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Goal and Explanation

In the 55th Ludum Dare game jam, we returned to our roots. Only three people - myself, Bobbie and Rabbit - participated this time around.

The theme was summoning. Like with our previous entry Liver Die, we wanted to hatch a unique and creative take on the theme that set us apart from the other teams participating.

This time around, our minds resorted to dropshipping - the practice of selling items without keeping stock. And so, our game idea was hatched: As a wizard in need to make rent, you summon portals to different dimensions, stealing items to dropship them on a magical online supply store.

Problems and Growing Pains

To be honest, this was the most chill game jam project I've participated in. Lunaculture had us struggling to scope out a game for three developers, Liver Die had us learning to split work amongst a large group of people, and Cache Me If You Can had us struggling to complete a game with less people than we had envisioned. This time around, things went by largely without a hitch. We had our game idea within the first two hours, finished the game loop with half the time to spare, and spent the last half of the game jam polishing and refining the experience we already had. No feature creep, no scope creep, just an extremely polished (if basic) game loop.

To be fair, there were several game jam hacks and poorly designed code under the hood, but this is expected of a game jam. Quick, dirty coding hacks enabled us to finish our game and polish with more time than we've ever had.

The only panic moment to mention was at the very end; with one hour to submit our game after the deadline, we decided to enable link-time optimization (LTO) in our WebGL build. Little did we know, this ballooned compile times from a few minutes to... about 43 minutes. Suffice to say, we weren't sure we'd be able to submit in time, but we're very thankful that the build finished in time to submit.

Lessons Learned

Sold By Wizards has got to be the most polished game jam entry I've ever helped create.

Not only is the gameplay solid and refined, we also had the time to play with advanced graphical techniques, from trying out baked lighting on dynamically loaded maps to a portal effect that obscured the wizard tower on the other side.

My team is currently considering pursuing Sold By Wizards as a commercial project, and looking into what ideas we might want to incorporate into a fully fledged game. It will certainly be a large commmitment, but with how solid the game is as a Ludum Dare entry, I think it's the closest we've ever gotten to a commercially ready product.

Let's collaborate.

Feel free to reach out to ask questions, connect, or if you want to work with me.