FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD43 → Trials of K'zhak

Trials of K'zhak

By drevilbrain

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall9452.8227
Fun9462.5627
Innovation9842.4027
Theme7293.1427
Graphics7902.9427
Audio5542.8326
Humor8681.5820
Mood5973.2227

Comments

drevilbrain 2018-12-04 02:47

Change Log: * v1.0 (Dec. 3, 2018) * Initial release * v1.1 (Dec. 4, 2018) * Fix broken player attack animations

lizouille 2018-12-04 17:21

Simple game, but quite efficient and fun! Sometimes dodging doesn't work though.

drevilbrain 2018-12-04 19:40

@lizouille There's a 1 second cooldown on the dodge so you can't just spam it everywhere. I wish I made some kind of animation to make that clear though.

aj-jones 2018-12-05 05:14

I liked the concept alot, really on theme!

sketchycode 2018-12-05 05:36

Great idea, the combat felt off like the swings didn't feel like they were connecting (even when they did). So maybe some sound effects wouldn't have hurt. I liked the overall vibe of the graphics and the music.

zayah0-0 2018-12-05 05:36

i liked the combat.... it wasnt too spammy lol

justalocalhero 2018-12-05 05:42

The background art is pretty sweet. The sound fits well and gives an ominous feeling. Sacrificing stats between waves is a nice way to implement the theme although I never really got a good sense of the value of the stats as they changed.

Dodging around feels nice, but I struggled to identify the hitbox on the attack. It seems much smaller than the animation (especially vertically) and a bit inconsistent. Sometimes I could spam attacks, or possibly only the animation, and other times not. It seems like you can dash and attack at the same time, but I could never connect this way. Probably more emphasis could have been placed on making attacking feel great since it is the core of the game.

With all that said, it's a solid concept and I had fun dancing around and chopping up some baddies.

phearbot 2018-12-05 05:43

Nice game! One thought, when you start the game all enemies take two hits to kill. You then get an upgrade that gives you more damage, but all enemies still take two hits so it doesn't really feel like an upgrade. Having varying enemy HP could make it so the first upgrade would let you one shot some making it feel "more powerful"

drevilbrain 2018-12-05 05:48

@sketchycode @justalocalhero

I really did want to mess around and make hitreg/combat overall feel better. Currently, there isn't a whole lot of visual feedback in terms of when attacks actually connect. The animation system is a real mess, so I'm sure that's part of the problem. If I had more time I would have liked to make a better hitreg system and add sprites for when enemies take damage.

@phearbot

I ran out of time when I was working with the whole sacrifice weapons system. Right now it definitely doesn't feel like it's doing a whole ton even if you get something really good.

disto 2018-12-05 05:59

System with evolution is fun, just the game seems a little hard to play for me, maybe improve the fight when moving ? (always target the nearest enemy, as you can go backward but continue to attack; increase weapon range; add a magic protection / explosion ?) Also sometimes, the enemy are inverted when moving ?

oddballdave 2018-12-05 11:45

I really liked the audio. The game was fun to play. I found a technique of attack->dodge that let me go quite deep. The whole sacrifice mechanic and concept was really well thought out and done. Had issues with the HTML5 version where key inputs were not registering, but no such problems with the Mac download.

Good stuff :8ball:

rs11s21n 2018-12-05 11:54

@drevilbrain i feel like attak still not work good, because i see how attack animation go through enemy head but enemy take no dmg. and after this i just get dmg for my self.

not bad concept, but for this time unplayable for me. and some times enemies show theirs sprite in wrong direction.

jfraser314 2018-12-05 18:43

Fun game. I really like the art for the main character. Something about a warrior monk/jedi outfit that looks pretty cool in pixel art. And your sacrifice idea is well implemented and completely maddening (I couldn't bring myself to lose attack power under any circumstances). The bad guys come out backwards at first, then once they switch sides follow correctly. Bet you have a value reversed.

drevilbrain 2018-12-05 21:07

@rs11s21n @jfraser314

The animation system is all sorts of hacked together spaghetti. It's definitely not just a value reversed because in my testing, enemy sprites will reverse in correlation to facing direction and distance away from the player. It's definitely something to do with the NavMesh Agent, but I couldn't locate it yet.

rs11s21n 2018-12-05 22:16

@drevilbrain good luck in fixig problems) (if you planing to fix them))

jeremy-ryan 2018-12-30 20:04

Cool concept. The graphics are pretty minimal but look nice; I liked the sword slash animation. The hit box for my attack was consistently smaller than I expected.

