Work / Quarantine project
Escape Ludo
A covid quarantine project: a multiplayer Ludo game. I picked it up to learn sprite design, character formation, and game UI.
- Role
- Quarantine project, designed and drawn by me
- Platform
- Mobile, multiplayer
- Explorations
- Sprite design, character formation, level screens, inventory UI
- Year
- 2022
No client, no brief. Just a game I wanted to exist and characters that needed to move. Everything here is learning in public.
01Sprite design and character formation
Sprites first, screens later. The sheets below are formation work: getting the characters to read at small sizes before anything else got drawn.
The clip is a movement test from the working file. Rough, and that is the point. You can see the walk logic before polish hides it.
02Levels and inventory in the same language
Once the sprites read well, the screens followed: level and inventory UI drawn to match the characters.
Hobby work has one advantage over client work. Nobody tells you when it is done, so you keep going until it looks right.
03What Flappy Bird taught me
While drawing these sprites I kept returning to Dong Nguyen. He built Flappy Bird in two or three days in Hanoi and released it through .GEARS in May 2013. A year later it passed 50 million downloads and made about $50,000 a day.
Then he killed it at the peak. The game was meant for a few relaxed minutes. It became an addictive product, so he took it down. He refused to sell it and went back to making games.
That is the standard I held these sprites to. One mechanic, readable at any size, difficult on purpose. A quarantine project earns nothing, so it has to earn its place another way: every pixel deliberate.