https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mahou-shoujo-monster-promised-fate

It was so fun getting to get the whole gang together and hyper focus on making a game though! No matter how we do in the votings, I am really proud of how far we've come! Its crazy looking back at our past work and comparing it to what we did this weekend.

Just the fact that we threw the monster dollset together in just three days is insane! If you want some "behind the scenes" of the monsters, the maker for them is published here:

http://farragofiction.com/DollSimE/?type=427

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mahou-shoujo-monster-promised-fate

Its funny 'cuz "Promised Fate" and "Post Mortem" are very nearly the same thing in this game ;)

Overall our team had a LOT of fun with our first game jam. We got to leverage parts of our in-house game engine to make parts of the game really quickly (especially art assets being contributed by a variety of artists with little need for time-heavy communication). People loved our escalation of tone, and we got great reviews on our music and art :) .

But we made some mistakes, too.

Feedback consistently talks about our confusing gameplay, and while we INTENDED for it to be a bit confusing and a puzzle, we clearly calibrating things wrong. If we'd had just a few more hours, it would have been good to have a better way to express "you do not KNOW how much this pact will cost you. Do you still want to risk it???". Maybe a better way to convey what pacts apply when as well, compared to just having it show up as a damage modifier. Plus, knowing the girls stats would make the damage feel less "random". Maybe a section in the recruiting cutscene listing the girls stats?

I do think we'll polish this up at some point after the jam (we're also working on the second Land in our steam game), so it'll be interesting to see what we focus on with less time pressure, and we expand past "oh god don't make it longer than five minutes or no one will have time to play" as a mentality.

If nothing else, we had another Magical Girl Mini game that was a lighter toned "Pretty Dress Up" kind of deal where you customize each magical girls outfit, and that might be neat to integrate in?

Though, come to think of it...that might be WAY too dark. Its one thing to have this purposefully no-emotional-depth Magical Girl turn into a blood smear, but I think it would be WAY worse if you'd raised her up and gotten her the perfect outfit to max out her stats.

We're a web based game dev team interested in seeing what other people are doing in the realm of web :) . (especially if you're also using DartLang for your games)

Comment here with your game link for us to get a nice queue going of games we're going to look over :)

And feel free to check out our own web game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mahou-shoujo-monster-promised-fate

I've noticed a lot of people using Unity and Game Maker and etc for Ludum Dare and that fascinates me. It makes SENSE, of course, in retrospect, to go as fast as possible via letting some third party lay the foundation for you.

Meanwhile, our team has been building our own tools for almost two years, using DartLang (google's answer to TypeScript).

We definitely have things we're good at and things we just aren't. Our engine is absolutely fantastic at rendering layered things to a canvas and letting you mess around with colors. It's a bit harder to get animations working with, and still harder for more complicated rendering things (such as individual layers moving around or changing rotation or size).

Overall we've built up 7 libraries we use internally, all that helps us get games up and running quickly, while being something we feel more comfortable using than a third party engine?

The biggest thing we do is allow custom replacing of pixels for layered assets, i.e. a DollEngine.

. .

Are all examples of the same art assets being rapidly recolored pixel by pixel.

We do this via having a "default" palette the individual parts use. A layered doll with no recoloring would look like this:

And one of her layers looks like this:

Our DollEngine has been used for a lot of things, including a pretty popular virtual pet game, where you can grow your pet up into an adult. This required the engine to support a "transformation" mechanic, where a doll can seamlessly go from one form to another.

Which of course, leads us to the custom dollset we created for this competition ;)

You can check our custom libraries out here:

https://github.com/FarragoFiction?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=lib&type=&language=

And you can see just what creating your own engine can get you here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mahou-shoujo-monster-promised-fate