Monster Garden is my entry for the LOWREZJAM 2023, and the theme I picked was Catch ’em All.

Intro

I was very much looking forward to this jam, not just because of the 64x64 resolution restriction, but also because this would be my first jam with more than a weekend to make the game.

Unfortunately when the jam started I was on vacation and had no proper gamedev setup with me, so I could only brainstorm for the first couple of days. During this time, maybe due to the high number of possible themes, I could not actually find much inspiration – my ideas kept going in every direction and not settling anywhere.

Gameplay

After a couple of days I was starting to have more concrete ideas : I decided to go with the Catch ’em All theme and make a Pokemon-like game, maybe with a very simple affinity/type system, either geometry-based (circle > square > triangle > circle) or cards suits-based (diamond > spade > heart > clover > diamond).

Still trying to think of a gameplay twist that would set me apart from the generic Pokemon formula, I got to work implementing the turn-based combat system.

The answer came from my favorite game : Golden Sun. I decided to ditch the affinity system and make the monsters more like the djinns from Golden Sun (my favorite game). If you’re not familiar with it, in that game each djinn allows you to make a special attack, and after using a sufficient number of djinns you could unleash devastating summons.

I did not end up having the time to implement the summonning system, but I did implement 6 different effects for my monsters : lower defense, lower attack, poison, stun, life-steal and regular damage.

For the monster recruitment, I figured that keeping it simple would be best, and gave the choice to the player after defeating a monster.

The gameplay loop ended up being : look for a monster, beat the monster, recruit/kill the monster, repeat.

I would have like to include more exploration and puzzles, taking once again inspiration from Golden Sun, but I did not think it was feasible in this amount of time – at least not without compromising the quality of the rest of the game.

Graphics

As soon as I got back home, I picked a color palette on lospec, as I found in my previous game jams participations that having a color restriction makes games look much nicer and cohesive.

Overworld

At first I struggled to make a readable overworld character animation. I took inspiration from Pokemon’s main character from the first generation’s games, but found out that a 16x16 size for sprites simply takes too much space on the screen at this kind of resolution.

I ended up going for 8x8 pixels, and struggled quite a bit to make it readable. As it turns out, simply removing complete parts of the character’s body during its animation works perfectly well to simulate the idea of movement. See the grandpa’s “squats” animation for confirmation … I basically only erased his legs, and it actually works okay!

I then made a very simple 8x8 sprite for the overworld monsters, telling myself I would make a different one for each monster later. Spoiler alert : I never had the time to do it.

The tileset’s story is pretty much the same, I started with a very simple one and never went back to it.

Instead of making the tree and house multiple tiles and putting them in the tileset, I drew them as single sprites and manually placed them in the world.

Combat

I wanted to be able to reuse the same animation player for every basic action in combat, and for that I made each combattant’s sprite 24x24 pixels, with exactly 5 frames.

After the initial set up, adding a new combattant was as simple as drawing the 5 frames and plugging the resulting spritesheet into my animation node. That ended up being very useful when I realized I had forgotten to create the stun monster at the last minute, even after actually implementing the stun effect in combat …

For the background, I went with a very simple parallax for the clouds and ground, so that it did not feel completely empty, but not too cluttered either.

Sadly I realized after submitting the game that my implementation of the stun effect made it possible for the player to get completely stunlocked, which would feel unfair for them.

Music

I went through the music on opengameart.org, searching specifically for chiptunes music to fit the low resolution. Ended up finding these from Juhani Junkala, and adding them to the game instantly made it a lot better.

Takeaways

More themes is not always better

I think one of the things that made me have such a difficult time finding an idea at the start of the jam was the fact that there were so many possible themes. With other game jams, having a single theme allows me to focus better on finding what I want to do.

More time is better

Having two weeks allowed me to take my time to make the game just how I want it.

There still was not enough time for me to make a compelling story, but then again I don’t think that it is really necessary for a game jam.

Ailments system

On the more technical side, I think if I had to do it again I would implement the ailments system differently.

Instead of a fixed chance of applying the effect (40% for stun and 100% for everything else), each combattant have gauges for each ailment.

For example, getting hit with a stun effect would add to the stun gauge, and once it reaches a certain point then the target would be stunned. Every turn where stun damage is not applied, the gauge would go down a little, until resetting to zero.

The gauge would be reset to zero after the ailment is applied.

Recruitment system

That one I liked. Although these types of games usually make it so that there is luck or skill involved in catching a monster, it is something that can sometimes feel irritating to me.

Here, simply deciding whether you want to recruit the monster or kill it is best, I think.

If I had to change something, it would be that I would remove the auto-focusing of the “Recruit” button, because players sometimes accidentally recruit the monster when they want to kill it instead.

Conclusion

Despite the shaky start, I greatly enjoyed making the game. I won’t say that I will continue improving on it after the jam has ended, since every time I said that I ended up not doing it, but I could definitely see myself making a full game like this one day.

Thanks for reading and give the game a go if you haven’t! :)