Basic play

WASD/Arrows to move camera. Mouse wheel/+/- to zoom. Most in-game actions are just clicking on objects on the desk: * Click candles to light them. This is how you summon demons. * Clicked the journal or potion bottle to read/drink what's there (after a demon has used them). * Click the doorway to copy a departed demon's name to your clipboard. Or light the doorway to summon a demon from your clipboard. * Demons will get distracted, whether that's complaining, berating someone using the tool they want to use, or just falling over. Click them to slap them.

About this game

Tiny creatures was very far on my list for themes. It evokes in me a want to focus and relate to those tiny creatures, and I didn't have a good idea for how to execute on that theme. I still don't. What is here is the sketchings of a demon-summoning gacha game, with randomly generated demons producing mystical goods of varying quality.

After the first night, here's what my schedule looked like: 0 -> 3: Brainstorming. 3 -> 6: Context menu design and fiddling. Wow, that took a while. Sleep - zzz 14 -> 17: Desk setup, with a couple interactables 17 -> 20: First demon gets summoned 20 -> 22: Text boxes 22 -> 30: Gameplay loop, with a winnable game Sleep - zzz 38 -> 44: More content! 44 -> 48: Share your demons?

Going into the second night, that was revised: Revisions! 0 -> 3: Brainstorming. 3 -> 6: Context menu design and fiddling. Wow, that took a while. Sleep - zzz 14 -> 20: Desk scene in Spine, Making things a little interactive. 20 -> 24: Fix up the interactions and add pop-up text. No text boxes! 24 -> 29: Start getting demons setup. Draw a few fun ones. 29 -> 31: Get demons to move around on their own, we're just going to have them wander around and create lore. Sleep - zzz 38 -> 44: More tools, creatures, and such. 44 -> 48: Share your demons! It's basically the only feature now!

In the end, the revised feature set is present. Those features are severely pulled back from the original plan, do not form a cohesive game, and are not polished. As I head into hours 46 -> 48, I feel like the one thing that I can get out of this game is just to make a bunch of cool demon bits and put them in. Let's see how much I can do!

Anyways, you can summon C͉̞͂‍h͙̺̐‍ä̝͖‍r̀̄̊‍l̗ͨ͐‍e̛͍ͨ‍ś̕. (You copy C͉̞͂‍h͙̺̐‍ä̝͖‍r̀̄̊‍l̗ͨ͐‍e̛͍ͨ‍ś̕ to your clipboard, then light the candles by the doorway to summon him. If you summon any demons from the pentagram and they leave through the doorway, you get their demon names copied to your clipboard to share with others.)

Since I'm calling it an hour early, I'll do a quick post mortem for myself and any readers:

The good!

As usual, having a catalogue of interesting things to pull from makes Ludum Dare fun. I deployed my "cursed" text encoding for this. It's basically the only thing I'm happy to have in this game.

However, I'll shout-out Spine as being surprisingly easy to work with, minus some oddities that I can reasonably chalk up to my inexperience. Why do slots' colors reset automatically, but bones' scales don't? I'm sure it makes sense within the idioms of the Spine ecosystem, but I probably shouldn't have bothered trying to fiddle with slot colors manually anyways.

The bad!

I spent so much time just trying to think of some fun take on this theme. I think Demons On My Desk could be that fun take, but it's not a game I can make very well. I don't know what the point of this game is/was/could be, but summoning tiny demons and watching them walk around is pretty fun.

The ugly!

It is incredibly demoralizing to get to the end of the second night without the core loop at least mostly done. I just about quit 24 hours in, because I didn't even know what sort of game I was making! I still don't! What is this game? But I "finished". It doesn't have the polish or completeness I usually want from a game, but I can call this "done" enough for some satisfaction.

The end!

Another Ludum Dare down. What would I have done differently, if I had the chance? Well, I would have made a penrose-tile-based game where you play as a microbe deep in the earth, struggling to find your way to food and avoid predators through narrow tunnels. This vague idea was the other contender for this jam, but I was a unsure how the controls would work on a penrose-tile grid. Halfway through, I realized I was overthinking it and I could have rotated the board as you went to get a consistent and intuitive control scheme. Live and learn, and then see you at the next one!