The idea

A game jam is a competition in which independent video game developers get together and agree to make a game within a given timespan then judge each other’s work. Last month I decided I’d try my hand at the big one, the Ludum Dare. It was only my second time joining a jam and being that it was only 3 days long it would truly put my programming skills to the test.

The theme was “summoning” so developers needed to incorporate that into their games. Obviously since I’m still a bit green to developing games in Godot I decided to make a Vampire Survivors clone. I had the idea to create a vampire-survivors-type game where instead of having weapons to defend yourself you had an army that defended you.

Eventually I came up with “The Forgotten” a simple game of surviving as long as you can by finding gravestones to summon skeletons at.

Shortly after the jam ended I started playing a game in a similar vein called Brotato and later found it was developed in Godot. This inspired me to try and replicate its gameplay loop and some of its systems but I knew I needed to add my own twist.

During the development of the Ludum Dare entry I had thought it would be more fun if the player had more control over their skeletal minions’ behavior. Thus I started work on Nekromanteia, a Survivors style rogue-like with a little RTS style movement thrown in. Ultimately I think it would be most fun if it felt like a tower-defense game in which the towers are mobile and the base to defend is the player character who is also mobile.