How did our fellow Professor's endeavors fare in this trying world?

(maybe too fancy a name for a postmortem?)

Hi there!

The other weekend, I made Prof Delespace and the Golden Record in 10-15 hours for the latest Ludum Dare. In short, this is a short and comedic Professor Layton-inspired puzzle collection in a soft sci-fi setting, with currently 3 puzzles.

This time, I tried a new game genre with very… interesting results. Worthy of a proper postmortem, wouldn't you say? Read more for all the crunchy crispy squishy details.

Warning: spoilers ahead!

The Theme

As usual, during the theme voting final round I made my little list of ideas. The idea for Limited Space was about the ghost of a taxi driver who wants to optimize a parking lot, but you also had the option of causing total chaos.

Visibly, this idea survived in the form of the second puzzle. But the night before the Ludum Dare, I started to play Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and went to sleep shortly afterwards. Even during the Ludum Dare rating period, I binge-played the rest of the series (except the Diaoblical Box & the 3DS games which I already played a long time ago). Those games were a bigger hit in my country & Europe than in the rest of the world; if you have no clue what I'm talking about, I encourage you to have a look at the series!

So you can certainly see the inspiration for the game I ended up making!

To fit the theme a bit more than for only one puzzle, I also named the rival organization Space Ltd (and the game takes place in space with a british-celtic flair, so that fits).

Puzzle 1

As Loike, the Professor's assistant, needs to check the map for their next mystery, he grabs his mentor's telephone and… oh no! The Prof's phone is locked! What's the gesture again?

The "Think outside the box" puzzle was a bit tricky to do. That's my first puzzle as a dev after all.

Make no mistake, the line making was the easy part; but the "trigger of resolution" is another beast. I could have used detectors (see below) but I feel like that wouldn't have played nice with the line drawing which had no base in physics. Unless of course I had dared use those fearsome beasts called… RAYCASTS. *dramatic chord*

So instead I look for the desired shape, and I check for the first/last node being one of specific nodes, etc.

Side note: when I made this puzzle, our protagonists didn't have a name yet! At least they can refer to each other as "Professor" and "my boy". And that's also when Loike started being a rude assistant.

If you play the game on mobile, that's the only softlock/pain point (you can't right click to cancel a line). The rest of the game is mobile-friendly.

Puzzle 2

We land on a beach! Why a beach? Because I felt like going to the soft-sci-fi equivalent of Brittany. I live close to real-world Brittany in France, so plenty of inspiration there. And it helps establish Loike, who is a butter elemental by the way.

And of course it starts raining after this puzzle.

In the meantime, please sort those vehicles. 

That is where the theme's original game idea comes into play. For that puzzle I looked up "Pentamino packing" and found a nice looking 7x7 square board with the corner squares removed.

I had a lot of fun drawing those ships. Then I picked one of them (the salmon-coloured one) and that was the Prof's space automobile.

I can't imagine what a mess the game logic would look like if you could rotate ships.

What's great about this one is that it has only one solution as long as you don't rotate the pieces. However, the trigger of resolution consists of detectors on each cell, you can see the little X/45 counter in the top left.

Side note: you could technically get over 45 when you move one of the ships around, but as soon as you drop your piece it is set to its definite value. And the next patch makes the hovered vehicle not count altogether. So no puzzle breaking for that one, my lads!

"Puzzle" 3: the Duel

You know what, this game needs a rival. The Moriarty to our Sherlock. Well, not as ominous and dramatic as that, we don't have the time to implement that.

Gaspard Ghetti was inspired by my messy code (often called Spaghetti Code). You could say it's a way of embodying the dark side of making this game.

He's basically a typical villain gentleman (?) with a thick accent of dubious origin. No need to make deep and expressive characters in only a few hours, I think. And now for the puzzle itself! 

At the end of the first day, I was running out of ideas, so I picked an encyclopedia of knowledge (from Bernard Werber, if you know the author you know what I'm talking about). And after an unexpectedly long search, I found a few puzzles/games in there!

So I implemented the "game of three stones", with the slight difference that Ghetti always plays first each turn, to make coding easier.

It seems like Ghetti gives no fuck to the duel, but that's because I thought a random "AI" would be enough for most players. Damn, I should at least have excluded the minimum/maximum guesses!

At least the music is catchy I guess.

Next time I do a battle of wits, I'll just borrow puzzles from Layton and the Last Spectre and implement the game of 15 bottles (you take turns removing 1 to 3 bottles, and the last to play loses the game).

Results!

This postmortem took long enough to write that the results of the compo were released before it! Here they are:

Overall: 102nd

Fun: 98th

Innovation: 278th

Theme: 318th

Graphics: 27th

Audio: 32nd

Humor: 8th

Mood: 73rd

As you can see, reception was pretty good, even if it wasn't excellent. Out of 489 participants, Innovation and Theme take the biggest plunge, falling beneath the median. That's because the theme was only relevant for one puzzle, and cloning the Layton series isn't very innovative by any stretch of the imagination.

The overall score was impacted in turn. But let's look on the bright side: that's my best Humor score that I can recall yet! And the art categories are going well as usual.

The good things

So yeah, the game was pretty well received, but not extraordinarily so. My art style was appreciated, both for characters and for environments. That includes the music. Speaking of which, do you think I should do a general devlog for how I make music?

Also, there are no game-breaking bugs!

The bad things

This game's puzzles are either frustrating or trivial, with an *inverted* difficulty curve! Ghetti having a random AI certainly didn't help. Making puzzles is certainly quite a bit harder than solving them!

Also, the first puzzle is kind of counter-intuitive, especially for physical buttons hitboxes. I'm thinking of fixing it, but that's not in the new version. Because I'm lazy

Lastly, there's a bit of a lack of polish, but no one complained.

Next steps

To be honest, motivation isn't really there for that one, so I'm going to work on other projects for the moment. There are cool ideas to be done though, countless puzzles and the potential for a real plot.

The new version has this change log by the way:

- If you click again on a tab, its text will disappear, freeing up empty space

- P1: Remove hidden microphone button (the puzzle is still solvable without it)

- P2: Bump up currently dragged ship

- Clear board on hint

- Smoothly interpolate hint-moving ships

- P3: Ghetti doesn't say 0 or 6 anymore, making him a bit less stupid

On that, take care of your bronze hats, and see ya on the next one!