Now that the thrill of the jam has settled i felt like writing about my entry to this edition.

This has been the second time i participated in LudumDare, and game jam in general. I'm very proud i pulled off making the game in time. It did not start well as i got sick on saturday... which forced me to revise the scope of Pawndemonium.

First i want to thank everyone who left a comment on the game page. It's been really rewarding reading those, and seeing that the most common critics were about it being too short.

Originally the plan was to have all the different chess pieces (pawn, tower, knight, bishop, queen and king) be enemies in the game. While they are only two enemies in the finished version, i had the sprites done for all of them:

I also intended the game to have a roguelike aspect to it by having the player get rewarded with random items for clearing a board, like a shield (an extra life) or a pitchfork to push your opponents away from a distance (with the possibility to push them off the board).

As it is now the game is in deed very short: the boss is on the third level and that's it. The checkerboards/levels are generated on the fly, each time bigger than the previous one, making it so that on later levels you'd end up in a gigantic grid, quickly to big for the screen. Instead of rethinking how the floors were generated i decided to cut there. There's no audio in the game, not being a musician i decided (on monday) to focus instead on thinks i'm comfortable with like visual feedbacks and gamefeel.

I'm now thinking very seriously on how i will approach expanding (and reworking) Pawndemonium into a more complete experience. I want it to lean on the original idea of "Hades but turn based because you're a chess pawn".

Thank you for reading :)

be sure to check out the game if you have not: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/pawndemonium