Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD39 → A Forlorn Wizard
By max-amaden
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 62 | 3.89 | 30 | |
| Fun | 39 | 3.89 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 206 | 3.37 | 29 | |
| Theme | 156 | 3.82 | 30 | |
| Graphics | 39 | 4.17 | 30 | |
| Audio | 81 | 3.63 | 29 | |
| Mood | 58 | 3.77 | 29 |
This is pretty bloody good! Rad sound design and looks pretty lovely indeed. All info is explained within the game, which is handy. The fading text adds to the already uneasy atmosphere - quality stuff! Only down side is the game doesn't actually restart when you click at the end, which is a pretty small thing, given how much other stuff is actually here. Awesome! :D
I liked the idea that there's a balance between "health" and "dashes", both powers one of which is always running out. It's great to play on fullscreen, but pressing ESC in fullscreen exits fullscreen instead of skipping the intro... It also seems as if when I'm left-clicking I'm selecting text... There's probably a bug in there somewhere.
The art is pretty great too, and the monster's moans are quite funny. Great job!
Very good game with a lot of polish. I like the balancing of not being able to dash when recovering energy as well as how you can increase the maximum dashes you can make. Managed to find some of the cheat codes :)
nice wizards/witch idea. though I was just trying to avoid the enemies, but the game works ok and looks nice.
Nice art! The dashes were quite a bit more powerful than I was expecting!
It was really satisfactory to kill by dashing, also graphics look so nice. Very god work. One little thing I noticed is if you keep clicking before a screen fades out, it just goes back full alpha and repeats.
Great immersion in the atmosphere of the game! Beautiful sprites, scary sounds, soft music and permanent decrease in health - wonderfull) I tried to run game in windows, but it crashed. And I couldn't skip the intro too)
freaking beautiful. your core dash mechanic is money
For a game made in 48hrs that had it all. Lots of fun, challenging, interesting mechanics and great audio/effects.
One of the best games I tried overhere in LD compo. Good job!
It took me some time to get used to the dash but when it's mastered, the game is fun. Graphics are really good.
Excellent pixelart and a smart idea! But I would not like to receive damage when I attack. EQCP_small.png
Very well-rounded game. Good exposition (I really loved the pixel meets medieval font. If that was hand drawn, props to you sir). Besides the impressive sprite sheets and the cloth animations, I really enjoyed the actual dash attack. It's explosive particles and graphics really caught me off guard and reminded me so much of Hyper Light Drifter. The UI is very clear and easy to understand. Something not to be taken for granted in these 48 hour games. I found the gameplay fun while upholding a high degree of difficulty (what else would you expect from the darker plane of existence??). Anyway great incorporation of theme and best of luck to you.
Definitely one of my favorite games I've played tonight.
Very athmospheric. The controls work well, perhaps I would decrease the distance of enemies attack.
Good job in such small period of time. Art, gameplay, sfx, well done. It's harder than expected, but I wanted to play more. Dashin' over everything! Congrats!
I like the graphics, the voice of the monster, the growing difficulty and the overall ambience. It has style and we have immediate fun thanks to a easy and simple game mechanic. Good ;-)
A really good game overall! The art and audio are solid and the game feels very polished. Amazing work!
Ha ha ha, I died so fast! Great game, It was really deep for such a simple game, with interdependent mechanics that made it a lot more than just a simple enemy evasion game, good job!
I'm clicking to restart but it will not restart.
Really solid fun entry with a very nice aesthetic.
The fact I was hoping for things that aren't there (like a combo mechanic for well timed dashes) rather than nit-picking what is there is testament to how solid an entry this is.
Your game has a really unique pacing and feel to it! I like it a lot. Amazing graphics too, and a lot of fun!
I like visual)
Good job)
Good graphics and overall aesthetic that works well with the audio work. Gameplay is interesting, your mobility is your offense and your defense made for some unique decisions for the player to make on the fly.
That said, I personally don't care for exposition dumps for teaching the player. I tend to find that it leads to a "reading a manual" type situation with games, where either you read and understand everything the first time (sometimes works depending on the length of the dump) or you have to keep referring back to it as you understand the different mechanics and how they relate to each other. In my opinion, a much better tutorial would be one that instructs the player while allowing them to experiment to get a better understanding of what they're being told while applying it.
The controls would feel a lot better if it were to lock the cursor to the window for the game. Perhaps it does this in one of the downloaded versions, and I'm missing out because I played on the web version (which has its own minor problems), but I'm assuming this is not the case. This is a problem I find with mouse-based games that are faster-paced. The nature of the game may often have the player quickly moving the mouse all over the game's window, and if the player accidentally overshoots, they could easily miss a necessary jump or movement by clicking outside the game's window. If the game were to pause while not focused (another thing a downloaded version may fix, but I also assume not) then this wouldn't be as big an issue, aside from the interrupt in gameplay the player has.
Most of the non-gameplay screens are wonky at best. The Restart/Gameover screen requires you to not click the screen in order to actually restart (despite being the opposite of what the game tells you to do), the exposition dump takes significant time to skip once you've read and fully understand it (rather than allowing the player to just spam left click through it), and the web version's exposition dump actually goes off-screen. It only cuts off one letter on the left and right sides, but it's still an issue that should be addressed.
Lastly, the power is just life/health/hp. There's not really any two-ways about it, this is almost nothing but a life-bar that slowly goes down. The only strategizing involving it is making sure it's somewhere above 0. It doesn't change your offensive power, shorten/length your blink distance, or affect any other gameplay in any way other than giving you a gameover once it runs out. The mechanics fit the theme in name only. Theme 1/5 from me.
Overall this was a game I did legitimately find fun, and would like to see after given more polish to the overall experience, but was barred down by several issues some worsening the first experience of the game, others the entire experience of the game.
EDIT: I did actually go back and try this game's downloadable version, and found it did actually pause when not holding focus. This does help the player get back into the game rather than punishing the player for missing the screen with every click, but still inhibits the flow of the gameplay, and literally pauses the pacing of the game.