The Dash Club Post-Mortem

Hello everyone,

This has been our 3th LD jam, and by far the game that we are more proud of! So, how did it all go?

It went fine, thanks for asking. Starting Saturday morning we rushed the first sketches, rough ideas and mechanics, cut what we thought would be impossible to complete within the 72h and ended up with something like this:

The first coffee:

The idea was to create a rhythm game, with low impact on the player controls but still making everything responsive to music, who should be the primary focus, we thought about a few mechanics that could have worked, but chose the dash and the floor switch as the most important ones. Our main goal was to design a very dynamic gameplay that could be fun to play and quick to finish, nothing too complex. So in addition to the previous mechanics we decided for 2 kind of tiles, one adds score, the other one subtracts, and a third one that could switch the player between dance-floors.

The core:

Our main concern when planning the game was the tempo in which all had to occur, since music had to be a primary factor guiding the mechanic we didn’t want to mess that up. A lot went on researching the tempo on disco music, and since we wouldn’t have a final version of the song until the end of the second day, we had to work with metronomes to nail the pattern progression, the character animations and the scoring. It took some time, but at the end everything worked on the beat 😀

Apart from that it was challenging to design the character so that it could be animated with a bone tool (Puppet2D) since we wanted him to face front for the finger dance, and to be able to move around walking(dancing) or dashing. To keep options open we went for the easy option, drawing a rotation of 45 degrees sideways… more or less, that added to a character without lines would do the trick and allow us for bone animation. frame by frame would have been insane for a LD, specially since we wanted to make a few dances for each action (idle,dash,walk x3).

The trouble club:

When the game was starting to take shape some weaknesses showed themselves. The game wasn’t responding good enough, sometimes tiles wouldn’t score, sometimes they scored even when dashing, and that was specially easy to see with the blue tiles. The last seconds of the game were supposed to be a constant floor-ceiling switch and we couldn’t have a low responsiveness. It was tricky to solve but at the end we are quite happy with the general feeling of the game, we’d need to keep working on that for a post-LD version though. Also, some of you have already experienced part of the trouble it gave us, since sometimes the “jump” would get bugged. That was finally fixed a few hours after the 1st rate.

If you tried our game when it was bugged we encourage you to play it now again :)

Some other challenges we needed to overcome were the feeding of the pattern on the dance floor, we wanted to make something that could be easily upgradeable and adjustable to fit the music or to adjust th

e difficulty. And the result was great, we could design patterns in a matter of minutes, although at the end we couldn’t spend as long as we would have liked designing the patterns themselves. But had enough time for a nice difficulty curve at the beginning and a cool finale.

The result

This has been our most ambitious LD so far, not like we have done lots of them, but there has been quite an upgrade since our other projects. We finished with a game we really feel proud of, getting the funny feeling we were looking for and a very solid gameplay mechanic.

ROOM for improvement

There is so much we should have done that simply didn’t do, I can’t recall everything, we are still really new to this stuff, but the main focus on improvement should go on the planning, which wasn’t good enough. For the next ludum dare we will try to plan how we will program all the game before actually writing any code (maybe using a whiteboard). This will help us see possible shortcomings in the architecture of the game as well as prevent bugs in the process and improve the communication between our two programmers.

Also when it comes to graphics, we should make a more serious version on how the final game should look so that everyone has the same image in mind. With that the characters can be designed considering the general view of the project, making them more functional.

Please, pretty please with sugar on top, try The Dash Club, be honest and tell us what you think, how would you improve it? what could be better?

Thanks :)