Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Vocatio
By Joost, brandsma, mantsje, Kaviso and SJM
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 289 | 3.84 | 46 | |
| Fun | 193 | 3.90 | 46 | |
| Innovation | 307 | 3.68 | 46 | |
| Theme | 133 | 4.25 | 45 | |
| Graphics | 556 | 3.76 | 47 | |
| Humor | 434 | 3.29 | 44 | |
| Mood | 867 | 3.27 | 46 |
I actually really enjoyed this! A classic format with a spell drawing twist. Love the rough pixel sprites, and all the fun enemies and their animations. I could never draw the star though, I don't the time or brain capacity for that...
Great idea with fun enemies. I laughed so hard at the priests
Great game overall and the drawing mechanic is well done ! The mario on scoots killed me lol
Nice concept, I'm impressed you got gesture recognition working so well. It was fun but it's tuned a bit too difficult for me. Could use more time to read the chapters and learn the spells, and I couldn't work out how to deal with the moped marios on chapter 2 :(
Fun to hear you all had a good time. As is tradition with gamejams some things were a bit last minute and could use some polish indeed!
Overall the difficulty for us as developers is still there as well, especially the third level is really hard :)
Gesture recognition works really good, best working version in my opinion from the whole game jam. Game looks and plays nice
Have a nice game jam!
Your game is very interesting! Although I have tried many games with similar mechanics (as we call them VampireSurvivor-like games here), Vocatio still brings me a sense of freshness and tension!
BTW, the Mario riding a motorcycle really made me laugh lol.
Fun game! I really liked the art, especially the level 3 floor tiles and enemies! Clever take on the survivor-like genre, getting the player to draw each spell. Great entry, well done :)
Difficult for me but it's super fun! Because I used a digital board instead of a mouse when I played this game, I felt the whole board was almost on fire xD
Those bears, rather cute pose! Also what are those 4 black boxes at start? Neat game-play, a nice spin on the survivor like genre indeed. I loved the art-style and the general aesthetic a lot, good choices. Splendid work overall and thanks for the linux build! :smiley:
Very fun, didn't expect to see Mario on the bike and got myself killed because I laughed haha !
@aly-name that should show some gifs/videos of the tutorial showing how to draw spells. We saw this in a Web build too. Mind telling us which platform you're playing on? We tested both MacOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows and those seem to work fine.
It shows should show the gifs in our description basically :)
Oh, snap! How did you guys pull off this level of awesomeness? It's so mind-blowing, I'm genuinely flabbergasted. Did you seriously whip this up in just 72 hours??? Your game mechanics are super polished, like, 'hold my controller while I master this addiction' level of good. This game is so fire, I can't get enough of it. Kudos on the epic win, I'm totally digging it!
Liked the game! If I could give some feedback it would be about the issue with meaningful choices. I tried to have a run where I would only spam one spell and it just worked, which hints at unfair balance of the spells! Other than that, great idea =)
Fun game, only thing that bothered me was that if I was moving I couldn't cast my spell unless my wizard was still
Hi! amazing game, cool drawing attack mechanic and Mario was the cherry on top. Thanks
Super well done ! I bet that it wasn't easy to handle the mouse gesture but it works great, art is cool, core gameplay as well, and I laughed at the mario on scooter guys. With a bit more time I bet it could be a great standalone game
Nice game, your draw mechanic work well, and I've loved the mario bike enemy, that made my laugh. It was just a bit to difficult for me (skill issue).
Hi there, I like the game and experience, however I think the mechanic isn't working well with my input device (have a trackball) and I didn't beat the game. But I do like the humor around and extra like for a hand sprite with a book - it's amazing :D
Mario's got some moves
That was pretty funny, I liked the game. I think a better tutorial would go far because it's a bit stressful to memorize all those spells with 10 seconds, but I remembered 3 of them so it was fine.
Also the cutscenes between waves went by super fast so I couldn't read the text - maybe that is a computer-specific problem with faster/slower FPS.
