Lagman – Post mortem

Introduction and design

This last theme was perfect for us. We started as usual with a brainstorming and we had a lot of crazy ideas but finally we pick one of the craziest @ReikVal ever had: a game about Lagman. Well, he is based on a real person and he is one of the team members.

For @beagleknight, being the original Lagman is a pain on the ass. He plays online games usually between 200 ms and 300 ms of ping and that weekend he was specially lagging for the occasion.

After the brainstorming we designed the game. We wanted to keep it simple so we design a simple platform game where the main character will clear the enemies on each level to complete it. The player will be in constant high ping so his movement must be totally annoying and frustrating. After seeing a lot of comments on our entry with the word “frustrating” it’s clear we achieved the result :D. In the original design of Lagman we thought about four different enemies:

• Soldier: A simple enemy who shoot randomly. This is the only enemy we included in our submit.
• Specialist: A faster enemy who uses a melee attack while jumping.
• Admin server: He can kills you instantly upon seeing you, like he reported you for high ping.
• Troll: A normal player who is using high latency intentionally with additional software.

We designed different levels for the entry but only included four on the release. On the original design, we designed special zones without lag. In those areas the player would be vulnerable because he cannot kill the enemies having 0 ping. We couldn’t include it on the submit, a pity :(.

What went right

We used Javascript as our programming language choice. This is not our first ludum dare so we have learned programming a game engine from the scratch is the worst idea we ever had on previous jams.

This time we used Phaser.io by @photonstorm and we fell in love very quickly. The game engine is amazing and that’s not because their features or its performance. Phaser has a huge community with a lot of examples and tutorials. That’s awesome!

What went wrong

The f* lag. Yeah, no kidding. We started a bit late because connection problems and that’s the main reason why we created Lagman so I’m not sure if it’s bad at all :D.

Personal triumph

This is the first LD jam where the team worked outside of their confort zone. In this edition @beagleknight was in charge of the art. He is starting with his tablet and doing his first sketches in years! We think the final result was pretty good after all.

Nowdays @ReikVal is improving his guitar skills very quickly as he demonstrated in this edition as well. He was in charge of the music and he did a splendid job improvising the two main themes for our game and also the special voice for Lagman in the death doors. You can download the music and sound composed for the game here:

https://soundcloud.com/reikval/playerdie
https://soundcloud.com/reikval/lagman2
https://soundcloud.com/reikval/maintheme

Conclusion

We are going to work hard on the following LD editions and we have decided we are going to start using Phaser on our personal projects as well. We love the engine and its community and we think it’s gonna be fun!

Check out our entry here and may the lag be with you!

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=36994