Postmortem:

We are a team of Portuguese developers. We really tried to push ourselves to our maximum production on the limited time we had on this one. We quickly settled on a basic idea since the theme did not give room for our creativity (yea we had no ideas basically). We went for a basic sidescroller slash-em-up type of game, which we knew was easier to make because of the simple controls.

Because we only had one programmer to implement everything that the artist and the sound designer had created, he had to stay up right until the end of the jam and barely had time to sleep so he was a bit overworked :sweat_smile: (he's fine though)

The game was made with Python using PyGame, which is our programmer's favorite library for 2D games. It has everything that we needed and the syntax is clean, meaning it was easier to read code done at 2am.

The color palette for this game is extremelly minimalistic having only seven colors, and the whole artstyle and control scheme was made to simulate the feeling of old consoles like the Gameboy or the NES. This minimalistic artstyle also helped speed up the production of sprites (there were more than 100 sprites done)

Full Palette:

But definifely the most impressive part of the game was the music. Composed fully by our sound designer during the 72 hours of the jam, it has a lot of that 80s vibe to it and we got blown away by it. He used synths to create a feeling similar to 80s horror movies (John Carpenter for example). The main gameplay soundtrack had to not distract the player from the game itself but also had to not be repetitive and keep progressing as the game goes on. The music was inspired by comtemporary synthwave artists like Com Truise & Carpenter Brut.

Soulcore Animations (currently unimplemented)

Even if it does not have all the features we'd like it to have we are still proud of the work we did, and plan on making a postjam version of the game soon. The game currently only has an endless mode because we knew it would be easier in the longterm and would give a lot more replayability to the game, but we hope to implement a story mode as well in the future.

One of the enemies we did not have time to implement was the Werewolf:

To finish: We had a lot of fun making this game, even if it was quite stressful at times, but that is always part of Ludum Dare. We hope that you have fun playing it too! We want to thank everyone for the feedback on our game so far, we are super grateful!

:videogame: Link to the game page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifelust :videogame:

:notes: Link to our musician who made our amazing OST during the 72 hour jam and completely knocked it out of the park: https://soundcloud.com/kamaraum :notes: