Last weekend I participated in Ludum Dare, my favorite game jam. As always, I opted for the Compo category, which consists in making a game solo in 48 hours. The theme for this edition was "tiny creatures".

You can play the game in your browser from my itch.io page, and that might be helpful to put this post-mortem into context.

Development log

Saturday

I started by making a mind map to brainstorm game ideas.

I opted for a virtual pet game and pay homage to Tamagotchi, one of my favorite toys from my childhood.

In retrospective, I should have made sketches of the UI, think about which attributes I'd like to implement, how the pet would evolve, but… I just went ahead and drew a hatching egg animation in PICO-8's sprite editor, and a square with two dots as the "pet".

Then I went on coding a calendar, a few actions, stats and the main core cycle of "selecting an action" → "modify stat" → "tick time". And I called it a day and went to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Sunday

A lot of basic features were missing, but at the start of the day I made a list of my must-haves:

• Pet death
• A simple mini-game for executing an action
• Pet evolution depending on the stats
• Some sort of "end game" beyond keeping your pet alive… I ended up with an idea of showing a gallery of the different pets you could collect, kind of like a card album.

For the mini game, I implemented a simple reflex-based game. Depending on your results, you will get a boost or a debuff to your chosen action.

As for pet evolution, I definitely needed more stats beyond the two initial ones. I ended up with eight, and I kept tweaking them during the whole day. I still don't feel satisfied with the balance, but it's very tricky to nail this in an afternoon. I would have wanted two distinct "evolution branching" events, but ended up with just one. At least I found the sprites adorable.

The last thing I implemented was the "reserve", aka the album. I did a trick of being able to collect female and male versions of every pet type, so it didn't look so empty and players would have an incentive to try to figure out what stats exactly made the pet turn out like it did.

I had only a couple of hours left till the end of the jam, but I decided to not try to pull out a background music track and submit that version already, since I was tired.

Lessons learned

What went well?

• Booking PTO for the following Monday and take it easy during the jam.
• The cute sprites for the pet and egg were a source of motivation.
• Publishing a build by the end of Saturday so people could check the game out already.

What went wrong?

• Making assets before coding the features.
• Balancing stats was very tricky. I should have set up a spreadsheet or something of the like in advance to help me balance everything.
• Introducing new pet stats on the fly.
• Leaving audio till the very end.

Tools

• PICO-8 as the game engine.
• Pen & paper
• Git for version control and back up.

That's it. I'm quite happy with PICO-8 because it features all the tools I need to make a game, like a sprite and SFX editor. I wish the code editor was better, though, and/or had vim shortcuts.