Duration: 2:06

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3

Player: DDRKirby(ISQ)
Raven Delivery Service 1.0.1 (Single-player Mode)
Play or download the game at: http://ddrkirby.com/games/raven-delivery-service/raven-delivery-service.html

Me and the rest of my team made Raven Delivery Service from scratch in 72 hours for round 38 of Ludum Dare. It's an Overcooked-style co-op game where you coordinate with a friend to brew potions. You can also play single-player mode where you can switch back and forth between the witches. All code and content was created from scratch within the 72-hour timeframe.

View the Ludum Dare submission page at: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/raven-delivery-service
Download the soundtrack at: https://ddrkirbyisq.bandcamp.com/album/raven-delivery-service-original-soundtrack
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A few general optimization notes for those who are trying to get high scores:

At any time when there are no awaiting requests, the tree that is chosen for the next request is completely random.

The requests that come in each level are shuffled, but NOT completely random.

The first potion in level 1 is always a mushroom potion.
The first potion in level 2 is always a demon.
The first potion in level 4 is always a mushroom flower.

After the initial potion (or right away, for level 3), the game uses a "bag" randomizer: It shuffles the list of possible potions, then goes through them in that randomized order. After all possible potions are dealt, it reshuffles the list again.

The bag list for each level is as follows:
Level 1: Mushroom potion, batwing potion
Level 2: Demon, demon, mushroom potion, batwing potion (yes, 2x demon)
Level 3: Enchanted mushroom potion, enchanted batwing potion
Level 4: Mushroom flower, batwing flower, enchanted mushroom potion, enchanted batwing potion

You can use this to predict information about the upcoming potion requests. For example, in level 2, if after the first initial demon you get a mushroom potion, you know that the next 3 requests will be batwing potion, demon, demon, in some order. All three of those require at least two batwings, so you can already start putting those in the cauldron.

This is why you sometimes you may see me "get lucky" in the videos by preparing the correct potion before it gets requested.

In general, the strategy for optimizing in single-player is to make sure that you are travelling the least distance in total, and also to have both witches be actively performing actions at all times whenever possible. That means finding a pattern where whenever you need to move one witch, the other witch is busy preparing an ingredient at the same time.

For co-op mode, the general concept is the same, but there are a few key differences:
- Both players can move at the same time.
- Due to the minigames, the timing for preparing ingredients is different. In particular, enchanting an object can potentially go much faster.
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Level 3 is extremely dynamic and was extremely challenging to come up with a good strategy for. I'm still not confident that the approach that I used is optimal.

First off, you want to alternate between making enchanted mushroom potions and enchanted batwing potions. The basic strategy is that one witch is on the bottom level gathering and the other witch is on the top level handling cauldrons as well as delivering to the ravens. If you do just that, you'll get a pretty decent score. There are two problems with just that basic approach, though.

1) Especially for the batwings, the bottom witch has too much to do and the top witch will be spending quite a bit of time idling. The only way to fix this problem is for the top witch to help gather ingredients at least some of the time. The best way I found to do that is to have the top witch gather a bat wing whenever the bottom witch is gathering/enchanting mushrooms. This works because the two witches won't be using the same station and because the bat wing station is easier for the top witch to get to anyways, and it's helpful because batwings are the ingredient that the bottom witch needs most help on. This also means you won't have two different ingredients going through the teleporter since the top witch can just bring the batwing around the long way.

2) The beginning of the level can be tricky to get right. At the beginning of the level there's no cauldron work to be done so both witches should be gathering ingredients, but if you send both batwings and mushrooms through the teleporter it becomes hard to sort through them, so I opted to only send one type through at a time. I'm not sure if the item stacking is deterministic. If it is, you could potentially memorize a sequence that makes this better.

Another thing that could be better optimized is keeping track of the bag randomizer to know whether to put ingredients in the left or right cauldron (which I did not do). With those improvements I can see the score getting to 11.