LD 43 represents my third entry participating in Ludum Dare. The first one (Combine incompatible genres) was rough. We had a rough time with the theme, and it was my first time using Unity, not to mention my first time coding anything larger than a small script in over a decade. Our second entry (Running out of space) felt really good, our concept was fun, my workflow was a lot smoother, and we did extremely well, breaking into the top 10% in multiple categories.

Enter LD 43.

This time, I though a lot of entries would have a similar idea and execution to ours, but much to my surprise, I haven't seen many that went the same direction as us, either sacrificing to historic gods or point and click adventures. Developing this game felt very different this time as well. By day 1, I had finished the inventory system and the point and click game system, so days 2 and 3 were mostly creating items, click-boxes in the world, the majority of the scripting left to do was the "special" code, such as the combo box or the altar and wheel. We overloaded our artist a bit this time with the sheer volume of assets (5 rooms, ~35 inventory items, title screen, 3 ending screens, 20 images of 10 gods, 1 character with 5 different animations), but they really pulled through and gave us beautiful visuals!

(Development screenshot, 26 hours in)

After developing our final version, last week we saw a huge spike in our itch.io page, with over 3000 views coming in. A google search for "Zoe and the Polypantheon" showed 2 video playthroughs of the game, and pages in English, German, Russian, Chinese, French, Polish, and more, hosting or linking to our game. This LD has truly been an awesome experience. Last year, the thought of making a video game seemed like a pipe dream, I never would have dreamed of being part of a team to make a game I could be so proud of.

Thank you everyone who has played and rated our game, we appreciate your support. We will do our best to try the games of everyone who comments. I look forward to making more games with you in 2019!