The Idea!

So I had the idea from playing a boardgame called Carcassonne where you lay down tiles to build a kingdom. I wanted to take this tile building concept and put it into a video game.

I am using game maker studio 2 and found a free extension that allows you to load rooms within rooms. It was designed for gms 1.4 so it was a bit of a hassle to work with but I got things working.

My first attempt with room dog

Lets work on grid movement for tile placement

Hand Crafting the rooms

This was a fun process b/c there are 32 rooms total. The first room is always the same but you the player get to lay down the remaining 31 rooms in a randomized order. Here are few of the ones I thought were pretty fun. Note all the enemies and rocks look the same in the photos but in game are randomized.

Using a low color palette

This was probably the most key thing for me since I'm not an artist. I used this awesome color palette https://lospec.com/palette-list/rustic-gb by Kerrie Lake.

So I was able to make enemies, rocks, and power ups pretty easily. It made life simple and it looked consistent. I was actually pretty happy with the look of the game.

Coming all together

Here you can see it all coming together at a glance

Play The game

I would love to hear your feedback and see if you enjoyed the game as much as I did. This was the first time I ever attempted to do anything with randomization and endlessly loop the game so it was a really fun process.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/99hearts