This is my first solo LD, first time making a tower defence game, and first time using Paper2D in UE4, so it's taken me a while but I've finally got most of the gameplay working. Tomorrow I'll see what I can do with the art.

Phew, that was an effort! I thought I'd picked something small enough to complete solo in three days, but even after stripping several features on the way I still had to work flat out to finish on time. I'm really pleased with how it turned out though, and really enjoyed working on it.

I'm a big fan of myths and legends so when I saw the theme I went looking for harvest gods and settled on Demeter, Ancient Greek goddess of agriculture and the harvest. Her most famous myth says that her daughter Persephone was kidnapped and forced into marriage by Hades, who then tricked her into eating some pomegranate seeds so she had to remain in the Underworld forever, though Zeus intervened and changed that to four months of every year. Demeter gets so depressed during the months that Persephone is away that she stops tending the crops of the world and they all die (which is where the seasons come from).

So I made a tower defence game where you play as Demeter trying to keep her daughter safe, with an art style inspired by Ancient Greek pottery.

I used Unreal Engine 4 and Paper2D, and did all the art in Paint.NET (a vector graphics program would've been better but I don't know how to use any and this weekend wasn't the time to learn).

I hope the game is as much fun to play as it was to make, and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else has made. But first I need to catch up on sleep!

I forgot this was happening so I've missed half a day already, but I have an idea for it:

You're an adventurer who goes into dungeons, sifts through the junk you find there, then comes back and sells it to traders. But you only have limited space in your backpack and the traders want different stuff each day, so you have to try and maximise your profit over several days. (Final result may or may not look better than this)

Last time I entered LD I spent basically the whole weekend crunching to make the best game I could. This time I'm going to limit myself to 15 hours in total (plus a couple extra for packaging and uploading) to make sure I still have time to sleep/leave the house/speak to my family/etc. But the way I split my days last time worked well, so I'm going to follow the same plan:

Day 1: make all the mechanics

Day 2: build the level(s) and balance everything

Day 3: art/audio/polish

Let's see how far I get!

I managed to get most of the mechanics done today, after 5.5 hours.

There's the dungeon area where you can pick up and drop items. The inventory shows each item's theoretical value.

And there's the market area where you can see how much money traders have and what they'll offer for each item. Traders prefer certain types of items so they'll pay you more for those than for others, so you won't always get the item's full value.

I still need to get the game flow implemented (market -> dungeon -> market) and add some basic menus, then I can start making the levels and balancing the prices.

Dungeon Junk is complete! I planned on only spending 15 hours on it but ended up at 16.5 hours. I'd have probably been alright but I got halfway through then realised I'm still terrible at level design so abruptly changed the game to not need one, which meant I ran out of time to do anything besides pen scribbles for the art. Still, it looks better than the awful Paint splodges I had for most of development.