I am going to share a little bit about the development journey of my compo entry. As usual I didn't have much time during the weekend so I went with the Lua framework I build on top of my C engine as it would give me all the speed I need to come up with something 2D without having to fight with other engines.

It took me a long time to finally come up with an idea, though. I had tens of different ideas but none of them really felt like it would embrace the theme and make it a meaningful mechanic. So, after hours of brainstorming, I decided to give it a try at something I never did before: a card/city builder mix.

I started big and scaled down the design in such a way to have to manage a minimal amount of variables and interactions between the different gameplay elements.

The result is that you get 4 cards per turn. Each turn lasts exactly 10 seconds. You have some energy that you spend to play the cards. Playing cards let you build different kind fo buildings. At the end of the turn, your town is hit by a disaster that you cannot avoid. But your energy replenishes and you get some new cards. Rinse and repeat and try to make your town survive as long as possible.

I also narrowed down the amount of buildings you can have to just 8 to make it a little bit harder.

I would have wanted to let you place the buildings on a map, have some people move around, have animations and nice looking graphics but I didn't have the time for it. I managed to squeeze in some basic graphics, some music and sound effects and then had to call it finished, even if it needed a lot of polish, still.

I hope you will enjoy it nonetheless. Here is the link to the game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/unlucky-town