Good afternoon! This is my first time on this website, and I wanted to share a bit about what we’ve been working on.

In the city where I live, they hosted an in-person game jam. To everyone’s surprise, they chose the same theme as Ludum Dare 59, giving us the chance to participate in two jams at once. (it’s been held several times before, but this was the first time doing this)

I was the game designer in a randomly assigned team of eight. Our group was made up of four artists, one musician, two programmers, and me. The theme was revealed at 2 AM on Saturday in our time zone, so we all met at the venue at 8:30 am to brainstorm over breakfast and narrow down the concept for our game.

In the end, we went for a board game that blends elements of a visual novel and classic RPG, with both 3D and 2D art, and situations where you have to make choices each with its own consequences. These decisions ultimately determine whether or not you can win the final battle. One of the core mechanics and the one that is based on the jam's theme is using echolocation to navigate across the board and uncover hidden objects. We would have loved to expand on it or give it a bigger role, but in the end, time was tight.

The story follows V the vampire, who loses his sight after someone replaces his eye drops with holy water. While he’s recovering from the burns in his coffin, a group of vampire hunters invades his castle to finish him off (tipped off by the same person who swapped his drops). V must awaken from his restorative slumber and stop those who are trying to destroy him. But there’s another problem: he’s been asleep for so long that even the people living in the castle no longer remember him.

This is just a sneak peek of the narrative, which mixes a dark, eerie atmosphere with touches of humor and satire.

Development ran from Saturday morning until 3:00 PM on Sunday for irl jam. We were a bit disappointed we didn’t have time to include some of the art and sound we created during the event, so we decided to spend a couple more hours polishing and adding that content for Ludum Dare 59.

In the end, we won 1st place 🙂 for Best Game (out of 11 teams), as well as the award for Best Art Direction. We’re obviously really happy with the result especially since for six out of the eight of us, it was our first jam ever. We had an amazing time (even if it was pretty stressful), and we’ll definitely be joining future editions.

That’s everything I wanted to share. I’m not sure if I did the right thing turning this into more of a blog-style post instead of focusing only on the game, but I figured it might help reach more people and hopefully get some feedback whether it’s what you liked or didn’t like about the game.

And of course, we believe and support artists, so no form of generative AI was used in the creation of this game.

Thanks a lot for reading, and a big hug to everyone! <3

If you’d like to try it, you can download it on Itch.io: https://angelosz.itch.io/v-de-vision And feel free to leave us a comment here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/v-de-vision