The Lost Strawberry - Post Mortem (LD40)

_Pss, if you did not play it, you can check it out here :wink:_

Short intro

This Ludum Dare was super awesome, I'm really happy with my game, it is much better, then some non-jam ones, I made before 😄

The theme

When the theme was announced, I had really no ideas, what I want to make, except that it would be a platformer. My interpretation of the theme is totally not the best one 🙃

"The more you have it..." there could be two things with this theme part:

• You collect stuff
• You have some kind-of an energy level

Pff, I did not think a lot at this stage, and just quickly picked up the first one.

"... the worse it is" this one is more tricky. But... "worse"? Haha, will make that evil related.

So my plan was:

• Make a spooky platformer game, where you need to explore
• There must be some kind of evil, that affects the gameplay
• It must have some ambiance music/noise in the bg, and awesome mood

Basic art and mechanics

So I quickly started sketching out some basic art. Somehow, I stuck to the three color palette 🙄

PICO-8 doesn't give you a lot of colors to peek from (only 16 fixed colors), so I've gone for the three darkest ones: dark blue, dark red and ~~dark~~ black.

_That how that looks in the game_

So after making a few simple tiles, I've quickly coded most of the mechanics, that I needed for the game:

• Jumping
• Moving
• Hanging on the ropes
• Spikes and death
• Platforms

Thanks to the amazing PICO-8 engine, made by @krajzeg, that was super simple.

Streaming

Ludum dare in my time zone starts quite early (at 5 am), so I got from the bed even earlier, at 3 am. Either I messed time up, either Mike moved the start of the jam (the site was telling me, that the jams starts at 4 am :X), I woke up two hours before the jam, super early and I was not able to go back to bed.

I had two options:

• Stream something
• Code something

I've picked both 😄
So I spend my time making some random doodles, like this one:

_I was coding it live on the stream_

And having some fun with the guys, who came onto the stream.
They also gave me a lot of nice ideas, and helped a lot with finding bugs 😆

_You can watch the full stream timelapse here: _

Making levels

That was the hardest, yet the most fun of my development. I tried to mix up Celeste Classic and Shuriken (by @x_rxi) styles.

I wanted to teach player slowly, but not sure, if I achieved that.

_That's the first level_

People had some hard time finding out, that you can climb on the ropes, etc.. But I think, that's happened, because of the really small palette.

But anyway, I spend half of my time making levels, the game has a total of 25 levels, including a boss one. Because my game is about exploring, I was adding as many details to the level, as I can fit on a 128x128 pixel screen.

_Here is the sprite sheet, if someone wonders... (that bottom part is a bit of an extra map)_

_And here is a piece of the map_

Audio

PICO-8 has great audio editors, that are simple, yet powerful. I wrote four simple songs in it:

• Main theme
• Boss theme
• Win theme
• Menu theme

My good friend @gruber_music pointed me out, how to make the noise in the BG better, how to make the boss theme sound minor. Biiiig thanks to him!

Second day and art

The strange thing happens to me every LDjam: on the first day I'm speed coding and trying to get all stuff done (and it almost always gets done in the first 24 hours), and on the second day, I'm sitting with no idea, what to do. This happened to me this time also.

I've finished the gameplay on the first day, added a few levels on the second, as well as the menu and some audio. But with free 12 hours, I had no clue, what to do next. So... I went polishing! 😎

I've added crouching and looking up animations (did you see them?), step sounds and my favorite thing: some cool animations!

Just look at this ice! I've used a bunch of particles to animate it before, but now, I've added a cool respawn animation. Or have a look at the evil bulbs:

Do you notice that shrink animation? I love it. Particles are also a good way to animate stuff, but if you have enough sprite space, why not to use them, huh?

I had a lot of fun making these!

What changed from the LD39

Let's take a look at my previous game, Spacy Adventure:

_It was my second PICO-8 game, made in one week, after buying the console_

So what did I learn? Quite a lot:

• Programmers CAN draw
• Particles are good, but animation is better
• Try to keep your UI as simple, as possible
• Focus on the mechanics and the gameplay first, and then tweak it
• Even if you have mood, tweak some art or something, that will make the game better

And well, I think, that was my best Ludum Dare from the last four, I particapated in. (Yeah, this is my fourh Ludum Dare, and it's also fourth in a row!)

Summary

Things, that I dislike about this game/jam:

• Some of the levels suck, and they don't look great
• On the second day I have no idea, what to add
• The final boss is too easy

Things, that I liked:

• I really love the graphics part of my game
• Music also fits it really well
• I've implemented everything, I needed

I really hope to get a good rating in graphics/mood/audio category, and maybe even win, who knows 😝