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 one other person 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.
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 was a really interesting prompt. 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.
From there I started developing different ideas related to sleep. For this particular game jam, a lot of the core mechanics stem very naturally from the theme.
Sheep help you fall asleep so they become allies. Sheep need guidance so the player character becomes a shepherd. The shepherd needs to guide the flock so all of his abilities become very utility focused and help the sheep deal more damage by applying status effects.
Reception praised the innovation of the systems and the graphics especially the sheep. We placed around the top 30% out of 3866 entries.