My Ludum Dare 45 entry on the theme "Start with nothing".

It is an adaptation of Monkey Island's "Insult swordfighting", a discipline two opponents would throw insults and comebacks at each other. Despite the use of swords, the result of the fight would ultimately decided by how fitting the comebacks were during the verbal joust.

In this game there are no swords, just the insults, and it takes place in an office staircase full of hateful employees. You play a hackathon organizer seeking financial support from his sister, the CEO of the company, who works at the highest floor.

The link with the theme is that initially, the player character knows no insults at all, and must learn them on the go from his opponents.

This is unfortunately an unfinished game, which I can hopefully finish after the jam. See the itch.io page and the GitHub repo for further development.

Jam entry state

v0.1: The current game has almost no interactions as you can only select an empty dialogue line. It consists mostly of a static screen, but was uploaded as such to have something to show for the Ludum Dare.

Because of this, I withdrew the game from all voting categories. Otherwise, I would have applied for the Humor one.

How to play

Run the game

This game was made with PICO-8, so there are different ways to play: - Download the HTML5 version below, or go to the itch.io page to play in your browser - Download one of the release binaries below, or on itch.io to play on Windows, OSX, Linux - If you own PICO-8, download the .p8.png cartridge and run it inside PICO-8

Note that the HTML5 and binary download links below refer directly to v0.1 on GitHub, so they match the exact version uploaded for the jam. For the latest versions (or for a nicer download UI), prefer the itch.io page, or possibly the GitHub release page (but it won't have nice descriptions).

Controls

The game is played with the keyboard.

• Arrows: quote selection
• Z/C/N (O button in PICO-8): confirm selection, continue dialogue
• X/V/M (X button ins PICO-8): nothing, sorry!
• Enter: pause

USP

I intended to add the following features to innovate, although none can be seen since the game doesn't do anything: - Multiple replies can work against a given attack (in Monkey Island, only the opposite is true, and only when including the boss) - Attacks and replies have a level, which decides how much (mental) damage is dealt to the opponent - NPCs learn your quotes