A small Egyptian Team’s experience in Ludum Dare
DATE: April 20, 2015 | POSTED BY: ElHassan Makled
We are a small egyptian team called “Null DIES” that started way back in 2010 we’ve been making incomplete games since then, and thanks to Ludum Dare this is technically our first “complete” game. We still can’t believe that this game didn’t exist 3 days ago (feels like a month’s work!).Our name actually originated from the fact that we spent years just talking and thinking but doing almost nothing, our output was “null” ?
I don’t know how the demographics of this LD event, but we feel that we are one of the few Egyptian teams here, and we really hope that we did a great job a representing our country 
The game we made called “Drop It” originated from the though “what if the unconventional weapon is sound waves? what if it’s … a DUBSTEP GUN?!!”, soon after than various videos and music started inspiring us (specifically Corridor Digital’s “Dubstep Guns” video), we also had other good ideas like using Farts as a weapon but I’m glad we didn’t do that ?
One of the biggest issues we faced during the competition was the fact that in Egypt the weekend is Friday and Saturday, add to that the fact that we are UTC+2, this meant that for us the competition happened during two work days, I was lucky to be able to take these days off but the other members of the team took one or no days off from work.
Another problem we faced was the fact that our awesome 2D Artist is currently doing an internship/training abroad and he was busy with too many things so effective communication was very hard.
But apart from team management, one of the big problems we had was that we decided to make the game very music driven, we wanted the player to feel like a DJ jamming some crazy beats and drops, so we basically had to learn how dubstep is made and we had to find a good free pack of samples that can be used to make dubstep music which proved to be very hard. On the upside though, one of our team members was part of a band so he had experience with audio editing which helped a bit even though he wasn’t a dubstep kind of person.
But in the end I’m actually very happy with the result, it captures most of the ideas I had in mind when we were coming up with is, we wanted a colorful insane beat-driven experience and I think we delivered well on that (even though the sound mixing need more work), I sadly didn’t have time to make a highscores screen (with possibly online leaderboards) but in a last minute change I was able to incorporate presistent “best score so far” functionality.
We’re planning to publish the game to both the Google Play Store and the Windows Phone Store very soon so watch out for that
And finally, I’d like the thank the whole Ludum Dare community for encouraging us to go through this and surpass our limits!
