Ascension

dino-jr 2018-12-04 23:14

It's hard to know the walkable path, but nice game, congrats!

mgoadric 2018-12-05 18:56

Nice movement on the minions, would look cool with some animations on the sprites. Sometimes I just moved back and forth to watch them change positions. I think I was always able to shoot lightning even when the meter was empty for it. I also didn't know where I could walk or not, it looked like there was a wall in the upper left, but I couldn't go through the water near it either? I'm not sure what the fruit or bones or gold were in the game, I kept seeing my numbers go up but never saw them. No matter when I died, it always said I ascended, which sounds like a win condition message, but it felt like I lost.

luqey 2018-12-05 18:57

I don't know where to walk, there's no point in boxes, they just get in your way especially since enemies can shoot through them. There's no sound which kinda was a let down for me... and I didn't see how this fit the theme. I don't wanna be a complete a-hole so here's some ups, the gameplay was pretty fun, and the graphics were decent.

codesity 2018-12-05 19:01

its a little game, with nice graphics. The gameplay is hard to handle, but later I get it ^^. Good Work!

kirke 2018-12-05 19:10

Nice game! I like power of acolytes! :D

danilo-freire 2018-12-05 19:14

I got lost with some mechanics, I did not understand the boxes, how to recover the spells and I had some problems with the walkables paths... But in the end i had some fun playing! Congrats for the result, i hope you guys had some fun during the jam

designernap 2018-12-06 09:16

Am I right in assuming there is no audio? I ran the game a couple of times to check but had no sound. If that is the case, you should remove "Audio" from the ratings. Nice entry though! I appreciate the work that went into the UI :) Great stuff.

tvle83 2018-12-06 14:28

@designernap yes, no audio. I forgot to opt-out of that so I just did.

@danilo-freire we did have fun. We are happy with the mechanics that made it in the game but it's probably 1/10th what we planned.

@luqey the boxes have gold (yellow stuff ) and apples(red stuff) that are collection quests. We were going to have them given out at the temples but instead just made them global quests.

Thank you everyone for your feedback and kind words. Obviously we were not done with it but we do plan on finishing it to our true vision.

rams3160 2018-12-14 19:25

@mgoadric sorry for the late reply, the win condition and death sharing the same screen was supposed to be a sort of play on the theme. either way, you ascended to the after world. Small joke but we definitely discussed that it could seem strange. Thank you for the feedback!

eli-delventhal 2018-12-23 05:28

I won... my fire stopped working and seemed pretty useless anyway (since the range was so short). I was never less than half health. So mostly I was just walking around shooting stuff. Pretty good.

riyroo 2018-12-23 17:39

I thought this was pretty cool, reminded me of that old game Adventure. Like @eli-delventhal, I thought the fire was pretty useless as well, just because of the range. I didn't run into a single enemy that had a range shorter or the same length as the fire, which made it not worth my time to use. Also like you said to @mgoadric about the win/death having the same screen, knowing now what you had intended behind it, it's funny, but at the time I didn't get it. It would be cool to implement something that showed it was on purpose, but I don't know how you would do that. I really liked this game overall though, I thought it was really cool what you got done in such a short time!

papaver 2018-12-23 18:53

I think I won? :) (It seems to always display "You ascended") It seemed that my lightning indicator was empty, but I could always keep shooting lightning, but on the other hand after a while my fire didn't work anymore, although the fire indicator seemed full. The graphics are quite nice! But it's hard to see were I could walk.

Well done! :smile:

2019-02-04 22:45

I liked this game, it was very nice as a play for fun thing but I didn’t really feel too much of the Sacrifice theme. At first I thought I had to keep my circles indicating how much of a power I have from running out or else the acolyte associated with that power would die. I tried my best to use the spells minimally as to not drain their life force, but when I did hit bottom on the power indicators everyone was fine and I could still use the spells.

The possibility space was very nice in size, especially since the spells of both monsters and myself would grow as they traveled, but I did have a very hard time maneuvering and being able to tell what I could stand on and what I couldn’t stand on which caused some frustration and interrupted the flow quite a bit.

I think it’s hard to identify one single core mechanic, but if I had to it would be that the spells can cancel each other out. Since in order to aim spells you have to turn and walk towards the enemy (in order to face the enemy) having a spell on your tail about to hit and being able to block it before attacking was a nice touch instead of having them simply not interact. It made me feel I could build more tactics and have more risk at turning to attack with lightning instead of simply blocking with water. That definitely added more meaning to spell choice.

As far as the main dynamic, I truly enjoyed the use of water as a shield to run away into before turning and shooting out lightning. Since one normally augments the other, it almost felt like a logical choice to shoot them out like that even though I know they didn’t interact with each other, simply with how we used them. However, I made almost no use of the fire other than to break boxes so I wouldn’t run out of lightning. The range was simply too small and impractical due to the frequency the enemies shoot spells and because there were not melee enemies.

I can’t say I felt much empathy for my avatar though. He was very heavenly looking but he felt shallow. I think if it was your job to PROTECT the acolytes at the sacrifice of maybe your wings (if they are used as shields) or at the cost of damage to you, then it would have been rooting more for the avatar. The storyline of having to prove to the gods that you are worthy would have been able to still stay, but just with that small tweak I personally would have felt more invested.

Considering the inherent narrative, the struggle felt very satisfying. The way you learn how to combo spells to make yourself more powerful had a bit of a learning curve but felt very nice when you start to combine them. You did a great job of allowing the player to come up with these combos on their own without being felt led to them. However, the goal and the transformation felt very weak. Again for me it was because the goal didn’t seem quite appealing and also because outside of combos I didn’t feel much character growth.

Despite that though, I had a very nice time playing! At one point I was surrounded and didn’t know what I was gonna do but in a clutch moment my mind connected the water spell and shielding so I simply combed one water spell after another to keep blocking while looking for pauses in spells to come out of and take out a couple enemies at a time. Being cornered like that was a very nice “do or die” moment.

Thank you!!! Awesome job!