Making games is hard. And it's even harder when you decide to do it in 48 hours, six hours of sleep a night, and a couple bowls of leftover pasta.
However, I've accumulated some useful nuggets over my twelve previous Ludum Dare Compos and have compiled some of them here. This one focuses on Graphics, but I might write up another one for Audio later!
🧂 Warning 🧂
Take all of this with a big grain of salt. These are things I have found useful, but the specific strategies you use depend entirely on your game and the styles and abilities of the people on your team.
With that disclaimer, let's hop in!
Make things legible
If you have a character on a dark background, it might help if the character is light in color, or vice versa.
Alternatively, you can use shadows and highlights to draw attention to the important things on the screen at the moment. In Fallowtide, I put a shade over the background when dialog is happening or when the player is playing a card.
Also, use legible fonts for large bodies of text! "Matura" might look good for my game's thumbnail, but I stuck with good old Segoe UI for the dialog in-game.
Shape language
In Fallowtide, I use triangles everywhere. The soil is triangles. The card symbols are triangles. The currency symbol has triangles in it. When you play a card, it explodes into a bunch of triangles. There's even a hint of it in the character design; the Doctor has a prominent mask and pendant that have pointed ends.
Often, sharp shapes are associated with danger or hazards --- for instance, spikes, thorns, bladed weapons, and caution/yield signs. This isn't always the case, but I leaned on this in Fallowtide to add a sense of unease and mystery.
Compare that to the screenshots from my previous two games (Eleventh Hour and Eleventh Second) where I used concentric circles very prominently. The power-ups, backgrounds (setting sun and rotating gears), and "time travel" animations all used circles to make the player think of clocks and cycles for the time travel mechanic. Note also that the enemies in Eleventh Hour are circular (they power your time travel device), but unfold into sharp, dangerous shapes when they're attacking!
This is one of those very subtle things in visual design that you rarely notice but can make a big difference when done right (or when done poorly).
Particles and modular animation
Frame-by-frame animation is a lot of work... and it's often worth it! But there are alternatives that are worth considering when you decide to make a game by yourself in 48 hours and only have a limited art budget.
Disclaimer again! These tips don't make sense for every team or for every game. If you are very good at frame-by-frame animation, absolutely use that in your games! That said...
Particle effects can be a very effective way to add an animation without having to draw anything, and are great for things like spawn and death animations. Here I use some particles when playing a card from your hand in Fallowtide.
The animation consists of the following:
- A large rectangle particle
- Grows larger over time
- Reduces alpha over time
- A bunch of randomly placed triangle particles
- Shrink slightly over time
- Rotate slowly
- Reduce alpha over time
- Spawn with slight variance in starting size, angle, and alpha
You of course have to tweak the specific values until it looks right, but the result is a fairly cheap effect that can add a lot of "oomph" to your jam game.
I also took a shortcut with how I drew the game's crops by only drawing one strand of wheat, then populating the entire tile with it. Each strand individually changes its angle in a sine pattern to sway to the breeze.
This has the additional benefit of making future crops very easy to implement... I only needed to draw a single strand, then use the exact same logic as the wheat.
Shortcuts are fair game
In Fallowtide, the sprites for Wheat and Hellweed are almost identical! The only difference are the palette and some thorns and lighting on Hellweed.
Wait, you say. This is shameless and derivative, and the players won't stand for it! Tell that to Dragon Quest, who sold two million copies with enemy designs like these:
Of course, you do have to be careful with this one. Adding ten shades of scorpions with different hit point levels probably won't add as much variety as, say, two shades each of five different enemies. And I like to make some changes to the shape of the sprite as well, so it doesn't come off purely as wheat dipped in purple ink.
It doesn't need to be perfect
You're making a game in 48 (or 72) hours. If there is a stray pixel here and there, it's very likely nobody will notice. Or at least I'm telling myself that, because I completely forgot to color in the bottom seam in the Doctor's shirt...
Usually, "good enough" is good enough to get your point across. Only agonize over the tiny details if you think they're very important.
That's all I had! Good luck for the rest of play and rate!
Star ReaperZ is an arcade space shoot-'em-up made with our very own open source Java 2D game engine LITIENGINE. We didn't have the full weekend at our disposal, so we had to cut some corners with graphics and audio, but all in all, you will have a great time harvesting innocent galaxies!
Check out the game HERE!.
Oh, and of course the game is open source! 
This is the link！https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/pseudo-harvest
