Dawn of the Karen - Post Mortem

Ludum Dare 50 has come and gone, and now it's time to kick back and reflect on our results. Let's take a moment to talk about what went into this spring's jam, how we did, and what the future looks like for us.

Background

Our entry was in the Ludum Dare Jam, giving us 72 hours to whip up a video game. This was our team's second jam and first Ludum Dare - although I have entered previously in the Ludum Dare 49 Compo.

Speaking of our last jam, that was the Seven Day Rogue-Like jam, which wrapped just barely a month before Ludum Dare began. It was pretty tough to enter another jam so soon after the last one, and I think in hindsight we'd probably have wanted more of a buffer between games. But in the end, we're very glad we did Ludum Dare.

72 hours is not a super long time to make a game. Then again, it's also just barely enough time to make a game. You know what would be pretty tough is only having 24 hours to work with - which is exactly what our artist had to deal with. Due to a schedule conflict, she only had one day she could give to the game - uh oh!

Our design philosophy going into the jam was that we wanted to make a small game as polished as possible while also making it from scratch. We figured that we would prefer to play something simple but finished, and we want to make the kind of games that we like to play.

So how the heck do you deliver a polished game in such a limited timeframe when you have the additional constraints on how long your artist can work on the project? I think we did a pretty good job with what we had. We were able to provide variety to the enemies with simple palette-swaps, and we also skimped on death animations by forcing the enemies off screen when they're defeated.

I like what we ended up with. I feel like Dawn of the Karen has this neat look to it, and it accomplishes it with surprisingly few graphical assets. Not having so many assets also freed us to play with some new tools that we weren't super familiar with - such as Unity's timeline animations, or the workflow around recording and processing voice-overs for the PA system.

Results and Feedback

I bet this is what you're really here for, so let's get right to it. Below are our rankings for Dawn of the Karen. For a little background, there were 1993 entries in the Jam category this year, and we received 48-51 ratings depending on the category.

There are a few outliers here, but generally speaking it seems we placed in the top third of entries. Our lowest ranking was in Innovation which frankly holds no surprises to us - our game is a relatively simply top-down shooter that offers no unique mechanics. Despite that, we placed quite highly in the Fun and Humor categories. This might be my own bias talking, but I think those two categories are pretty important to the player and ultimately influence their Overall rating.

These numbers mean very little in a vacuum, so it's always good to look at what people had to say about the game they played. We received feedback from 41 participants which is astounding. One of the great things about Ludum Dare is that developers are incentivized to leave feedback on your game, but even still I wasn't expecting such a high ratio of feedback to ratings.

The general sentiment of our feedback is quite positive. There are very few bugs or UX issues reported. In fact, the biggest gripe people have is that they wish there was more game to play. In that sense, I'd say our strategy of making a polished game with few features was successful - always leave them wanting more.

It's not a very good post mortem if we don't learn something from it, and there's no shortage here. Part of the great thing about the Ludum Dare is that the people giving feedback are other developers, so when somebody gives a suggestion for improvement you know that it's probably well thought out and achievable. There's quite a few things we hadn't considered ourselves which people suggested to us:

• Variety in the sound effects used is important. We limited ourselves to one shooting and 'death' effect, and both get stale pretty quickly. In the future we'd like to either have some more variety in the assets used, or else apply some post-processing to give the illusion of difference.
•  We thought we were being cute by labelling the mute button "Turn off the store radio." This lead to some confusion in what this button actually did, and there wasn't any immediate feedback that the game was muted. That's a pretty important accessibility issue, so we'd like to make sure that's more clear in the future.
• The player's weapon fires quite slowly at the start of the game, which is by design. The player is able to upgrade their weapon's rate-of-fire, however that means they have to suffer through a slow weapon at the start. This is unfun for the player, and isn't the point of a game to have fun? We should be more careful when designing features that they aren't including some pain-point for the player.
• There are some performance issues when the maximum number of enemies are on screen. In my opinion this is a really tough one to work around, especially with the time constraint we have for a game jam. We had tested performance with two hardware configurations, but in hindsight those were both high-performance computers. As developers, we don't really want to lock people out of the game because of their hardware - especially given this is a browser game meant to have a wide reach. I think we could have been more clever with our optimization to make this less of an issue, but it certainly feels bad knowing that people couldn't enjoy the entire game because of it.

There's one extra thing that I'd like to mention, which is a neat feature we had. At the end of every round an announcer reads out a message over the store's PA system. When we added it, we thought it would be a fairly trivial feature and our writing might be worth a laugh. When the feedback started coming in, we were surprised that this is the number one thing people commented on. Apparently our little gag was very well received, and voice work is quite rare for a jam game. I have some doubts that we would have rated as highly as we did if it weren't for the announcements, so I'm quite glad we took the time to make something fun.

Looking to the Future

I'm extremely pleased with the results of our team's first Ludum Dare. We got into game jams because it seemed like a good way to get some more experience making games, and it was enormously successful in that regard. So what's next for us?

As such a small team, we only have enough bandwidth for a single project and an occasional jam. We're currently working on turning our previous jam - Chthonic Corridors - into a full game. You can play the jam version of Chthonic Corridors here.

Of course, Dawn of the Karen will hold a special place in our hearts, so we're going to keep it free forever. You can play it here.

Well, there's 158 days until the next jam. We'll be seeing you again in September!