Sacrificing system is cool, although I ended up sacrificing my weapon several rounds in a row, and sometimes just ended up with a better weapon.

I could see this becoming a really neat game with more enemy types/waves and adding more complexity to combat. Well done for 72 hours!

pompi-pompi 2018-12-30 20:24

Really nice effort. It is a complete game even if it's still rough around the edges.

kothead 2018-12-30 20:35

I liked eerie atmosphere of the game. Good job!

johnny-turbo 2018-12-30 20:36

I really liked your game! I though the graphics were simple, but looked nice and fit the game very well. I think you created a game with a really interesting mood, so props for that. I did think the game played a bit slow however. I usually just found myself running in circles around the map with a horde of enemies chasing me as I slowly whittle away at their health. The dodge mechanic was very useful and felt nice to use however. One other small thing thing that could use improvement is the health bar UI; because the background of the health bar is black, this blended into the background really easily, so it was a bit tough to get an idea of what percentage my health was at. But simply swapping out the background color for something that contrasts the background more is a pretty easy fix. Overall I enjoyed playing your game, and thought your game used the theme in a cool way. Congratulations on making a game in a weekend!

sozey 2018-12-30 22:11

I liked the art style and the music. A suggestion I have would be to add sounds to give feedback when attacking, dodging or getting hit. I also didn't feel like too much skill was involved in the gameplay at first but choosing what to sacrifice between waves was fun and fitting to the theme, and did require some thinking.

limnori 2018-12-30 22:18

Hey!

congrats on making your jam game!

I liked the concept, actually its very similar to our arena-game concept with similar sacrifice mechanics! I liked the simple graphics and the cool background and the atmospheric BGM.

I couldnt quite understand how to use the dodge function effectively? I also think some weapon/damage sounds mightve really helped give the attacks more weight? but understand this is tough to do in the timescale given.

I found the difficulty level quite high, this is something we struggled with in ours too, so not sure the exact answer to that :)

drevilbrain 2018-12-30 22:27

@limnori Thanks for trying it out! I brought this game to a local game playtest that happened a couple days after the jam ended. The consensus was that dodging was definitely a little wonky. Definitely needs some kind of visual feedback and longer distance to be more useful. Also more i-frames.

I wanted to make all the weapons more different and have different hitboxes and properties, but I couldn't implement that in time for the jam.

The game definitely was considered pretty hard. I think it's mostly just because of the linear progression the game has.

sevkron 2018-12-30 22:29

Right so the music and the visuals go very well together, that is if the game wasn't combat oriented. It is very sluggish and the dodge doesn't work well but it still feels like there's potential here. I'm pretty sure this isn't meant to be finished, correct me if I'm wrong.

drevilbrain 2018-12-30 22:37

@sevkron There's a lot of stuff I wanted to add but couldn't. Primarily different weapon properties and overall more variety in enemies and weapons. I intentionally wanted the game to feel ambient and slow, but maybe that does clash with the combat even at this speed. I wanted combat to feel fatiguing rather than empowering.

thepiratenun 2018-12-30 22:58

Awesome game! I think it was a little bit of a quick start into the game, but once I got the hang of it, it was really fun! The game looked great and the movement felt very nice! I also loves the audio, because it really created an interesting and mysterious atmosphere. I think the game would have benefited with some more explanation of the mechanics and gameplay (and maybe some more sound effects), but it was over all very well done!

fashionbatman 2018-12-30 23:48

Only problem for me was the movement felt a bit too slow. The art and sound design made and nice creepy atmosphere, I liked that a lot. Good job overall!