Firstly, here's the game, if you want to get right to it. Ludum Dare is an enormous online game jam that happens a couple times a year. This most recent one (Ludum Dare 32) was the first one that I actually completed a game for, and I'm quite happy with the result. The theme for this jam was "An Unconventional Weapon", and I'm not all that keen on making games that have a lot of violence in them, so I picked a weapon that wouldn't actually hurt anyone. The apathy bomb was born, which, as you can probably guess, affects emotion and motivation. From here, I had the idea of borrowing structurally from The Stanley Parable, an excellent game which I highly recommend wherein the game plays with the narrative and storytelling opportunities that arise when the narrator and the player disagree. The game came together fairly quickly after that. |
It's a good thing, too, because I chose to submit this game to the competition. Ludum Dare is broken down into two categories, the competition and the jam. The jam is 72 hours long, you can work in teams, and you can use pre-made assets - the game itself just has to be original. The competition is a bit tougher, as it has a 48 hour time limit, you must work solo, and all creative work (including 3d models, sound, etc.) MUST be created in that time frame (with the exception of using third party engines or libraries, as long as they're publicly available). Needless to say, this makes things rather difficult, but I was excited for the opportunity to create something polished in a short amount of time. My favorite part of this game is my narration (which I suppose is good, because it's pretty central to the game). Besides being a game developer, one of my dreams is to be a voice actor, so this was a pretty awesome meeting of worlds. The hardest part was the 3d modeling, which I haven't been doing for very long and find very difficult. Take a look at this picture of palace, though - it's a little rough, but I didn't know I could do even that. |
I feel like I captured the tone of The Stanley Parable really well, so I think it works well as an homage. But, I also feel like it's different enough that you can still enjoy it without having played The Stanley Parable. Hopefully that's true ... Have fun finding the 6 different possible endings. In any case, I'm anxious for feedback. Please let me know what you think either on my itch.io page, the Ludum Dare page, on my Twitter, or here in the comments. Thanks so much for playing! You can also see the other games that were submitted here! Yep, that's right, there are nearly 3,000 of them. |