Thanks a ton to everyone who played and reviewed our entry this Ludum Dare. It was a fun experiment, a joy to put together, and I’m really happy that so many people enjoyed it! That’s what makes the hectic LD weekend so worthwhile.

If you haven’t played our entry yet but want to, check it out:

There are Tourists in my Castle

Here’s a list of some of my favorites from this Ludum Dare:

Death of a Lich was probably my overall favorite of this LD; the sort of game I would have paid to play. It’s got brilliant strategy gameplay, looks and sounds fantastic, and really makes you feel like an immortal lich biding your time, gathering strength, and trying to escape confinement. I can’t praise it enough, so just go play it!

Death of a Lich, by Managore

Hero Mate is a puzzle game where you help an incompetent AI hero get to the end of the level by positioning and sacrificing monsters to keep him alive. Solid puzzle design, a really cute presentation, and the sort of saccharine and heartwarming narrative that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Hero Mate, by Lancelot Gao

Monster Pizza was adorable too. I loved the feel of carefully navigating the city as a giant dinosaur, trying to get pizzas to houses. I loved how cars would stop when you blocked the intersection, and sometimes force you to choose between trampling them or nearby buildings. I loved how, when angry customers nearly cost me my job, I was able to knock their houses to the ground, despite not being something the game taught. Great entry, with a surprising amount of emergent complexity!

Monster Pizza, by DalbinBlue

R-adius was a really clever take on the sidescrolling space shooter. You take on the role of the level itself, summoning different enemies using a pool of points, and try to find challenging enemy combinations that can defeat an AI ship pilot. Pretty clever, fun, and nostalgic, while still presenting something very original.

R-ADIUS, by MrTwister

Sweet Dreams was interesting and unexpected. Framed as a Bogeyman sim, the game is essentially an interactive shadow puppetry gallery. I usually don’t dig Unity games, but this one made really good use of the engine. All in all, a really original Creativity Toy that I had a lot of fun with. Totally worth checking out, and seeing what people have made with it!

Sweet Dreams, by Hitchh1k3r

Yeti Scent made for a strange, wonderful experience. Billed as a yeti stealth action/survival/dating sim, it used drifting, fading colorful particles to emulate being a monster with scent-based tracking, which helped when hunting down rabbits and humans to eat to stay alive. The scent depiction was a clever mechanic that I appreciated a lot, and made for a pretty neat experience! I was mildly disappointed that I was unable to romance the lumberjacks, but the experience of finally tracking down the Skeleton King was totally worth it.

Yeti Scent, by Nanolotl

Working with Hitchh1k3r on an entry for the 72-Hour Jam (post seen above). Here’s some highly informative design sketches! Going to try to make some shapes cute after some sleep.

Haven't been Dareing for a while... not since the website updoot! But think it's about time to make another thing. Working with @hitchh1k3r and @naali again. Still rolling around ideas for Running Out Of Space as a Metroidvania. We shall see!

We're working on a rough premise, where the player must avoid an ever expanding slimy ooze as they navigate a puzzle-filled dungeon. For tonight, I've been working on some rough tileset art. Each in-game tile is stitched together using a group of 4 sub-tile graphics, to reduce the number of total sprites we need!

An earlier draft:

P.S. I am a child. For reference, Wang Tiles.

In lieu of a full Post Mortem, which I definitely want to put together later, here's some thoughts on the visual design from our LD44 game, Signal. (Also, if you'd like to play it, you can do so right here! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/signal)

The game features an Earth abandoned by most humans, where Robots and AI Systems inherited the world they left behind. And in this new robot society, some of the robots have run amok and need to be disabled and repaired! Since we didn't have much time left for dedicated story-writing, I wanted to do what I could to convey some of these setting ideas through the visuals.

For one, I wanted to make NPC robots be "normal" models of the enemy robots, with different monitor colors and expressions, to help convey the "buggy robots" problem. Since we also wanted enemies with different behaviors (walking, jumping, flying, chasing, stationary, and so on), I tried to design different models, to communicate a little bit of what they were all about! Dogs chase, rabbits hop, etc. Really enjoyed the challenge of figuring out their designs, and making them each look unique, but similar.

(P.S. I love all my chunky lads, but the expression on the croco-dog Chase Robot is perhaps my favorite)

The setting was an abandoned Earth inherited by machines, which was a big idea we really didn't get much time to play with... especially since we had bitten off a big challenge, in making a metroidvania in a weekend! We had a lot of design notes about the setting and story behind each zone planned, so I tried to at least keep the story in mind while designing some of the environment tiles too.

Each zone was designed to have it's own theme and core mechanics; a blend of tech and natural areas for an old ai-managed arboretum run wild, junk-heaps and shiny metal facilities around an abandoned factory, caves with ice from a faulty climate control system, and various bioengineered slimes run amok, etc.

I'd have loved more time to polish the aesthetics, and play around with the tiles as I worked before we started building levels with them... but we didn't really have the time to put off level design until the graphics were done. There were places where things were visually busy or visually samey, and I'd have loved to have some more time to fill out areas with details and variation too... but I was pretty happy with how everything came out, all in all.

If you've played Signal, I hope you enjoyed it, and it's visual design, too! And if you haven't and think you'd like to, feel free to head on over to our LD Page here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/signal

I think this is the most ambitious I've ever gotten with art assets for Ludum Dare game. Pleased with 'em so far, but there's plenty more to do for the final push! Wish me luck! ><;