Sounds of Nothingness - Postmortem

Thirteen hours of sleep later, the tea consumption is back to a normal level, we would like to tell a bit about our experience, for all those who like to read such a thing.

Even before the theme was announced, we had thought about which idea we could implement for which proposal.
For "Take one leave the rest" we had a nice idea that still excites us now. Something with firefighters. Maybe we'll do it later until Christmas as a small side project. But, as usual, the theme has turned out to be terrible. So we had to come up with something new. After two hours we had thought up something about the only suggestion we had not found anything about before.

The original idea was to defeat opponents in an empty nightmare world with sounds and harmonies. We planned that you could collect up to seven notes which you could even combine to form stronger attacks. But in the course of making the game we had to scrap all notes but two and the combination of sounds fell flat. That is of course a pity, because it would have been something completely different (hello Monty Python). But we keep the idea anyway.

The code magician had to sleep urgently, because he had been in the university until late in the evening. Here in our time zone, it started at midnight. So I began with the tile set. It was important to me to get something done quickly. Because nothing is more annoying than not having enough time at the end, because you spend hours with details. And so it was. At the end I had no more time to revise the tileset. But it served its purpose, yet I would have liked to have drawn it differently. Krita actually makes it easy to make some changes quickly. But when you're so pressed for time, you forget to drink. 🐱

We had planned until two in the morning, and I sat at the tiles for about an hour until I was reasonably satisfied. But then the main character had to come along urgently. Because without him the game would never have been finished. And I knew that it would need a lot of animation for our concept.

I didn't have time for a lot of details.
But a reference picture always helps if you do something new.

The character is divided into his extremities. In Blender I then map the individual segments to planes and animate them through bones. It's a pretty simple concept, but it serves its purpose if you want it to go fast. The most annoying thing is the weighting of the vertices. But most of the time even the automatic weighting works quite well. If the little guy on the screen is rendered much smaller later on, small rough edges won't attract much attention. It's a gamejam after all and you don't have to exaggerate.

Blender 2.8 has become incredibly fast.
Eevee makes it so easy to judge the finished look in the viewport. Also when it comes to animation it is much more pleasant than in earlier versions. In 2.79, for example, it was much more difficult to adjust the timing.

When I finished the first raw animations, it was already 11 o'clock in the morning. But we had overcome an important obstacle. Now it just had to go into the engine and be controllable.

So I, as an open window maniac, had made my way. But now the code magician was awake and he immediately started to integrate my assets into our engine. He worked out a physics system while I was sitting at the opponent and brought the character to life. We discussed the mechanics and the feeling the player should have.

It was important to us that the game should not be too easy. Because that wouldn't fit the concept. After all, it's supposed to be a nightmare, or at least something you find rather unpleasant. Therefore he adjusted the curves of the jump accordingly and a lot of work had to be done on the momentum. But we were happy to invest this time. Because that would make it different.

Actually, we wanted to have a lot of shots and be able to combine them. But then we had to cancel that. The time would not be enough and without a meaningful combination possibility it would not feel nice to shoot. So we reduced the idea to a minimum: two different shots.

Meanwhile, I drew the monster and animated it. Basically the way I had made the main character before.

Originally it was important that the music of the game harmonized with the tones you "shoot". I had deliberately planned something simple. Simply the C major scale, with the respective three notes of the main chords. So tonic, dominant and subdominant.

But in major the whole thing would sound a bit too "cute". So I just shifted it to minor. But because it would be disharmonic if you shoot I had to take half chords and so I finally decided, because we would only have two different notes, for c' and a' as "shots". So the whole theme of the music is based on a and c and becomes a full A minor chord once in the middle. This is simple, fast and still sounds interesting enough.

So far we haven't had a real gaming environment, just a test setting. So we talked about it and because the mechanics were good enough, the code magician could have fun with the level design. Meanwhile, I reworked the animations because it looked too bumpy. After that, I sat down and made some small decorations for the maps.

After all, the game should have three levels. Less wouldn't have been enough for us and it would have destroyed the impression that it's a nightmare world you want to escape from.

Sometime on Sunday night we noticed that there should be something like a menu. So I quickly started to position some objects in Blender and generated a fire simulation.

While the individual stages were being created I drew the final scene, which was supposed to resolve the situation of the game by means of speech bubbles. In the end the nightmare should end out of the feeling of emptiness and nothingness and take a happy end.

We had originally planned that you had to defend yourself against your opponents with chords and tones. The background is that a woman is unconscious in hospital and someone is playing her favourite music. When she awakens from unconsciousness, she realizes that she was saved from death.

In the little time we had left, because we couldn't work on it on Monday because we had courses at the university, I could only draw a single final picture and I was very tired. I'm not at all happy with it, but it's the only thing I could finish in that time without going insane. I rely on the goodwill of my partner who says it looks fabulous and I should keep my mouth shut. So I keep my mouth shut. 🐱

We hadn't slept a minute in the night on Monday and walked around the campus like zombies. In the evening there was just enough time to fill everything with text, build and upload everything.

So we only had about 50 hours and somehow it worked out. I'm glad we made it and finished a game with a real ending.

Of course I would have lovingly done a lot more and @VectorWolf would have loved to bring more into the game. But under these circumstances, I think, we have achieved a nice result, of which we are also very proud. In any case, we will participate again in the next Ludum Dare, because it was really a lot of fun. We learned a lot, found some bugs in our engine, came up with new ideas and I was able to check my workflow to improve it. So it's a very worthwhile undertaking.

I hope this little insight was a pleasure to read and our game was fun. Thanks for reading/playing.