manabreak 2023-10-03 12:31
Cool mood here! I accidentally found a "safe spot" where I could stand pretty much unharmed :D I like the different weapons and enemies, as well as the audio cues that hinted about approaching enemies. Nice work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD54 → AnathemA
By 3mpty
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 48 | 4.23 | 48 | |
| Fun | 47 | 4.18 | 48 | |
| Innovation | 551 | 3.38 | 48 | |
| Theme | 381 | 3.90 | 48 | |
| Graphics | 73 | 4.47 | 48 | |
| Audio | 107 | 4.00 | 48 | |
| Mood | 2 | 4.62 | 50 |
Cool mood here! I accidentally found a "safe spot" where I could stand pretty much unharmed :D I like the different weapons and enemies, as well as the audio cues that hinted about approaching enemies. Nice work!
Love the art and the theme. The right click to aim is a bit clunky coupled with the reload. Very cool entry.
The enemy SFX are so creepy! All of the art choices make a very cohesive mood + aesthetic.
The difficulty is quite punishing, especially because there's no dodge mechanic and some of the enemies are simply so fast that you can't really avoid them. I think if you could regain a single heart of life each round that would also help with the difficulty curve.
Take this with a grain of salt - I have potato aim :wink:
@manabreak I'm shocked to hear that because enemies can freely pass through trees. Glad you enjoyed it!
@olenikimid thanks for your comment, most of my jam games are a bit too hard, I tried to get the curve a bit more gentle on this one but obviously still needs a little work ;) I'm glad you liked the sounds! Getting them to actually help determine enemy direction was actually quite tricky! I had to spawn fewer enemies north and south since its much harder to tell which direction they are coming from in that case, but generally I think it works well :)
Window pops up, it plays an initial sound, then crashes. Windows 11, RTX 3070.
Couldn't play it so didn't do ratings.
Good luck :8ball:
great little game but PLEASE put the controls in the description, i got mauled to death while trying to figure out how to shoot (i am not a very smart man), but anyways, i got my bearings the second time around and really enjoyed it, great artwork and sfx, overall a job well done, especially for a solo dev, i hope more people find it :)
@3mpty
[There are some other spatialization plugins that can work quite nicely for these purposes](https://designingsound.org/2018/03/29/lets-test-3d-audio-spatialization-plugins/)
I've played around mostly with the Oculus spatializer VST in Ableton (the VST is free) and I'm happy with the results. It takes some experimentation but it might be worth checking out.
Since there's no support for Godot this would probably mean making audio files for the 8 directions and then playing the correct one relative to wherever the player is. Even after that, it might still be a bit tricky for people who don't have headphones or have poor listening skills :sweat_smile:
(although it's a bit of work for not necessarily so much return on investment, it's at least what I would do :laughing: )
@ps1hagrid sorry! You can see I started to have input prompts and the aiming system was at the top of my list, but got bumped down due to some unforeseen problems towards the end of submission.
@olenikimid thanks for the link! I wonder how different this behaves from the built in directional sound in godot? I'll have a read, I need to learn more about sound in general, I'm very amateur at it still. EDIT: wow the videos alone are amazing. I need to learn this tech!
I like this. It's hard to get the ambience right in horror games, but you really nailed it! It was just a tad bit too dark on my monitor though, even when standing just around the campfire. But that is a small thing and the game is well made. Good job!
It was real creepy... and difficult... and dark...
I love it.
That's a lot of content for the game jam! Athmosphere and visuals are top notch
Love thee gameplay, visual, sound design. Controls are smoothe, progression is nice. Good one. Hard to read hp's.
It was beautiful! Sound design, graphics, gameplay are great! It looks like a complete game for me! I hope you release it soon!!!
Great game! I liked the mood and the Artwork. The difficulty felt not to easy but also not to hard. Sound design was also solid, pretty much nothing to complain about really.
Loved the art style, this game is awesome, it really got the darkwood vibes, just missed control explanation, had trouble figuring right click to aim, but maybe there was and i'm just blind ahahaha. Great Work!!!
