We had a blast working on ZapDune this LD. This time around, there were two artists working in the team - Me and Rahul. We mixed the art up- both of us worked in part on the background, sprites and other things. So...wouldn't this mean there'd be a clash of art styles? Of course there was.

My Assets:

Rahul's Assets:

We didn't even stick to the same palette, heck, we didn't even stick to the same theme, as you can see!

So how do you get the overall art to look coherent and compatible when there are two different artists, each with their own different style, working on the same thing? This is what worked for us - putting a 1 pixel outline around all foreground elements!

The reason this was successful was because it was pixel art- and we already had the screen and asset sizes decided. Not only did it make the art look consistent, but it also improved the overall readability of the game so you could distinctly see which elements were part of the foreground and which weren't.

This was an improvisation, really, we never sat down to discuss what the things were going to look like and decide color palettes in advance - we should've done that! We were lucky this time - we'll definitely keep these things in mind next time.

Here's the link to out game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/zapdune

Check it out and judge the art for yourselves.

So we were a 2-man team working on the game, and both of us made levels. Although @Diptoman, the main programmer and designer, did a greater part of the work, ahahah. Thanks to coordination through github, even the artist(me!) can help out since I know the basics of using GMS2.

Getting puzzle levels down properly is pretty difficult- You don't know how easy or difficult a level is if you make it yourself, since you already know the correct solution! So we played each others' levels for testing, before approving them. Although that went a bit more rushed towards the end.

Our game's finally finished, you can try out our puzzle levels, and leave some feedback about how easy or difficult they were! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/mindblocked

So our game has this scale feature to fit screensizes of various resolutions. We mainly tested this on 1366x768(mine) and 1920x1080(@Diptoman 's) screens.

At first, we had trouble deciding the resolution of our game. It was a choice between 400x224 or 608x336 (our tiles are 16x16, had to be a multiple of that, and as close to 16:9 as possible).

Dipto went with 608x336 at first - it gave us a larger playing area, and we could scale it 2x and 3x to fit both screen sizes reasonably well. However, I felt that it was undermining the retro feel that I was going for in the art too much. The smaller 400px resolution would give us a smaller play area but improved the simplicity of both the graphics and gameplay(my main reason was the graphics, since I was in charge of the art), but it would also prevent the levels from getting too big and complicated(which I swear @Diptoman does every single time).

So here's what I did - I sneakily made the first few levels and menu in 400x224 while Diptoman was sleeping, ahahahaha(we're on almost opposite timezones). And...well, he was okay with that after seeing how well it worked.

On to the main problem - Construct 2 has this really awesome integer-multiple scaling that allows pixel art to scale automatically with the screen size. No such thing in Game Maker Studio, unfortunately, so I had to nag Dipto a bit for this and had him spend some time programming it - but in the end it turned out very good. One more advantage of the smaller 400px size was that non-interger scaling didn't break it much - it looked reasonably good even in fullscreen, on both resolutions. In contrast, the 600px area was not working nicely in fullscreen non-integer scaling modes.

You can check out our game here, and tell us what you think!

Still on the mock screen. Here's the main altar, updating the color scheme.

It's my first time going solo in a Ludum Dare, so I don't know how well it'll turn out! I'll probably try to finish all the art by today then spend the next day on the programming.

Idle and run anims. Although I just realized flipping the idle sprite will (seemingly?) make the wind seem weird so that was a stupid mistake. Oh well, maybe I'll make a left facing one later.

I want to keep the wonky mouth on him so badly ahahahhaha. But I probably won't xD

Finally managed to finish up everything!

Play and rate it here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-cave-god

It pays to submit early! Users immediately reported not being able to complete one of the endings, and when I double checked, the game was indeed broken! Quickly fixed the error and reuploaded, thankfully the jam submission's not over yet! I was seriously about to go to sleep but oh man, saved!(inb4 more game breaking bugs)

Link to game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/the-cave-god

Man, this LD was fun! Participated with @diptoman, the programmer and Joel, the sound guy.

I'm, well, y'know, that guy who draws stuff. Just wanted to share a few screenshots of the process during the making of our game, Satelloop.

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This is the mess we made while ideating, with a discord screenshare with me and Dipto putting in ideas and...well yeah, it's a mess. It's also my desktop wallpaper now.

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Then Diptoman went to sleep(we live on opposite sides of the world) and that mess turned into...this. Putting the UI in the center to use that space was a brilliant idea. Sadly, it wasn't mine. >:[

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Finally, here's a GIF of me trying to play the game frantically managing the drones trying to mine and protect the Satelloop at the same time.

Try out the game here and let us know what you think!