I’m a member of Team JMCJ, and this is our Ludum Dare Jam 55 entry!

Storm The Castle is a auto-battler game. In the game, you control a party of adventurers as they make their way through the seemingly infinite rooms of a castle. In each room, you will encounter some enemies that you must slay in order to progress. You summon the members of your party into the room to start battling. Optimize your placement in order to maximize your chance of victory! Along the way, you will also encounter more adventures that will join your party, as well as chests that contain upgrades for your party. But as you progress, the enemies will become stronger as well. See how many rooms you can clear before you meet your untimely demise!

How did we apply the theme? The playable units seem to appear out of thin air, at least from the perspective of the enemies. That sounds like summoning to me! :)

Instructions

On the title screen, you have to select up to 5 units to start in your party: * Warriors are close-range, single-enemy attackers with decent health as well. * Rangers are long-range, single-enemy attackers with slightly more attack, but less overall health. And a lot of speed. * Mages are long-range, multi-enemy attackers that can pack a lot of punch, but are very fragile when it comes to health.

After selecting your units, move into the first room to start strategizing! You can use the 1, 2, 3 keys on the top row of your keyboard to select which unit you want to summon, and use the pointer and left-click of your mouse to do so. Your unit will automatically start making its way towards an enemy in the room, but the enemy will do the same. The battling happens automatically, so just sit back and hope you prevail! If you clear all the enemies, you will progress to the next room. If all of your units die, it's the end of the line!

Sometimes, there are also chests in the room, which your party members will also work towards and open. The items in the chests are stat boosts for certain classes that remain in effect for the rest of the current playthrough. If you are curious about the current stats for all classes, press the i key on your keyboard to toggle the stats display.

Finally, if you don't want to listen to the sounds or music, you can toggle the mute with the m key.

Storm The Castle was written in Python. Pre-built versions for Windows and macOS exist so you do not need to install Python if you use those versions. Otherwise, or if you run a different OS, you should install Python 3.12 and PyGame 2.5.2, and run the game from source (entry point is src/main.py)

This is our fourth Ludum Dare game, and our second in Python/PyGame. We use these events mostly as a learning exercise for various programming concepts, with less of a focus on making an amazingly-polished game. While this definitely won't live up to the same standards as some other games in the event made with real game engines, we still enjoyed having to problem solve things that we might have just gotten for free with those game engines.

Enjoy!

Credits

• Cam: Art
• David: Music/Sounds
• Jack: Development
• Parker: Development
• Trevor: Development