Ludum Dare 46: Ordinary Human Conversation

For the first time ever, I was brave enough to take on the Ludum Dare Compo. For those who don't know, LD is a 48-hour game jam where you have to produce your entire game solo. I fired up every program on my laptop and built... Ordinary Human Conversation. Here what I learned from each step of the process:

PS. Ordinary Human Conversation is a web game. Play it on itch.io!

👾 Game Design

Since this was my first Ludum Dare, I wanted to keep my scope super tight. Ordinary Human Conversation only has one mechanic: pattern matching. I loosely based the gameplay on the card game Spot It. I didn't write a formal GDD, but I outlined everything I planned to build in my notebook during the first few hours of the jam.

🤖 Programming

I usually program during game jams; this was the category I had the most confidence in. I've learned during past jams to QA the hell out of HTML5 games, so I started testing my builds early and often. During the first 24 hours, I completed the core loop. The second day was dedicated to art & sound implementation.

🎨 Art & Animation

This jam gave me an excuse to break out Flash for the first time in 2020! Getting back into the old program gave me a chance to reconnect with my gamedev roots. I sketched the characters during the first night of development, but didn't digitally illustrate or animate them until the second morning. The characters use a mix of sprite sheet animation & programmatic tweening. Backgrounds were ultra-simple illustrations because I was running out of time.

✔️ UI

The UI aesthetic was inspired by Persona 5. I wanted to make something loud & in-your-face, because there isn't much action anywhere in the game. I don't normally think of myself as a UI artist, but I'm really proud of how it came out.

🎧 Audio

I am a true audio newbie. I used BFXR to make the sound effects and "voices", and a drum step sequencer for the music. The beat of the song speeds up as the conversation gets faster, which I hoped would amp up the tension. All in all, the audio came out more grating/harsh than I intended, and it's definitely the weakest part of the project.

Final Result

When the scores were tallied, I did quite well in graphics, theme, and humor. Audio... less so. I'm looking forward to trying again on the next Ludum Dare and putting everything I learned this time into practice.