First of all, I’d like to thank both my teammates on this jam : Lukasz, the “art guy” did wonderful work even though he was busy during the weekend, and Aubry supported me from start to finish with playtest, research, documentation, all the little things that allowed the game to feel more “polished”. The synergy was amazing, this is teamwork at its best; love you guys!
The idea
This Ludum Dare was kind of different : after a few success (mostly LD 28 :ย Rogue Rush and Mini LD 49 : Gaming Cockroach ) we started to be a bit overconfident, and this resulted in a massive downfall for LD 29 : we wanted our game to be smart, witty, good looking, fun, full of content… No need to say that we would need much more than 72 hours to do that and of course, we failed miserably at every single one of those goals. So LD30 was more about actually producing something. When the theme was announced, I quickly started looking for a game design; it usually takes me about 3 hours to define the concept of my game for a jam, but this one took only one :

Programmer art!
Idea 1 was about switching from one world to another one while your actions remained (Somehow like the cute and fun Heart Star); the second was about moving twice the same character in two slightly different levels ( Parallel Worlds does a very good job at it). Still looking for obviously “connected worlds”, Heaven and Hell came to mind, I sketched the idea not to forget it and *boom*, the concept spawned with it.
Getting started
I was not so sure about the whole tablet oriented and two player thingy : on the one hand, it was original and would change from what you can usually find on a game jam; on the other hand obviously not everybody would be able to play it and that is sad. That said, both Aubry and Lukasz were really interested, so we gave it a go.

Yup, french flag place holder
We quickly choose 8*8 for unit size, so Lukasz would have enough time, and I started prototyping. Because of some lack of skill from my part, some ideas got scrapped at this point : the smarter path-finding system for units was gone and with it some of the spells that depended on it. Overall, everything went smoothly untill we got the first playable prototype by the end of day 2. We had some fun with it and from that point on, we considered the game as shippable. And there came something that we learned in previous game jams : polishing.
Polishing
Do you know what they told you when you ask “what is your secret for a good game?” to a professional indie developer? Playtest. Playtest it as soon as possible, playtest it as much as possible, playtest it again and, when it’s over, do some playtest. This is obviously harder to do in 72h, you normally don’t have time for that and that’s why we got Aubry on the team : it was his first jam, he has no specialty (he can do a bit of code, a bit of GD, but nothing specific) but he gave his all on finding bugs, playing the game alone over and over, giving me invaluable feedback so I could concentrate on fixing stuff rather than looking for it. During this time Lukasz went berserk : adding animation everywhere, those wonderful attack spells, emotions for God and the Devil…ย Sadly, that is also where the second batch of cut down happened : some units and spells got scrapped, because we wouldn’t have time to polish them as much as the rest, and it would give an unbalanced feeling to the rest of the game. So we used the good old proverb: less is more.

Playtesting with my mom :3
I finished the game 6 hours before the end of the third day… 6 hours is both a lot and not that much to add something to the game, but I had in mind some of the stuff I learned from previous game jams, and I quote myself here : Don’t suppose everybody thinks like you do. You need to teach players how to play, even if it’s obvious to you. So I started the tutorial. The bitmap font doesn’t look right, my English is broken and it could be a lot clearer, but overall every people who watched it understood the game, and that was the objective.
Final words
Of course, with more time, more knowledge or better skills, we could have done a better game, but this is our current best and we are proud of it. We hope you’ll enjoy it, please give it a chance and rate it!
Project Page

War it is then!