Hug Me I'm Cold - PostMortem

Games Are Hard To Make

Seriously, whose idea was it to make a whole game in 72 hours? And then there are people that do it ALONE in 48?????

Well, we made a whole game in 72 hours. For @ariawyn and I, it was our second time doing Ludum Dare; for @eleonora-ivanova, it was her first time. Here are some thoughts.

(You can look at our game at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/hug-me-im-cold)

Coming up with ideas

We had 22 ideas when brainstorming, including

• a chubby bunny game where you fill a mouth with marshmallows and drag it around the screen to write the words "Chubby Bunny" but you can't spill the marshmallows,

• a game about having too many facebook friends,

• a dungeon crawler where too much loot means you get worse rewards,

• a game where you're an octopus waitress and your legs keep growing longer,

• a game where you're Scrooge McDuck swimming through money but if you have too much you'll drown,

• a game where you're crossing the River Styx with too many drachmas and there are things trying to steal your money...

and several more. In the end, we decided on Hug Me I'm Cold: a game where you're trying to survive in a cold place, so you put on a lot of sweaters, but the more sweaters you have on the slower you move (which is adorable).

What went well

• I was very happy with the pixel art, because I'm no pixel artist (animations are another story down below).

• Ellie and Aria's UI turned out great, and that's a big improvement from last time. I think the menu system and the cold meter at the top of the screen are both much better than what we made for OnFuelDrain().

• Aria put in a lot of work making the menu, and the input manager, so we have rebindable keys and user preferences! That's awesome. I still have no clue how to do that.

• Taking a look at the code, Ellie's generalized Stat class would allow us to implement more features easily. Same with Aria's interactable items.

• I was very happy with the LevelManager, although I cheated a bit reusing some code from another project. But I managed to get it mostly working within a few hours, and that was important--when there were about 3 hours left for the jam, we still only had test levels, and the ability to quickly make levels in a text file was essential. I'd like to learn more about making a tool for level creation, though, because if that were possible to make in a jam it would make life a lot easier.

• We made a whole game, complete, you can win it! OnFuelDrain() had a score system, and the goal was to get a highscore. It's pretty cool that this time we have a game that you can play from start to finish, and get a win screen at the end.

What went not so well

• Animations. Dear Lord. I spent so long trying to get the walking animations working. And it never actually happened. Every time I try to use MecAnim, I feel less sure of how to use it. Sprite animation in Unity is difficult. But I think the real issue here is not Unity but time management (more below).

• Level Design. Because I spent so long doing animations, and because we didn't have a working game until the last day, there was barely any time for thinking about level design. We ended with only 7 levels, all of them pretty easy, and that was a shame. We originally considered randomized levels, but decided against it because randomization can be very difficult to tweak and get just right. It would have been really cool to spend at least half a day on making levels, tweaking them, playtesting them, etc. I personally worry a little bit about the fun-factor of the game because of the level design.

• We made sound effects but ran out of time to use them!

• We were originally going to make 7 layers of sweaters, but I stopped at 4 in the interest of time. Iterating over every frame of the character sprite 7 times is extremely tedious, and I spent most of Sunday working on the player sprite.

Time Management

I think a lot of it comes down to prioritizing the right things when you're making a game in this amount of time. When we decided on a theme and started working, I went to sprites, Aria went to input, Ellie went to the warmth meter...and we didn't do anything for movement, items, win/lose conditions until later on Sunday. In retrospect I think it may have been better to mock up a level first, get it working, and then work on the other stuff. In a similar vein, I spent most of Monday trying to get the walking animations to work (sidenote: there are definitely a billion tutorials on this online but I neglected to watch any of them, cause I'm dumb) and that was a huge waste of time (thank you Ellie for actually looking at a tutorial instead of being like me).

What we could have added, can still add, final thoughts....

Originally we were going to have the sweaters reduce the rate of warmth loss, but they would degrade over time. We also thought about having wind gusts that make you suddenly colder, and a fire at your campsite to warm you up. It would have been awesome to have a full wardrobe of clothes, and also have different items of clothing that you pick up and then your character reflects that. More pickups would have been nice, enemies might have been cool...walking animations would have been great.

I think there's a ton of stuff we could have done.

But in the end, we still have a functional, working game! And I think we're all really proud of it, because it's kind of adorable and also we made a game in under 72 hours, and I think if I do 100 Ludum Dares I will never get bored of that feeling.

Take a look at our game and give us feedback, please! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/hug-me-im-cold