LOOP: Postmortem

My first postmortem, though I’ve been doing the dares for a couple years now.

THE GOOD:

STARTING WITH AUDIO

My goal going in was to write some music first and see where that took the gameplay. The plan was to play around on the guitar then transpose it all to video-gamey tracker sounds. I hated the theme, but stuck to the plan. Mostly. I ended up just playing music all evening and wrote nothing down.

Saturday morning I continued tooling around with the guitar and figured since it’s minimalism, I wouldn’t transpose anything. I recorded very random doodling and then looped that while I pondered a game. Initially I had planned a color-based collection game, but didn’t think it fit the music so went for a storytelling game. The artifacts of the color game remain though, as all the objects you’re tasked to retrieve ascend chromatically.

Every sound was made with a mic and audacity. I had fun thinking of ways to make noises to suit the game. I wanted one noise to represent egg-breaking, hair-ripping, and self immolation amongst other things, so I had a bit of fun with that kind of audio puzzle here in my room. (it was me scratching my desk through some filters, by the way). To say nothing of how fun it is to caw. I actually loaded up some crow videos and practiced my cawing and of all the happy thoughts from this dare, by far the most pleasing is knowing I have cawed at many people through their own volition across the internet.

ART:

Not much to say here, except that I’m pretty happy with where I’m at with pixel art. I studied a fantastic old crow animation by Eadweard Muybridge to look for keyframes. I was so elated to see this in my search for reference material as I love this guy’s work.

I also really improved on my ability to neglect details a bit to get important things done. It took untold amounts of restraint not to completely redo all the tree assets for the winter level. Tree leaves should fall off in winter! But I just slapped snow on the leaves and was done with it. I doubt anyone but me even noticed, let alone cared, but it is still making me twitch thinking about it.

STORY:

This turned out well enough, though really dark. At the last minute I had a change of heart about just how dark it was and threw together an alternate ‘good’ ending. I love it, but it’s kind of a pain to find since I didn’t really get to test it.

THE BAD:

THEME

Man did I dislike this theme. I nearly abandoned doing the dare on the first night due to lack of direction. I prefer extremely narrow themes that force me to push their boundaries to create something unique. I hate these wide-open themes we’ve been getting lately. I also dislike the joke themes typically but included a potato in protest this time, possibly to the detriment of the atmosphere my game tries to build.

GAMEPLAY

I don’t really consider this to be a game at all. There’s no real failure state, barely any player agency. I’m pretty displeased with joining a game-making competition and not making an actual game. It certainly works well as a little interactive storytelling device, but not much more. Also I forgot to include the damned title screen on the windows version! In hindsight perhaps the title screen was unnecessary, but what a dumb oversight.

ANDROID

I slapped on some virtual buttons and threw an android port out, but virtual buttons are just horrible for the control of the bird. Redoing touchscreen controls would be beyond the scope of porting, so I didn’t bother, but it makes this port pretty bad.

CONCLUSION

I’ve already resolved to start on game mechanics for the next dare, though this one turned out pretty well despite its lack of ‘game’. Also I learned an awful lot about sound editing and recording in small timeframes. Hopefully the era of silent vandriver games are over! Just I won’t try to wrap a game around music as it’s clearly way too difficult for me within 48 hours.