Acute Stronghold Postmortem (Ludum Dare 41)

In December, I participated in my first Ludum Dare Jam. I always wanted to try it out, but I always missed the deadline. LD40 was a lot for me because I was working alone during a big jam. Eventually I made it through and got honest feedback from other jammers. 

That brings us to Ludum Dare 41 and my submission of Acute Stronghold. While looking through the posts of ldjam.com, I saw someone mention that they were putting together all of the code that they needed before the jam. I thought that this was an amazing way to go about LD. Why not create a game and simple tweek it to fit the theme. In other words, don’t become attached to my idea. 

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Thursday: I spent all day Thursday creating notes for my concept. I have a major project that I am working on. Slowly I am trying to throw out small portions of the game into the community to see the reactions. I decided to create a dungeon crawler after playing NITW a few days before. 

Originally I wanted a four level dungeon, but I haven’t made any games where the player attacks. So I thought what can I do to make this game non-violent? I looked online for things that made dungeon crawlers unique. I forgot what triggered the thought, but I decided to pull an Undertale. I would make the dungeon crawler like normal, but add in an extra mechanic that the player can interact with the creatures. 

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Friday: I spent the day trying to relax. This way by the time the theme was announced, I would be ready to tackle the monster known as Ludum Dare. 9PM came and the theme turned out to be Combine 2 Incompatible Genres. Since I already planned the game with the dungeon crawler theme, I figured the best 2nd theme would be math based. My big project will be an edutainment game and I figured this would be a great way to test how an edutainment game will be accepted in the gaming community. The first thing that I did was use my go to art programs (DISCLAIMER: I am not an artist) MS Paint & MagicaVoxel. I started creating the assets that I listed down the night before. So far so good! My jam was right on track with the schedule I created. Another important note is that at GDC18, a big topic that many of my mentors (both AAA and Indie devs) mentioned was self-care. For LD41, I decided that I would test out what everyone told me. I would take care of myself by eating well, taking breaks, and sleeping at least 7 hours a night.

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Saturday: Today is when the fun began. I scheduled my day with a three-hour break for lunch and dinner. I was to stop my day at midnight and I had every item planned to make sure that I had used enough time wisely.  Everything went smooth until I had to code the interaction piece. This took up all of my time and created a lot of frustration for me. 

I ended up cutting my breaks about an hour short and stopped working at 2 AM. 

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Sunday: I slept in late because I wanted to make sure that I got enough sleep. For today, I scheduled a shorter break for lunch and dinner. I ended up still focusing on level one’s interaction and attack mechanics. I wanted to increase the player’s health points, but ended up not being able. I tried to have a rejuvenation health system, but wasn’t able to get it to work. I wanted to have health in boxes and have the player break the boxes to gain health, but I was too lazy. I fixed the health and interaction trigger boxes so that the player doesn’t have to be too close to interact, but close-ish to attack. I barely took a lunch because I was so focused, which made me a bit upset because, I was breaking my self-care rule. 

I ended up stopping work on level one and focused my attention to a boss level with the same concept on a smaller scale. I was able to code the interaction portion successfully on a one-to-one (player vs enemy) basis. I was working on the interaction code again, but I kept getting an error message, which was weird. I have been coding the same way all weekend.

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Monday: Today, is my last day to work! I realized that Sunday night I was so exhausted from looking at code that I was declaring a line!...rookie mistake, but good thing I went to bed on time. Once I woke up all the creative juices started to flow and I was knocking out code left and right. I felt good about myself. I decided to once again skip the interaction code for all of the enemies and work on other things. So I finished up the music, additional assets, credits, ending, and cleaned up the game with any buttons, triggers, or colliders that I missed. After everything basic was completed, I decided to do a workaround for the interaction code. I decided since I had the code work for one creature instead of multiple, that I would just have one creature know the pass code and everyone else just attacks the player. However, I didn’t want it to be too easy by just giving them a pass code to type in. My solution was to make it a math problem for the player to solve to get the pass code. 

Then I filled in all of my levels with enemies. My goal was to make the levels easy. There is a way for the player to get through all of the levels, including the bosses, and only losing one Health Point. 

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Submitting my game: This was my panicking moment. Through all of the frustration and scheduling of time, I was able to create a game without having to technically do “crunch time”. Those nights of staying up late or cutting short a break was me being too focused on the project not because I needed to stay on schedule and was behind. Those moments, I honestly didn’t get much done, which proves that working longer doesn’t mean you will get stuff done. While making sure that my LD page and Itch.io page were matching and correct, I was freaking out about the time. I wanted to make sure that everything was perfect for my submission. I would upload to check that my HUD was within the frame,  that all enemies attacked the player, and that all colliders were placed properly. Once I hit publish for both page, I felt good!. I felt like I was able to eat properly and sleep well without overdoing. For LD40, I ate only junk food and had a max of 4 hours of sleep. 

              Lesson learned

I can get the same amount of work done with proper sleep and food than if I crunched the entire time. Self care is very important and if I were on a team, I would only benefit them with the correct amount of self-caring.