[LD38] Postmortem - Lottery: You judge them I judge you

Lottery: You judge them I judge you

BEFORE THE JAM:

IDEA

- I already have the idea of the game before the event even started. I thought to myself that I want a death or life game where the player need to choose who to live or die. The idea is to let the user judge the characters based on their professions, personalities, and etc. And, at the end of the game, the game will judge the player. Maybe a convincing dialogue to prove that the player is this or that... Also I can't decide whether it will be a dark or comedy game.

DURING THE JAM:

IDEA

-Then after the theme (A Small World) has been announced I realized that I could still do my idea before. I made my game fit in the theme by adding a world map or sorts where the player can choose who to battle on the moment. I list the game concept on a piece of paper so that it will be easy for me to follow and not get lost. I put pointers too to help me determine whether that certain character is good or bad. Here is the scratch of the simple concept of the game:

GAME

- I want my game to be in compo (48 hours). At first I thought I wouldn't make it but I did. Though not all the things went to what I was expecting, I still managed to finish the game. Below are the explanation of how I did the pillars of my game.

1. SpeechController and Speech

• This is the first one that I did after I heard the theme. I made these two classes to generate different speeches at a given time. I made it possible to randomize the speeches' position near the character. In order for it to store different kinds of speeches I made a SpeechBank class where to store all the different dialogues that a certain character was allowed to say.

1. SpeechBank

• Each Person object contains a speech bank, With speech bank you can adjust the weights:
• adjust the spawn every sec. timer for each speeches to spawn
• the percentage of how likely the speech to spawn.
• whether to spawn a negative, positive, or generic type of speech.
2. Point
• This is one of the most important thing. This is how I compute or judge the player based on his choices. Each person contains a Point component. This determines whether the character is good, bad, useful, etc.

• To calculate the total point of the player I just accumulate the points by adding the difference of the points of the two characters. ex. (-2 = evil) - (2 = kind) = [-4 = evil]. A simple arithmetic right? 

WHAT WENT WRONG?

• Such short time that I was not able to populate the speech bank with interesting dialogues. All because I want to enter the game in compo(48 hours) not in jam.
• I fucked up the sounds. I made the sounds on my earphones on that I didn't notice that the volume was too low to hear when you have no earphones on.
• The battle system was a bit vague and the characters are not balanced well so it is possible for someone to get the same type of judgement every now and then.

WHAT WENT RIGHT?

• I was able to make a text to generate to the character with fade and scale out at the same time.
• It fits with the theme by adding earth-like map for picking contestants for each level.
• There is an award or judgement at the end of the game, and a special award of course.
• Manager to do it under 48 hours.

Play it here: https://doppelgunner.itch.io/lottery-ld38
Source code: https://github.com/doppelgunner/LD38_Lottery/

Timelapse:

Youtube demo: