Creating a building and managing game requires a lot of forethought and planning. And a good one needs to be rich enough to be a fun and interesting challenge. But when the theme “Your are the Villain” came up, it was hard to resist the temptation of doing a tribute to Dungeon Keeper. So we decided to do it anyway.

Keep our Dungeons Evil : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10263

What we managed to get working in time :

In KODE we wanted to add a nice twist which was to have an inspector arrive and check that your dungeon was truly an example of evilness. We thought that would suggest some backstory of a higher hierarchy where the player is only managing a branch of a greater evil realm. The kind anyone can relate to, since we all have someone to respond to at some time or another.
We’re really glad we managed to get that in the game in time. We kept it for the end, in case the other more urgent challenges we had to address first wouldn’t allow for that added layer of gameplay.

Also six buildings (corridors count as two because of turns) PLUS three animated characters is actually a lot to design and get working properly. Not only did the artists barely work fast enough to get them done in time, but some of them posed some serious coding challenges. And sleep deprivation really didn’t help in that respect. Especially  AI pathfinding was a big mouthful. Our coders must have spent half the time getting that working for the game.

What we needed more time for :

So the player has to place each bloc manually and you can’t really turn them otherwise than selecting them as different blocs. But give us a break, we only had one weekend ;).
The lava pit clearly deserved more functionality than it’s current evil aesthetic one. Even if it counts a lot in the demon inspectors eye. Maybe in a future release you’ll be able to drop someone in there.

We decided early on we wouldn’t go into fighting. It can also be interpreted as a game design decision as much as a time management one, but it clearly deserves more time to think about. And it could have implied more characters (three is enough for one weekend).

Some of our designs planned for more types of building like trapped coin boxes or canons pointing outwards for some more evil kudos. But you just have to know when to stop.

And more spells would have been a blast!

In any case, all I can say is, I’m having a ball just playing our game, which isn’t a very objective statement since I worked on it, but it still showed I loved working on it and I hope it will show when you try it.

ONE LAST THING : one of our late bugs is that everyone seems to get the WIN screen when finished. but you’re not THAT good. Until we sort it out I would suggest you to put your score in your comments to know if you are truly evil or if the goat only says that because it loves you all, deep down inside.
I know we don’t. But we are very evil, we hate everyone

Have FUN !

Please play and rate our game !!