I'll talk about how my Ludum Dare 50 entry, Cursed Unicorn was developed, received and some lessons learned.

Game

Cursed Unicorn is a compo game that's inspired from Vampire Survivors, but differs from it with side scrolling and flying mechanic.

Your objective is to protect the baby unicorn from evil spirits as long as you can. You fire projectiles at the enemies automatically. Each time you level up, you can either increase the attack speed or heal the unicorn. Oh, and you can fly!

Birth of idea

I'm a fan of Vampire Survivors and have been wanting to make a game with the same genre since I played it. It seems that I'm not the only LD participant who wanted that. In fact, I believe that this theme was chosen due to this, lol.

I'm also in a sad term in my life due to something I'd rather not talk about publicly. This game is a metaphor of what has been happening. I reflected the sorrow to the art.

Development

I did everything (except for fonts) and finished the game 10 hours before the deadline. I think I rushed the release too much. There are only two upgrade options at level up, Heal and Faster Attack. The main reason why I didn't add other upgrades was that I couldn't find any original and interesting upgrades. Honestly, I was afraid I would be accused of ripping VS if there were too many similarities.

This is a Unity game. I used to use FindObjectOfType too much before. Of course not in Update, but in Awake to cache the references to other scripts. I started to think this is a bad practice. In this game, I started to use static instances for communication between scripts. It went well.

Most of the development time passed with trying to balance the game.

Reception

Even though I tried not to copy from VS too much, I was still afraid of being accused of ripping it off. That didn't happen, many people liked the game. The others didn't like it mostly because of the lacking features I didn't develop. It currently has 335 browser plays and 23 ratings (I strongly suggest r/WebGames to find people to play your web games).

• There were too few upgrades. Only 2.
• If you play the game well enough, it can last till you get bored. I was thinking of putting a creepy, invincible enemy at 05:00, but didn't put it.
• Some people found the game too easy, some found it too hard
• I forgot to make walking animation, lol, but it didn't bother people it seems
• Something that makes VS addicting is to mass kill enemies. We don't have that in Cursed Unicorn

- I should have made the characters smaller, like in the above screenshot. People complained that getting stuck in air by enemies wasn't fun.

Overall, I wish I had added those features I mentioned in the article, rather than being afraid of getting called a rip off. There is a reason why those features exist in a game which reached 77,061 concurred players.