Ludum Dare 48: Sleep Deprived
Check out the game here: https://idaedalusi.itch.io/sleep-deprived (Warning, the WebGL build is buggier than the Windows Version)
Sleep Deprived is a turn-based tactic rpg game that was created by me and another teammate for the Ludum Dare 48 game jam. Where the goal of the game is to get to the left end of the map without dying to the Sleep Paralysis Demons.
On the team I was the sole designer, artist, and UI/UX artist, while my partner for this project did most of the system programming. Due to the time constraints this made it very difficult to iterate multiple times.
Luckily ahead of time we had decided that we wanted to try to create a turn-based strategy game, so the real difficulty was to find a design that would match the prompt while still working as a turn-based game.
The theme of the game jam was “Deeper and Deeper” which I thought was an interesting prompt to make work with a turn-based game. There’s the immediate thought which was to create a mining game or a caving game, however we didn’t want to accidentally create a really common theme.
So our solution was to brainstorm as many different “meanings” of Deeper and Deeper as we could and then start to build a design from there.
One of the ideas that I had was the idea of falling deeper and deeper to sleep. Which we really liked because it felt relatively unique and worked well with a turn-based game.
Once we had a theme, I designed a gameplay loop that worked well with the theme. The player is a shepherd that has control of a flock of sheep. When an enemy sleep paralysis demon dies, they become a part of the flock.
In order to make having more sheep valuable, the player can only deal real damage through the use of both the shepherd and the sheep. The shepherd can place stacks on the enemy. When the the sheep deal damage, the damage is multiplied by the number of stacks on that enemy.
Reception praised the innovation of the systems, use of theme, and the graphics. Especially the sheep. We placed around the top 30% out of 3866 entries.