Another Ludum Dare. This one was especially challenging. I recently became a parent to the cutest little boy, he's just 3 months old. I'm quite lucky to have the support of my wife Kelsey, who allowed me to spend so much of my weekend working on this jam game. I didn't really plan to participate this year, and didn't take any time off of work, so I only had the weekend to work on my entry. Juggling a game jam with a new baby is not something I would recommend.

With a 3 month old baby, a late start, a day short, and last minute taxes, this game may be a miracle. 

Summoning?



The theme was announced 9pm on Friday night. I was having some drinks with my wife and bro, while watching Smackdown. I was immediately disappointed by the theme, more than ever before. I felt like there were only so many ways to interpret it that could lead to new and interesting games ideas (We'll see I guess). I also had some cool idea doodles I had made during the week while the theme voting was taking place.

"Tunnels - Strange Machines - Single Use"

I struggled to find an idea that hit the sweet spot. I figured we would see a lot of; Summoning circles, Demons, Ghosts, Undead (Necromancy). Summon to court. Summon ancestral spirits. RPG style summons. Summoning fighters like Marvel vs Capcom.

There are a lot of concepts I could land on that could easily fulfill the theme, but... Is that what I'm good at making?
Can I make that? Can I make that with the limited time? How many assets will that need? 

Among the most important things to me as a game developer, is making a game I WANT TO MAKE.

This is a mockup-draft that I made Friday night for a couple hours, just kind of doodling. The idea was; The player would control a signal that would shoot from antenna to antenna, to control robots and other mechanism. This idea still seems cool in my head, but I think the theme interpretation would be somewhat weak (what exactly are we summoning?), and it might require too many mechanics to fully realize with limited time.

I considered not participating in the jam. The theme wasn't really clicking with me. I decided to sleep on it.

8am Saturday morning is normally too early for me. But I guess I had as much sleep as I needed. Baby boy was sound asleep, and I had this idea come to me. A summon is a type of call, maybe we can call something with a whistle. Maybe the whistle can be used to attract enemies so we can get around them? Once I had the whistle working, I started trying to call the enemies. Somewhere along the way it became this block moving thing.


(The stuff at the bottom here are some pieces of high rez stuff I shrunk down.)

Visually, I started the project with the idea of trying to make a higher resolution game than I normally make, in a simple style I could achieve, using adobe bevels and gradients, something like Mario Wonder or New Super Mario Bros. I tried going with a screen of 1920x1080, and the tiles would be 64x64 or something like that, but things weren't moving as fast as I would have liked,  and I'm just not used to using such large asset sizes. After trying it out, and building out a simple room, I reverted back to my comfort zone in low resolution.
Good old 320x180. The final look is a soft and inviting world, I'm happy with how it turned out. 



Over the last week, I discovered these "Hey Bear Sensory" videos. They're high contrast videos used to attract infants developing vision. I watched a few of these with the baby boy, pointing out the different fruits, counting for him, and making up silly random fruit based songs; "It's avocadooo, avocadoooo boy, avocadoooo, avocado boooy" lol. I think this is where the idea to make the blocks have the type of kawaii faces on them.



I spent a couple hours on music production. It's hard for me to talk about how I produce music, it's one of those things I just kind of feal out. I know I wanted something cheerful and upbeat, but there really isn't enough time to be too picky or calculating with anything in a game jam. There is no time to refine anything, whatever comes out is what you get. I tried to add enough variations to keep it interesting. It's possible to beat the game without ever hearing that ending section of the song.

For the sounds, I actually did a bit of voice acting, and those whistles are also mine (pitched up with some reverb and delay). I thought I was a good whistler until I needed to record myself lol.




Coming up short?
You may notice this entry is quite short. There are about 14 rooms. The last 2 rooms add mechanics I wasn't able to explore to my liking. I also needed to troubleshoot and develop a work around for these "grabber block" mechanics at the last minute, because the build was literally not working the way it worked in the editor (the blocks would latch on to the player but fail to recoil back to their position).

The 2 hours of time I had after work, and before the deadline meant I needed to bug fix the build (or cut the rooms), and try to jam out some kind of presentation and ending. I could have sacrificed the dialog, title screen, and ending, and maybe added a few more rooms, but I was also afraid I would rush out a bunch of bad rooms just for filler. So the presentation is the part that actually feels rushed, because it is! 

 I know this low-rez-puzzle-platformer style game is still a part of my comfort zone, which I think is fine because a weekend is not enough time to REALLY explore and develop something you've never made before. If I had tried to make an RPG style battle system or something like that, I would need at least a week to make it decent. (I had a really cool idea of a beat-em-up, but all your attacks are summons, so you'd just have like an army of characters flying in from the side of the screen to attack the baddies...  I wouldn't have been able to produce the art to make that game with this time limit, maybe with some help...maybe...)



I'm slightly bothered by how similar "Wonder Whistle" is to my LD53 entry "Special Delivery", but it's also unique in its own ways (I purposely avoided some mechanics like conveyor belts or wind), and I especially love how charming it looks and feels.

I wish I could have done more, but it's a 72 hour jam and I had less than 48 hours to actually work with.
I'm happy with what I was able to produce. I hope you love it like I do!