Vox Machina Post-Mortem - Part I: Theme and Ideation

When Ludum Dare 48 was creeping around the corner, I knew I wanted to participate and hopefully learn from some of our past mistakes. My teammates and I also submitted for Ludum Dare 47 https://mwahba13.itch.io/postal. That was my first ever game jam and although I was pretty satisfied with what I was able to accomplish over the weekend, there were still many lessons to learn from. As a group we took time to reflect on what went right and what went wrong with our previous game jam in the hopes that we don't make the same mistakes.

So far the reception for Vox Machina has been very positive and now I'd like to take a step back and reflect on what went right for this project.

Ideation (72 Hours Remain)

My teammates and I sat on discord as the theme for the gamejam was revealed. Deeper and Deeper. Before writing a single line of code or designing a single character, it was important for us to think about some interesting and unobvious interpretations of this theme. Our approach is to make a list of the most obvious types of games that would come from this theme and avoid making those games. Our list looked something like this

• Mining into the ground
• Going deeper into the sea
• Going deep into space
• Dungeon crawling

To us, these seemed like the most surface level interpretations and we wanted to go deeper (hehe) than that. At this stage we want to just shoot any and all ideas that is a unique interpretation of the theme, and then see what we want to latch on to for a game. We thought of psychoanalysis (going deeper into someone's mind), insects going deeper into flesh (Cronenberg eat your heart out) but the idea that resonated with us the most was having your voice go deeper and deeper.

And from that seed we thought of sound as a game mechanic and we ran with it.

Fleshing It Out

We spent about an hour ideating because we knew we needed a strong gameplay mechanic to make us stand out from the crowd.

With this original seed of an idea we had the idea to have the player use their microphone to cast "spells". Inspiration came from the gesture-based magic system from Arx Fatalis where players would wave their mouse in specific patterns to cast specific spells.

We thought it would be cool to create a voice-based system that would be a modular magic system, similar to Arx Fatalis. At this point, we were still in the wild ideation phase where anything goes. Pretty soon we would actually have to start development and possibly cut and scale back to finish our game on time.