The organs tree, post time-of-death recap (= postmortem)

This was my first LDJam, not my first gamejam, and as usual, I lacked an artist 😅

But I made a "roguelite organ fest where you grow trees from your fallen enemies’ organs, then harvest the result for more money, more power, more… blood?", intended for the Compo but missed the saturday, so ended up doing 48h but finishing for the Jam.

Play it here!

How it went

I personally wasn't too excited at first when seeing the theme, so it took me a while to try to find something that was out of the classic "farming theme". I managed to find something, but unfortunately couldn't start jamming before the end of saturday, so basically lost a day. But after that I quickly settled for this "grow meat trees from enemies organs, then harvest them for money" loop.

All in all I was a bit too ambitious for the time and the one-man-team I had, so the roguelite form wasn't the best fit. That creates a situation where you have a lot of content to test to look out for bugs, which is not ideal with such a short time constraint (especially when you're just by yourself working on it), so I highly recommend people to reconsider that in the future if they want to so something like that for a jam. But personally, in the end, I still managed to get in the play-die-upgrade-restart loop, so pretty happy about that!
I probably took way too much care into making expandable systems, in order to be able to have a variety of bodies/organs setups, dynamic upgrades system, expandable enemies spawning mechanics... Which is neat if I want to expand the game into a v0.2! (will I? Eh, maybe)

But I lost some time there, which could have allowed me to put in a tutorial, or make the organ fertilizing process a bit clearer, my bad! I initially wanted to have more variety in enemies, but only managed to squeeze in 3 (due to lack of art mainly), and obviously an end-goal, like a big bad boss that you need to slowly chip at to win. That was also an unfortunate casualty.

At least I managed to squeeze in a short tutorial in the game page, to try to make it more understandable ahem

I decided quickly to go super simple on the visuals though, so simple billboarded sprites with spritesheet animations made things super easy. And quite nice to look at too. With a bit of time to add variety, more spritesheets animations for decor items, and some post-process, this could look really nice :) Also having an artist on hand would have allowed me to do a more light-hearted theme (like mutated vegetable-monsters attacking you and you have to dig inside their corpses to get the seeds to grow your own crops 😁) but at is it now, what I could do was dictated by what I could find online as spritesheets that fit together. Not the best situation to be in, get an artist friend, friends! 😄

Obviously being short on time and hands, I couldn't add any audio, and didn't have time to add proper menus, transitions, animations, juice, pizzazz, particles, all that...! The lack of audio in particular is bumming me out, but well 😅

All in all fun, I hope you guys all had fun with your jam!