When we started the development of Solar we wanted to make a game where the player had to keep a fire alive, we weren't sure if we wanted it to be a torch or a bonfire but that was the basic idea (apparently pretty popular)

In the end we settled on doing a roguelike dungeon crawler when the torch dims out over time, the main character was supposed to be a humanoid figure or something similar.

Then, due to unfortunate events, we had to redo all the art 10 hours before the deadline, with an also unfinished game, and I was the one in charge of doing it.

Well, I never did any pixel art and I'm bad at animating stuff so my goal was to find something easy to animate and pretty basic. And then the idea struck me:

Why don't we make the character itself a flame?

I think that made the game a lot better and a lot less generic than a simple "dude in a dungeon", so I'm really glad that happened.

I guess the lesson here is don't let yourself be dragged down by problems in the project, especially in a competition like this when you have a short time to finish your stuff. Try to embrace them and go with the flow, they might lead you to something great ;)

If you want to play my game you can find it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/solar