Thanks for playing Underworld Management!!
Thank you to everyone for participating in this ludum dare and also for playing and rating my game, Underworld Management!
Every time I participate in ludum dare I try to push myself to try new approaches to game design and development. This time my focus was on intuitive gameplay and tutorialization. I think I managed to create a game that can be picked up by anyone and was able to dabble my toes in to some light tutorialization, something that I have never attempted before.
This time, I also tried a new art style. Heavily borrowing from games like Don't Starve and Cult of the Lamb I think it turned out great:
Pairing a hand-drawn style with 2D billboards in a 3D world - it was pretty freeing to step outside of the pixel art and 3d-modeling realms, though it took a while to really nail down the process. I could further improve this process with the 2D animation package and 2D bone-based animations.
Unity has some weird workarounds to get the look I was going for. Shadows for sprites required checking boxes in debug mode and writing a special shader. Using 2D physics forced me onto an x/y grid, which was difficult to navigate in-editor. In hindsight I think I would have started with a 3D URP project and 3D physics, instead of sprites and 2D physics.
All in all, I think this was a great project that really taught me some great new strategies for future projects and future ludum dare events. I hope that you will take the time to try it out and give me some feedback!
Thanks again for a wonderful Ludum Dare!!