Creatures of the Night

tabitha 2018-12-04 03:35

Hi! Yours is the first game I've tested so far tonight. It was tricky for me to jump into, I wasn't sure why I was dying or what my purple thing did. I know your page has instructions and I did breeze through them (I knew something happened when I clicked x and z, just wasn't sure what or why) I think if you added a quick line of text actually IN game to reiterate that the purple zap turns villagers into skeletons and that you can walk through the sworded baddies without dying but you have to watch for the !!! so you aren't struck. It just seems a little confusing is all. Once I figured it out, it made sense and it did make me want to keep playing to see if there's something at the end but gameplay is a little slow so I gave up after a few tries. I hope I wasn't too harsh with my ratings! Your game plays and it got a few replays out of me! Keep it up!!

flatgub 2018-12-06 07:20

I liked the art and the music! I felt like the game got very fast a bit too quickly, with more holy nights than there were civilians to convert to skeletons and having to rush all the way past all of the knights to get what few civilians had spawned.

acr515 2018-12-11 03:54

Neat little game! I agree with Flatgub in that sometimes I felt I didn't have enough skeletons to fend off the knights. I thought the art style you went for was executed well, and you did a nice job!

gizmolo 2018-12-14 04:58

@acr515 @flatgub Thanks for your comments. Yes, I pretty much ran out of time to do any "tweaking" and had to keep the spawn rates pretty much where I set them at for testing. In hindsight, I probably should've had civilians walking from the left to the right that you could use to make more skeletons. Oh well, there's always something to improve on. Thanks for playing!

honey 2018-12-14 09:29

Great job on this project! Especially the artstyle feels well thought, well picked colour palette, very promising! As most of commenters already pointed out - next time you should definitely try to tell as much information about the gameplay actually in the gameplay. That's what game designers do anyway :) Give your player chance to learn about your game playing it, keep them away from putting it down in confusion and never to come back to read the manual (no rtfm with your players). You should incorporate that in your game-developing mindset rather than it being an afterthought. Try to ask yourself "how will the player know this?" I know that time is short, but with this in your mindset, you'll be able to finish maybe smaller project but with much clearer vision both for you and your player!

In the means of your current game it means that nobody really knew where skeletons are coming from unless they read the manual. I wasn't sure what the skeletons are doing or how they work until I read the manual second time (some visual clues of skeleton attacking knight, knight dying, particles, screenshake... would help). Even when hit with the beam, lowering your HP bar is not enough to get the information through! On the other hand, you really did nail the beam telegraphing! Sure, be there more time it could've been something more in theme visually, but still, the beam felt pretty well! That definitelly is the way! Remember that your player is like John Snow - he knows nothing. It's your responsibility to teach him how to play your game!

I like the overall idea of your game and it's microeconomic system and after reading the manual, it was actually rather pleasant experience! Thanks for that, keep it up!

gizmolo 2018-12-15 02:50

@honey and @tabitha This was the first jam I did entirely by myself and was out of town for the first half of the weekend so it was a real challenge getting everything I wanted in the game. After I submitted my game and the deadline hit I realized that my game would've GREATLY benefited from a splash screen on the home menu giving the player visual cues on how to play. I've seen other games actually have their entire first couple levels dedicated to teaching people how to play, which is ingenious since they are incorporating learning to play the game as part of the game play experience. I realize LD voters don't really like to sit and read a game's manual anyway, so thank you for your sage advice. At the very least, for my next LD entry I will have a splash screen, and if I can add it, having a tutorial level would be ideal. Thanks so much for playing and your constructive criticism!

srx 2018-12-15 08:43

Good job on the background music! As posters above said already, the balance is off which makes it hard to play. You rely on luck to have enough villagers to turn to skeletons and when there are more than two knights on the screen it is almost impossible to dodge the holy blasts. The fact that the poor necromancer moves so slow doesn't help :) Great effort considering this was a one man game.

eddensoft 2018-12-15 08:47

I like pixel art and old school games, thiis what i need to play in this ludumm dare

honey 2018-12-15 10:28

@gizmolo There's no need to defend yourself, we've all been there, really :) That's the point of game jams (at least for me) that people are trying to give you the best advice they can. The LD voters are much more likely to sit and read a game's manual than any other player would be. We really want to know what your game is about! :)

bj-pucci 2018-12-23 22:14

Fun game, the pixel art is cool too.

knightsunder 2018-12-23 23:07

Interesting concept! I'm very much reminded of the horned wizard from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when I look at the necromancer - was that intentional? I like the pixel art too, it's nice to see some original spriting rather than asset flips. Groovy music too ~~~ My main feedback is that I wish the player movement was a bit faster and that the hitbox was a bit tighter.

shakedimus 2018-12-24 09:03

I really liked the music, it set a nice atmposphere. The game idea was also nice but in the end didn't work for me because of a couple of things: -The randomness element, sometimes almost no villagers spawn , leaving me just to dodge the holy lasers. -The disconnect between the mechanics and the game world. What I mean is, it's not great player feedback that the lasers come from random locations instead of the kinghts. Also the fact that you can run through them feels strange. Also fyi if you stand completely to the right it seems you can't get hit. ludumSS.png

cg-fred 2018-12-24 10:53

Yeah, I scored 9694 :D . The music is great and the idea is good but it's sort of too many knights and too little villagers that you can turn into skeletons. After playing it for a few times I noticed that you actually don't need to send your skeletons to attack the knights, both the knight and skeleton will ignore each other so then this just turns into a dodge the ray kind of game.

ratherjolly 2018-12-28 05:21

Brilliant! Oh man. Those animations... I freaking love it! I had a lot of fun with this one. The atmosphere you were able to pull off in this jam with the Art, Music and pacing was fantastic. Major props to the simplistic and solid overall design. Great job on this!

gizmolo 2018-12-29 03:17

@bj-pucci Ahh glad you liked it. Thanks for playing!

@knightsunder Haha no it was not! But now that you mention it, he kind of does! And I love Monty Python and the Holy Grail! Yes, my framework code didn't really have an API to handle specific hitbox sizing or placement, it pretty much just set a hitbox to match the size of a PNG file. I recently re-worked that section of my code so I can now make the hitboxes much more tight in future game jams. Thanks for playing!

@shakedimus Hey man yes everything you said was spot on. My friend actually caught on to those "cheese tactics" soon after the jam had ended and it was too late for a patch. The lasers actually are programmed to come from a random distance from the knights, anywhere from 0-500 pixels to left of them... but because there are so many knights, it's hard to tell, plus, like you say, there's not enough graphical information to convey that to players. Thanks for playing!

@cg-fred Yes, unfortunately I literally had ZERO time to tweak the game to adjust for these imbalances. I had the spawn rate for knights set high for testing purposes, but decided to keep it that way since I was afraid the game would've been too simple if players were never dying. As far as your last comment goes, this is true if you don't "send" a skeleton to attack, but they are still susceptible to getting destroyed by the rays. The only time a skeleton can collide directly with a knight is if you send it out by pressing "X" (Edit: plus you get 250 points for each Holy Knight you take out, so there is an incentive to not let your skeletons get taken out by the Holy Blasts). Anyway, thanks so much for playing!

@ratherjolly Oh man you're too kind! Thank you so much! I really just picked a random palette from lo-spec which I guess set the atmosphere (my pixel art skills definitely need work). The music wasn't directly composed by me, I just threw some samples together using Logic Pro. But I am so glad you enjoyed it as much as you did. Thanks so much for playing!

Thanks again to everyone for playing, good luck to your games in the final rounds of voting, and God bless!