Ludum Dare 56 Postmortem: My First Solo Journaling Tabletop LD Game

This piece originally comes from our blog, you can read it there if you'd prefer but it's basically identical aside from formatting :D

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For those not familiar, Ludum Dare is a 72-hour jam (with a 48-hour "compo" variant that I don't do) where a game must be made from scratch based on a theme announced at the beginning of the jam.

Also, I'm writing this post over a month after making the game, so I may not remember everything... Sorry about that, it's been a rough few months 😅 

Download the game for free here!

Previous Ludum Dares

When I started doing these postmortems, I figured they'd get boring because they'd be so similar. Goodness was I wrong! Each Ludum Dare has been a remarkably different experience, with remarkably different games being made each time around.

For the most recent Ludum Dares, I made:

• Ludum Dare 46 - MacGyval: A party card game based on the Facebook games of using the nearest objects for a challenge. In this case, it's MacGyvering solutions to survival challenges! It used custom cards and a sheet of paper to track scores, but the scoring is the least important part of the game.
• Ludum Dare 51 - The Epicathelon: A two-player, frantic, dice-rolling game where each "turn" is limited to 10 seconds. The game sees you pushing your luck across multiple tracks inspired by Snakes and Ladders. This one has no custom components, just standard dice and "tokens" (which can be anything), but you do need to print the game board.
• Ludum Dare 52 - Crawling to the Brink: Crawling to the Brink uses a standard deck of cards, dice, and tokens to traverse "memories" and unlock them, claiming credit if you can push your luck to the very end. It was my first zine game and even included a story zine.
• Ludum Dare 53 - Sidequests Only: Sidequests Only is a HUUUUUGE tabletop game with hundreds of cards that exists solely on Screentop.gg. It has a fairly elaborate rulebook, requires 2+ people, and has players skipping the main story and doing "sidequests only" to see who can beat the game first by defeating the villain.
• Ludum Dare 54 - In Space, No One Can Hear You EXPLODE: Another game that requires custom cards, this is a 27-card game where you speed through space, balancing overcoming obstacles and repairing your ship. The parts of your ship can be used to alter your die rolls, and shield the center of your ship: the only part that needs to make it to the end of the game.
• Ludum Dare 55 - The Summoned: The Summoned was our first journaling game Ludum Dare title, although the journaling is entirely optional and minor. This game requires you to print two score sheets and have a handful of standard dice in two colors, but the game as a whole is a collection of THIRTEEN dice games that you play with a narrative of a genie desperate to see a single benevolent wisher.

So, over the last few years, my Ludum Dare entries have been all over the place. While my goal is always to make something easy to learn and that requires as few components as possible, I rarely make a game that fits that goal.

Either way, Ludum Dare is an excuse to try something new and race toward completing the best title I can. Ludum Dare 56 was no exception to the whole "very different experience" thing.

What Is The Grinning Hill?

So, first off, the theme for Ludum Dare 56 was "tiny creatures." I hated it lol. Normally I get a theme I wasn't excited for and make it work, but this time... I just couldn't bring myself to connect with it. So, instead, I went with an idea I've wanted to do for a long time and just... forced it to connect to the theme.

The Grinning Hill is an idea I've had for over a year now. It's a hack of Patchwork Potions, an absolutely awesome game from Sophie Paige, an awesome gal. I used Ludum Dare 56 as an excuse to FINALLY make this game... or at least make the first solid draft of it.

This description comes from the Itch page:

The Grinning Hill is a solo journaling game of accepting and dealing with a huge new responsibility. As the last remaining descendant of Aquila Uffington, creator of The Grinning Hill —a hill with a massive smiley face carved into it— your job is to visit a town you've never heard of, in a country you've never heard of, to perform upkeep multiple times a year. This trip is your first, and in fact the first time you've ever heard of the hill or this part of your family.
Will you do your job as requested? Will you make subtle changes to the art? Will you make it into whatever the heck you want? Or will you shrug it off, sell your inheritance, and keep living your life?
The Grinning Hill is a 37-page document (mostly prompts) that guides you through your story: from your situation when you discover your new role and how you feel about it through your work on the hill, exploring the surrounding area, and learning about the hill, your ancestors, and the home you've inherited. Who knows, maybe you'll even discover aliens or other conspiracies around the 3,000-year-old hill art! It's your story!

Yeah, it's a 37-page game. It has a LOT of prompts, and I'm proud of how each has lots of room to write your story or guide it somewhere new while not forcing you to go against what makes you comfortable. It's one of the things I loved about Patchwork Potions and I wanted to get it right.

