thooom 2020-10-05 18:14
This has some potential for sure. And it was very pretty! Let us know when we can wishlist Coalescence on Steam :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD47 → Coalescence: Battle System Prototype
By seth-tal
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1205 | 3.21 | 70 | |
| Fun | 954 | 3.21 | 71 | |
| Innovation | 993 | 3.16 | 70 | |
| Theme | 1648 | 2.16 | 66 | |
| Graphics | 683 | 3.69 | 60 | |
| Audio | 1 | |||
| Humor | 1 | |||
| Mood | 1 |
This has some potential for sure. And it was very pretty! Let us know when we can wishlist Coalescence on Steam :)
Very cutesy game, I loved the feel of it, and if you were to continue development on this then I feel like it could turn out very good.
Love the battle music choice. Would be nice to click the icon rather than a small checkbox inside to choose your monsters. Also had a weird thing where the monsters stopped fighting each other even when I'd direct them. Would be nice to outline enemy in red and your team in a different colour maybe too.
Love graphics and overall feel of the game!
As for me, theme of the jam is yet noticable in matchmaking-ish behavior of this game.
But it is super cute, fun, and I'm waiting to see it some day on mobile :)
Good luck!
Regards, Alex
Technically, the rules say that theme is a thing that the community cares about and you don't have to follow it. I must say though, well done on the system. It needs polishing, like some of my characters just stopped looking for another enemy to fight, but by itself it stands quite well.
I liked the combat system, great job!
Loved the feel and great system at first I wasnt sure what to do but I got the hang of it
The art looks really neat, and the music is really catchy. Has potential!
I'm a big fan of this kind of "active battle system" - lots of potential here for a bigger endeavor. It reminds me vaguely of battling in the original Digimon World (psx) - you just cheer on your Digimon with buffs while it beats on enemies. Very charming for a battle system prototype!
@tomatolamp When coming up with this game I owe most of my inspiration to Digimon World: Championship for the Nintendo DS. Was one of my favorite games for the system along side Fossil Fighters and Pokemon. Crazy how much I grew out of those games only to come full circle :smile:
@seth-tal That's awesome! Oh man, DS rpgs...some of those battle systems are really creative and criminally overlooked. Lots of great game mechanics from the past just waiting to be put to use!
The combat system is dope!
That looks really nice, but I can't play Windows games, sorry :confused:
@netmute maybe you're in luck. I just added a Linux build to the itch.io page. I will be updating this page shortly. If you happen to only have access to another kind of platform I still have about a day and a half to port to any platform I'm able to.
@seth-tal HTML5 or Mac will work :hugging:
Art of the game is great! Audio is great! For me there was a mismatch in graphics of menu's/fonts and game itself.
Combat system is great, I think there would be some great potential with per character buffs, well done!
Really nice idea and cute little graphics, although you mentioned it was imbalanced, I was able to both win and lose so great job!
Since it is a prototype, I'll try to give some useful feedback for improvement. Most of my comments are about getting an overview of the battle at a glance:
During the battles, it could sometimes be hard to tell friend from enemy at a glance, especially when the opposing team had similar appearance. Color-coding the names of the creatures depending on which team they belonged to could improve this a bit.
Similarly, adding floating life bars over the characters would be a nice quality of life improvement as well, so you don't have to glance between where the action happens, the top left for the ally bars, and top right for the enemy bars
Additional visual feedback, e.g "floating damage numbers" might also be useful to gauge the effectiveness of a specific battle assignment, although this might also depend on the underlying mechanics.
I had a bug during one of the rounds, where the last enemy on the field stopped taking damage.
@netmute haha hi once again! If you're still interested, I compiled a macOS build of the game. I have no idea if the build works as it should, because I have no apple devices to test it on so uh... yeah, best of luck if you give it a go. If not, no worries, I needed to port the game to other platforms regardless
@somnium Thank you so much for this feedback. I agree with everything you've said here. Because battles are so fast paced, it can be difficult to acquire vital information in a timely manor. This will be one of the things I hope to improve upon in the future.
During the development weekend I sadly left a lot of the balance and UI clarity to the last half of the last day. This was a very very rushed prototype, and if you peer into the source code you will notice that much of the core components are strung together with little thought given to error catching, and so on. This essentially left me with many bugs, some even game breaking. Here is a quick list lol: * Sometimes the health bars do not accurately track entity health data * Sometimes the floating damage numbers do not appear at all despite entities taking damage * object reference for instantiating entities onto the battlefield remains on battle field throughout the match (its just invisible) * Some button sounds randomly become inconsistent (meaning they play different sounds...) * Hit detection is just wonky in general
And I am sure there are many more. Once again, thank you so much for taking the time to list out your thoughts. One thing I hope to improve on for my next jam, and for my games in general in the future will be to improve technical performance and improve UI / UX design. :smile:
@seth-tal Of course I'm playing it! :grin:
The music was fantastic, and the graphics really cute! I don't know if it's something specific to the Mac version, but the character selection screen only had a 4x4px clickable area for each character :sweat_smile:
If the battles are going to be 3 vs. 3 in real-time, I would like some reduced micro management. Characters choose new enemies themself, flee if low on health etc., and I make the big-picture decisions :smile:
Overall, great prototype! :thumbsup:
@netmute Oh that's an strange issue... maybe I should have taken the extra five minutes to make each selection a button lol. When setting up the UI canvas I set the canvas to worldspace - camera, and set a reference resolution of 720p. I'll have to look into a more universal UI solution in Unity. Anyways, thanks for playing I really appreciate it!