Excellent game, very immersive. Reminds me of Darkwood. A bit too hard though and also it seems like the aiming is obsolete once you get hipfire perks. Also I kept getting stuck in trees. Damn trees.
Really enjoyable game, good job !
Mate, this was *cool*. I'll admit to going straight to the post-jam version because I was too curious to see how this ended up.
Love the artstyle and overall energy - the little chunks of writing added a great deal to the overall mood. "Always save one bullet" says so much. Reminded me of Cultic and Dusk a bit in equal measures.
Sound and feel was solid - first couple of guns felt nice and meaty, revolver a bit disappointing. Upgrade trees between nights was a great thing, especially for a jam game.
Would have loved a little walk animation to make the character seem a little less slidey.
Overall - love it. Super focused entry and a wild achievement for a jam.
Fantastic work. Graphics, sound, and gameplay all come together into something truly unsettling. First jam game that has ever truly made me panic!
The weapons feel really good, and the upgrades are nicely balanced. I felt like a God when I got Speedloader, and then basically immediately died - but it was still awesome.
I payed the OG jam version, and I don't think it's too dark - maybe I just have bright monitors or something.
Great entry.
Fantastic game, loved it! Would just like a small delay before the crabs skitter across the screen~
What an awesome, grungy jam game! It totally gave me Killing Floor 2 vibes, and I love the Gunslinger. The whole environment and mood was really well done, and the interludes added a lot to it. Really well done!
If I had to give one point of feedback, it would be that the enemies didn't always stand apart from the background well enough. Maybe you intended this to be part of the challenge (woods creatures blending into the woods).
The final score didn't stay long enough for me to grab a screen shot :)
_Note, I played version 1.01_
@hawkin thanks for playing :) enemy visibility while stationary is intentionally a bit hard, but it's a fine line between hard to spot and impossible...
1.02 has a gamma slider to make it a bit easier but even on the same brightness it would differ person to person. I think it's a bit of a cursed game design problem.
P.S. I'm an OG killing floor 1 fan which definitely indirectly inspires the enemy designs, at least philosophically. I'm a big fan of every enemy having a distinct flavor and purpose and I did my best to do that here :)
If there were a category for atmosphere, you'd instantly have won (mood +5 for sure). This all comes together so nicely. Difficulty ramping is perfect for a Jam, the weapons feel crunchy... I don't have much comments at all. One of my favorites !
a cool crimsonland in limited space game. feel like the game have a bit uncomfortable controls, but just a bit, it's good. a cool game. art and music are sexy
This game was very cool. I love the atmosphere and art style. The controls are nice, and it feels good. The difficulty is up there. It'd be interesting if there were more ways to dodge enemies or heal. But overall very good.
Awesome game! Visually absolutely stunning. Requiring the player to hold down the mouse button to be able to shoot is a a nice touch but also hampers the game play a bit... Maybe have that for very powerful weapons only. As an audio person I love the sound and music but the "footsteps" of the enemies becomes a bit chaotic.. I'd go with the law of 2 and a half and just switch to a loop once the enemies are "many".
Really nailed the ambiance on this one. Good job!
Thanks for submitting the game to the stream! If you wanted to watch it again in the future heres the vod timestamped to your game
https://youtu.be/OMFzVKOU-1I?si=c20IGrDtDCBon7sk&t=16950
I really love the theme, the darkness, the mood in general!! Congrats.
This game is oozing with the creepy mood! Pixel art is also lovely! The game upgrades are all interesting and no boring percentage stuff which you get in so many games. Fun little game!
I had an amazing time playing this game! Super impressive for a first godot game!!! For future reference, Godot can export to Linux super easily, so doing that would make it easier to play your game! (I did figure it out eventually :wink: )
Great game! Gritty atmosphere! Difficult, but with a nice progression. Didn't make it past level 7, but still had lots of fun. Good job!
