Scroll of Sacre Bleu & the Fires of Fiji

bw-devel 2021-04-26 10:21

Things I like: - you used Love2d! - clean movement - small story to get the player started - lots of possibilities with the game concept - assuming the mazes are procedural generated, good job

Improvements: - make the intro skip-able - have a scoring system in the procedural generation (perhaps using a*) to make sure each map is traversable in time; I found some maps that just were impossible to traverse in time, even if all I did was go straight for the exit - introduce a cost for going through too many mazes; the player should be forced to balance staying longer for a reward vs progression to next maze; if there is no cost to just going to the next maze as fast as possible so you can get a chance at a lucky layout; players will see no reason to take risks. - needs some sound; ambient background, a soft growing sound as the fire progresses to create tension, item pick-up/mining sound - some visual indicator that a speed potion is active and possible a progress bar of some kind to show when it runs out.

Bugs: - I couldn't restart/exit from the lose game screen

anthonyharmitage 2021-04-26 14:01

@bw-devel whoa, thanks you for enlightening me! Now I know about this strange and wonderfull game engine.

staircase27a 2021-05-01 08:54

@bw-devel Thanks for your comments and suggestions. Quite a few I basically just ran out of time for so had to leave out. I did decide to do a post jam version that had some improvements added in which should be available shortly.

* I did originally have the intro animation skippable but had to remove it as it didn't work and sadly I didn't have time to add it back in. I have added it into the post jam version. * There is already scoring of the routes in there when generating the mazes but it was still occasionally possible to generate impossible maps. I've made a post jam version that has a little more scoring in which should make it even less likely to be impossible but it may still occasionally be impossible. Doing a full calculating is really quite complicated to do with account for stone and the fire progress. * I did think about adding scoring but didn't want to put too much pressure on to be quick as it is meant to be hard quite a lot of the time, with quite a bit of the puzzle being working out if you can make it now or should you just carry on to get a better situation later. I have added a little bit of scoring in now however, which shows how many floors you took along with a different message depending on if you were amazing, good or bad. * Sadly, sounds is an area I don't have any skill in and when I'm already working to a reduced time limit, this wasn't the time to try it. However, I've been meaning to give it a go as a post jam version for a while now so I finally got around to it. The new version has sounds. Sadly it wouldn't be comp compatible as the sounds aren't ones I made and that would definitely still be a bit more skill than I currently have but definitely working towards it for a future jam. * There are numbers that show how much iron, pickaxe, potion and fragments you have. Personally I often find that easier to read quickly than progress bars or icons but I realise that doesn't suit everyone. I have added nice graphical indicators to go along with the text based ones and also changed it so it shows fractions of a pickaxe/potion and whole pickaxes/potions separately rather than as a single fraction.

@anthonyharmitage love2d is a brilliant engine to use especially if you need to be quick.

thegreenworm 2021-05-03 16:07

This is hard ! The fire is going so quickly, and since there aren't many branching path this becomes more a game of procgen luck than a game of skill. I like the different choices, like going a different path to get irons or potions. But the fire is spreading so quickly that I often didn't have the choice to go elswhere than to the exit.

Scrolls could have their number written on them, I tried picking up a scroll I already had without knowing that I couldn't (or even that scrolls had numbers)

Overall, good idea, but a bit hard !

karlhk 2021-05-03 17:10

I like the concept. As @bw-devel already pointed out, a progress bar to see how much speed/pickaxe you have left would have been a more pleasant indicator to have a glance at in the fast paced environment of the game. Overall, great work on making it playable in the limited time that was given.

lombax 2021-05-04 11:44

o.m.g..... that fragment number 2 was nowhere to be found. got duplicate after duplicate, probably looted close to 20 fragments or something before i finaly got fragment 2. nice catchup mechanic that you can kinda get ahead of the fire, and you use the extra time you saved to grab resources and fragments.

shimonster 2021-05-04 17:13

Cool concept. It was super hard though because sometimes there just wasn't a pat to get all the scrolls.

scalphamission 2021-05-04 17:40

Cool particle effects.

jacic 2021-05-04 18:58

Very nice! It's a little difficult, and the version I played had the above-mentioned bug of not being able to restart after losing. I really like the minimalist art, and the particles make a nice effect.

Well done!

morcado 2021-05-05 23:05

nice game, I got stuck in the labirynth many times, but generation can be improved. hope to see this in the future. ps: post-ld game is not found!, maybe you remove or it got removed

staircase27a 2021-05-06 07:34

@morcado Ooops. I had got the file names wrong when uploading. The links now work :smile:. the maze generation used the simplest algorithm possible due to time pressures. More branches and less random trailing around would have been better but required a more complicated algorithm.

Thanks everyone for you comments and the ratings. It was meant to be hard and the pressure of not knowing if you were heading to a fragment you already had was intended to make it even harder to decide when to go on or rush to a fragment.

gamescodedogs 2021-05-07 12:52

Interesting level generation system(sometimes it does strange things).A good game with non-zero difficulty

fueelin 2021-05-09 06:41

Nice game! There were a few moments where I had to make a tough call about which direction to go, whether I had time to get a power-up, etc. Ultimately I got to a level that seemed impossible to beat, which seemed too bad. Overall I liked it and thought it had a nice amount of depth. Good job!

kpded 2021-05-10 20:20

Very nice entry!

I like the difference in mechanics of supplies consumption, quite interesting idea. But seems like mazes could be with fragments unreachable before you die, so perhaps a little balance polish could be required