Ludum Dare with IGD

In this second game jam of the year, I had the opportunity to join another five students from my Development Practice course. I enjoyed working in a team after working by myself in both Rapid Ideation sessions in the course.

The theme of the Ludum Dare 48 Game Jam was "Deeper and Deeper". The theme was released at 2 AM and at 9 AM after we had our morning coffee we jumped straight into a Miro board to start our ideation. We had ideas flying all around and about an hour later we had picked one for the game.

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"It is a Friday night. A blizzard is upon the town. You forgot your keys inside and you have to go back to get them. Little did you know that you are actually working for a secret organisation. Who knows what you might discover as you sneak inside…"

Then we proceeded to quickly jot down different assets and mechanics we would like to see in the game. We used Trello to write down cards for all of us to work on and we all started working.

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While we made great progress throughout, there were some key lessons we all learned from the game jam that we can take into future game jams and our practice.

Lessons learned

One of the most noteworthy things for me was learning how to generate dynamic meshes. We wanted to put into the game cameras which can detect the player so naturally, we needed to telegraph where the cameras were looking. The final result looked very cool and I even made it a customisable number of sides.

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We faced some issues, however. The first one was that a lot of people created assets and rightfully put them in Git branches, but we never merged those branches. We were mostly keeping in sync with what is done and what wasn't through Trello and Discord, so we knew things are progressing. However, in the end, we had to spend a significant amount of time merging everything together and solving conflicts that originated from moved folders and restructure of the project. The key learning from this is to always ensure everybody is in sync with the workflow proposed and to ensure there are no long-running branches in the repository.

The second issue was that our level design was a bottleneck. Our level designer took the challenging job of designing the big level we planned, but because we didn't know how to properly merge Unity Scenes we had only one person do the whole job. Additionally, the level became over 100Mb in size at some point, so we had to submit it to Git LFS (Large Files Storage) which meant that merging was completely out of question. Because of this issue we started putting things together very late and a lot of components in the game were not wired by the time we had to submit the game. This issue I think is very important for me to understand and solve as it will definitely come up in any professional setting and during the next courses in my degree. I will be researching how others in the industry have solved it in order to be better prepared for future game jams, the remaining courses in my Indie Game Development degree and my future career.

The game

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You can check out Le Gardien at our Ludum Dare page!

References

The Blender Foundation. 2021. Blender. [Software]

Unity Technologies. 2021. Unity. [Software]