Patchwork Potions

To explain The Grinning Hill, I first need to explain Patchwork Potions, especially since both have a lot of similarities.

Patchwork Potions is a solo journaling game with a really cool mechanic: rather than drawing cards or rolling dice to get your prompts, you use a 6x6 grid that you color as you play the game to get your prompts. Let me explain.

At the beginning of the game, the entire grid is empty. There are six categories of prompts, and you assign a color to each. Each day (or week or month or whatever you define), you roll two dice and get a grid location: a 2 and 3 mean you could go to square (2,3) or (3,2). Then, you check the color of that square and the squares around it. At first, with all of the spaces blank, it's "full of potential" which allows you to choose a prompt from a list.

Each prompt has you go about your day (or week or month or whatever), then you fill in three squares on the grid: the one you rolled and two of the closest squares. At first this is easy, but as the game goes on you may have to color in squares two or three spaces away.

As the game goes on, the grid is more and more colored in, so you're given prompts rather than a choice of prompts. For example, if I roll a space that's blue and three of the squares around it are green, I'd look up the category of prompts that corresponds to what I'm using as blue, then the subcategory of whatever corresponds to what I used as green.

Above: the explanation and example of how this works from The Grinning Hill

The story of Patchwork Potions has you play as a witch in a new village. You'll help other villagers, take care of your home, interact with your familiar, explore, seek out clues about the witch who came before you, and more.

It's a super cozy game that, thanks to the way the prompts work, really goes in a direction that you set up based on the first few prompts where you start coloring the grid as you choose. Sure, other prompts will come up —if I'm telling a story of exploration, I'll certainly still have prompts about my cat or other villagers— but those things merely add to the story. What fun is exploring 100% of the time?

Plus, at the end, you have this cool, colorful grid to go with your story!

Making The Grinning Hill

Angel and I went on our regular Ludum Dare walk right after the jam began and came up with an idea that I wasn't super into, but we also came up with the idea of doing this game: the hack of Patchwork Potions. Technically, "creature" means "a human being" or "something created either animate or inanimate." So, I figured, compared to the giant piece of art that you, yourself, are a tiny creature. The pressure and responsibility put on you are enough to make you feel tiny, even if that's a HUGE stretch of the theme...

I knew I didn't just want to hack Patchwork Potions, I wanted to add to it, make it more mine. My biggest issues in life are staying motivated and having the determination to do something, so motivation and determination were the two big changes I made. I didn't create these to restrict the player, they're there to help guide you on this journey. For me, motivation and determination paint what I'm doing: if I'm full of determination, I can accomplish ANYTHING with a smile on my face. If I'm devoid of it, life is hopeless and what's the purpose of doing anything? So these mechanics helped capture that vibe, and help you keep that in mind as you journal.

The difference? Motivation basically tracks, from 1-6, your motivation to continue working on the task. If it drops below 1, you struggle and might end the game early as you face one of three major choices. If you go over 6, you gain determination. Beyond that, your motivation can guide you with how excited or depressed you are as events happen. For example, if your motivation is at 6 and someone vandalized the hill, you can tackle it without getting too upset. If your motivation was at 1 and you find someone ruined your work, setting you back, you'd likely be ready to just give up...

On the other hand, determination is a system that allows you to reroll one or both dice whenever you want. This might mean you get a different space on the grid to deal with, a different day, or even a different setup prompt!

While both may seem to limit things, I made it very clear in the game that if you don't like a prompt or something doesn't fit with your story... just ignore it. Or alter it to make it fit better. With every prompt, even if it doesn't tell you to adjust your motivation or determination, you can do so if it makes sense. For example, maybe in your story the hill is vandalized and you're supposed to lose motivation, but you journal that a friend joined you to help out. This means you accomplished even more than you planned originally, and it was fun! So rather than losing motivation, you GAIN motivation!

In addition to the motivation and determination stats, Patchwork Potions had a few limitations I needed to adjust, so I made some changes, including:

• The prompt categories have changed, and of course the story and prompts themselves have as well
• The wording of the rules has changed, aside from a couple of pieces pulled word-for-word from Patchwork Potions (Sophie is more concise than me lol)
• You’ll use 2d10s rather than 2d6s, and the grid is 10x10 instead of 6x6
• Dice are sometimes used within the prompts themselves to randomly determine things
• A small grid has been added to create a small piece of art in the end, which represents the final hill art you created or at least a small little touch you added to it
• There are loads of introductory prompts, as well as two major ways to end the game

Normally I can get a Ludum Dare game done within a day or two and then have time to test. Not this time! Even though I made it in Google Docs, which meant not adding any art at all (in fact I couldn't even find good art for the cover and just threw a grassy hill on there lol), it took me the WHOLE TIME to make this game. I think I went through and edited the document once, but I didn't have time to play it at all...

