Hello everyone! I'm Michael and I have been doing the coffee fueled doodling for Glyphs of Madness, a roguelight spellcasting battler for Ludum Dare 48. Here I wanted to share some of our visuals and give a bit of insight into what went into our visuals.

Heroine

Our protagonist was actually one of the last additions to the game. Originally we played with the idea of having a simple character selection and differentiating them on a manageable level with certain character traits

In the end we had to scrap the concept due to time constraints and instead chose one main figure for this jam.

I decided pretty early on that I wanted something masked as I love them from a purely aesthetic point of view along with the mystique they can add to a character.

Monsters

A small menagerie of different lovable abominations. Given a deeper exploration of this subject I’d love to take the scripture and glyph aspect of the theme a lot further since there is a lot to play around with.

As it stands the actual decision was made after we started with the concept of “somewhat creepy but still colorful lovecraftian entities” to battle. Still quite happy with what we came up with given the short timeframe and the lack of iteration that this brings.

The Glyphs

When working with mystical symbols it is important to keep readability in mind. While they can be a great opportunity to do world building, this isn’t of course the focus during a 48 hour jam.

Mainly wanted something that can be done quickly with a hand drawn aesthetic to it and that has good readability on most resolutions.

Environments

Arguably the section where I wish I had more time to invest in or to have locked in the book-theme earlier. From a purely aesthetic standpoint they should strike the balance of being interesting enough and evoke the desired mood without overpowering the characters.

To this end backgrounds are being done without any outlines to compliment flat shaded characters with lots of lighting and gradients in the background.

That's it! It was a lot of fun and although things of course went not quite as planned (but when do they ever) I'm quite proud of what we achieved during this short amount of time.

Thank you for reading! I hope your experience was as pleasant and inspiring as ours. If anything caught your eye please feel free to check out our game and let us know what you think.

Glyphs of Madness

Cheers!

-- Michael