Arden's Artisan Artefacts
Sure, sacrifices must be made… but who has the time to actually make them?
You’re the new owner of “Arden’s Artisan Artefacts”, which offers a convenient solution: handmade, sustainable sacrifice sculptures for all occasions! Today’s modern cultists don’t need to produce offerings themselves – they can stop by at Arden’s Workshop and pick up a built-to-order sculpture exactly according to their wishes!
This was the third time that I took part in the Ludum Dare game jam (where you build a videogame in 72 hours, fitting a given theme). This time, the theme was “Sacrifices must be made”.
I built Arden’s Artisan Artefacts together with blinry, Lena, larkinia and Pecca.
In our game, you build sacrificial sculptures for a variety of customers, out of things ranging from everyday (plungers, lightbulbs, …) to rather weird items (skulls, tentacles, …). Each of the customers has specific wishes - don’t make the sculpture too heavy, for example. Or make it look like a fish.
You can download the game from the Ludum Dare website.
Development
Just like the times before, this game was coded in Lua with our favorite 2D game engine LÖVE.
And just like the times before, we worked together in one of our team members’ living room, hyper-focusing on the game jam and ignoring almost everything else (but don’t worry, we didn’t forget to eat and sleep). We had a lot of fun coming up with strange ideas and laughing about all the silly bugs we produced while trying to make everything work like we wanted.
We used a large magnetic whiteboard with little pieces of paper as our shared to-do list, so we wouldn’t lose track of all the ideas and tasks. And we tried to do a lot of pair programming this time, which worked really well and helped us better understand each other’s parts of the code (and also, it was fun).
Feedback
On the LDJAM website, we encouraged players to post screenshots of their sculptures in the comments, and we got to see some pretty cool art!
From the comments:
The game manages to be outright hilarious with very minimal dialogue. -themadprogramer
This is great! It’s so different from everything else and really well executed. Sounds and visuals are all very charming. -salierus
This was soooo much fun! Definitly the game I played the most in this jam. When I realized items could be picked from the box, my my, I did spent some time on your game, thank you for that, and well done! -Garymarance
Comments?
Toot to @flauschzelle@chaos.social or e-mail me at mail@metakiki.net.
Also, if you enjoyed this, you might want to buy me a (metaphorical) coffee or donate via PayPal to show your support :)