My Dear Pencil Post Mortem , Actually a story ..

Hello Jammers!

This is my first time writing a post mortem! so expect a non-professional one.
Instead of going through the original template of a post mortem I will tell you a story, a story about My Dear Pencil (not a story about my actual pencil but a story about the game I made!)

It all started by me posting on twitter the following :

And this cool guy replied (Never worked with him before, Twitter Rocks)!

Any how this JAM was just after me started watching Double Fine Documentry about their story of making Broken Age (Highly Recompensed it!)

And in it I learned how Tim figure out his game ideas!
And his secret was to simply get a new sketch book and to start writing anything (Exactly anything!) until you see some idea growing then you simply put a star near it! (As simple as that, so it is easy to read your ideas later) so I did the same (Didn’t buy a new sketch book though) and started writing, here is an image of how I started!

The first thing you will notice it is not in English (I like to write my ideas in my native language) and once I found the idea I sent the Artist this amazing game design document 😛

He didn’t understand a thing as expected so I ended up telling him to wait until I make a programmer-art prototype :

(click on this image to start a gif!)

And he loved it!

For a game like this I imagined a dark world where I kill by my cursed sword enemies and after that the world around me changes (New platforms appears and others disappear) but the Artist suggested a more friendly world where you erase monsters with your dear pencil … and that was it for the game story!

After that I focused on level design trying to figure the best way to use this mechanic and I invited a friend of mine to spend the night designing together (Thanks Omar!) and we came up with these :

And the plan was we will make 15 levels! (Unfortunately we ended with 8 only)

So after many drinks (Non-alcoholic) we reached the hour-before-submission zone! It was pretty scary! I mean I uploaded my game only 3 minutes before deadline!

However I am so grateful for this masterpiece :)

(click on this image to start a gif!)

Stuff people liked:

1. The Game Mechanic (So happy for this!)
2. Art Style
3. Music

Stuff people hated:

1. Controls
2. Off-screen Adventures

In the end don’t forget to give this game a try and maybe a litttle small tip on how to make it better? 😉

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-32/?action=preview&uid=52637

This game will go into full development so if you are interested in following it’s news follow my twitter or follow the game on Gamejolt.

https://twitter.com/TheDorgam

http://gamejolt.com/games/platformer/my-dear-pencil/61787/

Thanks for reading all this!

I hope you enjoyed reading at least :)