Post-Mortem: Clashy Clouds

Hey everybody, so my team and I completed what would be my first ever ludum dare jam.

Play our game here.

What we did:

So the topic was as everyone knows an unconventional weapon. This took quite a bit of brainstorming for us.
I personally sat up at 3 AM hoping to not get this theme, and afterwards panicking for a solid hour before being able to brainstorm some ideas (that we ended up not using at all).

I got two hours sleep and when my team (@wupto and @dekdev) woke up, we finally got to figure out some ideas. The idea we went with being a cloud that pisses off cities preventing pollution. Here rain would be the unconventional weapon.

So the first 24 hours were spent on mainly figuring out how the game should look and feel, what the mechanics should be, and how we were gonna execute it.

Who did what:

@wupto worked on the programming, @dekdev did the concept art,UI, particles and more, and I (@NatashaCBR) did the art for the background and sprites, and the awesome @Geemeeofficial did the music for the game.

What we used:

For art assets we used Photoshop CC and CS6.

For programming GameMaker Studio was used.

For planning, the ever awesome google docs lol.

Now on to my evaluation of our game/my ludum dare experience:

Pros:
– Good graphics (so many facial expressions)
– Nice dynamic music (the more cities are happy the more robotic the music gets)
– We finished it!
– It had the same feel as the concept
– Super motivating to finish
– Friendships all le way
– My first game (so psyched)

Cons:
– Lack of sleep
– Too much junk food (just me lol)
– We couldn’t really pin-point what we wanted to do along the way (but we figured it out)

So as you can see there were significantly more pros than cons.

My thoughts:

10/10 would do again. Definitely doing the ludum dare next time again, if I have time.

Though if I was to do something different it would be:

– Have more confidence in my skills

– Plan out the game more thoroughly before starting development (a lot of things changed, plus some features are absent)

– Stock up on more caffeine

– Buy better food instead of chips lol

The Ludum Dare is also amazing for shaking together people, I feel like it made for an awesome trust exercise :)

Now finally I’d like to show you some of the stuff from development:

Visuals:

Different clouds that ended up obsolete:

Totally no bugs underway:

Art tests:

And ofcourse when the game actually started to look like something:

Final product:

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy our game and leave a rating! (link at the top ^_^)

Feel free to ask anything about our process or whatever you want :)