2024-04-16 11:26
Great game ! Love the idea, awesome art. However it's not balanced and it lacks of feedbacks.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Shay’s Goldem Mob
By kyunru, krisss-gonko, Zomo, Prepe and 20GOTO10
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 928 | 3.25 | 35 | |
| Fun | 746 | 3.28 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 907 | 3.00 | 35 | |
| Theme | 372 | 3.93 | 35 | |
| Graphics | 496 | 3.84 | 35 | |
| Humor | 782 | 2.67 | 30 | |
| Mood | 870 | 3.26 | 30 |
Great game ! Love the idea, awesome art. However it's not balanced and it lacks of feedbacks.
Reminds me a bit of brotato but without the autofire. Maybe the game needs some balancing optimization because I got overrun by golems, or Im just bad at the game. The summoned companions are a nice use of the theme and also a cool idea but they seemed a bit underpowered to me. However, I had fun and it was a good entry.
Very good graphics that were easy on the eyes and fun summoning mechanics to use against the enemies, the music was really calming aswell and enjoyable! The only problem I had was that were were always too many enemies spawning at once and they surround you and you can't move after that and basically instantly die because theyre all damaging you faster than you can kill them, it would also be nice if there were health bars on the enemies aswell so you could see how close they are to dying so you could focus on the damaged ones instead, both other than that this was a really nice game! good job!
The artwork and art direction in general is gorgeous. Love the concept and really enjoy the themeing. Definitely needs a bit of balancing but overall very good. Great job!
Having companions in a game like this is great! I just wish we could summon more than one, even if it pronably will break the balance
Nice, a bit hard not to get overrun, unless I'm just bad at it, but nice idea :) and fun to play while it lasted :)
The art style is very cute and charming, with great designs for the characters. I really enjoyed the music track. I felt the game would benefit greatly from some feedback when your attack hits one of the enemies, both audio and visible, as it wasn't always clear to me if I was successfully hitting them or not. I agree with the above commenter that the balance is leaning a bit of the more difficult side, but it was an enjoyable game :)
@telkan you can have more than 1 summon out. You are only limited to summon 1 at a time, but once the summoning is done you can summon another if you have the soules for it.
@hollowbeargames yea we where working on more feedback, but didn't had the time to implement it fully jam stuff and all.
Thanks to the rest for all the nice comments, and yes the balancing is a bit off as we didn't want the players to be able to just spawn an army and steamrole up to wave 1000. Still in this version you can have an army and be nearly invincible at wave 8 and if you keep up the summoning you prob could go on until the game crashes due to to many mobs. I stopped summoning at wave 14-16 and survived up to wave 30 without summoning or moveing at that point.
At start it looks like a simple aggro game but then you discover that there is many abilities and you have to use them because without that there is no way to survive.
Liked the graphics :)
You are really great! The game turned out great!
Love the amount of process work you all put on this post, it's always great to see peoples thoughts a bit more in detail.
I absolutely love main character art! Music is also very charming. Difficulty ramped up a little bit too fast for my taste but overall I had a fun time.
The Good: - Very cute art, especially love the main character - The summoning mechanic is interesting, especially the different arrows used to buff them. - really like the music.
The Not So Good: - Lack of feedback. The enemies are too bullet spongy and this is made worse by the fact that there is no feedback telling me if I am doing damage (same goes for taking damage) - The background was cute, but the solid yellow was straining on my eyes. - A bit too easy to end up just swarmed and unable to move or do anything.
Design Notes: The game really has a lot of potential, I think the above notes on feedback are the biggest design changes I would make. When I played the tutorial the first few hits I thought I had completely missed the enemy.
It was really unclear to me in my brief playthrough the differences between the golems. Again with the feedback I had no indicator that the golems were doing anything.
When the player is hit I would recommend some kind of knockback effect or i-frames, that way it's possible to escape from being swarmed and locked down in place. The general difficulty could be tweaked as well, I felt like my game was over really quickly because I was overwhelmed.
TL;DR Really cute art, a fun concept with a lot of potential, needs some polish and maybe a little bit less yellow.
The game was fun, cute art, and maybe a bit too difficult. I managed to get to wave 8 and couldnt defeat enemies with normal attacks anymore. I also wish I understood the buffing mechanic. I spammed buttons and nothing had seemed to work. Otherwise pretty good baseline though.
@nycoisdreaming spamming buttons is excatly what messed you up there. I recomend using the tutorial to farm some souls and then practice the summoning.
@iellswo Sry for the late response, yesterday I was busy balancing the game a bit, and I wanted to give the response the time it needs.
Most of the things you listed where on our radar as we knew that we lack a lot of feedback for the player, but right now we can't add these functions as this would be against the rules of the jam. We where even debating on the balancing of the game. The changes we made for the balance where quiet minimal and we think you can argue that this falls under the umbrella of "not working as expected" part of the exceptions. We would have also liked to add a bit more information to the summons inside the tutorial level, but that would have been to much of a change for now.
We had a few problems with the engine and where not able to address these problems as we needed to fix more important stuff and the balancing and feedback fell a bit short due to this. As this was the first time we worked with Godot, we still need to learn most of the do's and donot's of the engine, but in the name of my team I thank you for the detailed feedback.
