Wolfbit Postmortem

Wolfbit was a game done by me and two other friends for the Ludum Dare 35 and the LowRez Jam 2016, where I was responsible for the art, oddly enough. It was a different experience for me, as I never had done any pixel art before in my life and I had to do it in three days in a sort of decent way. You can play the game here

The theme of the jam was “Shapeshift”. Before starting, me and my friends agreed to create a simple game that didn’t made us stay up late and loose our minds with the time pressure. So, to do that, we decided to participate in the LowRez Jam too, that made us limit our resolution to 64px. That was a great way to limit the art (and make it a little bit easier) and limit what we could accomplish in such a small resolution.

So, we decided to play with the character shapeshifting as well as the controls on the keyboard. We came up with the context of an werewolf running away from angry villagers, and made the WASD keys change up to any key on the keyboard. That created an urgency effect that fitted pretty well the context of the game.

During the three days of the jam, we took it pretty easy. We got a lot of sleep and worked just enough to get the job done, so much so that the game was only playable in the final hours of the jam.

The art itself was very fun to create. I followed some tutorials and got some references and I think I got a good result for a first timer. The wolf phase was difficult to animate and draw, not very happy with it. I even tried several times to recreate it after the jam, but with no success. The environment was something I had no idea how to do and, as you can see, it’s just some random brushes of black to create the ground tile. Anyway, it was a great experience for me and since then I started to draw a lot more pixel art stuff. Awesome!

Jam ended and it was time for people to play the game. We got quite a lot of feedback from our friends and the ludum dare site. We took the time to play a lot of other people’s games and comment on them and that led to people coming to play our game. That’s something pretty awesome about Ludum Dare that I never get on any other jam! Since it was my first one, I was kind of amazed with the feedback.

In the end, people enjoyed the game more than we expected. The download/view ratio was 35%, and I think that’s good considering that people often don’t want to have to download and install things. Our friends gathered around to beat each other’s highscore before classes and it was great! We then decided then to put in an online scoreboard for people to compete with each other and that made the game even more awesome.

Even tho the art was kind of half baked and I didn’t really knew what I was doing, I was happy with the game. People enjoyed the black and white art style and the music was very fitting, with a touch of castlevania nostalgy if I may say so.