FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Spring Summoner

Spring Summoner

By twist, ecb, Jacob Baum, adamag and tunagoo

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall5553.5831
Fun4843.5531
Innovation1703.8731
Theme2464.0831
Graphics9712.9831
Mood9233.1931

Comments

alex4101 2024-04-16 01:32

Love this game! It was fast-paced and very fun to play. Loved the worm that appeared at the end and the power-ups. Great work!

beauchama 2024-04-16 01:33

Very nice game! :D

zerocomms 2024-04-16 01:36

The swiping is really neat, couldn't get the final ally to spawn though.

mcmuniz 2024-04-16 01:39

Wow great job for a first jam! Really love the concept and having to draw symbols to summon! I was having a ton of fun playing it and its been the game I've spent the most time on so far!

There were a few times I died unexpectedly, it might've been due to enemies spawning? I think I saw one of the scarab things crawl out of the ground and get me? If it is them spawning, I feel like a small delay between them spawning and when they can damage or kill could help

Regardless, great job!

shasaur 2024-04-16 01:51

Pretty nice; a complete, fun, and challenging game with a cool concept :)

jlv 2024-04-16 02:54

Really cool take on the theme! The game is pretty tight and feels polished, especially for a first entry. I really liked that you took the time to add custom sound effects, as well as the enemy variety. Great job!

t-c 2024-04-16 04:29

Cool game! I agree with the previous comments, a job well done. I like the movement and the idea behind the summons. It'd be nice if there was some better visual clarity between your allies and your enemies. Also, it kept appearing I lost, but my healthbar was still almost full? So definitely spending some time in future games working on player feedback would be good! The draw to summon mechanic was really neat. I struggled with any summons besides just a single straight line, though. Overall very neat! Good scaling difficulty, and nice risk reward going further from the oasis to spread more vegetation. Good work!

bluepir 2024-04-16 04:50

A really clever mechanic for a first ever jam!! Really cool! Found myself a little confused on what I'm doing wrong sometimes, but that may be a me problem :p Incredible work!

blackcat508 2024-04-16 04:53

controls where nice and simple, easy concept to understand and start playing!

tykki19 2024-04-16 04:55

Interesting idea for the game which is supported with lovely name. When I understood to walk it was really interesting and I really felt the ground crumbling!

tesseus 2024-04-16 04:58

Nice atmospheric experience! I liked the control scheme a lot, but I found it hard to use unfortunately. Gathering power-ups was hyping me up :)

albatross 2024-04-16 05:03

The swipe controls were very cool! I feel like this would make a great mobile game if it were developed more.

kilthorne 2024-04-16 05:19

Mechanics were solid, but needed a little cleaning up. Kind of like a more involved vampire survivors

nash 2024-04-16 09:39

Very interesting twist to the Vampire Survivor genre. And quite solid implementation as well - especially for your first jam.

I did not really wrap my head around how moving affects the shapes you are drawing. It seems that most of the time they did not work (i.e. did not summon anything) but sometimes I managed to get something out so it was slightly inconsistent.

It would have been cool to be able to learn all designs in game. Either via a book of some sort or, even better, organically in game. But it is natural that you do not have time to make everything perfect during a jam. If you keep developing this, I would consider let the player find all designs by themselves!

But overall, great work! Looking forward to seeing you in future jams!

pusheeneiro 2024-04-16 10:28

The gesture mechanics are a great idea

tunagoo 2024-04-16 18:19

Thank you all for the feedback!

@mcmuniz @t-c There is a bug to update the HP bar when you get one-shot :( Good idea to add i-frames to enemy spawns to prevent player damage

@bluepir @zerocomms @tesseus @nash @kilthorne Apologies here! We should have made it more forgiving to make gestures. Unfortunately, the patterns are based on cursor position rather than the particles. I would suggest staying in the top third of the screen for the ¬ shape, middle third for the -, and bottom third for the ƨ. Here is how you can do the ƨ-pattern.

63316.png

@nash That's a great idea! It would be cool to discover as you go. Here is more transparency on the current mechanics in the game.

#### Boss

- The boss comes at 20,000 score - You need to kill the boss to win the game

#### Glyph leveling - Increase it by making consecutive accurate gestures (above 75%) - You are down-leveled to the previous level breakpoint if an inaccurate gesture is made - There are level breakpoints every 10 glyph levels

#### Scaling

- Environment: - The rate of scaling depends on how much grass has been created - Enemies are scaled each difficulty breakpoint ex. 1,2,3,4... - Player: - The player and their summons are scaled every glyph level breakpoint ex. 10,20,30,40...

impalpable 2024-04-16 21:20

Thank you for sharing the resources including the gesture training - it's really interesting to see how you did it (I wanted to do something similar but did not know where to start). The mechanic to draw is quite unique, and it was really fast paced. For me personally it faster reactions than I have (but I am slow lol) but could be very cool on the phone/tablet/touch device, even VR! I really loved the illustration style of the game and animation, and I think it was a bit different!

parkuhrmd 2024-04-16 21:47

Thanks for joining the stream! For your first jam game, this is great, keep at it!

breakfastgun 2024-04-17 00:24

That was pretty fun, albeit a tad difficult. Good job!

tunagoo 2024-04-17 01:26

Thanks! @breakfastgun It's probably because the scaling broke :(. I have no idea why it only works on certain conditions. The post-jam version on github.io caps the difficulty.

schwede 2024-04-17 15:19

It was a treat to have you demonstrate your game in the stream, thanks for that!

mongoose-59 2024-04-18 02:38

it can be a bit obtuse at first, but i think with some deveoplment this colud be a really cool game, the main idea is new to me