Welcome to Doodle Battle!

Welcome to my Ludum Dare 51 entry: Doodle Battle, a sandbox notebook doodle style of stick-people at war! There is no objective in this game, other than to setup an interesting battle and let it play out in 10 second increments.

Careful with performance! Setting up lots of soldiers can get dicey! Play to your machine and only put as many as it can handle.

See below for the Itch.io link if you'd rather not play the embed.

Controls

Camera

• WASD — Move the camera in the direction it’s facing

• Right Click — Orbit the camera

• Space — Move the camera up

• X — Move the camera down

• Hold Shift — Move the camera faster

Battle

• Q — Start a 10 second battle segment
• Z — Kill the soldier under the cursor

Top Left Buttons:

• Mute — Toggle sound. It can get a bit repetitive!
• Classical — Switch music to Classical music
• Forever — Toggle to not break up the battle into 10 second segments. Let it run!
• Restart — Clear the stage to start again

Side Buttons:

• Team — Select one of four teams to spawn as
• Kind — Soldiers, archers, and castle bricks to spawn. "Target" moves the navigation target for soldiers.
• Count — How many total to spawn
• Rows — Divide the count into this many rows
• Spawn — Begin spawning, which will place markers at the spawn locations
• Click — Confirm spawn location

Tools

• Unity
• Procreate
• GarageBand
• Blender

Credit

Credit to Luluk Surotul for the font.

Thoughts

This was one of the few jams where I had a preconceived idea, before knowing the theme. I wanted to try a large, chaotic battle just like the kind that would be drawn in a notebook. Unfortunately I didn't get as many set pieces as I'd have liked. More castles, more unit types (including catapults!), siege towers and ladders... Ah well.

I ate up a lot of my time doing a refactor on the soldier's state machine. Lesson learned to lock that in early rather than refactor it later. It's a good pattern to live by.