The Making of Frazzle Dazzle, My First Ludum Dare Game

I participated in Ludum Dare for the first time this past weekend (Ludum Dare 32 to be specific). This was my first game jam and I had only made three games before this. It was a very rewarding experience and I got to really test the abilities I had learned throughout making these past few games. I recorded a number of gifs that showcase the game in various states, so I thought I’d write out a little bit about the process I went through to make my game. This isn’t exactly a post mortem (though I should write one of those) but moreso a “making of”. Perhaps it could be helpful for those who haven’t participated but want to, or for those that participated and struggled. Anyway, here’s the making of Frazzle Dazzle!



I started out Ludum Dare by just writing down ideas. The theme was “An Unconventional Weapon”, so I wrote out a list of items that could be used as weapons, whichever ones popped in my head, and for the ones I liked I then wrote down a list of things that those items could be used for. After writing some ideas and brainstorming for about an hour, I liked a few but I wasn’t completely sold on any one of them (though a blow dryer was one of my first few ideas), so I then just started getting a basis of game together. I knew I wanted to make a platformer because it’s something I knew how to make (which meant I wouldn’t struggle with it over the weekend). Other than that, I didn’t know exacty what I wanted to make but I figured I could make something and then just get it to fit the theme. So I just got some placeholder art together, got levels loading, and got a character in the game that I could move around.

I continued on this process of building something by adding a double jump. It’s a common platformer feature and I figured if anything, I could tie it into the theme later. It ended up just being there, not tied to the theme, but it still became an important feature of the game’s controls.

I then made some sort of weapon, using a block as a placeholder. I actually wanted to get this out of the way because I hadn’t made a game with a weapon before (this was only my fourth game and my other games just didn’t have weapons) but I knew I wanted some sort of weapon, so I knew I had to figure that out sooner rather than later. I knew pretty much I was going to do it, and I finished it quickly, but since I hadn’t actually done it before, I did this early.

I continued on building things. I decided to add in some blocks for the player to destroy because I needed to test the collisiong between my weapon and other weapons. I think at this point I was pretty confident I was going to use a blow dryer (which is why they were blue cubes, a.k.a. ice), but as this gif shows, it doesn’t have to be. I just needed something for my weapon to interact with and this was quick and easy to implement.

Up until this point, I just started building several mechanics that could be tied together to be a game but open enough to changed around if need be. I had some idea of what I was capable of building and some idea of what I wanted to make. After this, I officially decided on using a blow dryer as the unconventional weapon. I spent a decent amount of time coding and had a few features together, so I wanted to spend a little time on the art. The first thing I really spent any considerable amount of time on was drawing and animating the blow dryer since it was going to be a key feature of my game.



I then decided to just transform my placeholder character into the final character of my game. It’s pretty stylized, cute, and cartoony, and it was also dead simple to animate because there were no limbs. The walk cycle is two frames, where the second frame is just the first with the bottom row of pixels removed. I feel I have pretty good art skills but I know my limits. Animation is still pretty new to me and I didn’t want to burn time on making a really good looking character with a nice looking walk cycle, so a stylized cartoon look saved me a lot of time and effort.

I then had the idea that my character could use her blow dryer to hover. I made this into the most defining mechanic of the game (though not terribly original overall). Between the blow dryer attack and hover, I had a couple of actions that I could tie together with other entities to make some interesting levels around. The hover was especially nice because it was an attack and movement ability, so there was a lot to play with there. I also spent a little time making a better tile set because I knew I’d need better art.

I then knew I wanted an enemy. I drew up a snowman because it fit the idea of something a blowdryer could melt. I started with just the entity loading and interacting with the weapon. There was no behavior at this point.

I then implemented the behavior of the snowman as well as some what for him to harm the player. I don’t have the best enemy coding behaviors unfortunately, so he’s pretty much a tall goomba. Ultimately, I’m not really happy with how they are implemented in the game. I love the sound they make when they melt, as well as their melt effect, but they don’t really add much challenge or anything interesting whatsoever to the experience. At this point in the process though, I had thought I was going to rely on them more to add some challenge.

