A lot of people came by yesterday, and were kind to rate and give feedback! Halfway through our ratings already. Thank you all very much, we really appreciate it! Also, special thanks to @elysiagriffin, who played our game on her stream:

Check her out! You can watch the playthrough here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/599197426?t=10h14m59s

If you haven't seen our game yet, we welcome you to play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/blood-oath

Take on the quest of saving the world by destroying the cursed, blood-thirsty sword you were destined to wield. Be careful, though - failure to feed the sword will cause it to consume you. It is crucial that you keep yourself alive, even if it means sacrificing others, as there will be noone to break this cycle of pain and destruction without you!

Again, a big thak you to everyone who rated our game! Got to the minimum amount of ratings required already. That's super awesome!

If you haven’t seen it yet, we welcome you to play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/blood-oath

Take on the quest of saving the world by destroying the cursed, blood-thirsty sword you were destined to wield. Be careful, though - failure to feed the sword will cause it to consume you. It is crucial that you keep yourself alive, even if it means sacrificing others, as there will be noone to break this cycle of pain and destruction without you!

If you haven’t seen our game yet, we welcome you to play! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/blood-oath

A little before and after. From concept, to first draft, to final artwork, to in-game. Came a long way!

If you haven't seen our game yet, we welcome you to check it out! Play here

Always wanted to be more social and post some devlogs, so here I go!

Soo... Kinda spent the whole first day figuring out the artstyle for our game :sweat_smile: Well, in our team I am responsible for just art, so I kinda can afford being a little more slow and thorough with it. Here's what I've got now:

Most of the search occured on Wizard the Grabby-Hand here (don't ask), the player hero sprite. I wanted to make everything colourful and saturated at first, but things just wouldn't "pop". And then I decided, screw it! I'm just gonna try this beautiful red palette I saw on LOSPEC that got stuck in my head and do a completely different style. And I think it turned out great!

The pallete I ended up using is BLOODMOON21 by Ademack, if anyone curious. Slightly modified it by adding white, probably gonna add a couple more colours for some details.

Overall, I don't think this time searching was wasted. All the guesswork is out of the way now, and my workflow should only speed up going forward. I hope :fingers_crossed:

Did this as a joke, realised I look exactly like this lol. He may look scary (or tired), but he's got the spirit!

Wanna get down and spin in a deadly dance with demons on a floor that is falling apart? Cause that's what our game is about!

Go check DOWN the DUNGEON: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/down-the-dungeon__

What will you find down the hole in the floor? Only one way to find out!

Go check DOWN the DUNGEON: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/down-the-dungeon__

Wanna get down and spin in a deadly dance with demons on a floor that is falling apart? Cause that's what our game is about!

Go check DOWN the DUNGEON: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/down-the-dungeon__

The final boss of our game!

Hesitated to show him before because his hands got swapped around and looked broken as a result :sweat_smile: We're finally fixed them so now you can see Dracula in his full glory!

Will you be able to reach the last floor to fight him?

We encourage you to try! Go play DOWN the DUNGEON

...like, literally

One of my teammates put together an iteration of UI for the boss in a way that it NEEDED at least 2 child objects to work. And it did have them, until I came in and deleted everything except one thing. Which made THE WHOLE BOSS break. He would spawn in a wrong place and just... stand there menacingly.

The fix? Make an empty child object for BossUI. It didn't have to be named like this, but I couldn't resist the joke :smile:

Anyway, we now have a Post-Jam build! We've added more visual feedback and polish, SFX, and a highly requested boss healthbar! So, if you've already played our game, we invite you to give it another look! And if you're new, try the Jam version!

Check out DOWN the DUNGEON

YES, YOU!

Dracula needs your ratings and comments!

Go play our game DOWN the DUNGEON

He vibin

Miscalculated the jump distance( Should have stationed the other bots higher!

Can you pass this level in our puzzle game with little wind-up bots? Try for yourself - play Windbots!

Solve puzzles with cute wind-up robots!

Go check WindBots!

Didn't have much free time to participate this LD, so our team would be without an artist. After some discussing, the two remaining game designers/programmers stopped on an idea of a text farming sim. That sounded non-art-demanding at all, so I was sure they could figure it out.

Fast-forward 2 days, I hop on discord to ask how it's going. Greeted by screams and pleas of help, I realised. They, in fact, did not figure it out:

I was reeeeally lasy but just had to come to the rescue lol. So I did some fast (still took me a few hours :upsidedown:) and simple (still had to cut even more corners when transferring to build :tiredface:) art and layouts inspired by old text games and ASCII art:

Original mockup. It's not much, but it's honest work!

How it turned out in build. Had to sacrifice fancy shaded letter stacks :disappointed:

Honestly, had a blast doing simple visuals like this. Especially mixing, matching and editing letters to make bird and scarecrow sprites. They did not make it to the Jam version of the game though :cry: Maybe in Post-Jam!

Regarding gameplay, I think my teammates did a solid job, it turned out really fun! Check it out for yourself and leave some feedback!

.....................................................................................................play CharacteRiser.....................................................................................................

what I designed

vs

what my teammates assembled in engine :sweat_smile:

Why, of course it has to be built on some weird solution because it's faster that way. And of course a bunch of code needs to be rewritten to make it look how I want it to look... And I can't code... Still managed to somewhat salvage it though!

Turns out dropping visuals and doing mostly text wouldn't be much easier lol. Go figure!

And if you're wondering what is going with this alphabet soup here, check out our text-based farming sim!

.....................................................................................................play CharacteRiser.....................................................................................................

Honestly, we were not ready for such high results. This is the highest we ever ranked!

At first, we were doubting Characteriser turned out too niche, unappealing and not that fun. But to our surprise, feedback we got was overwhelmingly positive and proved the complete opposite!

shoutout to everyone who took their time to share their impression and/or report bugs. We read every comment!

Huge thanks to everybody who played and rated our game :heart:

This is how DALL-E 3 sees our game. Gotta say, pretty close! But even though English text generation is impressive, it still struggles with Japanese. This is why we head a real person do translations for us!

Come check our weird Japanese TV-shows inspired game:

SUPA SEAL-MAN!! 小さな氷山島に魚の事故!!

Every time we try to make an image resembling our already quite weird game with AI, we get something even more ridiculous... Here the AI decides to go bananas and make an ocean out of oranges :rofl:

If you feel brave enough to check out our weirdness youself we provide you with a 100% AI generated link:

I am a link. I need your clothes and your motorcycle.