(playing 1.02) very stylish and moody, it's really satisfying to pick off enemies in a chain - especially the stickbugs; i think they're the most fun to fight, the oops-all-stickbug wave was probably the most fun one.
i found the regular bugs to be the most annoying to fight, their quick stop-start movement combined with your slower aim turn-speed made it feel a little irksome, at least to me. (possible lack of gamer skill?)
i do agree with the others about the visibility, i played it both with a more regular gamma and with it cranked to max - i think it'd be a little nicer if the blood blended in with the background a bit more & if enemies looked a little less flat to the ground, maybe if they cast shadows, or had some kind of faint shadowing underneath them?
it's really impressive for a first godot game, idk how you managed to pull it off!
Damn, this game is so good. I saw a post from someone else recommending it among others, truly a game dev masterpiece on simplicity. With this game here you can teach a lesson on how to be simple and make myth with a small scope. This game taught me so much without having to say anything, without thousands of texts to read, etc., everything was quick and direct. Good graphics, good sounds too, totally on theme. My only criticism is that the difficulty seems very difficult at the beginning. The difficulty progression could be slower, I would like to last longer, but it is really difficult. It's a hardcore game, but it's very good. I'm learning a lot in this jam, about how to be simple because I always broaden the scope, but I think I'm starting to understand it. It will be?
Awesome!
Jezz, this game is so cool and addicting, the art style is insanely good, really set up the mood and overall atmosphere of a dark and perilous forest full of unknown monsters craving for your flesh and soul, definitely a solid 5-star for me! The audio is top notch also, that crawling sound of spiders really sends chills down my spine, and the gunshot sound is really crunchy and satisfying too.
I love the single-round reload mechanic for the guns, very well implemented, but it would be nice if some guns like the rifle and shotgun could be fired as soon as there's is at least 1 cartridge in the chamber, without waiting for all the cartridges to be loaded first in order to fire. Because it took a while to reload an empty rifle until it's full, in the meantime the enemies could have swarmed up and killed the player while they were waiting for the reload to finish. Giving the player an opportunity to shoot during reloading not only would it save them in some danger situations, but also made the reload more worthy and rewarding too.
Beside that, this is a really good entry, considering it being your first Godot game, I appreciated the effort you put into this little gem in such a short amount time of a Game Jam! Great job my man!
@constance thanks for the feedback! You can actually animation cancel reloads by aiming, but I probably should have just let you cancel with a normal fire if you have the hipfire perk for the associated weapon for consistency. The animation cancel has got many people killed as they were mashing M2 while trying to reload and never got a bullet in the chamber. I think a fix for this would be to have a reload progress bar on the cursor, but I didn't think of it before release :)
Thank you for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Hey, Iām the host of the Ludum Dare score chasers tournament for this jam
Wanted to ask for score chasers if you were fine with me playing some gameplay of your game in the background in the waiting period / intermission. In the waiting period its going to cycle between gameplay of a bunch of different games in the background (with music from games in the jam playing as well)
Great entry!!
The mood is perfectly set up. The graphics and audio synergize really well in creating a tense atmosphere. Sometimes the enemies are not really "fair" (too fast to be dodged) but it makes the game even scarier. The gun feels impactful, making the game addictive. Congrats!
that's fine with me @ategon
anathema.png
One thing I liked a lot is how each upgrade has some sort of flavor text :)
I suggest you to put the controls at least here on the LD page (you can edit it), because it took me a few tries until I found out it was "hold right button to aim, click left button to shoot" š
Wow, what a fantastic game. It's hard for me to believe that you accomplished all of this in such a short time frame. The controls were unintuitive to me at first and I actually had to dive into the comments to figure out how to play (you have to right-click to aim before firing with LMB if anyone's curious), but once I understood the controls the feel was top notch. Implementing a functional skill tree in this time frame is crazy, even if it is a rather simple one. And everything from the graphics to the sfx to the text between rounds contributes to a strong and singular mood. Overall, great job.
Yes another game by Godot! The game's dark and terrifying atmosphere is conveyed well through music and art! The fast-paced mechanics somehow really challenged me to beat the game cuz I wanted to prove that I could survive:/. I'm amazed that this well-done project including AI was completed in 3 days.
