Hey all! I'm RenD and my entry for this event is called "Alpine":

The pitch

It's a 2D puzzle platformer where you must re-connect houses after a storm has swept through the valley. You route signals from cabin to cabin, up to the summit of the Three Peaks mountain.

As you can see, I did have a look at some Celeste screenshots when researching the mood and the art direction :smile:

The tool

For this jam I wanted to try a tool I've discovered recently, LDtk by Deep Night (who has been participating in many Ludum Dare in the past). I was previously using Tiled and while the integration with Unity was pretty seamless (thanks to the Super Tiled2Unity project), I found the editor to be a bit cumbersome at times. So I thought to myself, let's try this nice-looking tool and attempt to have a cool retro 2D pixel art side scroller.

And LDtk did not disappoint! If you're making a tile-based game (top down or side view), this is a must. The world/level partitioning, the auto rule system, the entities with custom fields. It's all super intuitive to use and thanks to the fantastic LDtkToUnity project, the integration with Unity is made super easy. You have all the callbacks you need from the importer to customize all the prefabs according to your needs.

How it helped

Once the tileset was up and running (there's a template so you can reuse some existing auto-tiles rules), I created all the entities (prefabs) that would be needed: the pylons, the houses, the triggers for dialogues and hints, the collectibles... Then in Unity I associated the tiles to specific layers (for collision, one way platforms, deadly spikes) and associated entities with prefabs. Et voilà! Now all the work was happening in LDtk and I just had to layout the collisions, place the entities, design the puzzles...

It made me gain so much time that I was able to focus more on the polishing and the visuals. I did overscope the level design and the mechanic progression big time (I had designed at least 3 additional uses of the cables and the signals) so the experience might feel pretty short, but I'm happy with the result and I'll certainly use LDtk again in future projects.

Thanks for reading, I'd be super thankful if you could try the game and maybe even drop a comment!

Cheers!