Ludum Dare #58compo

Patent Troll

by arkicade

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.37

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.11

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.88

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.31

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★4.06

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.68

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.50

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.77

ABOUT:

You are a patent troll: someone who tries to collect patents in order to sue others for patent infringement. The goal? Not only do you get money but you can claim other patents in the process! Mr Patent Troll (real name) specializes in getting patents for abstract artwork (that resembles pixel art). Sue artists! Go to court! And try to prove (in court) that an original artwork is ACTUALLY stealing from your patent by comparing pixels to pixels.

CONTROLS:
- Mouse for clicking buttons
- WASD or Arrow keys to navigate painting
- SPACE/ENTER to select pixel
- SPACE/ENTER to advance dialogue
- ESC to quit
- R to restart
- M to toggle audio

TOOLS:
- Godot 4.5
- Aseprite (for visuals)
- Garageband (for music)
- JSFXR (for sound effects)

Tags: #2d, #cute, #detective, #pixel art, #short, #singleplayer

Genres: adventure, interactive fiction

Tools: Aseprite, Godot, sfxr

Comments24

Sthor7265 Oct 2025, 22:29

Felt super polished!

debugman186 Oct 2025, 03:44

Creative and they get a lot of mileage out of their assets. Extra cool that they have embedded the game.

Quail Weaver6 Oct 2025, 03:53

The amount of content you managed to fit into this is really impressive! And I LOVE the art so much!!

Unfortunately I was really confused the whole time about how the painting-pixel-matching thing was working :slight_frown:

Quail Weaver6 Oct 2025, 03:57

I tried some more and eventually figured out that you're kinda just sposed to Spam similar pixels :sweat_smile: my bad lol, i had just been going rly slow so nothing was happening

arkicadeauthor6 Oct 2025, 06:58

@quail-weaver Glad you managed to get there in the end! For comparing pixels you have to be very fast but also make sure the pixels are similar (and not totally different) in order to gain points (or gain favour with the judge) rather than lose points :)

kykypy3o86 Oct 2025, 07:03

It's a cool idea, I really liked the visuals, and the execution is also top-notch. It would be great to develop this idea into a full game!

LDJam user 3736236 Oct 2025, 07:04

Incredible critique of the concept of intellectual property! Beautiful game!

thejackimonster6 Oct 2025, 15:58

Great idea! Hopefully there's no company using one letter as logo to play "Mr Patent Troll" in reality though... especially buying patents of common game mechanics. That would be annoying, haha. ^^'

mdotedot6 Oct 2025, 18:34

That is something different. I am more of a mechanic kind of gamer and I don't like text so much but I liked the idea of the pixel mechanic! Well done!

Kenneth Gibson7 Oct 2025, 18:23

pretty interesting mechanic to compare pixels, but didn't understood what to do at first, art is top notch, liked it as much as music

Ueighti7 Oct 2025, 20:24

Nice cool idea! Loved the character design and the responsible animation!

6Knowledge8 Oct 2025, 06:53

Like others have mentioned, I also couldn't really understand how the matching worked and just spammed closest looking ones and (I think) I won? Not quite sure since the game didn't seem to tell what happened and moved to the next case. Art and atmosphere are top notch but could use some updating. Also audio was quite loud.

Alex Mulkerrin8 Oct 2025, 15:40

This is a great entry. I found the whole thing to be polished and well presented. The main gameplay mechanic is really original and I enjoyed the mad dash to claim similar pixels. Congratulations on managing to do all this within the 48hrs, you must've had a very good scope of what to include. Only other thing to say is that spamming down on every tile you could seemed to result in winning too easily. Otherwise congrats :D

arkicadeauthor8 Oct 2025, 17:35

Thank you all so much for the feedback!
Glad to hear people like the polish, art and idea. Will take note of the fact that the tutorial can be a bit clearer as it should emphasize that it's about quickly getting a lot of similar pixels in both paintings. Originally, you only chose 4-5 pixels, but the paintings generated resulted in the scoring being too inconsistent.
I also wanted the game to lean on the easier side since it's a game jam :)

adjo8 Oct 2025, 19:49

cool idea. it took me until the second playthrough to realise how to match the pixels up, but fun game!

LDJam user 3841919 Oct 2025, 05:00

Nice take on the theme. As others have mentioned, spamming the pixels resulted in a easy win. But other than that it's a very well polished entry. Everything, from the graphics to the music to the writing, is absolutely well made. Very impressive!

LDJam user 3720129 Oct 2025, 09:11

When I first saw the thumbnail I thought this is homage to one of Daniel Mullins Games :D

Speaking of feedback and omitting what others said, I think you could really do users a favor and randomize your sounds a little bit with either pitch or different sfx assets (I'm talking about introduction text sfx in particular). Repetitive sounds make you wanna mute the game
Otherwise good job!

Ira Baciu9 Oct 2025, 09:57

OH MY GOD!!!! your game looks so cute ^^ and your itch.io site as well

Eugenik9 Oct 2025, 10:15

I really like the game art, is stunning!.

Linky4399 Oct 2025, 10:22

Very creative take on the theme! I was a bit confused on my first painting as I tried to select some very close pixels, and then realized something similar was enough to crush the artist's case.
Ended up with 5 painting, not much but Mr. Patent Troll is probably happy because he now has more in his collection!

Lovely art and funny dialog, it is a very surprising and very good game. Congrats!

Ciphereo9 Oct 2025, 11:58

The art is wonderful!! The music is highly in line with the theme! Very impressive, truly remarkable!

Re-Markable9 Oct 2025, 12:56

Really cool unique mechanic! Took a bit to figure out what I was supposed to do, but it sets a nice quick pace once you get the hang of it. Was a bit easy to just spam similar pixels though, I think it could be a bit more challenging, but I think if you expanded on unique ways of pointing out the similarities of the paintings, this would work super well as a full release!

tanis19 Oct 2025, 11:29

It took me a bit to understand how my pixels would actually match those of the artist but then I got it. It's super cool that there is a story behind the game and the art is so cute!
The music also matches the game atmosphere very well. Overall it's a solid game and I would say that it is also quite polished. Grats!

Franciscorp20 Oct 2025, 13:02

The graphics are quite cool and unique. The game is somewhat hard to understand, but an interesting concept. Congratulations :)