Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD36 → Ancient Heritage
By indieyp
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I give up after like 15 deaths. I really like the discovery element to it. I managed to get only up to 2 pillars to connect to my base.
I had no idea what to do and all the ways to die were often frustrating.
Really atmospheric though, really fitting music.
Yes, in future i think i do tutorial level, not hardcore. For not die you can get energy from column and spawn defense energy around base. Also on level you can pickup energies on ground
upload more easier version
I thought of the same things BoltKey wrote.
I really like the music its very calm.
And the graphics are cool too. I just didn't got the logic.
This game really needs some kind of UI to indicate what you need to do. It's beautiful and the music is trance, but I still don't know what the point is after 4 tries. Really like the cool imagery though.
I think i added arrow what indicate which side enemy come, it's help player destroy enemy before they reach base.
You need connect 10 energy column to base for win.
After a few tries I understood the concept :-) A short tutorial screen might be useful. Good graphics and sound. The world might be a bit too big, perhaps a smaller one would increase the fun.
I really like the aesthetics of this game-- the music was very peaceful and accompanied the core game well. It's very relaxing and zen-like.
However, I really don't like the whole "teach by yourself" policy, however, since I was really frustrated with the game after dying one too many times while trying to learn. The frustration I felt at the invisible rules broke the zen effect that the game was trying to set. It seems somewhat arbitrary that the player dies if they have too much energy-- there's no indication of what that limit is.
Basically what others have said - looks and sounds great but a short tutorial would have been helpful.
I like how you can achieve a stylish look using these simplistic shapes. But a minimap would be nice, using the radar I get lost all the time.
I think the mystery and not knowing what to do is the most interesting aspect of the game. A tutorial would ruin that.
Finding the monument, then connecting the line was exciting. It felt like a discovery. If you told me about that before hand it would be worthless.
Make everything faster, snappier and juicier. And let me make some mistakes.
So, instead of 1 enemy touching the base resulting in game over. Throw lots of enemies at me and let the base take a few hits first. That way I have some information to learn from. I can see the base taking damage, then I can react. Then I can start to correlate the enemies to the dots on the minimap.
Similarly give me some spare energy, or place some within really easy reach so that I can learn that mechanic too.
Then have the base regenerate the health lost. So now those mistakes I made whilst learning don't carry on for the rest of that playthrough.
Increase the movement speed so I don't waste all my time exploring in one direction only to find nothing.
Bring the camera out a bit so that I can see more of what is going on.
So the only thing that I learned is that I need to collect energy. But I didn't find out how to use it properly :)
Also the controls felt a bit strange. Like when I press WASD, I move 45 degrees clockwise from where I need to.
I liked the simple graphics style, and figuring out what to do was fun. I liked that after connecting a few pillars your temple can take a few hits before the game ends. This gives the player some time to fail (maybe dying the first play through), before starting to pick up pace and move towards the ending.
I didn't like that the player moved so slow, and at an off axis (up moved up and to the right). I didn't enjoy finding the last few temples (maybe each time you connect one the camera could zoom out a bit making finding the last few more easier). And I really didn't enjoy instantly dying when you pickup too much energy. I understand that is keeps the player from gathering all the pillars and hooking them all up at once, and means you have to make tactical decisions when you pick up energy, but it punishes the player very bad when they are wondering through the forest and can't even see the node they pass over.
In all I think you did very well, I like that the game let me discover how to play it, and did some unique things. Good work!