Mable: The Journey – Ludum Dare Compo Version Postmortem
IntroductionThe Ludum Dare Compo entry version of Mable is a 2D side-scrolling action game, in which you control a girl who has a sword that is too heavy for her to swing. Fortunately, you can also shapeshift into a faerie and recall the sword to your hand, which then cuts through anything in the way. This is pretty handy, since there are monsters in the forest who are draining the world of colour. You must simply destroy the monsters to return the colour to the world. There is no win. There are no points. There is just not dying (or more likely: there is just lots of dying and playing again).
I really need to work on my elevator pitch.
Anyway, that's all there is to the game really - kill the things before the colour fades – but it did surprisingly well, finishing #26 overall in the compo, #21 for mood and #6 for graphics! I also got a great response from so many people that have played the game, with it having around 900 downloads on itch.io and getting mentioned on a few websites. It also got
this awesome video-review kind of thing from thekillerbits on YouTube.
Even my Mum liked the look of it and she hates games! Well, except Spelltower and Solitaire, she's pretty addicted to those.
The Origins of MableI actually had no idea what to make for Ludum Dare. I knew I wanted to make something that I could enter into the compo, rather than the jam, so it would have to be something that I could make graphics, sound and the actual game for in 48 hours.
That 48 hours was actually going to be more like 24 hours, as we were having a little family outing to Manchester on the Saturday for the day. It was a lovely day, but there was no game related stuff going on at all – not even thinking about the game really (although we did have a discussion about what I could do with the theme on the way back, which I'm sure everyone in the car thoroughly enjoyed.
The development itself, when I actually got sat at my PC, didn't go well at all. I still had no idea what to make, but I had at least decided a few things I wanted to try out.
I'd not really done pixel-art for a while, so that was one thing decided. I'd just started to learn how to use shaders the week prior to Ludum Dare, so that was another thing I really wanted in there – but that was pretty much all I really had decided when I started work on the game.
So for the first day, all I had done was make a pretty scrolling forest:
I'd also drawn a few characters, but had totally misread the theme and basically drawn a bunch of different characters with giant swords – not really what you'd call an unconventional weapon. After a sleep-deprivation triggered outburst on Twitter, I was given a particularly good suggestion by Richard Goodness: why not use a conventional weapon in an unconventional way?
This seemed to be an awesome idea. So I decided to think about that for the rest of that sleepless Saturday night.
When I woke up - don't you hate that? When you can't get to sleep, but you somehow do
just before you need to get up – the idea was pretty much just there, fully formed. You can't lift the sword, but you can turn into a faerie and recall it to your hand to kill any enemies (who are draining the forest of colour, obviously just an excuse to try out a shader) in the way.
So that was that. I cracked on and, while the game was far from as finished as I would have liked it to have been, I got my entry up with about 20 minutes to spare!
Monday I pretty much just slept for the day. Which was nice.
No, I don't know why I drew a random business guy either I've been using GameMaker: Studio for maybe 18 months now, and I've made a lot of prototypes on it (prototypes are my favourite) in that time, alongside working on a big background project. I can do things quickly. If I have an idea, I can usually get it working pretty roughly in a few minutes to at most an hour (if it's something pretty drastic). This meant that I could focus more on the feel of the game, and make everything feel awesome. It also meant that I could feel confident to try out getting a shader in there to reduce the colour saturation as you play through the level, something I wouldn't have even attempted to learn over the weekend if I didn't already know my way around GameMaker so well – although I did learn quite a bit about compiling thanks to all the complaints about having to install it (who knew you could make a standalone executable so easily?)
Pixel-art. I find pixel-art, when done well, beautiful. I love it. It feels really good to create too, because I can tweak it to my heart's content. Animating in pixel-art is great too, because it really feels like you're giving life to these little characters. Creating the art for Mable was an absolute joy (hence why there's currently 20 enemies drawn and not coded in for the expanded version I'm working on). Another benefit of going with pixel-art was the online community around it. When tweeting my work in progress, I got more retweets than I think I've ever had for anything, and in the week from the Saturday when I started tweeting went from 585 followers to around 690 – which freaked me out a little bit! So yeah, it seems like a lot of people like pixel-art!
