2019-04-30 03:16
The visuals are creating very nice atmosphere.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Xochipilli's Trade
By giezi, Oropouche and Mane In Green
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 270 | 3.72 | 52 | |
| Fun | 387 | 3.47 | 53 | |
| Innovation | 429 | 3.25 | 52 | |
| Theme | 197 | 3.79 | 53 | |
| Graphics | 108 | 4.29 | 53 | |
| Audio | 80 | 3.95 | 53 | |
| Humor | 378 | 3.10 | 49 | |
| Mood | 170 | 3.81 | 52 |
The visuals are creating very nice atmosphere.
Very nice looking with a cool boss too! The "corpse run" sucked a bit though.
Really cool little game. Really liked the art (both visual and sound) although I would have liked to see the atmosphere a bit creepier. The intro was very cool :) The corpse run was a bit long and uneventful, but the fact that your death spawn new enemies was a nice addition. Well done!
Great job. I really love the pixel art characters you've created. They look awesome! That "press right arrow to acknowledge" moment was just perfect :smiley:
The atmosphere you were able to create with the scene and sound is just amazing! Would love to see some more as I think that you have set a very nice core/base for more content. Great Job guys! Liked it a lot
Wow, amazing job you game looking and playing really nice! I'm impressed! Also random generated?
First try baby! Even though RNG gods were not in my favor. I love the pixel art, and music. Controls need some time to get used to though.
The visuals are great and the player controller is smooth. Some of the jumps are kinda hard and the randomly generated levels not always on point.
Also wasn't really sure what the sacrifices were doing, but the game looks and feels great.
PS: It's very hard to hit the boss without dying in the lava
Looks good, general atmosphere and impression is nice. Boss is wayyyy to difficult for me tho. Consider shrinking the attack hitbox, and adding some telegraphing.
The game is beautiful and sounds awesome. That opening scene with soldiers is a piece of art. Damn skeletons are too fast for me tho.
True pixelart!Great! I enjoyed!
Your graphics are super duper nice, and at the beginning I just spent the entire team. The audio is a little humorous. I think jump height or double jump would be a very good upgrade! I had a tough time reading the text at the beginning cutscene, it appeared pretty smushed vertically. All in all I respect the chests/extra events. Great work!
Loved the artwork in this! Great job
@everybody Thanks a lot for your feedback and positive messages!
@drauthius what do you mean by corpse run? when the skeleton runs? @m0dsat yeah we also wanted something creepier but didn't manage to include all elements in the end. @serious07 yeah, the individual level-blocks where designed, and you get a certain number of them depending on how many people you sacrifice:) @bigwhiteshogun haha good job! @thevinter the sacrifice determine how many rooms/levels you get to get buffed before the boss. @binaryspark yeah sorry about that, guess I was tired when I did it. I fixed it now, should be better.
@serious07 here is a visualization of the randomly generated maps: https://twitter.com/SharpedStoneStd/status/1122436832648732673
Guess it could use a bit more refinement though.
Really nice graphics and art. The initial area was beautiful and full of detail but the dungeon felt a little lacking. Perhaps go a little darker and maybe less generous use of lighting? Suspenseful music etc.. Some of the sound FX, particularly the sword, were a little artificial sounding. With a touch of post-jam polish, this game will be amazing though, as all the fundamentals are there. Nice work!
Brilliant pixel art. Really enjoyed this game. Tricky, but fun. Loved the way the 'lives' worked, slowly loosing men. Nice touch. Hope to see it get expanded on post LD. Awesome work guys.
Takes a bit of strategy but once you know what you're doing, it's not so hard ;), great job <3
The game is cool, the platform is a bit tricky at times, and the game may have a better feeling of control, but despite that I enjoyed it a lot, I 'd love to play a more polish version of it !
Good artwork and the sound is woah <3 nice job !
Fine pixel art, great music and sound effects, also really enjoyed animations as well. Not sure if maps were generated by random or different levels were created based on my sacrifice choice - anyway it keept me playing longer.
On the down side - jumping sometimes feels clunky and hiting with sword sometimes lags a bit, also shooting with pistol when you have just 1 or 2 rounds is kinda useless imho.
Overall amazing entry. It's really hard to believe that it was put together in just 72h - i feel ashamed :)
Thought this was an impossible game, it was super short and suddenly i was at the boss until i read it's randomised. (the rng gods were not favourable to me the first time or it was because i didnt sacrifice anyone xD). Soundtrack, artwork and gameplay are fantastic. good job.
Found it kind of hard but I did like the graphics and music, even though the sound effects sounded kind of distant to me. Overall a nice entry, good job!
Great game, I want to see more of it. More bosses, enemies, levels, traps, effects, all of it!
Music was intense and created tension really well.
Graphics are great. Character sprites are really well done, nicely animated. Death animation was really cool.
I really liked that the levels were generated each time, instead of fixed. Sometimes it was a bit empty, and sometimes some sections were really crowded, but it still worked well.
Maybe the player could do with a little higher jump, to allow jumping up 2 blocks? Would be worth testing, if you didn't already.
Attacking bugged out a few times, and didn't always recover from spamming D. I just died and it worked after that.
I feel that the camera could start moving a little earlier, instead of requiring the player to be 3 quarters across the screen to give the player more chance to see what is coming up.
Death via sacrifice needs a little more time before resetting to the next soldier so the player can read what happened. And appreciate the awesome animation.
Really well made - probably the best I've run across in this LD. Theme, art, music all on point. And the level generation really helps the replay value. Great work!
@serious07 @thevinter @bartosz @davekingcool I wrote a small article describing how the temple is randomly generated. If you're interested it can be read here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/bkwlzu/xochipillis_trade_random_temple_generation/
@everybody thanks a lot for your awesome feedbacks and comments, will take everything in account for a next iteration of the game.
Amazing project with a big amount of work on the aesthetic which reminds me one of my favorite retro games - Future Wars. You did a solid adventure game - more than a simply slasher. Musics and sounds are great - oppresive and frenetic. I like all animation - those for enemies, even though I prefer those for player. Thank you for this experience. Respectfully you should develop it until it becomes a full game ++
Pretty cool roguelike, with an interesting central mechanic; sacrifice extra lives to extend the dungeon and give you more upgrades before a pretty tough boss-fight. You present the players with a pretty interesting and meaningful choice right up front (once they figure that out), which is very cool! The procedural dungeon-chunks felt pretty good, and connected well. The pixels were excellent, the animations good, and the sick guitar riff when you get stripped from your bones and leave a little conquistador skeleton behind was excellent. You managed to put together a really nice, compact roguelike experience, and I'm really impressed!
I love challenging games, and I try to play every game through to the finish before rating, but I had to quit after about 8 runs from a mix of frustration and minor bugs. In a game that centers around split-second reactions, precision, and making no wrong moves, it's really frustrating when the game drops inputs. I'd carefully time attacks to cut down arrows or enemies, or a jump to avoid them, but the buttons wouldn't register. And if it was a one-off bug, it wouldn't have been a big deal. But it just *kept happening* to me... really soured my experience.
There's a chance it was some form of latency with the WebGL build, but judging by the way it feels, I'm assuming the attack input checks were done in Unity's FixedUpdate function? This creates a problem I've run into before. FixedUpdate doesn't run every frame, so if input checks are done there, some frames just don't check for inputs.
Other critiques for things that felt unfair... clipping through the bottom of a platform and into an enemy, the fiddly platforming with low ceilings, the long runs of skeleton archers that are near impossible to pass unless you have a few lives to throw at it, the hitbox in the boss' fire hitting you while below the top platform... and finally, the jump down into the boss pit itself.
On my first run, with full upgrades, I jumped right down, and landed in the lava I had no idea was there. Which cost the whole run. In later runs, there'd be moments when the boss would already be in the middle of the fight as I fell, landing me directly into firebreath I couldn't see. Or directly onto a skeleton I couldn't see. Or onto a platform where I couldn't possibly outrun or avoid the attack. In a nutshell, it's important to give the player the information they need, so they could at least *try* to avoid a death... especially in a game where so much can be lost by something that's completely out of their control!
I mostly cite these frustrations because of how much I otherwise enjoyed the game! Really nice work here... solid music and visuals all around. Thanks so much for sharing this!
- Day
@solifuge Thanks a lot for your awesomely detailed comment, it's amazing :)
1) "I’d carefully time attacks to cut down arrows or enemies, or a jump to avoid them, but the buttons wouldn’t register." I realized during the jam that I had a bug with the attack command, but for the life of me I couldn't figure what caused it. I finally got to it, and found that it happens when the attack animation is interrupted by the jump animation, preventing the attack bool from resetting to allow you to hit again. I fixed it and it should work now:)
2) "Platform and enemies" yes I agree, this definitely needs a lot of work, the precision platforming isn't that fun. Enemies are not refined, the AI definitely needs some work. Might come back to that later :)
3) "jump down into the boss pit itself" agreed, there is an issue there, when you don't know where you are going. I could probably do this in time-line, or actually have an animation of the hero falling down the boss pit. Will see.
4) "the boss would already be in the middle of the fight" that was a stupid implementation from my part, having the boss do his thing all along, whether you are there or not (well I guess it was also easier ^^). I changed it, the boss starts to roam around once you get to the pit.
Thanks a lot for your feedback! I will probably continue to work on the game once I have a bit more time on my hands, hope you will get to play it again:)
Wow this is amazing, sweet graphics nice music and sound FX. Very polished, and interesting. Congrats!
What a nice looking game, I especially like the look of the outside area. I wish the inside had some more colours like that too. It was very pretty nontheless and had a great presentation. At first I tried to do it without sacrificing anyone but I had no chance. Then, after sacrificing half of my party and getting all the upgrades, the boss was a piece of cake haha. It really does matter a lot how many you sacrifice. I loved the sword slash sound, very satisfying. The platforming could have felt a bit nicer if you weren't stopped with every little step and the character would just climb over it automatically like in dead cells instead.
Awesome entry with amazing graphics!
There's a lack of sfx, and you could enhance the presence and weight of the protagonist by adding some footsteps, cloth and leather shrugling, equipment shaking, some grunt variations before releasing the attack, some grunt before jumping and after landing.
Also improve the skeletons attacks sfx by addind the sound of wood squeaking as the string stretchs, some bone shaking, the metallic blade hitting stone upon the arrow impact added to the surrent impact sfx (because it already sound like the wooden pole vibrating after impacting the stone).
Some ambience change from outdoor (some jungle sounds, like birds, tree leaves shaking, some monkeys, wind) to indoor (a cave ambience with mode reverb, bats, rats, dripping water) and into the boss scene (boiling sounds from the lava).
Just tested the game for a few seconds on our P&R stream and I noticed I'm not so good at it :up:
Well... I did not really get how often you can shoot? Also I noticed that shooting and dashing is not working while you are in a jump what makes killing enemies quite tricky somtimes.
But overall I liked the artstyle (if I forget about the fact that I don't like pixel art too much)
@firesplash-entertainment thanks for trying it out :)
for shooting: you have a limited number of bullets, maybe that's why you can't shoot? You actually can slash while jumping, not sure why it would not work for you (see gif) 2019-05-16_09-13-43.gif
Thanks for the compliments about the art:)
@ivan-garcia-filho thanks for the ideas, will keep that in mind :)