iguanana 2022-10-02 19:51
The art is wonderful, and I love the idea. The music is a bit too quiet, but when I cranked it up it sounded great. :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Blade To Blade
By jibberwocky
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 96 | 3.77 | 33 | |
| Fun | 198 | 3.41 | 33 | |
| Innovation | 83 | 3.76 | 32 | |
| Theme | 245 | 3.56 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 65 | 4.06 | 33 | |
| Audio | 86 | 3.68 | 32 | |
| Humor | 56 | 3.66 | 33 | |
| Mood | 40 | 3.91 | 32 |
The art is wonderful, and I love the idea. The music is a bit too quiet, but when I cranked it up it sounded great. :)
@iguanana haha it was deafening while I was testing it so I kept turning it down. Maybe I need to check my headphones.
Fun idea! I'd love to see it expanded upon. The style kind of reminds me of the old rotoscoped games, but a much nicer color palette. I'm going to give it a few more tries with some different strategies.
@davidbradbury It's weirdly well future-proofed to add new dialog and new duelists so if I feel inspired post jam I might expand it somewhat.The color palette is https://lospec.com/palette-list/aap-64 so yeah not something those older games would have access to :grin:
Very cute artwork. I love the exaggerated drama, its quite comedic :laughing:
Matches the theme very well: 10 seconds is a long time when it's a matter of life or death! I beat the game, but I'm not sure I could read the emotions of the opponent effectively.
The art style is good; the music fits the stage. If I were to nitpick, I would change the costume slightly between characters, and maybe their hair colour.
I really like the concept, the art, and the melodrama. Unfortunately I'm really bad and only succeeded in getting one hit on the opponent. Im not sure if I missed something but I never figured it out. The how to play feels explanatory but I cannot see a direct correlation between the dialog and the fight when I was playing. I really like the combination you have, aesthetically, and im 90% sure the particles indicate mood but I somehow manage to get an even number of each type every time so not super useful. If you wanted to tailor to a more, ah bad, audience you could try adding an indicator on each dialog to show which they will effect. Regardless even though I did poorly I enjoyed it, really gave me those Princess Bride "You killed my father" vibes.
Ha Ha .. most of the games 10 seconds is a little, this game it is a lot. Nice graphics, atmosphere,mode and music.
Good Job!
Nice expansion of monkey islands sword fighting. I was not really sure what did different dialog options did. Really liked the look and use of the theme. Expanding this and fighting your way to victory would be cool.
This is such a cute concept, and it let me live my escapist fantasy of flirting melodramatically on a cliff. This feels like it could be a minigame in a dating sim.
I definitely had to read the instructions to understand how to play (thank you for including instructions!) but after that it was much easier to understand. The emotion icons coming out from the enemy were really helpful for reminding me what I had done previously, and I liked that some responses had mixed emotions to them to make it a bit more interesting.
The dialog was adorable. I kept trying to extend the fight to see how much there was :)
Loved this! I hope I found all of the endings. Very nice touch of showing the emotions.
Happy to see that non-violence was an option :] Very polished little game
Great art and concept. The mechanics work solidly! I'm not sure if the game was supposed to immediatelly get me back to the main menu after i clicked on "demoralize", but aside from that, very good stuff!
Very nice idea. The art is really good. My only gripe is that there wasn't enough time to properly read the dialogues. Also not very sure what the dialogue choices were doing :D but I managed to win my first few playthroughs. Lucky?? Overall very solid and well polished game. Even the style of the menus was really on point. Well done!
super neat idea! Based on the source code, it looks like your opponent still mostly chooses their move at random, but with some weighting based on their current emotion? I think that makes it a little less interesting to choose my move, since I'll always go with the option that has the highest *chance* of scoring a hit - but whether or not it actually does is totally out of my control. I'd love to see this concept expanded on, though. I think there's real potential for a dueling game where taunting or admiring your foe is just as important as making the right sword maneuvers.
11/10, Great work!
I played this until I had every ending, which was a little longer than it should have been because I mistook fear for guilt/self-doubt
Cool game, cool art, who doesnt like a duel?
I really adore the art style, very impressive! :)
This is really good, great use of the theme! That father-murdering former friend of mine keeps stabbing me to death though
I felt bad choosing the meanest dialog so I could parry him :D Great game!
@nyxkn Yeah the time was something I went back and forth on over the 48 hours. on reflection 10 seconds is not long enough to read some of the longer ones especially if English is a second language or something. Probably should have been 15-30 but hopefully I get some credit for strictly sticking to the theme :shrug:
@nicholas-maddalena The formula for opponent's choice is a pretty simple random roll to pick each option based on the ratios of each emotion (so 2 affection, 1 fear, 1 anger gives them a 50% chance of waiting, and 25% chance for each of thrust and parry).
It starts off fairly evenly random (even odds of chance of each option) but your choices quickly add up (I believe you can get to ~70% chance for opponent to thrust just from the first dialog) and you can even reduce the chance of up to two of the options to zero (although I think it's much easier to just win or die before that). I think the main problem is with the particles being the only indicator it's still quite opaque how those things are adding up and equating to the weighting, so still difficult to predict the opponent. I'm curious if you're suggesting doing something more deterministic? because that might have been the way to go but weighted randomness was easier to quickly implement.
@lone-wolf and @swen thanks for playing through to all the endings :smile:, I tried to make it as quick and smooth to start over so people could quickly find them all. @actuallythemoon that's why clicking on the victory popup takes you instantly back the main menu, also I didn't have much time for more animations.
Really nice game! I loved the concept & your take on the theme. The different endings were also really cool. The opponent felt relatively predictable to me after the first dialog - when I went for the affection route, for example, they only attacked once - but maybe I just got lucky. I didn't really get what matching the dialog & action did (I only noticed the box highlighting while replaying for this comment), but other than that, great entry!
Took me a bit to get the hang of it but pretty fun once I did. Being affectionate to then use that to thrust repeatedly and kill the opponent did make me feel horrible! Overall great entry, an original take on the theme
The constraint of the 10 seconds sometimes make reading difficult, but otherwise it is super fun! It reminded me of the sword fights in Monkey Island, but with more depth. It's really cool to have multiple endings too.
This is so delightfully pretty and I really enjoy your writing. I wish there was more! Definite shades of Monkey Island (and the duels of Suikoden II) but you put your own fun twist on it. I'd love to see the story expanded.
From a gameplay perspective, I liked how the menus/option selection handled a lot (you really have an eye for this), but at the same time I didn't have the greatest sense for how my choices were affecting the game, even after I played through it a few times. Overall, you used the theme effectively to make something special and I'm glad I played this. Thanks!
There is a feeling of old amstrad cpc game ! :thumbsup:
I loved the vibe and idea of this game! It was really hard to correlate dialogue to actions, but I feel like trial and error should be part of it, so not sure where the balance is. So cool!
Great concept and writing. We enjoyed finding all the endings.
My only issue was readability: the combination of the font, outline and size makes it hard on the eyes imo. The UI could be smaller when playing on full screen desktop (it does make for a good mobile view now though I imagine). Also, I'd like to be able to skip waiting for the 10 seconds to end when already picked my actions (have an explicit `Wait` action instead), alternatively you could add some ramping up sound effect to make it feel less like a wait and more like the anticipation of the incoming action.
Just some daydreaming here but maybe it would be cool to have the gameloop and text be a bit more temporal and dynamic, like the characters start moving towards each other, the enemy shouts their line onto the screen (appearing at their head vibrating or something depending on their moral), time slows down as your choices to respond appear, you similarly shout your line when picking it and when you click your combat action the clash happens instantly.
Anyways, this is a lovely entry and I think you should try making it into something a bit longer like a series of highly dramatic duels between different characters which could branch out depending on who won which fight, so you couldn't really lose it just access different paths of the story. This could make some free narrative motivations depending on who killed who ;)
Monkey Island vibes, there! fun but a little hard to understand! Nice entry!