Part 1 located here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/$406164

Part 2 located here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/behind-the-scenes-of-mikus-minion-madness-the-first-24-hours

Guess who's back with a brand new invention? Or rather, a devlog! Misa again from Miku’s Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness) to talk about...

The Second Day

After reviewing the creatures with @miku, who at that point had gotten the flow of creature creation, we realized we needed a bigger card size to really display the creatures. I did some research, and we investigated phone resolutions, and opted for a 720x1280 resolution, or a 9:16 aspect ratio that's common on most modern smartphones - certainly, most people who play games would have a phone with a similar aspect ratio to that, right?

The creatures also were able to start attacking each other at this point, along with early versions of @jason-woerner’s and animation FX. While we were all worried about scope creep, our project was creeping forward with the working title of “Mini Mascot Madness”. Our working features were: - Cards can spawn a creature on the field with stats like flavor details, health, attack, and speed. (we plan to display this information more prominently in a post jam build.) - Cards are displayed in the 5 slots. - Creatures can attack other creatures, comparing statistics. - Creatures can move forwards objectives and attack them. - Each side has its own health pool.

We needed some more depth in our current implementation, and this is when we started thinking about how we would manage the player’s resources. There were multiple different methods being tossed around, and we didn’t really settle on anything in specific at this time as @miku continued to work on getting the UI in a better state.

With 7 sketches cooking and 5 colored to an acceptable level, we added some further elements on the field to represent the player and enemy’s health.

During this time, engineering and design were working together to figure out more details like: how will enemies spawn? How will we define enemies and enemy waves? How will the creatures attack each other? We also have some bugs at this point where the creatures would simply ignore each other and march forward onto the objective and problems with certain types of AoE attacks. We decided at that point to complete the game in the jam limit, we’ll just need to worry about the AoEs in a later iteration.

At this point, we needed to refine our design and determine what this game would eventually become. We needed: - The title screen - Distinct Game rounds - Enemy and wave definitions

Along with a small list of stretch goals, we continued working. One of the biggest challenges we had with this interface was to provide the proper display space for the game. This involved juxtaposing hand drawn card art with tiny little pixel dots. We could have considered increasing the fidelity of the creatures at this point, but we opted for a simpler style due for the sake of time, as well as representing the tiny creatures theme a bit more prominently.

How the heck were we going to tie these two jarring opposing elements together well? Find out next time on Dragonb.. I mean, Miku's Minion Madness Behind the Scenes!