I’m a professional software engineer, but this time I joined as an artist. I believe my teammate @evindor expected to split coding responsibilities, but it was so heavy on art, that I only touched Godot for the last four hours of the event to animate the Apparatus.

It’s my first game jam ever and I would like to share how it went for me, my process and some early concepts. If you didn't play it yet, go give it a try https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/apparatus

@evindor had an idea for a programming puzzle game inspired by an esoteric language called Befunge. As a prep work for the jam we had a few sittings to ideate on what we can build around it. An idea of an auto-batler came to mind. Funny enough, neither puzzle nor auto-battler games is my cup of tea. But I was curious to make something different from the genres I usually play (recent crush Nine Sols). The initial idea was to make something like Backpack Hero so here is what I envisioned:

But when “Tiny Creatures” was announced as the theme, @evindor convinced me that tower defense or horde survivors is gonna fit just right. I trust both my and his gut feeling, so after a short struggle I agreed and we started cooking. I’m glad I did, because making a few distinct creatures instead of drawing a bunch of detailed characters is so much less time. They were done within an hour. I wish I had more time to paint them a bit more and make a simple animation.

We made sure to have 8 hours of sleep and the rest of the time we were busy making the game. On the first day I finished the design of the machine and creatures. I was happy that everything clicked and concept art was done without any hiccups. But on the second day the real crunch started, because drawing that machine, all its pieces with a crisp lineart thinking of tilesets and animation is a work that I underestimated. On the last day I spent half a day finishing up missing details (e.g. icons) and preparing a tileset. Then half a day, head to head to the deadline, I spent on importing and animating machine UI elements.

I’m glad how much we did in just three days and how great the game turned out. It’s flattering to hear positive feedback from hardcore gamers who like challenges. Thanks to @evindor for inviting me to join him and to you guy for playing it.

It’s time to take care of life matters and have a good rest. But we’re planning to tune a few things and publish it on Itch, so stay tuned https://x.com/erasemenot_

In the meantime it's playable in the browser here https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/apparatus