Three days
Two developers: me, AhNinniah, as an artist, project manager and animator; devolonter — as a code writer and musician
And Ludum Dare 29!
We’ve missed several jams before, tried to participate in Candy Jam (ineffectually), so we were very excited to enter LD. Almost every LD we start with dissatisfaction with the theme. ‘Beneath the Surface’ sounded too obvious, so we little by little moved away from the theme completely.
The whole process was fun, but we again wasted too much time on the concept. First day didn’t bring us any actual result. And the third day was the busiest one. That’s something we should still work on.
I want to note that almost all sound effects were made with improvised means. And the main theme was written by devolonter — he’s a hobbyist musician. Of course, we added much more sounds in Post Compo version (and even replaced some of them). But at this stage it was enough.
LD29 experiments
- We refused one-screen games or endless runners. This time we totally pushed ourself from our comfort zone
- Some people take part in LD drinking firewater, so we wanted to try this method. But the point is, that our productivity was reduced to zero. It isn’t fun at all, when you realize that your brain doesn’t work in a proper way. In addition, the beer that we took was disgusting
- So many times we wanted to do something mystic or horror. I’m not talking about screamers or something like that. We love well-designed, atmospheric horror works. No matter if it’s a movie, novel or a game. So we finally made it
Post Compo
We planned to do Post Compo version of Whistle right after competition was finished. Since we didn’t managed to return to our earlier entries, it was difficult to start. Other problem was that we didn’t want to improve the code. But code, that was made during the speed development, couldn’t be characterized as of a high quality. And we cautiously added new features, because any wrong addition could broke the whole game. As a result, our Post Compo version was something what we wanted to make during the contest.
Voting
Personally, I didn’t expect that our marks would be so high. Mood — #33 Top Jam, Audio — #36 Top Jam. So that was an unexpected surprise for me and devolonter.
Feedback
In order to gather more feedback, we uploaded Whistle to Newgrounds. We have already uploaded one of our LD games to this community and we really liked the experience we got from it. We received different points of view, but one opinion was often repeated — great, scary atmosphere. And now we are very inspired by that fact and we plan to go further in this direction.
The result
For ourself we decided, that we don’t want to make any commercially successful game. Game development for us — is nothing more than fun and opportunity to tell a story, make an interactive experience. Whistle is the first result followed by this resolution.