Shattered Reflections - Post Mortem

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/shattered-refelections

WHAT WE MADE

For Ludum Dare 53 I worked with my friend Erin and together we produced a deductive mystery adventure game. I usually run solo so it was pretty awesome working with a team member again after a long time. I think it came together really well and despite a lot of hard work it was one of my least painful game jams in a long while. We even finished in under 48 hours where I'm normally always digging into at least the 3rd day of the jam

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Deductive Mechanic - The main mechanic of the game is inspired by Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective board game along with Curse of the Golden Idol. It lets the player solve the mystery whenever they're ready and the game is about collecting the clues. Some players where a bit shocked the game doesn't stop them from cheating, but in general people seemed to get it and were able to solve the mystery. I feel we got lucky here as we had no way of being sure people would piece things together without extensive playtesting.

Horizontal Slice - There's no AI art in the game, however during the early part of development I used AI to make temporary assets to act as placeholders for all the game's content. This allowed me to build a horizontal slice of the whole game while the artist was still in early phases. By the end of the 1st day the artist had done sketches of all the assets which then replaced the AI art forming our second horizontal slice. During the last day each time art was completed it was just a drop in replacement for the sketches already implemented. This workflow was super smooth and avoided any art implementation crunch at the end.

Tools - I worked with Adventure Creator within Unity. It's a toolset I'm super familiar with at this point and it allowed me to work super fast. I'm not keen on using game jams to learn new tools, I'd rather do that before the jam and spend my time in the jam laser focused on making the game. The only new element was the deduction panel which was the most complicated task of the jam and tbh it wasn't that complicated. This all made the development process very smooth.

WHAT WENT WRONG

The Theme - I never complain about the theme. I think it's a common trope in Ludum Dare and I've always found no matter what the theme I can find something interesting to do with it. This time it was really hard, Delivery did not fit into the kind of deductive game we wanted to make mechanically so we initially had it be part of the narrative. However during the first day that part of the story was the most contrived and I didn't think players would get it so I had to drop the theme entirely. Also having played a lot of other entrants this year I think this is the first time I've seen the theme draw so many people to make such similar games. So I sadly do think Delivery was a bad theme.

Scope - I knew from a game design perspective I could only really build around 1 puzzle per day and so that's why the game has 2 puzzles. However the art requirements to support those puzzles were quite a lot. My team member Erin who was doing the art never complained however she had to work a huge amount solidly for 2 days to complete so many rooms and characters needed to deliver the game. Only at the end did she tell me how much her hand was cramping from so much drawing. In retrospect we should have done 1 puzzle in a smaller environment and just polished that more.

WHAT I CONCLUDED

This was a great jam for me, I'm really proud of the finished game. It hit what I wanted it to do and it's a nice compact piece of storytelling. Sure there's loads more polish I could put into, I could spend another month trying to get it up to a commercial standard but I'm not going to. I think it stands on its own as a very nice game jam game. I'm now very much looking forward to LD54 and hoping I can work with Erin again on it.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/shattered-refelections