– Abstract

Idilium is a game about a magical creature that suddenly realises that some enchantment connected his world with an unknown one. His duty is to collect enough magical power to break this unpleasant situation! Gather all the gems spread in both worlds and find your way to the end of the level! Good luck!

– The creative process

Connected worlds can aboard a wide variety of game genres, from RPG, puzzles to stealth or action. It only depends on the flavor you want to give to the game as a developer, so in our case we chose to de what we do better – platformers.

From art direction, we wanted to experiment with a more abstract and magical atmosphere. We love cartoons and we wanted to translate this flavour to our game. Since we would put different worlds in the game, it also made sense that we could experiment with different styles from one to another. But the latter was also challenging, as they couldn’t be too much different or they would feel unconnected.

Also, we wanted to make sure that both worlds were clearly differentiated, not only from an art standpoint, but also in matters of level and mechanics designs. So we decided to switch gravity! This way, both worlds are really connected and traveling from one to another is just a matter of going high enough. Voilà!

Java is our language of choice. Not only we are experienced with it, but we also built a big robust engine from previous entries/projects that would make our life easier. We prepared a basic game loop, a basic character controller, level design tool and its parser, a sprite animation editor, a basic collision/physics engine and some other basic parts that can be reused in every game – until we felt we were prepared for the contest and ready to go.

– What went right

We had a straightforward plan – we knew what we wanted to do and how to achieve it. So we started prototyping it and we saw that the core mechanic and its wow effect was wonderful. It worked!

Also we know from collected feedback that the art design and the music fits perfectly with the mood we wanted to inspire with the game – a wide world to be explored, challenging but not stressful and cute.

– What went wrong

We had some issues regarding with not testing enough our engine before the start of the contest, so we lost time debugging some core features we shouldn’t have lost time with.

Also we underestimated the amount of work the game would take from an artistic point of view. More animations should be added for better feedback, an ending cinematic, a wider tileset for the map and a cleaner UI. Also we should be giving better clues about where to go during the gameplay! Right now the map seems a little puzzling.

– What we would do next

If we had to choose something, we would try to make the game *beautiful*. We would animate every single tile of the map so we would be showing that the world(s) is(are) really alive. We want to make this a really enveloping experience.

Please try the game and rate it! We would really appreciate it. Thank you!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=27472