Posted September 04, 2024 by diralf
#jam #mechanics #art #music #level-design #dark #ladybug
The active period of the jam has ended. I would like to share a brief story of how everything went.
I discovered this “Made with Defold Jam” only after it had started. It was fortunate that I develop my games on the Defold engine and decided to participate in it, even though I had not yet moved far from the previous LOWREZJAM. Initially, I thought of continuing what I had done there, a colorful game about an archer with a sight. But I couldn’t come up with any ideas related to the jam’s theme “One too many.”
Then I remembered my small game from the recent Ludum Dare 54 about a little black ladybug, a complete opposite in atmosphere.
Initially, I wanted to create a mechanic where the level would start to collapse based on the player’s actions as they progressed. This somewhat fit the theme, i.e., ‘The ruins stood stable, but the ladybug’s interference was one too many.’ I must say that I never managed to implement this mechanic. I didn’t know how to approach it, so I worked on other things.
I also noticed that Rive became more accessible for free use and saw the integration of Rive with Defold. I thought it would be cool to have runtime vector animation in the game. But after some attempts to run at least an integration example, I realized it was not worth focusing on this for now. Especially since there is currently no HTML5 support, and I didn’t want people to have to download the game for the jam. Rive remained in my graphics pipeline but only as a tool for animating and drawing. Then I exported everything to PNG. I created two simple animations for the ladybug: Idle and walking (more like crawling).
Then I set up all the transitions between levels, thanks to the Monarch library. Fixed many bugs with movement and all the features.
I took sfx from ready-made assets from itch.io, essentially footstep sounds, teleportation, platform destruction, background noise, and some subtly noticeable effects in the menu. Used those great packs:
In the end, all I had the strength for was a simple image with a bug.
There was an hour left until the end of the jam, I quickly built the project, uploaded it to itch.io, ran through the level. I noticed a slight strangeness with the trigger to transition to the final screen at the very end. Fixed it. Uploaded again. And finally submitted the game. It was already 0:30 AM for me, so I just went to sleep.