This was a strange (but awesome) Ludum Dare. I chose to participate alone because I really wanted to develop my own idea. I wanted to make a "cute" game based on long dialogues and scenes with just one image, but I ended up doing a very dark and environmental game.

That shows me once again that I have to learn how to stick to my initial ideas and don't iterate too much.

A proof of what I am saying are the concepts I made. Clearly there is almost no direction:

As you can see, I went from "dragon ball" like characters to something more similar to what I ended doing. But was a long road and a lot of time wasted.

After finishing my game I felt a bit sad because I didn't include everything I wanted. The idea was destroy the island, get out in a boat and arrive to another island where you could interact with other entities.

But a good thing is that I managed to make a decent amount of gameplay to extend the duration of the game 8-10 minutes.

The overall reception in general have been really good! (better than I expected) It feels so good read nice feedback or comments from people who really understood what you wanted to say. That thing for me is the best part of Ludum Dare.

What worked

Music:

I spent the whole first night (about 3-4 hours) composing music. I wanted to make it an important part of the game because the environment for me is essential. It seems like for now it worked well because I've only received good comments about it.

Mood:

People who have played my game said that it is really "moody", so in the end I managed to make the game feel the way I wanted it to.

Graphics:

Even if they are very simple I am quite happy with the graphics. I really like the 1-bit style and since the beginning I knew I was going to do something completely black and white.

What did not work

Playability:

Before today the game controls were really bad. Path finding was broken and the interactions were too slow. I received lots of comments about it and I did fix some issues. I hope that after this update the game feels better.

Content:

As I said, I wanted to include a lot more content, but I spent too much time working on code that in the end was not even used. Lesson learned for future Ludum Dares.

And that's it!

Thanks for playing it!

I want to upload a timelapse soon (I have to guess how to export stuff with chronnolapse), so if you are interested, visit my page one of these days!

For now, here are some concepts I made: (recorded with procreate app).

Play Daydreaming Island Here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/daydreaming-island :milky_way: