making of bergs

This is a behind the scenes for the making of our Ludum Dare entry - 'bergs'.

You can checkout the LD page here
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bergs

Ideas
The first couple of hours were spent brainstorming ideas. We came up with quite a few but eventually landed on the idea of making a 2D puzzle platformer where the player could summon a new  character and use the previous character to help them complete the levels in some way.  We expanded on this idea a little bit and decided that the characters should spawn with shape and size variations which would also effect how fast they could move and how high they could jump.

Implementation
As the person with the most GDScript (Godot's programming language) experience, I did the majority of the implementation and  programming.  I wanted to get all the main features added to the game in the first day so that my teammate could start creating levels as soon as possible. On the first day I spent around ~10 hours working on the project. Most of that time was spent creating the core features however some of it was spent on art and a bit polish.  Over the next 2 days I spent around another ~6 hours fixing bugs, tweaking a couple of things, and adding polish and game juice (to distract from the lack of any type of graphics lol). There's probably more to say here but I'm writing this a week later so I've forgotten. (I also have no clue how to properly write these things lol).

Level Design
The level design was done by my teammate, CaineTinyArms. I think he did a great job in designing the levels in a way that teach the player the core mechanics of our game without directly telling them. 

Here's what Caine had to say about it:
I spent a couple hours brainstorming level ideas, many of the early ideas had to be scrapped because I didn't account for berg falling from the sky when they're summoned. The main issue encountered when developing levels was the player could cheese pretty much all of them by just berg-stacking, which is where the no-berg-zone came in. Overall, I think the levels turned out well, considering it's my first forte into level design. (also shout out toast for carrying the team <3)

Sound
The awesome music track was create by my friend, Iiro. I think he did a great job with it and props to him for always being up for creating tracks for my projects. He also did most of the sound effects for the game - including the "BERG" summon sound. 

Art
I'm not an artist so I kept things super simple. The bergs are basically just squares with arms, the levels are made from a square only tileset, and the background is made up from spinning squares. This isn't relevant to the art but the game's resolution is also square (it's 160x160 if you're interested). If you couldn't already tell, I quite like squares. All things considered, I think the game turned out looking ok.

Other
The bergs were original called 'guys' (in the project file they still are) but we changed it to 'berg' once we released they kinda looked berg-y. 

End
Thanks to everyone who has played the game and left feedback. We haven't replied to many comments as there's quite a few but we have read every single one and taken notes on the feedback everyone has given :). 

If you haven't played bergs yet you can check it out here.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bergs