This event started a bit rough for our team, we had the idea to make a game about surviving in a cold night by getting warmth from a campfire (seems like we weren't the only ones). We soon encountered the problem that none of us could draw that well and the unusual lighting (one light in the center and no sun) made it extremely hard to do shading for a 2D game.

After creating some assets we didn't like we decided to ditch all of them and commit to a "lowpoly" 2D artstyle.

This looked ok-ish (it reminded some of us of Southparks style) but ultimately didn't create the mood we were going for. Doing some simple lighting helped, but it still wasn't quite there.

Turns out you have to focus on what you can do best. In our case programming. We had the idea to implement shadows (our game is built from scratch, so there was no engine that implemented shadows for us) which turned out to be manageable for the type of scene we were going for. I think the results speak for themselves:

So in the end everything worked out and we managed to complete a moody and atmospheric game in 72h. You can play our game "Lonely fire" here.

Has anyone of you had a similar experience? I know there are many programmers participating that aren't to fond with art. What was your solution to that problem?