Great game, super cool art. The only issue I had was occasionally an enemy would just become invincible and just stand still. I don't know if that was just me though. Well done!
Hello, this is a really cute game :). The graphics were especially great, this is a really nice prototype. ATM i feel like it is way to easy and i don't get how you can lose... However I had fun playing and that's really the most important thing ! Keep going buddy !
Aloeman the best boy!
@feesh @aymeric-le-moal Thank you so much for playing! I'm glad you liked it. I did not spend a lot of time balancing and fixing bugs like I should have. In the future I will take these things into greater consideration :smile:
This game was pretty good for a jam game it has some really good potential. I really enjoyed it best of luck for the game
Graphics are great, some stats could use some explanation. Loved the cute little creatures!
Since it looks like this game has a lot of individual parts i would recommend that if this system was used in a future project that you spread out your tutorial between battles and introduce mechanics slowly when they are relevant rather then all at once.
The look of the prototype is cute and appealing. I wish the UI also matched up to the charm of the graphics in a way that wasn't difficult to read. The text was a little on the small side and it seemed as though it could have been a lot larger.
The battle system also was pretty straightforward for me to understand, although most of it seemed to be just me button mashing the three buttons, then fiddling around with clicking on the player characters to have them gang up on remaining enemies. As much as I enjoyed the look and description of the characters, I didn't feel as though what character I selected had an impact on the outcome of each round. Going into each round, I wish I knew which enemies I was fighting against and their stats, since I picked each character based entirely on looks :smirk:.
In regards to the music, the battle music seemed like a good fit. The titlescreen music, while also nice, didn't seem to fit as well. It was as if the music was going for two conflicting moods.
Overall, I think the characters and battlefield look great, aesthetically. Best of luck fleshing this prototype out.
Good game with fantastic art. This was a really enjoyable to play.
I like the improvements on this one! It's come a long way since the Vimjam in only a couple weeks. I'm excited to see where it goes in the future! I think you're supposed to opt out of the graphics rating though if it was made prior to the jam or at least be transparent to the voters that it was made prior.
Rule: You’re free to use 3rd party Artwork/Music/Audio assets, or assets you previously created, but we ask that you OPT-OUT of the respected voting categories (Graphics, Audio). You can opt-out of a voting category when you submit your game.
@barelyevengames oh! you are totally right! I will be changing that immediately!
A pity you had to opt out of the graphics category because I loved the cute pixel art! The battle system idea is interesting although as you said it doesn't tie in with the theme. I did have an issue with the system because it didn't feel intuitive when the battle started. Firstly, the two teams rushed to each other and I had bit of an issue figuring out which one's were my friends. Obviously they were the partners on the left but even so I think some way of distinguishing between the two would be better. Have you experimented with a turn based mechanic? I get a feeling that might actually work better here but only experimentation will bear that out. Looking forward to what you do with this! Good luck!
this was a great game idea and I enjoyed a couple of battles, some kind of progression would have been nice but it was fun!
I liked your game my congratulations, I also did one if you want to know, and give me your feedback I am very grateful, this is the link https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/resurrection
Cute game and nice music!Like the juicy buttons motion in main title.
@nolife-m Thank you for playing!
@etrealjunior Thank you! I hope my feedback for your game is helpful!
@copito Thanks for checking out my entry! I was considering making some kind of player progression but I ultimately wanted to finish prototyping the core concept. I appreciate the feedback!
@theseusinabottle Thank you! I'm glad some of the game breaking bugs didn't impede on your enjoyment too much
@random-storykeeper This is fantastic feedback. I really appreciate you taking into consideration all of the components here. I agree with pretty much all of the criticism, and in the future I will be reworking every system I implemented to be more flexible and manageable. One thing I was disappointed did not make it to fruition was that each of the ability buttons was actually supposed to be a unique ability per partner instead of team wide support abilities. What ended up happening was that I could not think of a clever enough programming solution for providing uniquely programed abilities to each creature without reworking systems I already had in place. This is really what I hope to improve the most in the future. Thanks again for playing!
I love it! Its a very interesting concept of choosing three members of a party and then watch the duke it out from the sidelines, but you're kind of cheering them on and giving them buffs. And I'm pretty sure your "monsters" are inspired by digimon correct? What a blast from the past haha
@jag haha :smile: thank you for playing. Yeah my mons are absolutely digimon inspired
yeah, it does not run run on mac. Let me know when you can make it, I'd be interested in giving it a try!
This was very fun! It reminded me a bit of Pokemon Quest. The music was great!
@aless sorry to hear that. When compiling the mac build I was really just kind of hoping it would work without needing to test it, as I don't have any apple devices to test it on. Could you describe the issue you're having? I can do some research and see if it can be resolved.
