Part 1/4: How it started

This is part 1 in series of 4. Part 1 is "how it started", part 2 is "how it went", part 3 is "how it ended" and part 4 is "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".

So, how it all started, you may ask?

Well, for starters, I was looking for a team to join in Ludum Dare's Discord channel when Béphane contacted me. He had already joined forces with sso. So now there was three of us. Eager for the gamejam. I wanted to prepare beforehand and made us a Trello board for task management.

Trello at it's current state after the gamejam is over:

We got most of the things we wanted implemented.

Remember this Trelloboard was empty before the gamejam started and theme was announced: "Limited space".

Yeah that what it was. We got some generic space saving and storage management ideas. But Béphane got idea probably from his experience last night club event(this is just my assumption :D), that it would be nice to have a club that is crowded.

So we gathered some ideas what it could be. I even created concept art drawings of the mechanics:

As you can see clearly in the image, not that I have to tell what is there, but anyway:

1. first scene would be getting inside the club. What struggles you would need to go through to access there?

2. second scene would have been topdown view like in original Grand Theft Auto. With mission to get through crowded space trying to avoid others.

3. third scene would have been a dance scene where you would have to push other men away from the ladies and try to stay close to the ladies to get more points in the game.

But yeah we scrapped these ideas to limit the scope. Béphane had chosen stickfigure like pixelart style. We went with that. It looked awesome and is still awesome! So topdown view was out of the question at this point. Anyway Béphane started working on the art. Clock started to be 2 am for me, I went to sleep.

Tomorrow morning sso had created us a github repo. Which is by the way public if anyone wants to see the spaghetti code made hastily, go ahead. I have warned you. :D It can be found here: https://github.com/LudemSJB/The-Limited

I started working on the game. We decided early on before the gamejam we would use Godot. We decided to use Godot 4.1 without mono, which means no C#, only gdscript. This decision was because we knew that Godot 4.1 mono version doesn't support web export, but the non-mono version does. I created root scene, scene selection and some levels.

Then we discussed how the interaction would work. I made concept of the talk bubble:

yup.

I slapped it in the game as a placeholder.

We hopped some ideas back and forth. 

sso started working on minigame parts for the game.

I started working on the dialog system.

And Béphane started working on the art:

It's still progress, I tell you.

This is end of part 1. "how it started". In next part, I will talk about "how it went", which will contain more detailed technical explanations of dialog system. Part 3 will be "how it ended", will contain last hour struggles and a retro of sorts, or it will be in part 4. Who knows! You just have to stick around to find out more!