Ludum Dare 31 is now over and I tought it was about time to write a damn post-mortem… because that’s what we do, right? Uhh… Ah, yes:
THIRD PLACE IN HUMOR!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! BRONZE MEDAL?! NO WAYY!!1! THANK Y’ALL so MUCH VERY, VERY MUCH! (srsly, brah, srsly)

This is very heartwarming. After all these entries I’ve finally gotten Bronze on a category. Third Place on Humor. Wow. Seriously guys, thanks for the support and love you gave to our game. Hopefully one day I can get to Overall Top 100 and beyond.
But now let’s chill and talk game dev, m’kay? Just be aware that this contains major spoilers about the game, so you should check it out before reading this, I guess (Click Here To Play).
Alright, first of all: GOD DAMN IT GUYS, why did you have to choose such a terrible theme for the Jam?! Did you all vote for that because you tought it was an easy theme? It was so easy it was so limiting idea-wise (instead of being technically-wise) I rated dozens of games with the exact same concept. My partner and I were worried our idea would have been not original as well (apparently it wasn’t, thank Lawd). At the end it was the only theme with positive votes, whyyyy? I hated the snowman theme but now that I think about it, it would have been way better than this.
But anyways, things are the way they are and now that I stopped my ranting, let’s actually talk game dev. My mate, Jorge, decided to help me this time around for the Ludum Dare with music, sounds, beeps and bops; so I crashed his place this time around (he had to take of his younger brother, whatever). Thankfully I use a laptop for doing these jams.

You probably can’t see it very well, but my laptop is so crappy it needed three fans to keep it cool; there was no other way.
Alright, so we agreed that Jorge would do music and I would do art and code. Then we waited a while watching YouTube Poops until the theme got out. Then we got mad about the theme, dealt with it and began to brainstorm. Alright, so the theme was “Entire Game On One Screen” and I was struggling to think of a good non-Pong idea that wasn’t entirely crap. Then based Jorge said: “what if we do a game about closing internet pop-ups?” Heh, I just laughed pretty hard for how spot-on he was with his idea. We checked the Twitter hashtag to see if someone was already working on something alike, and no, so we began to hit the buttons.

We tought since this was all about a game on one screen, the game could go about simulating a PC that simulates an intendedly stereotypical (or shitty) game and then random pop-ups interrupt your gameplay leaving you vulnerable to enemies in the game. As Game Design rules dictate this would be a bit of artificial difficulty because you can never predict where a pop-up will appear or when, but fuck it, it’s funnier that way. You have no idea how much time it took me to deal with this decission.
We tought of giving the game a small plot where the character you play as breaks the Fourth Wall and asks you to team up against the evil forces of his game and the pop-ups that wanted to fuck your PC, like, pretty badly and such. BUT THIS IS LUDUM DARE, there’s simply NO time! So this obviously didn’t happen.

Break time: Jorge’s cat.
Probably the hardest part of making this game was deciding what kind of mood our game would be headed to. You see, most of my games feature very cartoonish, exploding and violent stuff with everyone screaming around. Since my previous Ludum Dare entry, Gargantuan, did exactly the opposite it did awfuly bad on its ratings, so I was very afraid to NOT do a comical game.



As you can see I tried to come up with lots of tiny, expressive and ridiculous designs for the playable character, any of these would have fitted the kind of atmosphere I wanted for the game. However, Jorge disregarded these. Even though I am really negative when someone has contrary ideas as me, I listened to him and let him give his oppinion: Fuck, he wanted a serious, cool-looking knight YET having all the explosions and violence I commented before (WHAT?! WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT THEN?!).
[Crappy dramatization]
We both wanted completely different moods for the game, which I really disliked. After hours of, instant soups, pizza, Pepsi and thinking about the problem I compared both ideas and came up to a conclusion.
If you’re an aspiring Game Designer, like me, then you should definitely read this. I learned a lot on this decision and you could too.
Okay, sometimes describing what a Game Designer does is hard, but shortly I can tell you that a Game Designer is The Art of How The Fuck a Player Will React to Your Game.
By evaluating the both ideas Jorge and I had, I realized what we could do by mixing them up!
[Another crappy dramatization]
By joining the two ideas + the core mechanic we could pull what I call a Double Twist (OC do not steal btw). It’s hard to explain but I will try to do it anyways:
Okay so if you already played the game, you already know how this rolls. You get the first (and only screen):

By the way we presented the game on its profile it looks really bad and effortless (notice how we didn’t show anything about the pop-ups on the game’s description), next thing you open the game and it is in fact disappointing: an average platformer with an awkward combat system, average grunts doing average (eh) grunt voices when killed (also no effects when they die, just plain dissapearing). Well, this was part of our master plan…
I planned this first part to be easy as cake, mainly to purposely get you bored but also so you can get where the game gets its stands out and commits to the jam’s theme.

