I vowed I would not fail two Ludum Dares in a row, but here I sit again, four hours to go, with the realization that while what I have could be brought to some stage of completion, it would not be in any way fun, and I would not enjoy finishing it.
I could write a long, ranty post about what went wrong at this point, but I’d only be echoing a lot of other posts, so here’s a description of my concept instead:

What I’ve got at the end of it all:
My concept was a reverse, SNES-style RPG, ‘Willful Encounter’, where instead of ‘random encounters’ you control ‘willful encounters’, pitting monsters against the heroes without warning. You would receive tokens for every tile the ‘player’ walks his party across, which you can spend creating a group of monsters to assail him. Stronger monsters would cost more tokens and different environments would give attack and defense modifiers to different monsters.

An expansion of the concept might involve detailed AI controlling the movements of the player’s party, the ability to spawn loot to attract his attention, and the ability to select a sub-set from a vast array of creatures at the start of the game.

But with only four hours to go I have yet even to implement the battle system, and the monster party construction. These are essentially the meat of the gameplay, and could only be finished in a really rough un-fun form in the time that remains. So what do I have?

• Tile loading from an image
• A player party that walks north to your tower
• The ability to initiate a battle
• A nice transition to the battle scene and back
• Battle environments based on the player party’s location
• The beginnings of a really terrible battle system

Oh, and good luck to the rest of you!