My 10th Ludum Dare Game is released on Steam and GOG!
Last year in April I participated at Ludum Dare #46, together with my friends Luca, Sandro and Zwi. It was my personal 10th time joining Ludum Dare and we created the first prototype for our relaxing village building game Dorfromantik.
The Origin
The theme was "keep it alive" - after our ideation phase we decided on the idea of keeping an ecosystem alive by balancing nature and civilisation. We wanted the game to be really simple at its core while still being easily scalable in the future and came up with the tile laying mechanic to build landscapes, as well as quests rewarding certain landscape formations.
And this is what our entry looked like in the end:
https://youtu.be/yGqdeMoUPFs
The MVP
All four of us are currently studying for our Game Design Master at HTW Berlin and were planning to found an indie studio and document the development cycle of our first game as our Master thesis, so Dorfromantik was one potential prototype to pursue as our first commercial project. Your initial reception was super positive and supportive which encouraged us a lot to develop Dorfromantik into a full game! So after evaluating all our prototypes and the feedback we received, we settled on it. We would commit on working on Dorfromantik for 12 months to release it as our first commercial title!
After some more planning (as well as applying for funding and founding our company Toukana Interactive) we began redesigning and reworking our core system and ended up with our minimum viable product in June 2020.
Originally we had the plan to work together at an office space provided by the DE:HIVE institute, but the Covid pandemic forced us to work remote for almost the whole development period. However, we found a good way to make remote collaboration work for us and embraced occupying our minds with developing this peaceful game while staying home during the extensive lockdowns.
The Result
So with several months of high productivity, we improved all aspects of the game and managed to build up a community in the process. Since we felt confident about our progress, we also decided to release Dorfromantik earlier than originally planned as an Early Access title.
And so, on March 25th we released Dorfromantik on Steam and GOG! 🎉🎉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nrfmZ5CpI4
We're super proud of how it turned out, but also absolutely overwhelmed by the amazing reception Dorfromantik received from the players! Now we're looking forward to continue working on it, improving and extending it and maybe bringing it to other platforms as well!
Thank you so much everyone for being an amazing creative community! Dorfromantik wouldn't be here without Ludum Dare and I'm so glad that my first successful title has its origins in my favorite game jam!
Also we have to give a huge thanks to our professors at DE:HIVE for supporting us along the whole development and the Medienboard for granting us funding, enabling us to work on Dorfromantik full time!
If you're interested, you can check out Dorfromantik on Steam or GOG and help us out by leaving a positive review!