Really great game overall! The atmosphere was well created with the mix of the dark graphics and the spooky audio. It was difficult and you did feel the limited space without you forcing the theme too hard. I did get brutally killed at first and only figured out how to shoot after coming to the comments! I can see you added the "wasd" in game and you didn't have time to add the rest, nut please please add it to the game page as I feel like it would save idiots like me having to die many times then scroll through the comments!
I am actually terrible at games like this and did give up after a few attempts only getting as far as the fourth level on my best try but the gameplay that I did get to play seemed really good. The introduction of a new enemy was nice and the levels felt like they scaled well. I particularly liked the trade off between the slow relaods and actually firing which meant bullet conservation and reloading whenever possible was always something to think about.
I really like the graphics being dark with the red highlights, the visual cues of the aim were really nice and very useful. All art in between was also really nice and really fit the whole vibe. Sometimes, I feel like full art when actual gameplay is pixel art can sometimes be a little mismatched but this fit together very nicely. There was so much feedback to everything you did in the game which made it all so immersive. The shadows from the one light source made the whole background so dynamic with the constant moevemt. The visual feedback when firing was also very nice with the bright contrasting flash and the screen shake, the cape movement was a really nice touch as well, all of which really made the game feel very polished.
One tiny thing on the audio that could have made the game feel even more polished would be to have a little bit of pitch variation in the shots and damage taking sounds in particular. It's fairly easy to do in Godot but makes it feel a tiny bit less samey.
The UI was very cohesive in the levels as well as in between. The only thing with the UI in the levels would be that I wish it was little brighter since it blends into the background a bit too much so it takes a bit more effort to try to see my ammo and equipped weapon than I would like.
The game is also incredibly well written despite that not being the main focus of gameplay. I really love the wording of everything adding to the atmosphere and the flavour text for the upgrades as well.
Overall, an amazingly polished game that I wouldn't ever think was a jam game if I saw out in the wild. Everything comes together so nicely to create a great atmosphere and all the little details are very impressive!
@teto thank you for the in depth review! I am glad you liked the writing as I'm fairly shakey at it. I usually don't write at all so this was an experiment for me. There was a lot of editing of flavor text over the jam which I think helped, but even now I'm not fully happy with it. The only way to improve is practice though, and I'm pleased that it's received well :)
I'm impressed by how immersive the game is! You nailed the graphics and the audio. The enemies' movement felt pretty fluid, which increased the eeriness factor this game already had. Add to that, this is your first game in Godot! My only tiny criticism would be the reloading. It got me a little confused at first. I wish it were either automatic or the hint to press "R" wasn't a one time thing. Other than that, awesome entry!
I really like immersive games and I think this one nailed the immersion. I enjoyed the flavour text with each upgrade, the lighting contrast of the fire against the dark, the sound design on the enemies, and the jerky eeriness of the enemy movement. What teto said in terms of the graphics is pretty much what I thought. I played 1.01 to review it as it was on LDJam release, and the criticism I had was the lack of visibility of enemies was a little frustrating but reading what you said I see that 1.02 has a gamma slider so I'll probably check that out. I enjoy rougelikes like this and I think the presentation was done very well, it's kinda hard to add any new feedback when there's already over 2 weeks of feedback but just letting you know I enjoyed your game!
What a great game guys, I had a blast playing through it. I don't know how you managed, but even the audio was great, I could find enemies off sound alone.
No real feedbacks, I just found odd in my second playthrough to get the shotgun as a first upgrade when I already have it. That was the only odd thing I bumped into.
@ivan-b thanks for playing :)
that sounds like the upgrade store bug I fixed in 1.01, the store erroneously adds a rifle + shotgun + pistol to the perk pool every time you start a new run, even if they are already in there. This can actually make the game extremely hard if you keep dying because your pool of perks gets heavily diluted by pointless weapon unlocks you already have. Thankfully it was a fairly easy fix.
Good game! Great pick on the jam theme! Great atmosphere and design. But reload mechanics feels kinda non-informative, but it plays on the mood of the game. Well done!