"...what if we made a Trading BARD Game?"

With this joke I made, Roundabout was born. But let me rewind a bit.

Every Ludum Dare, we try to gather the gamedevs from our city in local sites to keep ourselves hyped up, cheer one another and provide quality feedback for our friends. This is awesome and I love these guys. However, the theme hit us like a brick in the face and we were all bummed out when we first heard of it. No one had any good ideas and we couldn't stop joking around and complaining.

In the middle of that, something fun happened: When I made that joke, I got to know that Felipe was dying to try to code a card game. I threw in my passion for roguelikes and it looked like we had a good idea for a fun game.

We were counting on a local musician friend to help us out with that, but we were crushed to receive the news he wouldn't be able to - he's busy with another awesome game's work (and we are SO happy for him). We thought to give our best anyway and try to finish early, so we could leave sunday+monday only to learn and work with sounds.

Comes Saturday morning and we had a working alpha. I grinded Photoshop to make all the sprites as soon as I could and have time to test and work on balancing. I was drawing with one eye on my screen and another on Felipe's, pointing out changes needed as I was delivering musicians, enemies, card arts and background previews. Sometimes I had to stop and write the HP and Damage number progression, how the targeting system would work and more. we only had a couple discussions about how something should be played and how to give visual feedback to the players. It was a lot of work, but the work was going on fast and quite smoothly.

On Sunday we were able to contact Murilo, and he pleaded allegiance -caham- to help us, even if he only had a couple hours to work on that night and a couple more in the next morning. He delivered all the sound effects for the cards and lent his awesome voice for our Vocalist. We improvised he rest of the solos with what we could find and edit.

By Monday morning we were only empty shells of ourselves, smelling like redbull and coffee. Felipe had college and work. Murilo had to work as well. I did my best to publish the game and spread the word to streams and more people, until I came back to work on tuesday and didn't have much time to play or rate others games until now (but I'm anxiously looking forward to the weekend for that).

And today I'm impressed to see we surpassed 40 ratings and have a lot of nice feedback on our game's page.

This is actually the first time I can deliver a finished product for a Game Jam that was my initial idea and something I was really proud to work on.

It gets even more rewarding from the fact that I have been tied to a dozen projects that never got to see the light of day. I wrote countless pages of GDDs, animated pixel characters (and I suck at animations), made concepts, talked to teams... and somewhere in the middle of the project, someone pulled the plug.

I genuinely cried when I hit "Publish" this time.

Because it's another step towards my dream of living off my games.

It's me getting a little closer to being sure that I can be a gamedev.

And it's also a great reminder that I can't quit.

I really hope the HUGE amount of work we did this last weekend can give you all a couple minutes of excitement and entertainment. I hope it can make you laugh with its bad jokes and puns. I hope that it makes you feel challenged and rewarded for overcoming those challenges. Above all, I hope that it makes your day a little bit better and fun.

Because this is why I want to keep making games.

Thanks for being an awesome community. Love y'all. <3