Reflect on my latest LD29 entry: Princess Fart

  Ludum Dare 29 is over with the voting ended. As always, I did my best to participate. Since I joined, Ludum Dare has been a chance for me to participate in an exciting game making event, and be more active in the game developers community. It has encouraged me to go from making one game a year, to pretty much making one game a month. (#1GAM also helped a lot). This time, my submission was Princess Fart. I would say, I was hoping much better result. The game didn’t get very high notes overall, except in humor. I guess farts will always make people laugh. My approach for this game was different than other LDs. For a while, I’ve been wanting to make a game with my friend Sophie. Together, we came up with this idea to make a game about a farting princess (And of course, that princess is Sophie ;-)). I pretty much shoved the LD theme (Beneath the Surface) into the game, rather than having the idea sprout from it. The rating for “Theme” really suffered from it, but this time I was more interested in making a game with Sophie than having a game that really conveys the theme. The game had its charms and flaws. I ended up spending more time on the intro cut scene than the game itself. At the end, Sophie liked it, but she could point out a few flaws. For her, the puzzles (like fetch the pendant to open the heart door, get the flute ect…) didn’t really feel so meaningful to her. The game should have been more geared towards action rather than running around solving puzzles like in an adventure game. When compared to “The World is in your hand“, the different puzzles had meaning, because they each helped people reunite with what they love. She’s right. I didn’t really think much about the puzzles because I had the notion those could just be anything. A lot of games out there simply have “Find the key to open door X”. I was also used to LucasArt adventures that had weird wacky puzzles like “Use the monkey on some fire hydrant to turn off the waterfall”, or something like that. I failed to realize that just like films, elements in a video game need to have some reason for being. The game was appealing to me enough that I would want to develop it, and as Sophie suggested, make it more “action” oriented. The music composed within a few hours was still nice, and the graphics are cute. I also have a nice code base to work off, so perhaps it’s not all failed after all.