Save Nebuville Post Mortem

Post Mortem for my 11th Ludum Dare game, "Save Nebuville"

Posted Oct 27, 2024 Updated Oct 28, 2024

By Viktor

5 min read

Introduction

During the Ludum Dare 56 jam, we created Save Nebuville. The theme was Tiny Creatures, and we had 72 hours to complete the game. The team consisted of Myself (Viktor), Pijinguy and Bonejacq.

How did I find these peeps you ask? Every time Ludum Dare rolls around I make posts in a bunch of game developer discords and group chats looking for a new team. My goal is to work with someone new each time, part of the reason I do game jams is to be exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Anywho, I was in Bonejacq’s discord because I liked Bonejacq’s game development twitch streams. So I posted in their discord and both Bonejacq and Pijinguy said they would love to join the team…

Timeline

Pre-Jam: Leading up to the beginning of the game jam, we were brainstorming potential ideas using the potential themes as prompts. This time around I didn’t have any strong desire to make a specific game, so the brainstorming process wasn’t super important. Pijinguy was allocated all the art assets, Bonejacq all the audio assets, and I would do the programming and implementation and marketing stuff.
Day 1 (Friday): The jam has begun! The theme was announced (Tiny Creatures), which definitely wasn’t my favorite out of the possible themes. We agreed that the first 24hrs would be spent trying to nail down a concept. Some of the concepts we came up with is a ferrous fluid simulation of lots of individual pixels moving around, a plinko game, something similar to Loco Roco.

Nebuville Prototype Mockup by Bonejacq

Day 2 (Saturday): In the morning we settled on the idea of a giant slime ball coming towards the city and I began working on prototypes for it. Pijinguy sent over some prototypes of the environments and assets and I implemented those. Most of the day I actually spent working at my day job fixing watches and sleeping though.
Day 3 (Sunday): Pijinguy sent over more art assets, revised based on my feedback. Bonejacq sent over the music for the game. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that was the first and only audio contribution Bonejacq would make. Most of this day was spent working at my day job as well, but I managed to make more progress on the game which included upgrading how the slime enemies looked, and bullet mechanics.
Day 4 (Monday): Pijinguy sent over a turret asset that I separated into two parts and implemented into the game. The rest of the time was spent crunching making last minute changes to the build and finally publishing it to Itch and LDJam. I also had to find all the sound effects and implement them because Bonejacq didn’t submit any sound effects to me. We submitted the game on time and it contained most of the features I wanted. Overall a pretty lax jam.
Post-Jam: This time was spent playing other jam submissions, upgrading the visuals on our itch page and ludum dare page with gifs and screenshots.

What Went Well

I didn’t have a lot of time to work on the project, but I spent the time I had very well. I managed to design, implement and polish this game within the span of perhaps 10-15 hours total. Quite quick!

Comment from Pijinguy (Artist): I somehow was able to make all the art in time and i am happy enough with the quality of it which kinda surprised me. Also you viktor, really tied it all together to finish the project well.
Comment from Bonejacq (Musician): Assembling the team was quick and painless. We didn’t really have any creative differences, which is important. We just picked something and went with it.

Challenges

Like I alluded to before, this jam had pretty minimal contribution from the other teammates. This gave me a new challenge to do more with less. In addition to my usual challenge of fitting in working a day job with game jamming.

Comment from Pijinguy (Artist): My job was getting very hectic at the same time as the jam, and the stress levels were quite high. I was really scared of not being able to make the art in time, and i actually almost didn’t.
Comment from Bonejacq (Musician): Mostly personal issues on my part, so the challenge was getting up and doing what I needed to do at all. In terms of our collaboration, I think it felt like we were all equally lukewarm about the prompt and the resulting ideas, which made it hard to lock in as well.

The Final Product

I think my favorite part of the entire process was seeing a final product that was actually quite good, despite how little time myself and the other team members spent on the project. This Ludum Dare was definitely the least amount of hours contributed towards the end project across all the teammates that I’ve ever been a part of. That being said : It’s not my least favorite final product, so that means there is tangible improvement across the game dev spectrum for myself! Very exciting!

Comment from Pijinguy (Artist): Quite happy with how everything turned out, a very great learning experience for me, the game is actually a lot of fun, and the results weren’t half bad. Glad i got to participate.
Comment from Bonejacq (Musician): The final result is a cute little flash shooter. I like it! Could obviously be refined into something slicker and sleeker but it doesn’t really need to be.

Reception

Game in action!

Final Game: After a week of people playing the game we got our scores! We had 41 people leave ratings, and lots of comments as well. Here’s a link to the scores and feedback! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/save-nebuville

We scored 189th in Fun, which marks the first time Fun was my best category since I started doing Ludum Dare 4 years ago. My fixation has been making fun games, so I think this is a big milestone! I’m aiming for my next game to be super high effort so we’ll see If I can score highly in Fun again!

Overall, we scored 423 out of 1478 (which is top 29%)

Comments & Reactions

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