I've noticed a lot of people using Unity and Game Maker and etc for Ludum Dare and that fascinates me. It makes SENSE, of course, in retrospect, to go as fast as possible via letting some third party lay the foundation for you.

Meanwhile, our team has been building our own tools for almost two years, using DartLang (google's answer to TypeScript).

We definitely have things we're good at and things we just aren't. Our engine is absolutely fantastic at rendering layered things to a canvas and letting you mess around with colors. It's a bit harder to get animations working with, and still harder for more complicated rendering things (such as individual layers moving around or changing rotation or size).

Overall we've built up 7 libraries we use internally, all that helps us get games up and running quickly, while being something we feel more comfortable using than a third party engine?

The biggest thing we do is allow custom replacing of pixels for layered assets, i.e. a DollEngine.

. .

Are all examples of the same art assets being rapidly recolored pixel by pixel.

We do this via having a "default" palette the individual parts use. A layered doll with no recoloring would look like this:

And one of her layers looks like this:

Our DollEngine has been used for a lot of things, including a pretty popular virtual pet game, where you can grow your pet up into an adult. This required the engine to support a "transformation" mechanic, where a doll can seamlessly go from one form to another.

Which of course, leads us to the custom dollset we created for this competition ;)

You can check our custom libraries out here:

https://github.com/FarragoFiction?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=lib&type=&language=

And you can see just what creating your own engine can get you here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mahou-shoujo-monster-promised-fate