Luckily, as I said, this is a hack of another game! One I've played, even! So I knew the system worked, I knew I liked it even. And since this is a solo journaling game where you're free to adjust things, there wasn't anything to "balance" really. Yes, I would've loved to play it so I could ensure the prompts were nice and that I didn't make anything confusing in the rules, but oh well...

What Went Well

Takin' It Eeeeeeeeeeeasy...

A large part of why I didn't get to test the game is because I took it so easy on myself this time. I didn't have the anxiety that eats a lot of my time up, thank goodness, but I relaxed quite a lot. I was in a bad place mentally when this jam rolled around —a crisis mode that started two months previous to the jam and is still going on now— and to ensure I didn't burn out, I took it very easy on myself.

In hindsight, it felt like I took it too easy on myself. How much more could I have done if I pushed myself more? But on the other hand, this is a cozy game and I was in a bad place... if I pushed myself more, I likely would've had a snarkier voice come through in the game, or I would've just stopped myself from finishing it at all. This cozy attitude toward the game meant the game felt cozy too!

Hacking a Game

Hacking a game meant that I already had the bones of it, I just had to make it mine. Which, again, is very good because if I made my own system and didn't have time to playtest it, I would've been SUPER anxious...

This felt like I got to make a sequel, it just happened to be a sequel to a game that wasn't mine.

Making a Game I've Wanted to Make for a Long Time

Normally, Ludum Dare means another incomplete game for me, one I'd never even considered making before. That's great since I often look back at those ideas and I'm blown away that we even came up with the idea in 3 days, let alone made it happen. But it does mean yet another incomplete game on my list...

This time, all I did was take a game I already wanted to make and then make progress on it. It's not done by any means, but at least it didn't add yet ANOTHER project to my list... It just took it from "idea" to "prototype" on the status spreadsheet!

Purpose-Driven Creating

Something I'm working on leaning into is finding purpose for everything I make. I try to look at every creation through that lens. It's like keeping items from your home: an item should both fill you with joy AND have a purpose. One or the other can be okay, but it's a struggle to keep something in those cases.

So I try to create from both points of view: something that excites me to make and/or makes me grow as a creator (trying something new, experimenting, etc) AND has a purpose.

While I wrote a whole section about this game's purpose (right below this), I can say here that I'm very proud of sneaking a lot of purpose into this game. It's what I'm the proudest of, actually!

The Themes and Purpose

It's funny... I've written this post over the course of five different days, and each day I've had different feelings about it. Today, as I wrote all of the "what went wrong" (below this) and this part, I'm depressed. I didn't even know it until I started writing this piece.

My writing feels defensive, like I'm writing out excuses for why my game sucked. I'm proud of what I made, and considering what I'm going through I'm even more delighted with it.

But when I got here to this part of the post, I'm even more proud of what I did.

I'm a purpose-driven creator: while I like finding fun mechanics and toying with concepts, the central thing that pushes me to create is finding something and pushing people to empathize with it. Or for those who go through it, to relate and see they're not alone.

With The Grinning Hill, that purpose can be broken into a few different aspects:

Being Thrown Into an Unfamiliar World

In the game, you're tasked with moving into a home you've never seen in a country you've never heard of. Most of us don't travel much (if at all) for our jobs, and many people have never even left the country they were born in.

So learning to adjust somewhere new and accept this new situation, surrounded by people who have given you celebrity status, while also accepting you're stuck until this job is done is a LOT. And it all happens very suddenly.

The prompts make this easier on you: the people are kind, nature is lovely, and you're often free to do whatever you want. But I feel like if this happened to me for real, I would be more anxious than excited, despite the inheritance. In time I'd be like "dude I own a house?" but that'd take a while 😅

Pushing Yourself When You Don't Want To

The game's most important tracker is the number of days' work remaining. This is what ends the game, and the only way to reduce it is to work on the hill.

Learning to push yourself to get this job done so you can return home to whatever you're missing (guided by the setup prompts), but not push yourself into overwhelm, is a big lesson to learn. It's something I struggle with on a daily basis: how do I convince myself to relax when full of purpose? And how do I get back into the habit of working after taking time off?

The Ephemeral Nature of the Hill Art

One of my biggest struggles in life comes from the paragraph just above. I'm typically an all-or-nothing gal: I work all day every day or I don't work at all. Being reminded that our efforts don't matter and will be forgotten makes them feel worthless. It's easy to forget that there are people, right now, who are affected by what we make.

The hill art perfectly represents this. It's art that was dumped on you, the celebrity nature of it coming from nowhere. The fact that all of these people are so reliant on you for part of their history can be empowering or crushingly overwhelming. Or both as your motivation and determination fluctuate!

And, worst of all, the fact that you have to do this multiple times a year, every year, until you get a replacement or give up is a losing battle. At what point does the pressure overwhelm you? At what point does your aging body lose the ability to do this work? How many times will life get in the way and make it impossible to escape to the hill to maintain it? How many times can you skip before the art has been erased by nature?

And, at what point does it not even matter to you anymore? Unless you make it your own artwork, you're just maintaining someone else's vision from potentially thousands of years ago. Who cares?

It feels like a perfect metaphor for creating art: with very very very few exceptions, no one can make a few things and then live off of that forever. It's a constant battle to slowly improve and find new fans. And if you give up, that's just the sudden end of your work. It's something I struggle with every time I take a break: I start to enjoy the downtime and ask why I even want to go back to the work. Why struggle my butt off to grow as a creator when the work doesn't matter, and playing games and chilling is so much nicer?

When I'm depressed, there's no answer to that question. When I'm not, it's easy to overcome: I enjoy the process, I know there are people who enjoy what I do, and maybe my work can make a difference to people today even if I'm forgotten shortly after I quit creating.

Something I frequently hear lately in productivity circles is how a steady, consistent pace will always overcome bursts of intense work. Putting in even an hour or two every single day is far more than working 12 hours for a few days and needing a long break. It's also far healthier and easier to maintain.

The wildest thing is that this whole theme was a surprise to me! It never hit me while I was conceptualizing or making the game. I just realized it when I wrote the last paragraph of the above section! 😮

Embracing or Letting Go of the Expectations and Pressure Others Put on Us

This is the single lens I looked at the whole game with, the central theme of the game. I made sure to apply it in all sorts of ways throughout the game.

Some characters will encourage you to make small edits to the hill art so it's more yours, and others impress upon you what your family and this art meant to the community. Who knows what you'll discover as you research history and meet people, but that stress to maintain this specific piece of art —or the opposite: the encouragement to be yourself— runs through the entirety of the game.

At the beginning of the game, you learn about family you never knew, and then this high-pressure task that'll wreck your life multiple times throughout the year, every year, as long as you live. The whole community loves your family and knew them far better than you did. Heck, you're a celebrity here!

As an outsider, do you feel okay with making edits to the art on the hill? The lower your motivation and determination, maybe you won't even care if you feel okay, you'll just do it. In fact, one of the options when you lose all of your motivation is to say: "screw it, I'm making this art what I WANT IT TO BE!" and in doing so, you gain infinite motivation! This obligation is now a privilege, a new way to creatively express yourself, and perhaps even influence the town nearby. Or make them all hate you for ruining history...

I wanted this to be a huge change to the game, as it's a reminder that no matter what pressure people put on you, you always have the option to ignore it. You can always just be yourself, do what makes you happy, and shine. Sure, there are moments in life where reigning that in a bit is nice (I wouldn't want to wear rainbowy clothes to a funeral and live loudly there lol), but this is YOUR life and it's ultimately up to you.

This theme is so important to me as a trans woman. It didn't take long at all post-transition for me to start shrugging off obligations and expectations. Whether someone is trans or not, I think that's a vital lesson everyone needs to learn.

What Didn't Go Well...

Taking It TOO Eeeeeeeeeeeasy...

I pride myself on my "sense of urgency." Goodness, I've had so many bosses tell me what that means that it's a core part of me now... It took a long time to get rid of that drive to complete everything as quickly as I can at the cost of my mental and physical health.

