Rain on Their Parade! - postmortem (Patreon)

continuing my trend of doing a game jam every month this year, i successfully finished another ludum dare! but i couldn't have done it alone!! and i'm not even the one who got this team together, so really i was just along for the ride.

anyway, we released our game! so it's time for me to talk about how it went!!

the moonlight jammers are back, baby

we had so much fun making Greenfinger, we were all super excited for the next ludum dare to come around. and when it finally did, we gained two new members! DonutShoes handled all the sound effects, and damifortune did the amazing soundtrack! we actually wanted DonutShoes to join us the first time around, but he was at a convention that weekend... this was the first game jam both of them had ever participated in, and i feel lucky i got to work with such talented people!

the rest of us reprised our roles from last time--jummbus doing all the heavy lifting by programming the whole thing, npckc writing the outline+script and putting the game page together, Miragey drawing the cute clouds and background art, chunderfins on animation (and logo design this time!)... and me on character art and producer duties again!

game jams with a 7-person team are really fun, since whenever someone was unavailable, there was always an extra person around to pick up the slack. so even though i named all our roles just now, we all pitched in on different parts too... like, i did the lines for the level select screen after chunderfins did the rough layout, then i handed it back to him for colors so i could get back to animating all the little guys! (he drew the doodles on the left too haha)

by the way, the premise of the game (being a cloud that delivers rain) came from damifortune! then kc threw out a bunch of level ideas, and it came together from there. we improv'd our way into making another really cute game... and i had so much fun doing it ;o;

a relaxed jam time

i think because we all knew what to expect of each other (and ourselves!) we were able to scope the game to be a good size without overworking ourselves. a few of us were only intermittently available some days, and we're a little scattered across time zones, so some part of the game was always getting worked on by someone.

the jam started at 6pm friday, so all i really did the first day was draw the character design for our main cloud, which we later named skylar

we had talked about having other weather patterns, but ended up just doing rain! i think if the jam was longer we could've done a lot more, but the rain was fun enough by itself :) we had our first prototype within a couple hours, where you could fly around the screen raining on things and getting bigger when you absorb other clouds!

i didn't sleep well the first night, so i woke up feeling really drained on saturday. Miragey took care of the skylar frames we needed, and the first cake to rain on, so i could go at my own pace making more assets for jummbus to use to design levels.

since kc had already written up the outline for what each stage needed, i didn't have to think very hard about what to draw, which made it really easy to jump in and start drawing characters! the marching band was first! then the schoolgirls and teachers, and then i sketched the ska farmers before calling it a day.

on the production side, i didn't bother making a notion page this time, since this game didnt feel like it needed one as much (and kc already had the outline so it would've been redundant!)

i didn't get the trello board up and running until the end of the day on saturday either, since everyone was pretty focused doing their thing and no one really needed direction. but we got to a point where i realized it would be useful to transfer some of our discord checklists into cards to refer to more easily, and see who's working on what, or what important things we needed to finish next. plus i had the energy by that point and really wanted to do it... so we used that for the rest of the jam, and i had the tab open all day so i could know offhand what important things hadn't been touched yet!

i think that's probably the most important skill for a producer... to be able to look at what's left, and know when someone asks you "hey i have nothing on my plate, where would i be most useful?" to just be able to point them exactly where to go.

idk, i'm more of an artist than a producer, but it was fulfilling to organize things in a way that was useful for everyone to be able to do their thing :)

character design is my passion

i drew most of the characters on saturday, but i finished the rest on sunday and had time to draw an extra frame to make a quick walk cycle for all of them! here's everything i could fit on one page:

it was really fun thinking of little dudes, and various ways i could draw them all soaked. drummer guy is my favorite... the inspo for him was negative man from mother 3. actually, speaking of inspiration, we were specifically thinking of rhythm heaven and elite beat agents when thinking of the mission format and the 3 different results you can get at the end!

i had fun with the little illustrations i got to do... i think like, getting to come up with a way to communicate a small story very quickly is the most fun for me to do. the style for this game was very low effort, so i could draw a lot without getting worn out. it makes me want to do more for my personal games, especially in terms of animation (!!!)

speaking of which, please admire my crow. i'm very proud of it.

it's 2am so i'm going to stop typing now

I'M REALLY GLAD WE FINISHED THE GAME... i'm so proud of it......

uploading the final build was actually really close to the submission deadline this time, because jummbus put a lot of effort into making the cute credits sequence that names all the ingame characters. we came up with all of them on the final day (monday!) ...i think the only other thing i did was pick up some odds and ends, like the dark cloudy background for the tutorial screen (since it was just black before that), and the level briefing ui since we hadn't updated the placeholder...

wait, i said i would stop typing. sorry that this postmortem was more scattered than usual! I HAD A BLAST THIS WEEKEND! i hope you enjoyed our game, and look forward to the next one >:)

thanks for reading <3