Origami Wings – Post Mortem

Ludum Dare Jam #27: Origami Wings – Post Mortem

Eight days have passed since we submitted Origami Wings to the Ludum Dare #27 Jam.

It was the first Ludum Dare for all of us and we didn’t really know what to expect. Most of us went to the same game development program at the Stockholm University so we had done small projects like this before, but never in a timeframe this short.

We had a well balanced team consisting of six people (two programmers/level designers, three 3D artists/animators and one 2D artist/composer), five located in Sweden and one in Denmark.

We told ourselves that we would aim low, we wouldn’t do anything big, as long as we had something at the end of the weekend we would be satisfied, but I know we all had great ambitions even if we didn’t say it out loud.

We spent several weeks talking about strategies, trying to plan as much as possible without knowing the theme and preparing for the weekend. We decided that Unity3D was the right platform for us as it would allow easy web deployment on Ludum Dare’s webpage. We also decided to work from home because then we wouldn’t have to waste time in transit.

On the Saturday morning we all converged early on Skype to discuss the theme that was revealed last night while we were sleeping. As you all know; 10 Seconds was the theme for Ludum Dare #27.

We thought the theme was limiting but we decided to do the best we could with what we had. Even before we started, we knew we wanted to make a game about exploring, so we quickly designed an idea around 10 Seconds that would still allow some exploration gameplay.

The concept we developed was a bird exploring a world by flying through rings every ten seconds. This would limit the amount of features we had to develop and we could instead focus on the amount of content which our team was more opted for.

Before we started we also had an idea about generating content near the player, not necessarily random content but specified events that always happened around the player, that would allow the player to freely choose a direction to move in and always get the whole experience.

It didn’t take long before we realized this idea was overly ambitious for a weekend project and we instead switched to only randomizing the order of scenes in Unity3D. At this point of the project we wanted to have 9 unique locations, each in its own scene. The number of locations we had time for shrank by the minute and eventually we landed on two; The Meadow and The Desert, only a fraction of our original ambition. Although, we created two version of each location, giving us four semi-unique locations. Randomizing the order of four items felt nonsensical so we cut that idea too.

That was quite an introduction, are you still reading? Cool.
The rest shouldn’t be as long, bear with us.

What went better than expected?

– Big group

We expected a big group would be difficult to organize for Ludum Dare, especially since we had multiple people of the same discipline, but this turned out to be much easier than what we expected! Having many people was not a problem at all as long as everyone worked towards the same goal and took responsibility over their own work. We managed to use almost all the content we created, nearly nothing was throw-away work.

– Tying the bag together

Tying the bag together in the end was far from painless, but it went surprisingly smooth.

Some of us had to work on the Monday, but we still managed to get a build that was good enough to send in. However; some things were missing, like the collision and the cows…

– Concepting

Getting all the members to look in the same direction can be difficult. However, spending a bit of extra time to create great concept art, moodboards and inspirational videos helped us get on track at the start of the competition, and kept us looking forward to the very end.

What went as expected?

– Unity3D

Unity3D is a great tool for quick development, but it does have it flaws. Something take a long time to debug unless you have a lot of experience with the editor, which we didn’t have. We were aware of the shortcomings of us using Unity3D before we started.

– Killing our darlings (and cows)

We all had to kill one or more darlings. We knew we had to from the start, and everyone accepted it and no one bitched about it. We still managed to keep the most important components of our project.

– Skype

Skype worked well and was time effective, we tried to only use it when we had something to say to prevent spending time chit-chatting. The screen-sharing feature of Skype was very useful and we used it a lot to show the work in progress.

What went worse than expected?

– Matching the theme

Matching the theme was not difficult, but matching it well was. Our desire to create an exploration game did not work well with the theme and this is perhaps something we should have realized much earlier.

– Putting your life on hold for 72 hours

No matter how much you plan ahead, life always comes in the way. Most of us had to run unexpected errands which in the end took a lot of development time. We also had to go back to work on the Monday, so we basically lost 24 hours of development time.

– Going back to work after barely having had a break all weekend

What would we do differently next time?

– Plan Less

A mistake we made was trying to decide on things before we could make proper decisions. This caused us to paint an idea of what we wanted to make that we couldn’t live up to once the theme was announced. Next time we should not think about what we want to make at all until we know what the theme is and then design something that builds on the theme, instead of stuffing the theme into the design.

– Sit Together

Sitting together doesn’t necessarily mean better communication and less time spent on it, but it could potentially help us put everything else aside for three days if we left our apartments and locked ourselves into a room together for three days.

The Bottom Line

Ludum Dare was a great experience for all of us and I’m sure we’ll do it again.

If you are curious in how Origami Wings looked during development, hit this link;

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11HBTYcvFOttMwnSyKseXnTT0DHFNeN1Ju7xys4cXJng

Thanks for reading!

See you next time,

• Team Cow