When the theme was announced, my initial reaction (like most) was to google game genres. My biggest issue with combining two genres was that, by definition, if they were able to be combined they were "compatible". This was hard to wrap my head around at first, until I came to the conclusion that the theme should really be interpreted as "Genres that don't work well together". At this point I also hit another roadblock, if I'm making a game with a core that by nature doesn't work well, making a fun game could prove very difficult. I decided my best approach would be to take a game under a genre I knew I could make fun (Beat 'Em Up) and just add another genre (Art Tool Games) on-top of it as a slight twist.

I ended up coming across the Art Tools genre (Mario Paint Wikipedia lists Art Tools as a genre!), and immediately I thought of coloring tiles with enemy remains to draw a picture. The easiest combination I could think of for this, was a simple Beat 'Em Up game.

The vision from the start was to build a game where you walk into a room with a picture outline on the ground. You then have to fill in the picture, like coloring, with the blood of your enemies. Points would be scored based on how closely you manage to draw the picture at the end of the level, hence the ability to clean tiles. Unfortunately the final product isn't quite this, the levels are more like random colored tiles to be filled in and not necessarily pictures. I found that making the tiles small enough to draw a good picture made killing monsters too tedious. Additionally, levels proved too difficult if there were a large number of tiles to be filled in. I felt the game was more fun when I designed the levels to challenge the player in a specific way (i.e. blue tiles opposite side to green tiles to force the player to lure sucka's better).

My final submission does not have any pictures or real drawings in it, but the concept is still there. To go along with this, I had planned a way to upload an image and generate a new level to play based on the picture. This is something that will be in a future update (Yay post-LD versions!).

I plan to make more of these posts in the coming days, talking about things from music to why certain monsters were cut from the game.

If you haven't tried my game yet, give it a shot! I'd love to hear feedback, good and bad :)

You can play Art of the Kill here