Miguel Condez

I’m a bit late on this but I participated on Ludum Dare 53 and wanted to show and talk about a little bit about what I did.

My entry is called “A Day in the Life of a Stork” and you can play it here.

The theme of this edition of Ludum Dare was Delivery. I tried to come up with something new and out of the box but I wasn’t coming up with anything interesting. The last LDJam I participated in was the 46th one and I thought my idea of that one was a fun one and wanted to repeat that but nothing was coming up to me.

Since I couldn’t come up with anything original or interesting I decided to go ahead with the idea of a stork delivering babies hoping that I could at least finish and publish a game.

The goal of the game would be to deliver as many babies as possible until the end of the day. You would need to go back and forth to pick up new babies and avoid obstacles on the way.

What went well

• I finished the game. It can be played from start to finish and no game breaking bugs were found. The progression is functional
• Instead of a timer on the screen the player knows the day is moving by the color of the sky. While the art aspect could be better I’m happy with that idea and implementation.
• I liked the drone and alien enemies. The drone animation ended up kinda neat and the alien has some different effects depending on where you collide with and if you are carrying the baby or not.
• Used Godot instead of Unity. I have been playing around with it from time to time but this was the first project that I used it from start to finish.
• Good scope for the time I had. Was able to include a lot of what I first envisioned.

What went less well

• No music or side effects. Unfortunately didn’t have the time.
• The sky and background are lacking.
• Concept is not interesting and execution is basic.
• No dashing mechanic. I thought of adding one but didn’t have the time. Instead there are power ups but they are less interesting than the dashing.
• Lower score than my last entry.
• Not really game related but embedding the game on the LDJAM website instead of sending people to my itch.io page tanked the view and play numbers of the game. Do not recommend.
• Took a long time to write this.

Overall my thoughts on this LDJam are positive. I don’t think the game itself is anything special but it was a learning experience and it felt really good to have something to show for it at the end.

Thanks for reading!

After two years of on and off development (mostly off If I’m being honest), Please Stay Until Midnight is finally available for free download on itch.io.

You can download it here: miguelcondez.itch.io/please-st…

Thanks to everyone who has helped me get here and that have made this possible!

One of the goals of making this specific game was to learn and gain experience with 3D modeling and Unity. I had experience with both tools but never tried the full workflow from one to the other.

The apartment of the game itself was designed using ProBuilder (an Unity tool) and, up until making the humans in the game, I had only done simple props and objects where the bad geometry was less notable.

One of my big concerts with modeling people was making clothes and texturing them. That’s why the initial concept for the game involved grey and red human figures. Unfortunately, people who played this version of the game weren’t a fan of this choice.

Making the first human was simple enough. There’s a great tutorial on YouTube that covers how to make a low poly person and adding bones to make simple poses wasn’t hard either. The big problem was making clothes.

My “process” involved copying the faces I wanted to be covered in clothing and then separating them from the main object to then give them volume. The worst part was dealing with the bones and having the clothes follow the movements of the main object when I tried put it in different poses. I fought a lot with Blender and objects clipping or being all messed up. At first I was doing a new variation of the human model for each new person I added to the game, that meant I was fighting this battle each time.

For a while the idea of working on the game became unpleasant. I had more than 30 characters to add to the game and I felt that a slight misstep when making them would turn into an headache. I didn’t try to do anything fancy either, only long sleeve shirts and t-shirts. The idea of trying to make more elaborate clothes made me “scared”.

The idea of making a human character and having them wear something looks simple since it’s a common need. Many games have characters in them and you can even switch what they wear sometimes! That wasn’t the case for me and I couldn’t even find many tutorials that covered this or described a “standard way” to accomplish it.

I assume that I was doing it wrong and that I had made my life more difficult than it needed to be. By the end of this grueling process I stopped messing with the human model and instead only changed the textures. Doing this from the start would have been wiser given my skill level. Looking at all the models I made, I am happy with one of the hair pieces and the fact I made someone wear a nice beanie (I liked the beanie enough to use that model three times!).

If I could go back instead of tweaking the model each time and re-doing the clothes I would have had four base models and then I would change the textures and hair around. Even the hair I would re-use after a certain point.

Moving the 3D models to Unity was easy. It was important to make sure that all the transforms were applied and then it was drag and drop. The size didn’t match between the two programs so I always had to scale the models.There were a few instances where the models had a 90 degree rotation and where I had to recalculate UVs (when a face of the model doesn’t show up on Unity is probably a UV issue) but that was it. The textures were automatically added to the model 90 per cent of the time as well.

After all of this I will never look at clothes in games the same. I am also close to being done with this game. Fingers crossed and thank you for reading!

I’ve always wanted to make a game that tried to represent how social anxiety might affect someone. During the years I had several ideas until I settled into the one I’m currently making.