A focus on 1 mechanic. The actual turning into a faerie and recalling the sword thing took about 15 minutes to get working, and probably another 3 hours polishing it up to make it feel awesome. There's a whole bunch of tiny little juicy things that happen when you recall that sword, and a whole bunch more when it slices through an enemy. When I was just flying through the level as fast as I could until I ran out of colour, over and over again, I new I'd got the feel about right. I've made the mistake in many games before, not just jam games and prototypes but larger projects too, of trying to get too much in and make it a super deep experience. I don't really think that's the right way to go about it. I mean, depth is fantastic and it's certainly a good goal to aim for, but you've got to make sure you've got something enjoyable before you start making it deeper. Nobody wants to dive into a swimming pool filled with excrement, right? Please see my website for a collection of such swimming pools.
Not being in work on Monday. I didn't really get any sleep from Friday until Sunday, so being able to recover from the weekend was really important. In the past I'd always been in work on the Monday after Ludum Dare, and it had always added to the stress of trying to get the game done. It felt a lot better this time, and I really got to enjoy the whole experience of the weekend. Even if you have to plan to pull a sicky, I 100% recommend no work on the Monday.
What Went WrongToo little pre-planning. You can see how the voting has gone. You know that one of the top 5 voted entries are going to be, so at least start thinking about how you might use each of those themes. I had an idea for a couple of the final round of themes, but hadn't bothered to look at how they'd performed in the earlier rounds (badly, as it turned out). I started making something without an idea of what I was making. I mean, I didn't even get the theme right when I started drawing the characters! The stress that this caused was not good. It did not help me sleep. It did not help the game.
No testing. The collision on the sword doesn't work properly (it only draws a 1 pixel thick line from the centre of the sword to the centre of your avatar, so you've got to time it perfectly to hit something), the text appears behind the trees, you can't switch in and out of fullscreen on a Mac, the bulls can get stuck right underneath you and, worst of all, it's just ridiculously hard. Don't get me wrong, I love a difficult game, but it just got ridiculous after about 20 seconds. This is a lesson I should have learned before, but I keep getting it wrong! Maybe this time I'll learn (probably not).
No win condition. There is no point to the game. You just fly around and kill stuff to stop the game ending. The longer that you survive, the more stuff comes to try and kill you. I think I got the last enemy in with about an hour to go, but I'm pretty sure I had enough time to at least put a simple scoring system in there. I know I would definitely had time if I hadn't wasted time on adding in...
...The last minute tutorial (and the front layer in general). I'm pretty sure this lost me points and the game would have actually been a lot cleaner without it. As soon as the last enemy was in, I added a stupid little text thing to try to explain how to play. Sadly, it doesn't explain how to play. And worse than that the text is behind the front layer of trees so you can't even read it! You squint and move around trying to read it, then you realise it's a load of rubbish. This was a stupid tired mistake, but overall a pretty minor one. It just kind of takes the shine off the thing a little. Another thing that was pretty clear after a good sleep was how much of a problem the front layer is – it basically blocks a lot of the action, making things harder to see. Again, a bit minor and I'm sure a lot of people didn't a) notice or b) care.
Looking at the theme in the middle of the night when it is announced. I looked at the theme at around 2am UK time. I then tried to get back to sleep. That didn't happen, so I got up and started drawing. Then we drove to Manchester and I felt like hell. Then we came back and I tried to start work on the game and felt worse. I do this every time. I am an excitable man-child and the merest hint of Ludum Dare starting sends my brain into overdrive. I think I'll be asking someone to hide my phone next time so that I can't peek!
ConclusionsPeople seemed to love what, to me, felt like a handsome mess of a game. However, as a starting point I think it's pretty awesome. I really enjoyed making it and I'm definitely going to expand on it to make it a more focused experience that has a point to it. I'm really happy with the level of polish I managed to achieve and how cool it feels to fly around and slice through the enemies. I've already fixed many of the issues with the Ludum Dare version, and the community here on TIG has been pretty amazing.
I'll be doing a full update soon on what I've got planned for the game. I want to keep it simple and focused, but really give you a full world to play with. I've already had plenty of ideas of fun ways to play around with using the sword mechanic in different ways, so I guess really I just need to learn level design super quick and get everything in there. I've been even been playing around with a local versus mode – which is stupid (and therefore super fun).
I think the main takeaway has been: keep it simple and make sure that everything is awesome before you add more stuff in, and don't forget to get people to test the game for you!
Community
