'The Weard Summoner' is a pachinko game mixed with an auto battler - play through the first phase to collect food and gold for your summoned troops to stand a chance against increasing enemy waves who are trying to destroy your castle. The more pegs you hit, the more knights you can summon to defend your castle.

Created in Unreal Engine 5 - all art assets created in Blender.

Art wise we wanted to go for the classic PS1/retro look as it was just far more realistic for us to get some assets done quickly and efficiently. The texturing process was done with photographs, with the post process in engine knocking down the resolution to achieve the old school feel.

If we had more time, we would integrate the UI better, give some visual feedback to the 'auto battler' section (i.e. when your knights die, the enemy is shown attacking the castle, you see how much 'health' the castle has etc.) we also wanted to integrate the 'spell cards' on the left hand side as single use bonuses for certain battles as they get tougher - but we ran out of time.

We (as always) over scoped and should have focused on protoyping core mechanics earlier, but we learnt a lot and had fun with this one. I think it would be really nice to carry on with fixes and features I have mentioned after Ludum Dare as a team, and get this polished up and fully playable.

This was a great learning experience for our first Ludum Dare.

Thank you to Peej, Carty and Sam for everything.

Thank you for reading (and playing)

Playthrough video -

https://youtu.be/hTF1YdahKmA?si=5QpC3NktxKqX6P2t

Download link from WeTransfer - (Game was too large to host on LD directly)

https://we.tl/t-ZCT7eTzv3K