I then needed some background art because I was going to need some at some point. I added one tile that could loop endlessly, figuring if I had time I could add more later. It’s much better than a flat black background though. At this point, it was about halfway through the compo. I had planned on originally entering the compo but I scheduled my time to accomodate the jam if I felt I needed it. Ultimately, I did enter the jam.

I had struggled with thinking of a goal for the player to accomplish for a while. I felt like getting the player to go out and explore in the game because of the movement range that was avaible, but I didn’t know what the player should search for. It then hit me that the player’s weapon is a blow dryer and those are actually used to pretty up people’s hair. So I then took the player character’s sprite, altered the eyes a bit, did several palette swaps and finally created a version with frazzled hair. Now the player had the goal of fixing these ladies’ hair. This solution did wonders for my game. The art was a slight alteration of the player sprite, it provided a goal for my game, and I ended up using these characters as checkpoints as well. All of that was rolled into one very simple to implement solution.

At this point I also introduced the spikes, which become the most important obstacle in the game. Because so much of the player’s ability is movement based, I figured spikes where easy to implement (no AI) but instead challenged the player’s ability to control the player character using the hover and double jump mechanics. I’m glad I ended up adding this in because I think it provided the most interesting challenges in the game.

With a solid set of mechanics and things to interact with, it was time to build levels. I started out just building a quick and dirty tutorial showing all of the buttons the player would be using and one obstacle per button or button combination to teach the player. The one thing I never tell the player explicitly is to blow dry the friends to fix their hair, but I figured people could figure that out by context and the fact that the HUD had one of their faces on it. Nobody has complained to me yet that they couldn’t figure this out, so I must have assumed correctly.

After teaching the player all of the controls and features of the game, I felt safe branching out the level and allow the player to explore. So I built obstacles to overcome and places for the player to discover. The game features one level, because that I is all the time I had for, but I feel it is decently large and interesting enough to explore. I also added a HUD to the game. Because fixing the hair of these friends was they goal, and it was some sort of count, I needed a HUD.

After that, I just added a main menu. I held off on that because I didn’t really need it up until this point and it was easy to implement. The only things I this post didn’t cover was the creation of sound and music. The game’s music is a short loop with two sections on repeat and it took me maybe an hour or two to make. I created all of the sound effects using bfxr, which is dead simple to make sound effects in. When that was all in, I then I had a game!

Some of the lessons I took away from participating in this jam were the following:





Get something working, even if you’re not totally sure what it is exactly you want to make. You can always adapt what you have made into to the theme and since you’re going to have to make a game anyway, might as well start early.

Always go for easier solutions. Occam’s Razor holds true in game making as well. The fact that I opted for little to no AI and using entities for multiple purposes when possible made things easier to implement, which means I had more time to polish my game. If you have time left over after making the code, art, and music, you can take that extra time to polish up the areas where your game may be falling short. Play to your strengths. If you lack skills in art, use geometric shapes and cool effects with shaders, or if you’re not a great programmer, build a simplish game with lots of polish. I know my limits as an artist, a programmer, and a musician and I took those into consideration with every decision I made.

Sound and music are super important. Okay, I didn’t learn this here, I already knew this. However, I’ve been playing a lot of LD entries this week and I can easily say that adding sound makes the experience so much better. Sound adds so much to a game and how it is received.

Hopefully you can something away from this. It was nice to write up even if nobody does though. If you make games and you haven’t participated in a game jam, I would highly recommend it. It really tests your abilities and you learn just how much you can do in a short time. It’s also great practice and I feel like a better developer for doing it.

I’d love to know what you think about this write up. It’s not very often I write down my thoughts on these things, so I’d like to hear if this has helped you. Thanks for reading!