Juan (Ludum Dare 28)

Juan is a video game I made in 72 hours for the 28th Ludum Dare, an international accelerated development competition. The theme is announced exactly when the competition begins; from that point, you have 72 hours to submit a finished project.

juan Ludum Dare LD28 game design concept Prototyping process Competition direction rush

Font used: Isabella, a font by John Stracke, <http://www.thibault.org/fonts/> (GNU LGPL)

I actually mostly hate video games, which I think is a good reason for making them. But, more importantly, it was the positive pressure implied by the requirements of the competition that motivated me.

The theme was "You Only Get One". In my mind, it sounded like "You Only Get Juan". As I thought other people (very few surprisingly) would make the joke too, I simply used Juan and only Juan word for the title of my entry: Juan.

So, basically, Juan Carlos wants to impress the girl he secretly loves by tap-dancing. If you want to do so, dance while she looks at you, and only when she does so!
I tried to make it as silly as I can; pretty successfull, if you ask me.

One of the interesting aspects of such an event resides in the time-downscaling it forces you to operate on your usual workflow and creative process. You have to discard everything that is not essential, or at least keep them for later if you have time.

I got the overall main themes and mechanical ideas figured out in one hour. There were, of course, still a lot of questions left unanswered, but it was enough to get me programming the base engine, the foundations on which visuals, music and interactivity will communicate to each others.
Taking advantage of my home-made programming librairies, it was quickly made, and I rapidly got a running thing filled with placeholder visuals.

As Juan tap-dances, the musical atmosphere was of uttermost importance. Obviously, I didn't have time to compose the music, though I made one very small sound effect.
I expectedly quickly found all I needed in the never-ending sea of Creative Commons licensed content avalaible on sites like CCMixter.

The main theme was composed by Jeris; download it here: http://ccmixter.org/files/VJ_Memes/35286

All visuals here are from early day 3 or maybe end of day 2, as I was too busy refining the details for the overall experiences to make sense (which is a unvaluable qualtity in that competition).

I focused a bit too much on some of them, that I enjoyed making: the bench and the wood trunk.

Still, visuals were banged out, due to obvious time constraints. Some lights or shadow are incoherent or missing, but at least it looks like something. Perspectives are sometimes messed up too (look at the manhole-cover).

The background, as you can probably tell, is unfinished: I originally planned to draw some stairs in the lower left corner, a roof in the lower right corner, and something before the grass.

On day 3, I realized I had too little time to draw, then paint the living characters as detailed as the background and (sometimes half-finished) environment.

I had a total of 8 frames for 3 different characters (girl on the bench, Juan Carlos, and other randomly placed persons around) to draw, which is a lot for one day (day 3); so I decided to not even paint them...