FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD34 → Soulless Dungeon

Soulless Dungeon

By andybrown

View on Wayback Machine

CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness372
Audio2013.58
Fun4553.22
Overall4553.38
Graphics5603.36
Humor6722.35
Theme7263.43
Mood7382.94
Innovation8082.68

Comments

andybrown 2015-12-15 02:26

Play the Windows version if you can, the Web version seems to have a lot of issues. Trying to fix the build now.

schizoid2k 2015-12-15 04:17

Nicely done!

banana4life 2015-12-15 04:23

The web version worked OK for me. Good game

tragon288 2015-12-15 11:58

Nice little dungeon crawler!

Had no problems with the Web Version.

andybrown 2015-12-15 17:47

Thanks all! I had to recompile to WebGL 5 times to get a build that actually included all of the assets. The first couple times didn't include the music, and then it didn't include some of the art assets. It should be working- but it does feel laggier to me than native builds.

Emi 2015-12-15 18:40

This is awesome :V I love the sprites

miketsunami 2015-12-15 19:01

I really enjoyed this game! Nice dungeon crawler, good use of two button mechanic, and love the music!

modenv 2015-12-15 19:12

Nice core game play loop. Surprisingly fun to walk and open boxes. I like the stamina meeter, but feels a little to deadly to kill the enemies. got killed by the boss later.

Also, nice music.

jdoughty 2015-12-16 19:10

Wow, I never realized how much depth there can be in just letting a player actively block attacks! This one was alot of fun for me. Helps that I have a love for procedural generated games. Add up good sound, good sprites, and solid game play and this is one of my favorites this year!

andybrown 2015-12-17 00:55

@Emi Thanks! They pale in comparison to your art though!

@MikeTsunami Thanks a lot! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out even if I had to cut a lot of planned features.

@modenv Ah sorry, the gameplay was meant to be punishing, but it might have ended up a bit too punishing due to the lack of time to balance! Thanks though!

@jdoughty Thanks, that means a lot to us! The combat mechanics were heavily inspired by the Dark Souls series.

crazi456 2015-12-17 17:43

Very fun! Loved the sprite work and music. Great job

bradur 2015-12-17 17:47

It was quite a fun game, although I thought it was a little tedious to open the boxes since it was so slow. The slowness was OK for the combat since it was tactical but the boxes could have been opened instantly in my opinion. Great graphics, sound and musics. Well done!

denycetm 2015-12-17 17:52

Combat was very rough for me and the pathfinding for my character was a little wonky But the art looked awesome and the boss character was especially great.

andybrown 2015-12-17 21:00

@Crazi456 Thanks! I feel like I learned a lot on sprite animations during this!

@bradur I kind of agree, although I like smashing them open, but I dislike that it uses stamina- I didn't have an easy fix so I just made them give back some stamina when broken, which I should have just made them give back a full attack's worth of stamina.

@denycetm Ah, I had intentionally not created pathfinding for the player. Pathfinding would mess up dodging enemy attacks and could lead to many annoying cases, I felt it was better to just let the character hold down the move button to move in that direction. I did want to add pathfinding to monsters, but ran out of time, which was a shame since I already implemented my own A* algrorithm for the level creation. The combat design is a bit hardcore and meant to be challenging though, so it's understandable that it won't be enjoyable for a lot of people.

hotboxgames 2015-12-18 23:59

Solid entry! Font was a little hard to read.
But good effort for a small team!

justashadow 2015-12-19 00:05

Very solid game. It might be worth developing a full version in the future, but for a LD game, I think it will score very well. Good job!

justashadow 2015-12-19 00:21

I took the easy way out with procedural level generation. Your algorithm seems a lot more complex. Do you mind adding the source code? I'd love to learn from what you did! :D

andybrown 2015-12-19 21:41

@HotBoxGames thanks a lot! I agree the title screen font ended up being more illegible than intended, whoops!

@JustAShadow Thanks a lot! I'm planning on continuing development on the game- I've already got a lot planned now. Sorry, but I don't plan on releasing the source- it's a mess to figure out what I did anyways from that.. What I did was I created a two dimensional array to represent the tiles. I first filled in randomly sized rectangular "rooms" keeping track of each room and only filling them when they did not touch other rooms with a 2 tile padding (to ensure room for walkways). I then created doorways in 1-4 sides of each room, keeping track of where they started. Then for each doorway, I randomly selected another doorway that was not associated with the same room and implemented A* shortest path to find and trace a 3x3 width path connecting doorways together. From there, I just filled in walls around the edges of the paths that were created.

phocker 2015-12-20 05:26

adding this to my play again list - nice crawler - little hard figuring out how to attack enemies - nice game

gyfis 2015-12-20 10:09

Web version works well for me. It's nice little game, I like it. I think music is quite cool and the controls are great.

andybrown 2015-12-21 03:45

@sP0CkEr2 Thanks! I wish I had the time to put in an in-game tutorial.. I know a few people who didn't figure out how to block when trying it =)

@Gyfis Thanks! The initial web issues seemed to be with the first attempts of exporting the game, after a few tries most of the issues seemed to be fixed.

zenmumbler 2015-12-21 17:55

The web version worked fine for me but when I got to level 3 the entrance section was sealed off from the rest of the level, trapping me.

Cute little platformer with nice sfx and music. Consistent style. Nice!

jacklehamster 2015-12-22 00:01

A pretty solid dungeon game. I couldn't figure out what the right-click button do though.

andybrown 2015-12-22 23:00

@zenmumbler wow, you must have been extremely unlucky! There is a very small chance of rooms connecting to each other and not the rest of the map, but I've yet to see it happen in all of my testing.

@jacklehamster Thanks! Right click is for blocking, you hold it down to block an enemy's attack. The dervish enemies and boss are pretty much impossible to beat without it =)

christina-nordlander 2015-12-25 22:40

Pretty nice retro graphics (brought back good memories of playing "Gauntlet" as a kid), and the music is excellent. I can tell a lot of work and polish went into this, from the procedurally generated levels to the scorecard at the end of each level. Combat is simple, but works.

The connection to the themes didn't feel strong.

My main problem is that it was too hard: I lost a lot of health killing one slime, and there doesn't seem to be any way to regain health other than levelling up. Could just be that I was bad at fighting.

andybrown 2015-12-28 11:09

@ChristinaNordlander Thanks, we tried our best! I often have issues with balancing difficulty during Ludum Dare entries when I'm the only person testing the game. I also intended to have health potions in the boxes as well, but ran out of time. My goal was to make something challenging, but it ended up being more on the punishing side.

loveapplegames 2016-01-02 17:10

Good-looking dungeon crawler! Pity neither player nor enemy do any wayfinding. Is there a way to heal? As it is, it's just too deadly to attack enemies. Avoiding is much easier. Didn't manage to kill the boss.