Ludum Dares
Dear God is it hard to keep a blog updated. Much harder than making videogames! How do people manage?!
Between the last post and now we’ve participated in a couple of different jams, all the while indulging in our other “bigger” projects. I’d like to say we have been busy but finding the time to dev while also committing a sizeable amount of time towards studies and work can at times be a difficult task! Nonetheless i would like to think that this has been a fruitful half year.
LD30
I guess getting a pretty unexpected 5th place in the first LD we participated in (LD29) made our 35th place this LD a kind of disappointment. The process and aftermath of making Dream Witch Erika certainly made us more aware of what constitutes a good, or atleast appropriate, scope for a jam game. Not to say that we think this is a bad game, but making our first metroidvania-styled game and doing so during a 72hour jam, made for more of a learning experience than a proper “product”.
LD31
We almost didn’t participate in this jam due to our immediate dislike of the theme. In the end we decided to throw a few ideas around, one of them being good enough that we ended up committing yet another weekend to the unholy practice of game jamming.
You don’t win if you don’t participate, and if you do participate you apparently do win! Placing 1st in Overall, Fun and Mood, 2nd place in humor and 3rd in innovation I guess you could say that this game was a much more calculated effort than any of our previous entries. We tried to apply what we had learned from our jam experiences during the year especially pertaining to scope and the games immediateness.
During the voting period people go through a lot of jam games, and as such won’t necessarily devote oodles of time towards each game - we know this from ourselves too. One of the faults of Dream Witch Erika was that the game simply took too long to unfold, being a bit barren and featureless until you ventured far enough into the world before the game got any fun. We definitely wanted this game to be small in scale but polished, and most importantly fun from the get go!
Lately the game has seen a pretty decent amount of exposure on gaming blogs, and seems to be especially popular among streamers and YouTubers. Seeing and reading about people having fun with our games really is one of the biggest pleasures of developing games. This flux of attention has been a big motivation booster. Hopefully more people will pay attention to our future endeavours now, as we have a few projections in the line that we feel really confident in!
