Beaver Submarine Postmortem

I was in for the latest Ludum Dare and here are the results!

This time there were 1145 participants in the compo. Those aren't my best results, but I am content with them. The "audio" ranking is due to a music bug on some browsers, and the "fun" ranking is mostly due to me experimenting with physics. More details below.

What was made

Like Lighthouse Keeper, and unlike Ace of Rope, this time I didn't follow my ideas list after the theme was revealed to be "Deeper and deeper". The original idea was to fight a villain who has a voice so deep he can sing in the infrasounds and cause earthquakes. The backup idea was about a game where instructions or dialogs are getting more and more profound and philosophical.

By Saturday noon, I spent around 2 hours on a platformer. The infrasound adventurer was turned into a chicken, because most birds sing, and the bigger the bird, the lower the voice, so why not a chicken? I even coded the stabilized head effect when you walk! This, however, was a long way from the original theme, so it ended up scrapped in the afternoon.

Inspired by a previous prototype some years ago (with Uubu on the art style, back when I used GameMaker), I decided to make a beaver control a submarine. After drawing basic woody elements, I started using kinematic bodies for both the beaver and the submarine, the behaviour of which was… interesting.

(apparently I can't post mp4 files here, so you need to visualize the submarine teleporting in various places when the beaver touches the ceiling or the walls)

Fortunately, Godot gives the possibility of a full rigid body simulation instead, and that ended up being the final physics of the game. Note that to ease frustration, I gave Jules Beaverne the ability to jump in mid-air infinitely. Which is fine, because he is trapped in a submarine. I directly took inspiration from my very first games ten years ago, made with GameDevelop, when I wanted to make a platformer but didn't know how to do it.

What's great about physics bodies is that everything has weight. Want a more responsive submarine? Reduce its weight or add power! Want the beaver to rock the submarine when running around? Make him heavier! I also added crates in the background (they have negligible mass by the way), and some light bulbs because the lake is dark and it looks nice and you can swing them around like the rope in my previous game.

Add some fish (technically enemies, but they don't really do anything), a propeller and some cannons, and the basic idea is done! To match the theme, the side-scrolling is slightly vertical, and various effects give more depth to your progression. I also added bubble particles when necessary.

Slap a cutscene (two images and three sentences), an ending goal (house keys), and a losing condition (the oxygen isn't gonna replenish itself after all), and the game is complete by Sunday evening, after around 8-10 relaxed hours of development.

What went right

The atmosphere was really appreciated, and some even liked the physics! The audio soundscape was also appreciated by those that didn't have that bug.

According to the ratings, an entrepreneurial beaver searching for his house keys in a steampunk vessel is also a humorous novelty.

And finally, this was the occasion for me to play your games, some of them were truly amazing!

What went wrong

So, the initial idea behind the wacky submarine's controls was to avoid coasting to the bottom without any input. That's why buttons on the left cause the submarine to go left and the beaver to go right because of kickback. The help button upstairs, on which you start the game, should have been removed and the helper text permanently displayed.

Also, some play styles caused the submarine to flip around and go upside down. Unless you realized you can infinite jump, you were very frustrated and almost stuck. I tried to stabilize the submarine with some torque, but that just caused it to turn into a centrifuge after 30 seconds.

In addition, it was a bit awkward to do everything on the arrow keys, especially for some players that skipped the ending text too early. The only button requiring mouse input is the pause button in the corner.

The black, algae… thing, on the foreground, was interpreted as a wall for some players, so that needs a bit less contrast and more legibility. The audio also suffered an audible bug that I couldn't reproduce (or that might be the poor-but-lightweight 64kbps encoding that you can notice if you have good headphones, but I'm keeping it that way to reduce loading times).

Finally, the fish are probably the worst enemies I have ever created on a published game.

Conclusion

I would like to thank Ludum Dare organizers and other participants for their creations, especially reviewers that were throwing an absurd amount of feedback at me (more than usual, probably because of my previous performance).

Thanks for playing and see you for the next games!