Nice job overall, I had fun!
edit: here I am just now realizing the spells are also in the bottom right
Solid, classic game design. Great input detection considering the variance you have to work with for spell drawing. Loved the different enemy sprites, very Zombies At My Neighbors which is of course the GOAT. A very clean, solid entry, congratulations!
Spot on graphics and intensity. Mechanics are solid. summoning was charming, even though it was hard and hectic. xD I kept dying. Lots. So much. So much dying.
The accuracy of the recognition is impressive, having upwards of 95% accuracy in the game, great work! I'm curious if the detection is related to where you start drawing though, I've found when drawing ☆ and Λ that changing the order of the strokes (e.g. start drawing ☆ from across) seems to make the game not detect them. Overall a great game!
What an interesting game! The combination of two control methods really aligns with my understanding of the summoning theme.
Oh I am really enjoying in playing this, but mario scooter just gets me done, well, play. :smile:
oh no! No web export! If you are using Godot as I did, you might have had the same problem I had with the HTML export. To fix the problem I had when uploading it to itch.io in the "Frame options" section I had to check the "SharedArrayBuffer support — (Experimental)" option. After I did that my game started working correctly with the web export. Please let me know if you manage to upload the HTML export and I will definitely give it a try! Have a nice jam!
Oh man I made it to the final level but could not survive :sweat_smile: I love the controls for this! Reminds me of playing Black & White with the spells in that, and this felt like it had better recognition! It did feel like there might have been a cooldown on some of the spells? I think that would have been a neat mechanic to show visually like in MMO hotbars how each spell has a countdown or bar timer before it can be used again, that would also encourage using different spells more! I could also see having some buff spells in there add a lot of playstyle choices too like a simple heal, magic shield or a knockback AOE blast!
Good stuff! I struggled a bit at first drawing some of the symbols but eventually got the hang of it. Fun game
Please explain the presence of Mario lookalikes on scooters on level 2.
@ursagames yeah even for us developers it's quite a hard game! We thought of all these concepts for different spells too, but in true gamejam fashion had to cut a lot of things from our scope :/
The pentagram gives a heal though ;)
About your request for cooldown timers, we did have that! I think (at least lvl 1) should have proper cooldowns with effects and everything but somehow the UI got borked and now in later levels it is somehow gone :s Something easy to fix I'm sure but not at 02:00 AM on a monday when the deadline is at 03:00
Thanks for the feedback though, definitely a good suggestion!
@moonlightbomber what is there to explain? xD It's rome, nice little plaza, there are old guys, vespa-like scooters, and then of course Mario. Seems logical to me :smile:
Despite a bug forcing my character to move automatically towards the upper left corner, I have really enjoyed this take on bullet heavens. The summon and run mechanics work really well together.
Nice game, I had a hard time making pentagrams and some of the cutscenes wouldn't work, but overall nice experience, it's a fun concept
Cool idea of casting spells by drawing them, seen it quite a few times in this jam but it's always cool. Graphics are nice too. I also have some feedback/bugs to report. The scrolling text also exposes the HTML tags like while it's still typing them, which is probably unintentional. Noticeable in Level 1 intro. I also wish the tutorial stayed for a bit longer. I was still trying to figure out how to draw the shapes properly as they weren't getting detected (this might've been my skill issue and not the game), but then I had no more cheat sheet just after one level. I also wish you could see cooldowns in levels other than just one. I also had a hard time running away and also drawing perfect circles or arrows to cast spells. I saw some games have a slow-mo mode when casting spells, maybe that could work here? As I mentioned above, I did have issues with the gesture recognition, but it could be that I just can't draw, and not a game issue.
Good job on the game though, it's cool!
Nice game, I like the gesture casting system which is very forgiving (my stars were terrible). Nice graphics, excellent work!
Cool game and the gesture detection worked suprisingly well. In the tutorial there was not enought time to learn the spells and I did not have time to read the books in between chapters. Also every levels seems to be "level 2".