Coming up with the idea for our game was super fun! Here was my initial concept: Basically, I think I was being influenced by world events at the time, and came up with an idea of two fictional countries trying to negotiate out of nuclear war (which inevitably happens, anyway) using a call-and-repeat Pa-Rappa-the-Rapper style gameplay of talking on the phone.

Play Our Ludum Dare 50 game here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/hang-up

When I shared this idea with my friends, they very reasonably called it pretty dour and not something people would want to play. After talking about it a lot, we came up with the idea of being a telemarketer avoiding getting hung up on! I instantly fell in love with the idea! After a quick huddle and divvying up tasks, we quickly got to work, me on art, @kylazaur programming the game, and @whirlguy on sound design and music.

Coming up with the UI layout was pretty fun! Friday Night Funkin' was definitely an inspiration with putting the happy/mad meter at the bottom. Here are a couple sketches of my process.

This:

Turned into:

Here are some finished characters where I tried out a new brush and painting technique, and applied a cardboard texture overlay to give them some variation:

BONUS!!!! Here are some characters that didn't make it to the game:

Thank you for checking out our game, and congrats to everybody who participated!! :D