Our Ludum Dare 35 experience was riddled with problems from scheduling to programming and even to brainstorming. We had a HELL of a time brainstorming… In the end, we came up with ‘So You Think You Can Science?’ (SYTYCS?), a top down shooter/roguelike featuring no less than 3 playable characters.
The Team
The main team behind SYTYCS? was myself (programming/design, @morrilet), Jeremy Helsel (programming/design, @JIHlucky7), Josh Ruffolo (music/sound, @jruff7) and Jasen Helsel (graphics). We also had some help from our good friend Matt Carollo (@trip_yuh), who stepped in with some sound effects toward the last half.
The Idea
Brainstorming, for us, started at around 8 or 9 PM (depending on your time zone) and it took us a solid couple of hours to settle on SYTYCS?. Josh wanted to do sounds for a sci-fi game, I wanted to make either a dark and gritty story or a racing game where cars transformed into humans (I still think it’s a genius idea), and Jeremy wanted to make a roguelike. We ended up switching our idea back and forth between a gritty story game or a goofy shooter. In the end, we went with the shooter, because that’s simply what we knew best. The first idea we had for the characters was a porcupine who shot his quills, but with the addition of Lemmy (the bee-shooting bear), we swapped the porcupine for a cactus. We just didn’t want two animals, and for us, Lemmy was the more interesting character. The porcupine was replaced with Francus (pronounced Fran-sus), the cowboy cactus. After that we were trying to come up with an idea for a character that wasn’t carbon based, and our tired brains settled on a hairdryer wielding, you guessed it, a smaller hairdryer. Thus, Cordulator the maniacal hairdryer was born. We also all agreed that it should be sci-fi themed, so we decided that the setting would be an infinitely deep space ship run by an alien mad scientist and guarded by his alien henchmen.
The Process
We ran into issues at almost every step of the way. Firstly, this was my second time using github and my first time using it with more than one other person, so we had a few scares during development. Secondly, I’d never worked on a project with this many people, and planning was soon recognized as a big issue. All of us have jobs, and some of those jobs are at odd hours of the day. This made keeping everyone working together difficult. In fact, on the last day, we almost didn’t have any overlap where all of us could work together to submit it. Some people even left work early and rushed home to finish. The whole thing would’ve taken even longer, too, if it weren’t for some scripts I had lying around. Because of this, we didn’t have to bother making a camera or 2D navmesh agents. This was also the first time I’d actually used a procedurally generated map in a game, and the first time I’d programmed shooter AI that did more than appear, point, and shoot.
Submission Hour
We went right up to submission hour and came in hot. We were in a mad dash to get sound effects in and build. To make matters worse, every time we built, we had a new issue. Once, no sound effects played. Another time the player spawned in with no health. Every build, new problems. In fact, the build we ended up submitting had horrible UI scaling problems and didn’t play gunshot sounds. These bugs and others wore heavily on all of our minds for the rest of the night and most of the next day. We hadn’t intended to release any updates, but we couldn’t live knowing we could’ve done better. We released an update to fix the menu resolution and sound effect problems. A day later, released an update to fix wall sticking.
Final Thoughts
I think we all learned a lot this time around. We certainly have a better handle on working in a large group and I feel pretty confident in my ability to throw together AI, which was entirely alien to me for a long while. Next time I think we’ll probably scale back a bit so we’re all less stressed out. Also, we’ll have to manage our schedules a little bit better. I think, all in all, that this was a fantastic jam for all of us. We all got to do what we wanted with the game and I feel very proud of the game (and the characters) that came out of this jam.
You can find the original build of ‘So You Think You Can Science?’ here.
If you’d rather check out the updated version, you can find it here.
Go ahead and give our game a try! We’d love to hear what you think.
