FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD32 → DictionBlade

DictionBlade

By azure_kyte

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness366
Mood3373.19
Theme3723.56
Innovation4933.18
Audio4932.81
Humor5132.77
Graphics5293.09
Overall5483.18
Fun7792.79

Comments

yamzho 2015-04-19 17:38

Very cool, love the art. The theme is matched. Music is a bit repetitive though.

2015-04-19 20:12

well played. I made 3 levels

domus-umbrae 2015-04-19 20:14

could use a lot more in the directions department

stoarch 2015-04-19 20:14

Art is good, but can not find how to fight

vini60 2015-04-20 05:03

I liked the doodle effect, not much to do but good one. The music is very relaxing.

barret907k 2015-04-20 05:12

Controls are weird. Typing mechanic but than mouse attacking makes this game just annoying.

azure_kyte 2015-04-20 05:14

@barret907k, In retrospect I should probably have allowed directional attacks with the arrow keys. You know what they say about hindsight, though!

mrdave 2015-04-20 11:58

I liked the typing aspect to the game as it brought in a skill element to fighting, once you became practised at entering in the input fast you could become very adept at fighting swiftly. Even more than that I liked the fact that there were many words you could type in that it recognised, however I found that I would just use the shortest word I could and use that one over and over again.

azure_kyte 2015-04-20 13:00

Yeah, that was something I was considering trying to stop through preventing the usage of words consecutively. It's definitely something I would discourage if I continue working on it, though.

jupiter_hadley 2015-04-20 17:24

Enjoyable game, though I do wish it was easier to see enemies. I included it in part 1 of my Ludum Dare 32 compilation video series, if you would like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/-ZkAqIe6FiQ

xgor 2015-04-20 21:12

Hey Azure, long time no see.
Interesting game you got there. The idea to type in different words depending on the enemies is very neat and the randomized levels is a nice touch.

I noticed that some mean and nice works was seen as weird but I guess it's pretty hard to figure out as many different polite and mean words in 48 hours as possible :P

domus-umbrae 2015-04-20 21:12

Rather confusing at first, but still a well made and interesting game.

fanttum 2015-04-21 00:29

Hmmm, took me a sec to figure it all out, but it is an interesting idea. I really liked the look of the backgrounds. nice job.

jushii 2015-04-21 11:10

I love the animation on the background and the tiles, even with the simple graphics the game gives off a really nice mood! Combined with the lovely music! :) What I would see working better concerning the mechanics, would be replacing the combat/enemies with different puzzle mechanics! Like for example there could be colorless tiles which you have to paint. etcetc. :D Good job!

agilejoshua 2015-04-21 15:38

Tried to play couldn't just got a javascript popup with a bunch of azure related error messages for the html5 version.

hotboxgames 2015-04-21 15:43

Cool Idea, I like how the levels seemed random, would be cool to see this fleshed out into something more!

dyfer 2015-04-21 15:44

visualy good, didn't figure how to fight

nppro93 2015-04-21 15:47

Having to move my hand between the mouse and keyboard was annoying, but the typing mechanic is pretty cool; it would be nice to see it expanded to more than three types of words and open up a lot of cool gameplay in the future!

azure_kyte 2015-04-21 15:50

@agilejoshua, if you read this, can you let me know which browser you were using? I haven't been able to repro this with Firefox or Chrome.

atomicvikings 2015-04-21 16:11

Really nice game. Sound is sometimes a bit annoying. :-) Great work. :-)

latency 2015-04-21 16:49

I like what you did with the art, although it was a bit small so my colorblind eyes failed to tell the difference between some enemies, it was fun though gj

gafblizzard 2015-04-22 08:41

Restarting all the way from the beginning is really soul-crushing (my game has the same problem but is much shorter at least :P).

The idea is kind of neat, but ultimately I'd rather just press a button to use the different pen types instead of type words. The art has a nice style, but the blue sky cloud flashes are a little seizure-inducing.

I didn't finish because I died just after the black tornado and restarted all the way to the first level. ;(

armanky 2015-04-22 20:19

The idea's definitely unique, but in practice I found it was pretty distracting to stop and type in a word every five seconds. It was also an odd choice to feature an idea that so heavily involves the keyboard, yet ask the player to attack with the mouse button. To use the word system, the player has to move their right hand back and forth between mouse and keyboard.

On top of that, there's not really much incentive to actually USE the system. I found the mouse-based attacking to actually be very satisfying to use and wound up using to knock enemies away. That was actually more fun than stopping to type in a word and your mouse and keyboard control scheme feels very nice on its own. It's also not particularly hard to just run past enemies and bolt towards the end of the level.

I do have to give you major props for NOT using W/Up as your jump button and binding it to a more convenient and separate button instead. That's quickly becoming one of my biggest pet peeves.

Overall, the idea is pretty cool, but in practice it doesn't really work. Your platformer mechanics otherwise feel pretty good and the sketchy paper style is very charming.

azure_kyte 2015-04-23 03:36

Thanks for the feedback Armanky!

Other players have also voiced concerns over the mouse combat system, and in hindsight, I 100% agree. I'll be changing the system to allow the player to attack using the arrow keys on the keyboard after the Dare is over. That will heavily reduce the arm exercises while still retaining the game's word mechanic.

jakob37 2015-04-25 08:23

Nice concept! Liked the look of it, and the mechanics. Was quite easy to exploit the nice/neutral/mean system, through picking a single word for each category (for example writing 'a' for green all the time), don't know if it is easy to avoid this in a non game-breaking way though. Well done, would be interesting to see future development of this :)

taro 2015-04-28 03:29

I thought the general controls, abilities, and attacks were really good, but the word-typing was gimmicky, in the way, and unnecessary. I can see a good emerging from this, but it's made cumbersome just for a sake of novelty.

f7f5 2015-04-29 20:48

I love the art and the music and sfx. The mechanics are original, but after the initial novelty, it's not that much fun, unfortunately. The typing part end up being goig to the keyboard to type 1 of 3 words, and the platforming doesn't add much. Still an excellent effort.