It’s not a new concept or a groundbreaking idea (“Pet the Pup At The Party” by Will Herring is my biggest inspiration) but it’s simple and it conveys what I want. You are at a party and the more time you are surrounded by people the worst it feels.

While making the game, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and the concept of an house party became impossible to imagine. In fact, being surrounded by people became scarier for a different reason altogether. This game about social anxiety could almost be retooled as an horror game where you could catch a deadly virus.

This realization came to me later than it should. I had thought about this concept for a long time and I didn’t even realize what I was making and how out of place it was given the mental space a lot of people are in these days.

On top of that, now that vaccination is available in certain parts of the world, the longer I take to release it the closer I will be to releasing a game about social anxiety in a world that is full of people craving the contact of others. It will be a game about hating parties in a world that’s throwing parties like never before!

The pandemic hasn’t cured my social anxiety and everything in the game is still true to me but I’m releasing it in the weirdest and worst time possible given it’s subject.

I’ve struggled to start writing a dev log. I get long winded trying to do an intro and a “how I got here” introduction which turns the whole text impossible to read.

As a starting point it’s easier to say that I’m working on a small (both in terms of length and scope) 3D game on Unity.

I started it this year with the goal of getting back into making games. It has taken longer than I would’ve liked to finish, mostly due to general procrastination. In the meantime I did participate on Ludlum Dare so I managed to make a game this year after all!

Regarding the 3D game, the basic idea is that you are at a party and hate it, but you promised your friend you would stay for a while. This means having to deal with your general social anxiety while being forced to interact with people.

I made a simple design doc (that has since become outdated) and started by making an apartment in Unity using ProBuilder (a plugin that allows users to create 3D models directly into the Unity Editor). This allowed me to test scale and layout without having to import and re-import from Blender. I had never used Blender models together with Unity which made ProBuilder a nice solution. Since then I have imported several models into this project and I understand scale from one program to the other better but it’s something I haven’t entirely grasped yet.

Figuring out how to build the apartment and lighting has taken a good chunk of the game’s development. It is all new to me and it has been a learning experience.

The other struggle I faced (and I still face it today) was how to translate the idea of the game into engaging game mechanics.

It started with two meters (one for anxiety and another one for social interaction) that eventually turned into one, since I realized I was measuring the same thing twice. There was a point where I found myself running towards people because not enough socializing was ending the game too often. It was the opposite of what I wanted!

Characters that called you to speak to them were introduced. The idea was to give the player structure. I think. Can’t honestly say why but it probably felt genius at the time… Eventually the game changed so not socializing didn’t end the game. Instead, ignoring those characters would. This change made thematic sense and it served to take away the “I have to get to someone fast, my meter is running low” feeling that I didn’t like.

People spawning at the party was another part that went through a lot of iterations. At first the biggest issues were how many people should spawn, how would the ramp up work and how long should they last. My first vision of the game was people teleporting all over the place, almost like a fever dream. This felt quick in a bad way, it was another part of the game that was fast and frenetic, which made this party more exciting than dreadful. Writing it know I wonder if that aspect of it could be retained more… Anyway, the spawns were slowed down and the duration of people at the party increased.

Another aspect of spawning that gave me issues was the question “Should people block the player?”. This was something that felt mechanic and thematically relevant. Getting blocked when trying to run from a room or getting to a special character was frustrating. There could be some thematic relevance there but I didn’t like how the player had no control over the situation. You couldn’t push characters away or predict the spawns. It was bad chaos. This meant I had to place the spawns in a way that the player could always move. A possible path needed to always exist. I kept changing and re-arranging the spawn positions for a while until I got to a point I felt it worked okay. It wasn’t easy due to the size constrains of the apartment, the simplistic way the spawns themselves work and trying to do it while maintaining the core idea of the game. The truth is it felt much better to me after this change with no compromises to achieve it.

During all of this I kept changing the layout of the apartment, creating some environment objects and changing aspects related to the light in the game. For a long while I didn’t have any windows which gave the game a claustrophobic feeling. There was a lot of iteration in all aspects of the game.

Right now I’m in a stage where I want to start play testing the game with other people. My vision is too narrow. I’m nervous about this stage since I don’t particularly like the game, but I hope people are nice. This thing is releasing either way at this point, but let’s at least try do improve it. Before giving this to other people I do need to clean it up first. Having a start and end, a simple intro and replacing the debug text with UI elements is fundamental.

After getting feedback I’m expecting to start to focus on making more 3D props, improving the visual aspect of the game and working on sound. I think I’m closing the door on big overhauls for my sake. Fingers crossed for the feedback round.

If you read this until the end thank you! I will try to write more. It’s a good exercise even if no one reads them but you.