FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD25 → Conquer all the castles!!

Conquer all the castles!!

By ithildin

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness371
Theme2403.48
Humor3562.56
Audio4502.16
Fun5582.43
Mood5642.40
Graphics5662.39
Overall5692.63
Innovation6372.26

Comments

thomastc 2012-12-17 08:53

Controls are pretty smooth. It's a bit too easy and too much of a clickfest. Why would I ever *not* want to spawn minions? I love the intro screen, by the way :)

jahlgren 2012-12-17 09:56

It is frustrating how the character controls. It gets stuck all the dam time. I think it would also be better if you could hold the mouse button instead of repeatedly spam clicking

mrpiglet 2012-12-17 10:03

Title screen made me laugh out loud :D

Game was okay, but kind of tedious if I'm honest.

smaxx 2012-12-17 13:09

The title screen definitely adds to the humor. But yeah, it's a clickfest and my poor mouse doesn't approve. Also, the collision detection is a bit off (sometimes not being able to move into free tiles).

zenmumbler 2012-12-17 13:24

Click-o-mania indeed. 3 levels is just about right. Minions work well. Not sure if you can lose other than getting stuck. Pretty good.

lyonsbanner 2012-12-17 13:29

I usually play with azerty keyboard and direction arrows. Only play with qwerty keyboard is pretty difficult for me.

However, the game is simple and complies with the theme.

waveon 2012-12-17 13:31

It's annoying how easy it is to get stuck, but you knew that already. It seems that it's because the space between two objects are about as big as your character (including white space)? This often seems to be the issue since you would require to go through the space almost pixel perfect.

The minions don't seem to have a great AI too, they sometimes just wander in a random direction and thus make you fight the guard and castle alone. This is noticeable in level 3. It would be nice if they tried to stay close to you, move in the direction of the caste or something in that direction.

Despite my criticism, it's still a nice game that fits the theme well. I would play it more if not for the few levels.

cthu 2012-12-17 15:57

Yay Starling!

zener 2012-12-17 16:41

Very nice little strategy/action game. I love the main character and the minions, they are well drawn and fit the theme perfectly.

One clear improvement is to enhance the minions AI or to add the option to have some control over them.

The sounds of the game are very funny and it has the best title screen ever :)

loren 2012-12-17 20:19

Cute, I like the game's size, it's great!

suese 2012-12-18 14:09

It seems I didn't have to move anywhere to win. Just clicked on the castle a bunch of times and viola.

emveyh 2012-12-18 20:53

Click it! :D cool idea but the controls ruin it a bit. The minions also seem a bit pointless since i can destroy everything by myself (and even faster then the minions can)

joekinley 2012-12-18 20:55

Nice little game. Yeah the collision problems in level 3 were a bit PITA but I still won.
Was it even possible to die here? I didn't see any health bar and was pretty easy able to kill that king.
I liked the graphics and it was fun while it lasted. Good work.

berkano 2012-12-18 20:55

Short and sweet, I enjoyed it!

moomoo112 2012-12-18 20:55

short, and .. odd

dalbinblue 2012-12-18 20:55

The controls are difficult work with; I kinda needed three hands. Might have been better to make the spawn minions as right click so that only one hand needed to be on the keyboard. Other than that it was easy as the hero always seemed to get stuck.

meep 2012-12-18 21:49

I think grid movement would have helped the movement feel a lot. Perhaps some attacking/fireball animation of sorts when clicking something might look better as opposed to a little icon/sound. The idea is good though, and it fits the theme well. Good work! :)

ithildin 2012-12-19 09:53

Thank you all for the feedback, it is much appreciated and the criticism is really useful, I've learned some lessons for the next LD :D

Some (but not all, of course) of the most important problems you've mentioned can be blamed on time.

For example, the collision issues (this will haunt me for weeks). And, to be honest, I didn't think of changing the level layouts for some more sensible ones, to at least help mitigate the problems with units getting stuck.

Time's also the reason why the AI leaves a bit to be desired. I started with a simplistic approach to have something more or less functional that could be replaced easily later with pathfinding, more complex behaviours and so on, but in the end it made it to the released game.

And the low final difficulty some of you are complaining about is a combined result of the poor AI and the lack of balance time (plus not giving the player attack a cooldown to avoid clickfests).

And I agree that the control scheme can be improved. Maybe mapping attacks to a key, or spawning minions to a different mouse button could have helped. (And, thinking of different keyboard configurations, using arrows rather than WASD if there are no customizable controls).

tomk32 2012-12-19 10:17

Attacking should be happening by running into the opponent, but other than that, a nice, quite literally small game. Conquer all the scores!

gornova 2012-12-23 10:20

Uou already know about collision problems, so I don't blame you for this :D

gagapete 2012-12-23 11:46

The controls are kinda buggy, I get stuck every now and then. And there are to less tasks to accomplish. The knights are to weak. But it makes fun for a few minutes. And that is all that matters for a game. :)

sfx 2012-12-23 15:02

I kept getting stuck, which was a bit frustrating.

arhpositive 2012-12-23 17:36

A good effort. Minus points are, it lacks any kind of difficulty, and the gui to show the hp and level was kinda difficult to see. Other than these, it's a decent game overall. :)

permanente1600 2012-12-23 21:43

The character seems to get stuck sometimes. I love the idea of spawning your own minions to do the attacking for you though.

mangosarecool 2012-12-23 23:46

pretty funny
it is a little bit glitchy but what can you expect
like the minions

mangosarecool 2012-12-23 23:46

the game was a little short too

cabral 2012-12-26 20:46

I get the idea, but it could be better. The controls aren't very good, because it's awkward to use WASD, J and the mouse all at once, there's no reason not to bind Spawning to a closer key. I don't get why you decided to use the mouse, either. I'm afraid there isn't much gameplay at all, and it's simply not fun. On top of that, there's the issues like the character getting stuck and clicking enemies at a distance.

Not a bad idea, but keep those things in mind next time =)

azurenimbus 2013-01-05 06:23

I like it. I'd just suggest working on level design and improving collision detection. : )