In this post I’ll present to you how I take the decision of make this game, how I deal with (many) problems, why I enjoy the results and what is my next steps after my participation Ludum Dare 28.
But you can play the game here first
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Everything! I decide to participate in Jam mode, but I want to participate in Compo. A programmer want to participate with me and them I decide to call one friend who is a artist to help us with the assets.
After our brainstorm, we decide to make a game about Trust. In the game you can trust only in one person, and the idea of the game is make the player survive in the middle of a bunch of assassins wanting more money.
The idea comes from the programmer, and unfortunelly he decide to give up in the second LD day. The artist have issues with his PC, and start to work only in Sunday, and I take a day trying to write a story about trust with many choices. Sounds hard even when you try to imagine such a thing. The wost thing in my opinion is the programmer don’t warn anyone about he’s give up. So the artist take all the Sunday night to make the characters sprites… and we can’t use it.
My first failure was let the theme be accepted (my sugestion involoving beer), and after I make it harder in the game mechanics. The withdrawal of the programmer is expected, so I made a plan B: a text-based game with my script done.
My second failure is that I’m not a good writer. I can tell some stories but not using only words, specially in english. This game makes me training my english a little, but I believe it was too earlier to make a text-based game like this. At least I’ll try to write more stories.
And finally, people don’t like to read, and I write a lot in this game. My story have this problem: have too text and nothing seen very important. I will try to improve this storytelling ability.
WHAT WENT RIGHT?
The visual for a text-based is AWESOME, i admit it. This experience I got from another game that I made in September, which this same developer let this job to me to do and take vacations.
You can play it here, but it’s only in Portuguese
This experience help me a lot in the visual concepts and ideas. I also have to say thanks for my girlfriend and his sister to help me with the intro video. The video gives to the game a good visual effect that I particularly like in the Start Menu.
With the grammatical errors, I have the help of @TomoAllTheWay, a nice guy who make the copywriting for me. I also have the help of Christina Nordlander to some basic errors that I let it pass. Advices about how the story fails in trying to give the player care with the characters was received too and I want to study more about this technique.
But one think that surprise me a lot it was Twine. This text-based engine is so good to make games, that I take two days to learn it and do the game. I also learn how to use the CSS to control the background and how to improve the game with audio. There’s a lot of things on the internet that you can use with Twine to make a better visual to your game.
The most important lesson that I learned in this LD is: the game sometimes can reflect the reality you live. I try to trust in someone to make a game with me. I let another programmer out of the group to let this one make the development as he want, and yet he doesn’t. I let he decide the theme, and yet he simply give up. Meanwhile when I need someone to make a video in Sunday night, my girlfriend make it. When I need a copywriting Tomo decide to help me. In his work. Choose wisely when you gonna trust in your jobs.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Christmas, New Year’s promisses and a lot of work to do in January. I’ll decide my path and simply do it. And you, play the game. It’s harder to do this text-based game than you think.
Goodnight for now!
