Hey pals!

We finished making Radish Kid Ascension as part of Ludum Dare 49, a 72-hour game jam.
Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to share our experience of how things went down

THE TEAM
Cozy Game Pals is just two people: Crista, our artist. and Bryan, our coder. 
We've worked on larger professional teams, but building quick small games is something we are still learning to do.

WARMING UP WITH GHOSTIES
It's been so long since we've made a game together , we were SUPER nervous. We weren't sure if we could finish ANYTHING within just 3 days. So, like true anxious nerds, we decided to do a smaller 6-hour game jam to make sure we understood Unity, Photoshop, and working together.

We came up with this tiny game (and we mean TINY) where you are a ghost trying to complete their final unfinished business. It's not a 'fun' game, but it was huge for us to learn and remember how to work together again. We felt ready to take on Ludum Dare.

DAY 1 - FRIDAY NIGHT
Friday afternoon at 3pm, the theme "Unstable" was announced. We took the entire day to brainstorm ideas. 

We had a few frontrunners:
 - Two kids in a trench coat, trying to stay balanced
 - A crazed, emotionally-unstable person that needed to be calmed down
 - A wobbly unstable building game
We weren't confident about any of these though, so we went to bed without a decision made.

DAY 2 - SATURDAY
We kicked off our first full day of work by settling on an idea: a game where you built an unstable tower for an AI character to reach the top.
We weren't in love with it, but it was good enough.
We took a long breakfast to energize before working.

Crista spent the afternoon researching and concepting. She found some neat rickety tree houses and bridges that were great reference for making structures look unstable. Then she found some art styles that she could remix and confidently pull off in such a short timeframe.


Meanwhile, Bryan investigated 2D physics in Unity. He found a feature called 'fixed joints' which can attach two objects in a stretchy wobbly way that is perfect for this game.  A few hours later and he had an early version of building by connecting objects together.
By the time Bryan had tech figured out, Crista was wrapping up the first game art: building pieces that could fit into Bryan's building system. The project was starting to look like a game and we were super proud

DAY 3 - SUNDAY
We made a lot of progress yesterday, but there was still so much more to do today. The focus of the day was getting the character in

Crista spent the morning learning how to animate in Unity, something she had never tried before. Luckily, she figured it out and made a handful of animations for the character to move and climb the tower.

Meanwhile, Bryan was working camera controls, pause mode, and an 'earthquake' that chased the character up the screen.Crista finished the character with time to spare. Now that all of the interactive art was done and ready for Bryan to hook up, she could move on to the background.

Bryan fell behind and ended up staying up late getting the character AI working. He wrote a custom pathfinding system for the character to navigate the crazy messy physics towers that can be built in our game. It's a risky move to do something so complicated in a game jam, but it paid off. Our character added so much life and personality to the game!

FINAL DAY - MONDAY MORNING
We had until 3PM to wrap up the last bits of the game. No real time to make levels, just enough time to complete what we had here.

After asking ourselves what Radish Kid is doing climbing up all these towers, we came up with an idea for the ending: Radish Kid is climbing to Heaven to join their family. It's a dark ending that we though could be surprising, funny, and sweet when done in our style. Something that really matches our taste.

We also cranked to get in the title screen, make builds of the game, and do some final bug fixes.The deadline came and we were done! we took a much-needed rest, and a few days away from our computers to recover.

CONCLUSION

We couldn't be more proud of ourselves. We really confronted some insecurities, made something we like, and learned a lot about ourselves.
We think we did a great job coming up with some core gameplay that feels familiar but original, which is something we really value. In the future we want to get better at making levels and content - we kind of ran out of time here, but we know this game could have been more interesting with a better progression.

It's been so great to see other peoples' games and have people respond to ours!
Thanks for reading and sharing this adventure with us

If you haven't played yet, what are you doing!? Play now now now!

Your Pals,
Bryan and Crista
Cozy Game Pals