Ludum Dare 27

Hey hey,

After a busy evening of brainstorming and idea crafting, our first day of the Ludum Dare game jam has drawn to a close! Before I go into what the process was like, I think some introductions are in order. In addition to the regulars here at Neo-Blue, we have two special guests participating in the game jam with us:

Satoko “Holly” Young, Music Composer / Sound Designer (@SkittlegrlSound)

Holly has found the time in between her work at SkittlegirlSound.com to join us for Ludum Dare! She’ll be creating the music and sound effects for our game.

Mieko Haire, Artist / Graphic Designer (@Sadomin)

Mieko has taken time out of her busy schedule to lend her artistic talents to our Ludum Dare project! She’s going to be taking care of all of our environment and character assets.

At 6:00p.m. PST, the Ludum Dare 27 theme of “10 Seconds” was announced. We immediately started work on coming up with ideas for fun game concepts that would match the theme. After creating an initial set of about 18 different concepts, we set to work trying to trim the list down. Most of the weaker ideas fell off naturally as we removed concepts that didn’t adhere closely enough to the theme or didn’t inspire a lot of interesting discussion on ways to expand on the idea.

After a fair amount of time, we were able to get our concept list narrowed down to a collection of our top eight ideas. From there, we set to work trying to plan out the design specifics and work requirements for each of the remaining concepts. This was really helpful as it allowed us to identify the ideas that were hard to lay out gameplay specifics for or were a bit too ambitious for the 72-hour game jam.

In the end (around 1:00a.m. PST), we finally narrowed things down to the game concept that we’ll be working on for the game jam. We actually ended up choosing an idea that was initially unpopular, but sparked an interesting design conversation late in the process. I don’t want to give away too much yet, but I can say that the idea we came up with is much… creepier than anything I’d thought we’d work on.

Check back with us tomorrow (later today?) when we’ll hopefully have some of the first screenshots of the actual work in progress to share!