Mini LD 10: After School

After School is a game I made for the tenth Mini Ludum Dare compo. Play it at yoyogames.com, download it here, and see the original compo post here.

design

I made this using GM7. I don't even have the pro edition. There's a pretty major bug for XP users, and a couple things I'm not happy about.

-it's not clear if you're stuck in an infinite loop - players could quit and miss the final message.
-the art sucks
-some of the writing isn't great
-the fonts have weird fuzz on there
-there's no sound
-the animations are corny
-it really sounds like I hate it, doesn't it?

But I don't hate it, not even a little, because this is the first game I've ever made and it was an education to persevere with it. I came up with the idea for a game you couldn't win because I thought it'd be insensitive and ignorant to make a game where you can just talk the abuser out of being violent - these people scumbags have already given in to their urge to hurt you, to shatter your confidence and make you feel ugly and threatened on every level, and all you can do is A) be a victim, or B) hit the escape key.



code

I used a couple things. GM7 works with objects (which are secretly classes), instances (which are secretly objects), and scripts (which are secretly functions). I have a dude called Kubrik; he's a persistant object that contains a very clumsy List of Shit To Do. How it works is, Kubrik runs through a loop with a value called "step". If step = 1, print the title card (this is a couple of dialogue boxes). The dialogue boxes are programmed to tell kubrik when they are done. If kubrik makes three of them, I have to tell him to wait for three of them to finish. This isn't automatic or sexy in any way.

Then I have an object called dialogue_response, which is an object that prints text and detects if the user moves the mouse onto that line. If so, it highlights it red, and if they click, it passes a value to kubrik, then kills itself and all other responses.

This value is Kubrik's new value for "step". So, right away, my program doesn't remember the result of previous decisions. It's also pretty limited to dialogue, characters walking on a flat plain, and stupid animations. I don't have many tricks up my sleeve at all.

And it has a bug where XP users can't highlight dialogue options.

life cycle

I started off wanting to make a game where you start as a baby, then become a kid, a teenager, and a young adult, at which point a certain thing happens. I won't say what the thing is, because it's libellously close to something that happened to a real person. Suffice it to say, it's the ugly pinnacle of everything "domestic violence" has to answer for.

The game also was too large, and not interesting enough. When I came up with the idea I did, I was pretty pleased at how concise it would be. That was on day 2, though, and I was having trouble just getting things to print on the damn screen. In the end, it took me four days to actually finish it, and a couple people had nice things to say. I emerged a wiser developer. Then the bugs starting raining from the sky.

Still, I'm tempted to release a slightly better version. Hmm. Any thoughts?