Mandragorae Somnus' Dev Diary

We are here presenting a little about how did we work things out for the 48th Ludum Dare:

23/04 - After the theme reveal, the three of us started a quick brainstorm session to collect some ideas for the game, the ideas were pretty different to each other, varying from a "push your luck" game to a game based on an old local popular song, but in the end, we all agreed to work on an idea about a plant spreading its roots to reach deeper and deeper underground. Then it was time to roll up our sleeves (metaphorically) and star working on polishing our concept. Our artist wanted to bring a fantastical aspect to this project and made a concept of a Mandrake, which we all liked a lot! The programmer made the logic of the roots' movement with flying colors. The game designer, with the help of the others, defined the objects found underground and how they would interact with the roots.

24/04 - The second day was real intense, each one of continued from where we stopped during the day before and, as we moved on, new problems and ideas came up along the way. In the art section, the underground elements were made first and being put on unity by the programmer and the game design was being adjusted all the time.  During this day, the game's music started to being made. To match the artist's style, the music evoked a dense aspect, this way the player would feel in sync with the game's narrative.

During the whole day, we held an eventual meeting to share our progress and rethink some aspects when needed. When the clock marked 8 P.M., we agreed to not add any new idea and discarded the other ideas that wasn't implemented to focus on the game's best self working on what we had and turn it a complete experience and not an experiment missing parts. The rest of the day we followed this formula and focussed only on what we had into our hands and solving the issues that appeared in the way.

25/04 - The first meeting of the last day was to define the game's interface, and for the rest of the morning the remaining SFX were finished and so was the core mechanics. By afternoon all we had to do was keep working on the game's balance and a few assets were improved to keep it clean. The last step we did was the screen flow, with the creation of the menu, tutorial and introduction screens. Small corrections on the screen's text took a lot more than what we previously planned but with that finished, our game was complete!

26/04 - The last official day of the game jam was all about corrections, we received a lot of insightful feedbacks and used those to re work on some of the game's aspects and balance to improve the game's experience: most of the feedbacks were about the camera control and how hard was to click on the roots, move them and go to the left buttons to move the camera, but it was jeopardizing their experience. We, then, added keyboard functionality, redistributed the root's actions towards both of the mouse's button.

By the end of the day, we just played the other games and tried to be as helpful as the people that commented on our game were.

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Overall, all of us fully enjoyed the experience promoted by the Ludum Dare! If you are curious about our game, please don't hesitate to give it a shot!