Post Haste

A game jam entry built over a weekend for Ludum Dare 53 by five of us: Sam Neale, Daniel Neenan, Luke Berry, Amber Hornsby and me. You play an ordinary package that has realised it is not on the delivery truck, and you roll through a warehouse - over planks at height, around water puddles, past the objects that turn out to be friendly - to reach the loading bay before it leaves. Three levels, built in Unity and playable in the browser. It is the most successful thing we have submitted to a jam: it ranked well, it was well received, and people came back to compete over best times.

• A two-input physics controller: the player is a box that rolls and jumps. It was playable within hours, which is what freed the rest of the weekend for level design.
• The jump adds to the momentum already in the box rather than replacing it, so timing one well builds speed and timing one badly scrubs it. That single piece of nuance is where the skill ceiling and the best-time competition came from.
• Three separate levels, each completed in its own right, built dense rather than large: planks at height, water puddles, shelving and conveyors to climb over and fall off.
• A camera down at parcel height, so a warehouse floor reads as terrain and a plank across a gap reads as a crossing.
• Shipped as a Unity WebGL build on itch, so anyone voting in the jam could play it in a browser tab with nothing to install.

• Playable in a few hours, then grow it

  Two inputs meant one system to make feel good, and it was in our hands the first evening. Finding the fun that early meant the rest of the weekend grew a concept we already knew worked - the momentum-carrying jump came out of playing it - rather than betting the deadline on one that might not.

• Levels made dense rather than large

  Jam entries usually run out of content before they run out of space. Keeping each of the three levels small and filling it properly put the weekend's remaining hours into the thing players spend all their time doing, which is moving a box through a room.

• Browser build over a download

  Jam voting is a stranger giving you two minutes. A download spends both of them. The WebGL build is the reason the entry was played enough to place at all.

Keep the scope tight, and get something playable in the first few hours. The player is a box that rolls and jumps - two inputs, no grab, no inventory - and it was in our hands by the end of the first evening. That is what let us find the fun before committing to anything, and only then grow the concept around the part that was already working. The jump is a good example of growing rather than adding: it does not just lift you, it adds to the force you have already built, so a well-timed one carries speed and a mistimed one kills it. That nuance came out of playing what we had, not out of a design document, and it is the reason people kept racing the levels.