You’re playing the game, most likely bored thinking nothing else is comming until the first pop-up shows up. I assure you, anyone playing this and noticing the first pop-up was like “Uh-What…? Oooh, okay”. What I mean with this: the player is startled with something he didn’t expect, but pretty soon after understands what the game is about (maybe after the second or third pop-up, but eventually will understand), the game is about alternating between killing enemies and closing pop-up ads. This is the first twist.
At this point the player is most likely struggling to move its character, but can’t. Since the player could move normally all this time until the pop-up appeared, realizes that the pop-up is indeed the problem and needs to get rid of it or else it will be hit by an enemy.
While we’re on that, I decided that the control scheme was forcely a WASD scheme so the player could control the character with his left hand and close pop-ups with using the mouse cursor on its right hand. Also, we intendedly used popular pop-up ad sounds and the Windows pop-up sound instead of making our own because people are already familiar with these. The player, not only by looking but also by hearing, recognizes that the thing that just appeared on the screen is in fact a pop-up, and it knows already how to close it. We didn’t use any tutorial to show the player how to close pop-ups, people already know how to deal with these, so they simply head to click the [x] mark. Even if our pop-ups don’t look much like regular pop-ups, we achieved to make them credible. Thanks Jorge.
The player closes the pop-up and regains control of its character. The player now understands the core mechanic of the game, and now goes ahead and actually plays the game for real this time, the player is now encouraged to play the game. The player plays closing pop-ups, each time pop-ups appear at a faster rate and it’s impossible to close all the pop-ups and kill all the enemies. Eventually, the player can’t handle all the pop-ups and unevitably dies (this is actually artificial difficulty, but it serves a very important purpose).

So the player eventually dies, all the enemies run away and the game goes mute. The player understands he lost but suddenly… a scaling tone begins to play, as the screen begins to shake, and shakes harder and stronger as time follows, just as the knight that gets a stronger tone of red as time passes.
This serves yet another purpose. Let’s recap, the player has already gone through: disappointment to encouragement and now confusion and probably anxiety. You obviously don’t expect this to happen on a video game, I mean, probably you could from an enemy, but generally not from the playable character. As the pitch gets higher, the screen shakier and and the knight red-er; the player gets each time more anxious about what the fuck is going to happen next.

Next thing: my golden art. Next thing to happen: the knight explodes turning himself into a big, bulky man; holding its sword awkwardly accompanied by screams of all sorts, screen shakes, color twists on the background, a change in the music and lots of explosions and particles. This is the second twist.
Right now the player must be shocked at this point and probably laughing by how ridiculous the game has become. Let’s not forget how both pop-ups and enemies explode, screaming and launching tons of particles when killed. We basically just juiced up the game. The player is given a few seconds to realize that the mechanics haven’t changed and then is thrown back into action. It is basically the same game as before but with a completely different atmosphere. I know this is almost a complete look-back at a previous Ludum Dare entry, but, oh well.
I believe we couldn’t have pulled this part with the same impact without the previous part (the part where the player dies at first). I’m not sure about this, but the player experiences anxiety, expecting that something will happen but nothing expected for sure.
Unless you think I’m pretty retarded or euphoric about my own creation, I think this game is a good roller coaster of emotions and I encourage you to test it on a friend or relative by showing this game and studying the reactions (just don’t tell them what to expect, eh?).

Yes.
Even though I hated this, theme or even this game, it turned out to be my best Ludum Dare entry to this date and even if it doesn’t have a pretty good gameplay, I think it has an amazing effect, though. Just like always, I learned a lot from this Ludum Dare jam and had lots of fun and stuff. I feel bad that I slacked off and slept, like, a lot this time compared to my previous jams. Hopefully I’ll upload the Timelapses to my last three Ludum Dare entries soon so you can see my pretty face move back and forth real fast.
Lastly, a link to the game…
I’d like to thank you all for all those amazing ratings you gave to our little game, without mentioning all those heartwarming comments you left us. Also, big, BIG thanks to my bro Jorge for making the music but also being really supportive on my game making passion after all these years. We both are traveling to Monterrey (it’s like, another state) heading to the Global Game Jam and hopefully we’re going to make a great fucking game, if not, we’ll at least make you smirk.
Blockade, a game by Rodrigo Gómez Maitret, music by Jorge Figueroa.
Peace out… I spent some good two hours writing this. I’m off to the fucking bed.