Devlog

Day 0

This is the 5th time I enter the jam, yer every sin Ludum Dare feels really different than the last. This time around I took it with a lot of calm. I started thinking about possible uses of the theme as soon as the theme was revealed, 10 PM on my TZ. As always, I start with a blank drive document

and start by writing the definition of the relevant words of the theme. Then I start writing synonyms, words in full CAP for key concepts, and some random stuff that works for me. When I find something that I like I start expanding that idea and write possible mechanics and stuff that may or may not work at all. For some reason doing this always work for me, so I do it every jam. This was my first version of the Google Drive document

about 40min into the jam

Once I had that general idea in mind, I did my best to write down some basic main mechanics list, I use that list to guide my work the next day. As

a "rule" for myself, I never code until Saturday (Theme is released at 10 pm here), so I dedicate my first 2 hour-ish to design how the game is going to

work, write down a very basic "GDD"  and then make a sketch trying to put what I have in mind into a very basic drawing. These drawings often include

every single mechanic in a single image, which makes them super hard to understand later, but it's something that I actually make to kind of fixate the concepts in my mind.

Usually, the list starts in black font, and I color blue each task that has already been completed (Yes I'm aware of tasks management software, I use Trello and Jira every single day, but it's proven to be cumbersome for me during jams). This format allows me to quickly add, cancel, and modify every mechanic

on the fly. I usually try to "Follow the fun" with the mechanics. When I see a mechanic Is not working or I can't make it on time, it gets scratched out and forever forgotten. 

Once I had a document I was happy with I went to sleep

Day 1

I woke up on Saturday at around 8am and started working on the mechanics with placeholders for every single asset. Things were flowing and progress was steady.

At around 1pm - 2pm, I started sharing screenshots and asking for feedback from my always trusty local game devs community (from which other awesome games by @azagaya @freddyturbina and @gamedevtraum were made and I encourage you to check out). 

The first screenshot looked like this:

As Saturday advanced I finished writing most (around 85%) of the mechanics and tested them out in a sandbox test level. I knew I had some bugs and a huge chunk of messy code that needed to be fixed but I decided to postpone that (first bad idea...).

By the end of day 1, the game looked like this:

Day 2

On every Ludum Dare I've ever entered, both JAM and COMPOs, Sunday is Art day. So I started working hard on the art. This takes me FOREVER because I'm by no means an artist, so it takes me hours to make only a few sprites. At around 4 pm on Sunday, most of the basic art pieces were ready. I did some playtesting with the non-placeholder art and the rocks were very confusing, not much contrast between dirt and stone, but I said (yeah I'll fix that later... spoiler alter, there's no later).

so I started working on those mechanics that I haven't finished the previous day, this took me a LOT more than I've expected, and by the end of the day it's very bugged and I had NO LEVELS. 

By the end of the day the game was looking like this:

It kind of looked good, but there's a lot of work to do. Above all that, Mondays are mostly a no-go for me, since I work from 9 to 18, and I can't really do any more on the game. So I was aware that I had about 5hs left.

Day 3

I woke up at around 7 am and started working on polishing and thinking some levels. I started laying some levels, and by the time I got to 3rd or 4th level, it hit me... HUGE bug, the entire mole mechanic wasn't working, at all.. it's a huge mess.. Of course, this was being caused by that HUGE chunk of code that I postpone and never got to revise again. I took the most extreme, but probably best, decision, I had to rewrite that entire part from scratch. So I did, and it worked! :D 

 ---- No progress made between 9 and 18  ----

I started working again on the game after work and my first task in mind was to make some damn levels!!  So I said, ok from here until 19:30 it's going to be "Level design fest." I have had written down some ideas and had some levels in mind. 

I finished making levels at the planned hour and was missing SFX and music. As usual, tried to compile it a few hours before the deadline just in case (Good call!). 

This is where a lot of things started to go wrong, HTML5 compilation wasn't working at all in unity, I had dozens of weird errors without explanation.  After working out those errors, which took me A LOT, I started playtesting in the browser. Everything looked fine, so at about 1hour before dead I quickly added some music and SFXs, compiled, and uploaded a version to itch.io, with the idea of adding a few more last time levels if possible, (spoiler alert 2, it wasn't). 

If not enough things had gone wrong already, the game wasn't working when uploaded to itch, Unity loading bar stopped at around 90% and the game never loaded. 45 minutes on the clock and I wasn't able to publish my game. Browsing like crazy I found a guy stating that they have had the same issue and it got fixed by disabling compression in player preferences. Oh how much I loved that person at that moment... The was up and running, hit the publish button on Ldjam, and started working a quick miniature, description, added some screenshots and, Rooted was alive!.

 POSTMORTEM OF THE JAM

The game did very well in my opinion! :D, a lot of people commented with very constructive feedback and, in general, seemed to like it. So I'm more than happy with the result. It could've been a LOT better, but as I told you before, some bad decisions took a lot of time from me. 

What DID work: 

• Levels seemed to be interesting for most people and the main mechanic and control scheme was accepted by most of the players
• Art was welcomed by most of the players, despite the low contrast mistake.
• Total gameplay time was good, as it wasn't either too short or too long and most players seemed to enjoy it.
• Adding a skip level button was a good idea.

What DID NOT work:

• Some of the rules of how the game worked were not correctly explained, neither visually nor written in the tutorial
• The mechanic of making the root unusable after connecting to a water node was not welcomed at all, and most players - thought it's annoying
• Have I already complained about how bad I managed contrast between sprite???
• Music was annoying since it restarted with every restart. This was mainly a time thing, I added the music at the last minute, but still.
• Too few SFXs and at a very low volume

What I've learned for future jams:

•  Don't leave things for later and break your own organization rules
•  Ask for early feedback on your art, or you may end up with low contrast sprite which a lot of o people had a hard time seeing
•  Ask for feedback on things you think are trivial like main menus!! Some people gave me feedback telling me that they almost abandon the game because they thought the game wasn't working. This was due to not adding a button like an appearance  to the main menu buttons, they were just plain text

Thank you for reading if you made it this far!! 

*(Yes I wrote that in-game, and YES I had to retry like 10 times xD)*