Hi guys!

I see that a lot of people like our game for visual. So I would like to share with LD community a small but very easy hint on how to avoid a lot of time spent on the topic.

So that is the hint:

Use random!

Simple as that. Let's go with details? So how it was working in our case. At the very beginning of the first day after brainstorming about the theme I was sitting and sketching around to find out the root direction for the game style. Here is the result I got in the middle of the first day - Sketch

Looks not so impressive, but actually, it was enough to create a core mechanic and think about levels. We were doing that almost till the middle of the third day when we started to think about how to decorate them. It turns out to be not so hard to do since we have everything in prefabs (preset objects with some code attached to it). We also decided to add some wall decorations to make levels more visually interesting. So there is a level without decorations, with and with randomized decorations

I created 17 variations of the wall block (on the image it is a dark section on the wall), 9 vertical blocks, 5 small boxes, 5 big boxes, and 3 cryo-chamber types. I didn't count what time did it take, but not a lot. That's all give us a lot of visual richness effect. At the same time placing them was pretty easy and was done by my mate, since we don't need all variations to place them everywhere.

I checked a lot of games on LD47 and surprisingly spotted that people are not using this pretty simple technique to enrich their levels. So hope you like this small tip and found it useful.

You can check how it is working in our game for this LD: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/cycloop