Screen One Post-mortem – Sam’s perspective.

Sam’s Perspective – Art

Friday night I am haunted by dreams about Snowman games. Saturday morning, I wake ready to pitch and Octo-Dad style game about a snowman just trying to have normal family life in a centrally heated home and then…

“Entire Game on One Screen”

Well then.

We were a bit stumped by this theme (if “theme” is really the right word…). As we brainstormed, Alex had the wise idea of googling the word “Screen”, and from there Becky suggested setting the game in a movie screen. We bandied the idea of playing as a cinema usher around for a while, but I was really not liking it. From an art perspective, I wasn’t sure how I could make this an interesting project for me (what, no spaceships?) and I was equally concerned as to whether we could make anything fun out of the concept. I pretty much vetoed the idea. But two hours later, with no other workable ideas, I relented and we pressed on regardless.

As we worked on it though, I began to get inspired. Alex stripped the game play mechanics down, cutting out fluff from the original idea (sweeping up popcorn, for example) to get a nice core gameplay idea based around arranging the customer’s locations. This added puzzle elements to the game and prevented it from simply being a lot of busy work. Meanwhile, Becky and I focused in on the idea of it being in a 1940’s cinema, using the inspiration for jazz samples in the music and the Art Deco styling on the graphics.

Then around Saturday afternoon, sketchpad in front of me, I asked “Should the customers be humans or cute animal people?”, only to be immediately answered by a unanimous chorus of “ANIMAL PEOPLE!”. The rest is history.

By Saturday night the core engine, music track and backgrounds were all in place, but a complete game was still a long way off. Sunday was filled with animation, sound effects and working on the mechanics. As the day wore on though, I became more concerned that the visuals of the game were getting cluttered and it was hard to tell what was happening. One reason for this was that Alex had done early play testing with just a few customers in the game, and as she added more to ramp up the challenge, it became a lot more busy on screen. I went to bed Sunday concerned that the finished product might be a bit of a visual mess.

Early Build. Needs more animal people.

Monday was a work day for us, so I didn’t get back on it until after 4pm GMT. With a fresh pair of eyes on the game, I added “mood auras” to show when customers were unhappy, new icons, and perhaps most importantly some animations to show when things were happening in the audience, whilst Alex added in the sound effects and text. These changes really helped with conveying the game’s information, although I am not 100% satisfied with how it turned out and there are definitely a few things that might have helped had we had time, such as more animations or an indicator as to which row the player would move down when they were on the aisle.

If I was making the game again, I would keep the style, but would take a different approach to making the assets, perhaps using bolder colours or giving them outlines/dropshadows to help them stand out. This is what Ludum Dare is great for – learning through mistakes!

Finished!

Ultimately I am really pleased with how our game turned out. There was a lot of frantic tweaking with two hours to go, but we got something working, unique, original and fun to play to boot. In addition the music turned out great and that’s something that sets it apart from a lot of entries.

Hope you enjoy our game!

~~~~RATE AND PLAY~~~~~

Cheers, Sam