players with different skills to play cooperatively to get through a level, or for players to deliberately mess each other about by running into the transforming areas to switch characters at the most inopportune moment. There is freedom to play the game in a number of ways that is decided by the players, and not dictated by the design. 

Engine Choice - Using Unity made life easier for everyone. Although I did not get actively involved in building the levels for this project (Rob B did this based on my colour-coded designs) or tweaking variables, it is something I have done professionally and would have been relatively straight-forward. Everyone was able to share packages over Skype with relative ease, and prototype builds were made available online for team members to look at.

One of the designs for a later level. Purple platforms move up and down, only certain players can fall through green platforms. Black squares are enemy spawn points, and white squares are the transforming lights (which allow the player to switch their characters)

What Could Be Improved
I would definitely have liked more time to play test the game nearer completion. There were a few things I spotted.

Mechanics Clarity - If you don't read the instructions, it's not easy to tell that Big Bad Wolf can jump when close to Little Red Riding Hood; you'd have to give it a go, and there's nothing in-game to suggest you should try. This leaves the player assuming they are stuck on one platform level and will be left to die, without any clue that Little Red Riding Hood will die as well.
With more time, we could have developed an intuitive system to make it clear to the player that they have new abilities when colliding with Little Red Riding Hood. Something such as their bracelets glowing far more fiercely when in contact might have clued players in, and having them glow increasingly more dully as they move apart. Perhaps giving Big Bad Wolf glowing feet in such circumstances, or making him jump on the spot a little, would have got players wondering if he could do something more relating to movement. Of course, there's always the tried and tested pop up message, but it's nice to avoid those where possible.

Stingy Jumping - Big Bad Wolf needed a more generous jump. We simply didn't have time to do extensive play-testing and rebuild in time to submit, but this leapt out at us quite early on. Given half an hour of extra time, we would have increased the height of that jump to make platforming easier. It is possibly to leap up to the higher platforms, but it requires judicious running and jumping in different directions.

Level Testing - We simply didn't have time to play through the levels that were designed and really critique them. Though I had tried to envisage how the platforming would work and provide at least one route through a level, we didn't get chance to really test out how that worked. Would players get trapped because a platform was too far away? Did those routes really work? These are the questions I needed to ask and verify.

Enemy Placement - Our system of random spawning with probabilities was decent enough for all other enemies, but did cause a few problems for our big and slow Troll. They would get trapped in certain areas, and not in a good way. Though the idea was to allow Little Red Riding Hood (whom the Trolls were programmed to chase after) to lure them between some platforms so they couldn't get away, allowing Big Bar Wolf to easily attack them, for this to work effectively, we needed to control where the Trolls spawned from more rigidly. 

A playable prototype level! The woodcutter chases Big Bad Wolf and largely ignored Little Red Riding Hood, whereas the Troll chases Little Red Riding Hood and doesn't care for Big Bad Wolf.
Note the castle and beanstalk in the distance; these are future worlds the player will explore.
The witch is not present; she throws cat projectiles and will bother any character present.

Despite the issues, the game we made had an interesting feel and I think it would definitely be worth working more on it. Everything I have mentioned above could be worked on and improved with a little more time. For 72 hours of work, I don't think we did a bad job.