Ludum Dare 48 Retrospective

Hey, this probably isn't worth reading, but I wanted to write down some notes/thoughts about the jam

The 'inspiration'

When I first tried to play Binding of Isaac, it didn't click for me. I don't know what the reason was, but I bounced off it pretty hard, and it sat unloved in my [Other Video Game Distribution Service] library, untouched, for a few years. When it came out on Switch, I grabbed it as I figured it deserved another chance to redeem itself. I don't know how many hours I've now spent on it, but it's a lot. Many, many hours made up of everything from a quick 10minute session, paused to resume at the next window of opportunity (and, no; I don't mean bathroom breaks), to reclining on the sofa for a couple of hours doing multiple runs.

For me, though, the one problem I've always had with Isaac is its aesthetic and I've wondered if it would be possible to make a similar game without the somewhat juvenile poop/religion/gore 'humour'.

Now, obviously that is not what I've done here. I firstly think that such a task would be beyond someone of my ability. Secondly, I don't think Game Jams typically provide enough time to produce much beyond a proof of concept or prototype, and I have so much respect for people who are able to craft entire worlds and stories (albeit typically very brief ones) within the confines of a 48-72-hour Jam.

Scoping and tool choices

My aim was simple enough. I think I've done enough jams now - this is maybe my 7th or 8th, though I tend to look for slightly longer ones on account of my work/life commitments - that I think I'm getting the hang of setting an ambitious but reasonable target for myself. I went a little more ambitious that I normally would for a weekend jam, in part because of my choice of tools. I consider myself very experienced with Ruby, and in the last couple of years I have dabbled a little bit with DragonRuby Game Toolkit as it has evolved from its first release a little over two years ago.

[Interlude: my LowRezJam 2019 entry, Nitefall, was written with a fairly early release of DragonRuby, but I spent most of my game development time between then and now expanding my Ludum Dare 42 entry, Land Grab, into a "proper game" - Marchland - which was created using GameMaker Studio 2]

My Ruby knowledge/experience would, I figured, enable me to move a lot faster and create more elements of the game in a shorter time than I could with other engines where I'm less familiar with the core language. So, my basic goals were:

• Randomly generated dungeon layout
• Room contents picked from pre-defined room layouts with both destructible and indestructible elements
• At least 1 enemy type
• At least 1 boss
• Power-ups (max-HP, speed, damage, range, fire-rate)
• Collectibles (HP-refills, coins, keys, bombs)
• Loot-dropping (destructible objects like crates, chests, and a chance of random loot when clearing a room)
• Keyboard & controller support
• Special power-ups/curses (ones that go beyond just boosting a single stat)
• Shops to buy special power-ups with collected coins
• Locked doors/rooms
• Mini Map
• Music
• Sound Effects

I chose to use a graphics pack for my tiles/sprites, so that I would only have to make minimal edits to some things and end up with something that was at least presentable - I am very much a coder, and very much not an artist. I went with the lovely "8-Bit Top-Down Pack" from the incredibly talented Johan at Canari Games (Lunark out soon check it out!)

The cuts

To quote Homer Simpson; "The cuts. Although I wasn't able to cut everyone I wanted to, I have cut a lot of you.".

I didn't do the sensible thing and prune my list from the start; I instead just ordered cards (using Trello) in priority. It created a natural cut list, particularly as I ran out of time on Monday night and looking at about 20 remaining cards and trying to pick 'wins'. "Shop" rooms never made it in, which made the (mercifully quite short) work on coins redundant. With fewer 'interesting' rooms, I had less reason to lock doors, so the locked doors/rooms didn't make the cut. I had put a bit of effort into keys, though, so I made the (with hindsight perhaps unfair) decision to make any loot chests 'locked' and require a key to open them.

The biggest regrets fall into two camps. On the variety/enjoyability side there was failing to get to any special power-ups in. In order to be worthwhile, it would have needed at least a handful of these to be created. On the core mechanic side, the lack of a mini-map is really a bit of a drag for trying to keep track of where anything is, and the game could really do with some audio - at least sound effects, but ideally also some background music.

Quite committed

A little git pun there; from an empty `main.rb` file I made 89 git commits, with ~3200 lines of code, over about 58hours (3PM on Saturday until about midnight on Monday [UK time]), and all in all I reckon I spent about 20 hours of that actually working on the game. The biggest hurdle for me with any jam is the time commitment. As I said earlier, I tend to try and participate in longer jams preferring those that offer more than a week to submit, ideally a month. The benefit there is that it means I can complete something even if I only get an hour or so each evening. The down side is that you're often submitting into a jam where other people can spend an entire week of 8-10-hour days, and the gulf in quality can be very demoralizing.

Opinion

So far, the opinions coming in through the comments on the jam are reasonably good, though I guess the final scores will be the real kicker here. Some are finding the game difficult, which I feel can be a good thing for a game like this - you shouldn't be reaching 6 or 7 floors deep on your first run - but perhaps I need to really investigate how fair it is, as 'difficult' and 'fair' are very different feelings as a player. Most are reporting the player is too sluggish, which was intended to be balanced out with power ups as you progress, but I concede that the start speed is just that little bit too sluggish. I got the move/shoot thumbsticks/keysets the wrong way round! Oh geez, as someone trying to appeal to fans of Binding of Isaac, I really screwed up not checking the keyboard mapping/input mappings. This must be an absolute nightmare to play with the sticks/keys the wrong way round compared to your muscle memory. People seem to broadly enjoy the 'Zelda' aesthetic, so perhaps I am onto something when I suspect there would be a market for a more aesthetically PG/family-friendly Isaac-like.

Future development?

I think I'll do a tidy up around the project. In terms of basic playability I would like to get the following done for a post-jam release:

• Increase the base player/shot speed
• Make the controls customizable or at least flip them
• Add Sound Effects
• Add some Background Music
• Mini Map
• General bugfixes

Beyond those, though, I'm not sure if I'll do much more to this so perhaps I'll open-source it in case some plucky young adventurer wants to have a code-swamp to start a project with. I learned from Marchland that turning a basic 'proof of concept' into a more fully featured game is a lot of work, and I'm acutely aware that a lot of work would be needed to put in a completely custom tile/sprite set, which in turn requires design time and creativity, or money.