But this time around, I had zero sense of urgency. Don't get me wrong: the game is 37 pages long, which is a lot to write in 72 hours. But by comparison, The Summoned (our last Ludum Dare creation) is 18 pages long AND a collection of 13 dice games. That means I had to, over a 72-hour period:

• Come up with the idea (thanks, Angel, for doing this part!)
• Do research into every dice game I could find
• Figure out my own twists on the ones I liked and invent a few of my own
• Write the rules for them out
• Playtest each of them at least twice with Angel and make major changes
• Write the story for the game that wraps around the dice games, and put them into an order that makes sense
• Create a whole game sheet for it
• Format the Google Doc to make it fancier
• Proofread it all with Angel and make final edits

So, while this is in my top 5 games for page length (perhaps the longest?), it didn't get that playtesting time and I didn't even have to create a single set of rules... I added a couple of mechanics, sure, but those were certainly easy enough.

It's Plain as Heck...

I had zero time to fancy up the Google Doc. Heck, the image I made for it was even a disappointment: I wanted to edit an image of a hill to look like it had the grinning hill art on it but I couldn't find anything usable. So, instead, I just used a hill and slapped some text over it.

I'm proud of the game, don't get me wrong, but it'll take a lot of effort to fancify the layout and even the cover image to get it up to standard with my other work. And my other games don't exactly scream amazing pieces of art either lol

The Rating Period Went by WAY Too Fast...

I had high hopes to stream a lot during the rating period: when people play and rate each other's games. But I was really depressed during this time and couldn't bring myself to stream at all...

After a while, I realized I at least needed to rate some games so mine would get rated (each game needs "approximately 20 ratings" to get 'ranked' on the Ludum Dare website) and, well... I realized that with fewer than 48 hours until the rating period ended.

I pushed hard and rated over 30 games. In fact, I have 20 of them I want to play on stream sometime soon (tomorrow?) to show off the best ones I found. But because I started so late, I wasn't able to get anywhere near the 20 ratings I needed. It's already hard enough to get ratings as an analog tabletop creator (especially making such big games) but this one takes hours to play through and the length of the document alone is enough to scare people off.

This was the first Ludum Dare I've ever participated in where I didn't reach 20 ratings... I got super lucky the last few times to barely make it, but this time I only got 16 ratings overall. Which brings me to...

The Results

I was incredibly lucky that getting 16 ratings was just enough to get ranked! However, the more ratings one gets, the more "solid" the scores are: the average of people who get it vs don't get it is better, people aren't quickly rating something at the last minute, etc.

Further, as I said, 16 was just enough and not everyone who rated the game overall rated it in every category... So only 2 of 6 categories received rankings.

Apparently, 16 ratings was exactly how many were needed since the things with 15 are listed as "N/A" for ranking lol.

I knew my "theme" score would be low because I REALLY stretched it. And I always have to remind myself to look at the rankings while considering the total number of entries:

Getting 528th place overall feels really bad honestly lol. But with 1,396 games getting 20 or more ratings, that puts The Grinning Hill in the top 38% of games. I think if I could've gotten the ratings earlier in the rating period where people wouldn't feel rushed to play the game or take it on like a chore (many people will rate games with few ratings whether they're interested in it or not toward the end, but early into the rating period people will play what interests them, and all of that means a totally different emotion when diving into the games), my scores would've been better.

Plus, this was my first strictly journaling game in Ludum Dare. The Summoned had optional journaling but it was primarily a collection of dice games. The Grinning Hill had me introducing video game creators to a genre that's very alien to them: almost totally devoid of mechanics, and focused big time on crafting a story.

So between grabbing people with presumably a worse mindset going into the game, having them dive into a LONG game, and in a genre that they're not the intended audience for... I'm honestly delighted by those results. The 3.385 in fun hurts lol but the 3.808 in innovation is nice! Really undeserving though since this is literally a hack of another game, meaning the only innovation that's mine were those changes I made and the theme.

Overall

Writing this piece was really emotional. Writing it across multiple days, I came at this from points of pride, excitement, depression, and shame. I stood on a soapbox and shouted about what I loved, and I found myself in a fetal position defending what I did while not even believing in it myself.

As I reread it and made edits, the shame and depression faded away. This is truly a piece I am proud of, and I'm proud of the lessons I learned as well.

This was easily the most important postmortem I've ever written. I went into it with the intention to make something for you, so you can learn from my Ludum Dare experience. Instead, this experience ended up being for me. I roamed through my purpose and intent as a creator, examined what I did, and took loads of lessons away from writing this.

This has always been the purpose of a postmortem: for creators to reflect and grow while sharing what they learned. But this is the most growth I've ever done while writing a piece or reflecting on my work. I truly feel like a different person now than I did a week ago when I started this.