I hung out today at a friend’s apartment while I worked on the game, and explained how miraculous it feels when you manage to even get the bare minimum of a game working, enough that you can say “it’s actually a game.”

Anyway, the main mechanics for my fighting game visual novel are mostly working (minus a few bugs) and I have the character art in. Still needs lots more UI art, visual polish, and some script revisions, especially to make the mechanics easier to understand. Not sure I’ll have that all done by tomorrow at 6 for the Compo, but at least it’s actually a game.

I finally have most of the most important art for the game in, including the characters and the main elements of the UI. But this has definitely been a lesson in how much the art can eat up my time if I let it. To think, at one point on Friday I considered having more than one enemy to fight!

Still to go in the art department: customizing the Renpy default UI with some better colors and frames for text/buttons, and, oh yeah, an actual title screen.

Got it in just under the wire! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/friendship-fighter

Friendship Fighter is a fighting game visual novel about beating people up and making friends. It basically turns the fighting game rock-paper-scissors mechanic into a turn-based visual novel with multiple endings!

It’s my second Ludum Dare game (participated in the April LD last year) and I’m much happier about the result this time around. I left myself a lot more time to sort out the mechanics and playtest it, and while there’s a lot of room for improvement, I think it’s actually kind of fun right now, which is more than I could say of my last game.

Please play and rate our frantic microgame collection DRAINED to help push us over the threshold! Playable on mobile or desktop web on any platform. Link to your game and we’ll play/rate yours too. Thank you!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/drained