Game of the Name

captaindreamcast 2024-04-15 17:05

What a cool take on the theme!

Just entering names of your friends and something for the eldritch monsters and seeing which of your friends is truly worth his salt during a fight with cthulhu was hilarious. Reminds me of these popular hunger games simulator games that were going around a while back, in that it has that quality where you want to share around screenshots of it to your friends to show them proof that they would get oneshotted against [wingdings name here]. Had a great time with this, I went multiple rounds until I found my winning team. Super cool sophisticated system you made here with the name distance and the powers too, again, I think it's really an impressive take on the theme. Had a great time with this game, awesome job!

owtuvammo 2024-04-15 22:15

My friend Ian was pretty solid, but no match for girlfriend Alli in the center. Fun take.

wubbaduck 2024-04-16 01:11

Apparently "your mom" is a tough being to defeat! Go figure :wink: Fun take on the theme. Well done.

sariiger 2024-04-16 07:05

Really neat concept! Got me curious if the strongest team could defeat the strongest summonable boss. I'll need to experiment with some team compositions.

jdeedubs 2024-04-17 21:20

Really inspired design!

I like how robust the system you designed is; it's a very cool sandbox to experiment in. it is a familiar but unexpected take on the theme, and makes for a wicked smart game. All of the UI is clean and effective, and really helps to express how much work you've put in beneath the hood. That being said, I never came remotely close to beating the eldritch being. I found myself hoping for a bit more guidance on the player's part: Maybe a sum of power, or some sort of feedback for coordinating damage types?

Very cool ideas in this game. Thanks for sharing them!

adam-gould 2024-04-17 21:23

Hah! That was fun trying to come up with the "deadliest" sounding names for my summoners. Finally managed to beat the enemy called "A lil guy" with an army of huge names that had lots of fire in them. Great fun.

thebigjut 2024-04-22 03:26

Very fun concept! It was fun trying to think of names that would synergize well with each other. My MVP ended up being my healer, Leif. I like how you can hover over elements of the UI to get an explanation of what they do. Obviously some music would have been nice, but otherwise great job and thanks for sharing!

zungryware 2024-04-22 05:32

This is a really neat concept! I love the discovery that can come from these sorts of systems, where you write down the names of your best guys to use in future fights.

My main complaint is that there are a lot of things to look at for each beast you summon. It would be nice if there were more visual representations of the stats. Like making the font size for a particular stat get larger if that stat has a higher number assigned to it and giving the special abilities visual symbols that represent their functionality. That would make it a bit easier to understand how my typing is affecting the beast's stats in real time.

Nice work!

burnedkirby 2024-04-24 03:42

I think its pretty brave to use Vulkan for a Ludum Dare Compo entry, well done. Feels like a sandbox game where you set up the pieces and watch them fight. Kind of curious about the heuristics about the names, but I guess it's based on the letters? Neat concept. Good work!

alvaroromeral 2024-04-24 07:35

Interesting game! Its good to see people focus more on mechanics than visual you end up with original concepts like this, good job!

dyingwolfwood 2024-04-24 16:57

Great game! It took me a few run throughs to get a win, but I made it happen! :)

josang1567 2024-05-02 08:32

Good game quite hard at the beggining

animawish 2024-05-03 03:36

Really cool gimmick, I love the simple and elegant design of the "arena" with your party around a pentagram. The variety of stats is neat and I love the monster designs. Great job!

zinkler 2024-05-03 20:04

First of all, loved it! Still, I've given it four runs and didn't win a single one, no matter how much I've tried to buff myself and debuff the boss. Either there's a balance problem, or I get overwhelmed by the amount of info I need to keep track of.

I really like the idea, giving the power to the name, showing this difference between giving a letter name to people or a glyph name to a monster. I had this awesome experience of writing a glyph name so long that it didn't fit into the screen, but we kept chanting, until we found a name that granted him a low hp value.

I suggest you go for some simplification, maybe finding a way to somehow show the Levenshtein distance (if I understood its' usage correctly) directly to the player, for example by coloring the last letters based on it, maybe switching from letters to syllables. I think this would be great as an arena game, where you summon the demons stronger and stronger still to stand against your squad of better and better optimized characters, maybe with a leaderboard or a story progression. Really like it

kaliuresis 2024-05-03 23:09

@zinkler Thanks for the kind words! I tested the game again after reading your comment. It's possible to beat most of the bosses, but I think I tuned things too much based on the strongest team setups. A few of the abilities are only useful if you plan around them, and can be detrimental otherwise, so the average random team is pretty bad. If I had time to tune things I probably would make those more rare and make simpler abilities that are always useful more common.

I love that experience you had summoning the boss. Things like that are exactly what I was hoping for :)

Better visualization was definitely something I wanted that I had to cut for time. My original idea for that was to have a word cloud showing you the strongest matching words, so you would be able to see words grow and shrink as you type. Combining some of the elements so you have less you need to look would also probably have been good.