This spring Ludum Dare 55 happened. The theme was "Summoning" and I participated Compo as usual. The final game is narrative minimalistic novel with loops called HTON.
I knew that summoning diabolic things will be major usage of theme but decided to make a twist that player plays as ancient entity that is waking up from eternal dream to fulfil someone wishes. Originally I wanted to make novel/roguelike but in the end the game become too linear.
The title is based derivative of Russian's 'хтонь' that means much more then just evil spirit but emotional depressed feeling too. Also sounds like lovecraftian name that is suits for the game's need where you play as an ancient god. Not just god but dark entity that summoned by weak people. They offer sacrifices to you, one by one, and you can accept or not.
Summoning my shit#ludumdare #indiedev pic.twitter.com/8TH6EAXkJE
— Denis Kazantsev 🌳 (@JokerDen) April 14, 2024
Gameplay is simplistic too. Originally was built around idea of unusual text-based roguelike but finished just simple dialogue tree of few branching. One answer always leads to the beginning, the void. And other answer moves you further on a global purpose to eliminate eveything.
Game contains few violent scenes and whole theme is dark. It was just my associations to the LD theme and also crossed with some back-time near depression condition. The game didn't ended well by player's choices, not only because of topic but also poor usability and primitive gameplay. Unfortunately my idea of unwrapping mystery is not very readable but I like that still game have kind of emotion inside.
Visuals are built around the idea to imitate Playdate game console. It was like a personal challenge to design the game within poor boundaries. The console screen resolution is just 400x240 pixels and each pixel could be just black or white.