@nailuj29-gaming Thanks! glad you enjoyed it. If you liked the music just know that I did not make it, however, the music is free to download and use in any projects as long as you aren't making money off of said project: https://tallbeard.itch.io/music-loop-bundle
Captura de pantalla 2020-10-08 a las 2.18.28.png
Only this message "Application cannot be opened"
@seth-tal
@aless Thank you, after some quick research it would appear that when compiling the build on windows the files are given certain windows specific file permissions, thus you may experience difficulties running on macOS devices. To solve this try performing some of the steps found in this thread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/mac-unity-build-from-a-pc-not-opening-on-mac.947727/
* Open the macOS terminal * navigate to the folder where the game was downloaded: cd [PATH_TO_APP]/LD47_macOS.app/Contents/MacOS/ * then type the following command: chmod -R 777 Coalescence_BattleSystem_LD47.app
This may work. Sorry for the inconvenience. If this solves the issue then this will not be something I can fix on my end as I am not able to compile a working build on a native apple device. Hope this helps :)
@aless Minor edit: turns out this may be something I can fix on my end. Still not sure if it will work but I changed the unix file permissions on the file manually through WSL and reuploaded the LD47_macOS.zip file. Try redownloading the game if you're still interested.
somehow it's still not working, the same error again :(
@aless I'm sorry :frowning2: If I come up with a solution I will update the itch page, and ldjam page
The battle mechanics felt kind of opaque to me. There was one battle where I was just mashing two of my mons into the last enemy, which had a sliver of health, but my team just kinda died and accomplished nothing. Having some kind of color-coded aura on the mons would be helpful. Also, I think slowing down the movement would give the player more time to react and plan the battle. I really wish the abilities were hotkeyed so I could use them without directing focus away from the battle. I really like where you're going with this - in fact, I've wanted to do something similar for a while, so I wish you the best of luck with the larger project.
@piscythe I apologize for the technical issues with this prototype. I really did rush this little project in order to meet The Jam requirements. I think greater visual clarity and more consistent AI could have gone a long way here. Thank you for your feedback
Nice Battle system, Would have liked a little more depth or context but Technically its a nice system.
Very nice concept, reminded me of Battleheart on Android. Agree with improving visual clarity, which is hard to do in a weekend. I'd suggest also toning the speed down which will make it feel more strategic. Also, it wasn't clear to me what a winning strategy looked like. Maybe improved visual response and less speed will help, but I felt like I couldn't do a ganging-up tactic of making my whole team fight one enemy. Certainly an impressive prototype in just a weekend, keep tinkering with it! EDIT: I should add I loved the visuals and music, it had a really fun energetic feel.
It's a decent prototype. You pick creatures, they fight, and you try again. The bottom creature often went to the far right bottom of the screen with it's match, but otherwise it seemed to work.
Fun game!
I think I had a glitch where I had killed all my enemies, but it still said that one was alive in the HP bar on the top right, but there were no creatures on screen. My allies didn't have anything to target, so I just had to wait for the time to run out.
Other than that I found it interesting and fun! It would be cool to have some sort of upgrade system, or reward or unlock system to make gameplay feel like you were competing for something.
No matter what, great job :)
Great prototype! I can tell you've got a lot of passion for the project!
Nice game! The graphics are right up my alley and the controls are a pleasure to use, could you check out my game when you can? :D
Good game, art is really cool and cute. Music is amazing. I liked the ui animations. It would be convenient to block or at least slow down the time to change targets more easily. Also, at the moment it is difficult to distinguish the characters of your team from the opponents. Finally, buffs are a nice mechanic, but do your opponents have them too? It seems to me that they are a bit overpowered, I rarely lost.
I love the art style.
cute pixel art characters
I think the prototype is very strong and battle works fine. Do you have plans to add some additional animations?
@tricky-fat-cat I plan on overhauling the whole experience as a component of a game I am developing. When entering this jam, I wasn't keen on the theme, thus I decided I would program a prototype from scratch. Everything will change but the foundation and ideas present will remain the same. Thank you for playing!
@seth-tal haha, HONK was born in hatred to the LD45 theme. :D
Oh man, game art is goodlike!. Thememaster, thats you are, fit into the theme. I want more, its very fun game, release it on the steam after some polish. Overall that game is good, good job.
Neat little idea. :) I think if you had a bit more feedback when the player clicks an ally so you get confirmation that your next click is going to direct them somewhere, it would go a long way. Also, I would often lose my characters in the scuffles, and would struggle to differentiate friend from foe, since they use the same pool of sprites. I know that my characters are marked with a (P), but that can be hard to read sometimes when everyone's goin' at it.
Otherwise though I like what you got here! I'm also in agreement that the theme was kind of "meh" this time around. Props to you for tossing it to the wind while making something anyway!
It is a very interesting prototype. I like the graphics and the sound too. The mechanics of the battle are innovative, you would certainly be able to expand it into something bigger. Perhaps you could adjust the reload time for buffs. In general it is a pleasant experience. Good job.