Candles of Doom - LD55 Postmortem

Me and my brother have been making games for years but now finally we gathered enough encouragement to join our first game jam and it was an honor to participate Ludum Dare 55. This is a postmortem about our preparation and the actual game jam time.

A couple of month ago I asked my brother if he would be willing to join me on some game jam as I think there's nothing more enjoyable than bouncing ideas back and forward with someone with same excitement. He said yes and we knew the roles would be shared as follows: we design together, I would handle coding with Godot and he would handle the art and most of the other misc stuff.

A few times beforehand LD55 we met and did some quick brainstorming sessions from random game jam themes. They went well and gave us nice boost to the real deal.

When finally LD55 came we decided to work next to each others to keep close interaction and quick reactions to needed changes for the game we would finally would want to make. This meant me to stay in his place for 3 nights.

I participated also in theme voting but I really didn't care what the theme would be as it would be just a nice challenge for us. We didn't stay up to see the theme announcement but wake up 4 hours later to see the theme: Summoning.

We brainstormed and I went more with the idea of some entities (such as patients) would summon help and player would summon people to help them. Idea was to have this kind of busy game. My brother had idea of mixing different ingredients to summon new things. For both ideas the concept was not super clear but we went with busy game idea where player would manage small town and would try to keep hoards of enemies away.

First version had attacking zombies and we prepared for it the first day. We however felt that it was not so unique that we would be satisfied with it. The on next day my brother drew new version for the attackers and they were more like dark monks which game as better idea to move forward with: monks trying to summon something huge with their candles. This would also give us a way to get away from combat focused interactions to more softer interactions such as persuasion and putting down the candles.

We worked the second day through with strong motivation and basically finished the core game within 48h but as we still had one day to go we wanted to do some final testing and polish before submitting. We submitted after 2 and half days and we are pretty happy with the result: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/candles-of-doom

Thanks for reading.  Please try our game and leave us some much waited feedback too!