Part 1 located here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness/$406164

Misa here again, from Miku's Minion Madness (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mikus-minion-madness) with another behind the scenes dev blog!

The First 24 Hours

Our engineer @poco0317 would be the one to start the major implementation. His goal was to get the base game up and running by the end of the night.

For @miku, she opted to contribute with the art. When we homed in on the idea that this would be a game that has a big focus on the cards, she felt eager to take on this challenge. Even though she is professional a game designer by trade, she also had just gone off a fresh streak of drawing Hatsune Miku every day for a year. Drawing little creatures like this shouldn’t be hard! Or so she thought…

She honestly had some difficulty with the initial iteration of the cards - we had no idea what size it should be, nor what the creatures should be based off to make them tiny. Should we think of these cards as basic playing cards, or something more elegant like the cards of Magic: the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh?

We simply needed to move forward, and as our engineer shared the first draft of the battlefield, Miku shared with us the first draft of our most basic minion.

If you’ve ever been a fan of VOCALOID, this drawing was based off the derivative of Megurine Luka known as Tako Luka. Long story short, the tiny creatures theme made us think of mascots! This would also be our first placeholder card. Miku made sure to keep in mind that this is a card game, so we need a lot of cards, so all the cards must be relatively simple while also being visibly distinct in the UI.

And that's what gave birth to Miku doodling us all as mascots, starting with poco's t-posing Agent Lemon, and then my Mipaka.

We knew we wanted to make the game work on mobile, but did we want to go portrait, or landscape? We opted to go portrait, and @jason-woerner would start to work on some effects in the engine so that we could have an indicator of when units would attack.

Eventually, we were able to get the UI in a state that looked like it made sense. We took major inspiration from games like Clash Royale for how we would place our cards and UI elements. Our base UI used a lot of Godot progress meters, but we knew we wanted more diegetic UI, so those would just be placeholders for the prototype. Although our final implementation of it for the jam was not perfect, we wanted to make it feel more organic when you play the game.

We started to consider how the UI would display information to players, thinking about three specific elements: attack, health, and speed. These elements were used to inspire some of the mascot art, as well. At the same time, poco was working on optimizing the game code so it could support a lot of entities at once. Behold, the Miku Army!

Our game was finally coming together, but we needed more cards. Miku was hard at work, mocking up art for the rest of the cards, based on folks working with us on a Miku RPG and the rest of our dev team.

We were cookin' with gas, but... we were also all exhausted, so it was time to turn in. You'll have to come check back later for the next Behind the Scenes!