@prepe oh yeah, for sure, the fact that anything playable exists at the end of 72 hours is a feat and a miracle in and of itself. I hope I didn't come off as too negative or nitpicky, but when I do play and review these I try to be as thorough as possible.
The whole team should be super proud of what you accomplished, and I can definitely understand the hiccups of using a new engine (on my team I was the only one who had used Godot before, and I was focused more on art and design than programming), but I hope you had a good experience with it, Godot is awesome.
@iellswo No not at all, i appreciate the greate feedback, even if we already where aware of some of it. I still hope you had fun playing our game.
It's an interesting concept and I like the game. Good job!
Nice game and a really great tutorial. A tutorial is a very rare thing to see in a game jam, especially such a short one. Like the others I missed feedback a bit and I would have liked to see a death animation for the golems, maybe also a kind of "get out of jail" card, because when I was surrounded by golems, I couldn't move anymore. Overall good job.
@roburab The tutoral was a last minute job, so I am happy you like it. Basically it was thrown togetter in the last few hours as we recognized without one the players would just be lost, it is still missing some information. This we could see on the first day as some streamers played it and of course skipped the tutorial and failed to get very far.
As for the getting traped I will look into that on the weekend, but the fix for that probably will not make it into the game until the Jam is done with the rating. I know it is probably going to be something trivial but right now I have no clue what I need to do so Godot will allow us to collide with the golems and still allow the player to push them. In Unity I would give the player more Mass/Weight but I have not found a setting for that in Godot.
I am also already working on more feedback for the hits on the Golems, but these changes are also after the rating as they would add stuff and that would be against the rules. Probably going to be a red flash for taking damage and a short slowdown or stop.
The thing that bothers me most is the missing Z Axis handling in the game. This is why shots can pass behind golems without hitting them. But that is a 2.5D problem that should have been handled from the beginning and we forgot to °_°'
Good game. Cute art (I like the character) and good music. The gameplay is pretty fit with the theme (summoning allies,...) and simple shooting system. I think there should be more feedbacks (for hitting enemy, get damaged, summon effect) to make the game more juicy. Sometimes I didn't notice that I have summoned the enemy or getting damaged. Anyways, good job! :D
Cute game! The tutorial was a great touch, and the art was really nice. I think a hit sound and animation (like enemies flashing on hit) would go a really long way. It was a little tricky to see what my golems were doing.
@maymay thank you for the feedback, in fact we have already added more feedback like a small flash when you or a golem takes dmg, as well as a small slowdown, but due to the jam ruels to updated these changes will only get applied after the rating period is over. We also have changed the player so he can push araound all golems to eliminate the risk of getting swarmed and stuck.
I LOVED the graphics. I love how cute it was. Felt like I was in a color pencil drawing! Love cute games with this sort of esthetic! However I do have a couple of suggestions.
1) Thee monsters seem to ramp up in numbers REALLY fast. Faster than I can have hope of dealing with any of them before an even bigger wave hits me. Maybe tinker with that a little?
2) Audio seemed to be a bit high in the db and was making my sound all staticky. Maybe turn it down a little, or put a volume slider in.
Otherwise, VERY cute game. Well done team! ^-^
Cute graphics! Would be nice if enemies took damage every time they damaged me so they'd eventually go away and I wouldn't get stuck in a mob. How am I supposed to press the arrow keys to boost summons when I'm using WASD to run away and the mouse to shoot? I can see a lot more potential in a fleshed-out version of this where you have different situational summon types to help you out.
@flyingkaida have you been only summoning or have you been buffing your summons? The game should be balanced that if you do not use the buffing mechanic you will die around wave 12-15. I will look into the sound issue.
@koboldskeep the reason you use the arrow keys to buff is so you stop shooting. It is a risk-reward mechanic. If you just summon you lose a lot of potential for your summons, but in order to survive you need to buff them. Also as mentioned 2 comment ago, we already have implemented that you can push around other entities, but uploading this change now would go against the rules of the jam.
I thank you both for your feedback.
The game was visually great, very polished given just how little time you would have had to implement them. The audio works very well with the aesthetic of the game, and having a playable tutorial with any game makes it super easy to pick and just get started! I will cover some of the drawbacks which I don't think anyone else covered below:
Aiming was difficult as shots fire from center of your character which is not precisely in the center of the screen (it's where the feet start), meaning unless my cursor was directly pointing exactly where I wanted I would frequently miss as the shots would go high/low.
Trying to manage a mouse for aiming and shooting, WASD for movement, arrow keys for buffing, and 123 for summons meant that my hands were all over the place meaning quickly got overrun. An alternative input schemes would be hugely welcome. Scroll wheel to select summon with RMB to summon then maybe switch WASD to buffs would limit having too many controls to manage, alternatively use QE to cycle summons with RMB to summon, or QE to switch between move and buffing. Just something to limit the hand movements XD
Very cool entry though!
@kjscott yea the controlls are a bit overloaded, but we had to splitt up the buffing and movement. Grouning you just because you wanted to summon a golem would get you killed really fast. The summoning selection with QE or Srollwheel + RMB is a good idea, maybe SHIFT + WASD would act like ARROW KEYS. The aiming is a thorn in my eye anyway as we did not hanlde the Z-Axis, which as it turns out, is a huge mistake in a 2.5D game.