Day 1 - Idea and core gameloop

Finding the idea

It's 10:00 AM (08:00 UTC), we connect on our Discord server (a coffee mug in hand) and discover the theme. The theme has been released 8 hours before and the ludum dare feed is full of game messages showing up prototypes. 

In our side, we're not really inspired by the theme. Before the start of the jam, we wanted to build a game about cooking with cauldron on a fire pit. But we've not found a idea that fit with theme and cooking idea, so we continue to brainstorming, we're looking for inspiration in our shared file full of pitch. And after few minutes of messy talks, I don't know how exactly, we start talking about a game with cats . The first idea it's "a grandma" who have to care of "meowing cats". We have already made 2 games about animals (fish and cows), why not a third one?! We dig deeper on this idea and finally we imagine a game about feeding cats (and also smashing).

And voilà! Our game design paper!

For the artistic direction, the main idea it's to reproduce old cartoon style (like "looney tunes", "Cuphead"), and use theme color of "Kill bill" movie.

Prototyping

Ok, we have the idea so... it's time to rush! First we work on our tools (Blender & Unity) to build quickly a rough prototype of our game in order to approve the concept. You know, just check if the game is fun... or not. And at the same time, we model a beautiful 3D cat that can be animated (with bones, blend shapes and all cool stuff).

After few hours of coding and modeling, we have a nice rough prototype of game 🤮 ... and a cute cat.

The core game loop seems to be fun, but the timing and score system are not perfect yet, so we decided to code a "game manager" to easily tweak the main values and improve the game. Actually, it's a good way to try something else changing the player experience quickly and so, check the limits of your design.

Day 2 - Polish

Ok, it's Sunday morning and the main interactions are approved. Now we have to implement animations, Vfx, sounds... Maybe you know that: when you just finished the core game loop, you got the feeling that you've done 90% of the game, but in reality, you've done maybe 30% at most.

We want to make a great game, with many features but we also realized there are only few hours left. We have to make a decision. And now. So, we talk a lot about our features and the reasons why this one should be done first and not this one. It's really hard to do it but it's necessary. This situation probably sounds really familiar for people who love gamedev.

> We should add a splash effect when cat is smashed on the bowl!

> Yes, but this sound effect is more important!

> Oh no, we've an issue with the camera!

We're getting tired, but we can't give up, because, you know, we want to make this game!

Day 3 - Back to reality

Monday morning, we almost finished the game, but we don't have time to publish it. Damn! It's Monday, we're back to our office, we can't work on our game and it's quite hard to hide to our boss that we're really exhausted.

We were secretly going to hide in toilet to cry or sleep:

> I'm soooo tired! I want to work on my jam game... I need to sleep!

Just kidding. We did it outside alone, not in toilet :p

After few hours of suffering, we're finally back to our personals screens to fix the last few bugs, add the last animations, polish the game, create the itch and ludum pages, and... Oh my god IT'S DONE, the game is released. Now we should test some games but... meh. You know, it's time to sleep sooooo... We'll test games tomorrow!

Game is playable here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/what-do-cats-dream-of

Thanks for reading this and thanks to all people that support us and our game!

Written with love and flowers by Duck Reaction