Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Necromancer 101
By ty-victorson and Austin C
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 1074 | 3.04 | 23 | |
| Fun | 1036 | 2.92 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 1099 | 2.69 | 23 | |
| Theme | 757 | 3.45 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 1052 | 2.52 | 23 | |
| Audio | 655 | 3.02 | 23 | |
| Humor | 316 | 3.50 | 22 | |
| Mood | 1146 | 2.64 | 23 |
Interesting concept, I just feel like the execution could have been better. The character movement speed was very slow which made me not really want to play past the first few wolf fights. The art style was also a bit confusing, it would have been better to stick to either a full 3D world or the 2D sprites. I did love the sound though, "Sound Effect.Wav" made me actually laught out loud :joy: Keep it up!
@chrisbeck I'm glad we were able to give you a laugh at least! We weren't sure what to do with the art style that would give us enough time to make things look good so ended up doing an experimental combo, I agree the player could be sped up I will make a post jam build to address this. Thanks for all the helpful feedback and thanks for playing!
A good foundation for the game, but still needs to be polished. Like from the very beginning I didn't understand what to do and I would like to have more speed. The sounds of fighting are quite funny
The game is very good, turn-based combat is good, with management of different statuses! Collection of minions to summon for the end! Fun sound effects! A little more victory feedback and balancing by creating a group system to prevent players from being attacked one by one by enemies. Great discovery thank you very much, keep it up!
WoolfSoundEffect.wav
Interesting concept with a fun turn-based combat system, but
This entry has a lot of potential. The ideas here are great and it seemed you guys had a great deal of fun making it. I think some things are overly complex and more effort than it worth.
The 3D world could have been left out, the interest of this game does not come from navigation, but of the feeling of growing your army of the undead and gaining power based on what you defeat. To make these decisions even clearer, having a 2D world (or at least fixed camera) with more confines would be better to clearly see a difference in challenge. For example: do you want to fight 3 wolves, or 1 knight and 1 assasin.
The combat also feels overly complex. Units have 2 different attacks, but one seems to be better than the other. So I would suggest not giving the player this choice. The interesting part here is not what you make your units do, but what kind of units you are putting on the field.
There are some other smaller UX improvmenets that would make the game much more smooth to play: - Have the targeter auto-select an enemy. - Have an "all attack" button. - Have my premake my army or a better UI to summon them, there are too many clicks before combat really starts. - Have the status effect icons be way clearer, and just skip the turn of the guys who are stunned. For this going 2D or pseudo 2D would have helped.
Its a lot of feedback, but I am only giving it because I had a good time, finished it to the end and I see a lot of potential here!
(PS: it seems you get the summon you select as default for free, so you get 2x of the first guy you come across, after getting the sword guy, I could stunlock everyone)
@chifu - thanks for the feedback! I ended up spending most of the time making the turn-based system so there wasn't much time left to make things clear in the world :sweat_smile:
@abominablescience - I'm glad you enjoyed the game! I completely forgot to throw in a victory sound! That would have been a great thing to have, I appreciate the feedback!
@sam-minh - I completely agree with your judgment on the world, I also felt something was off but didn't have the time to test out any alternatives. Those UX improvements were on the list, but we didn't have the time to get them all working, will definitely get them in for a more complete version! Thanks a ton for all the feedback I'm glad you had a good time!
It is an idea with potential. It just needs a little more work to be a good game. Good job!
The game was very fun !
I do agree with the feedbacks form Sam Minh, the game do lack a bit of polishing on the ux part, but it didn't stop me from having a great time at all, which definitly is a good sign.
I'd still like to emphasize on the "removing the 3d world" part, because I think it would not only help you simplify the ux, but it would also help building the mood of the game, which seems harder in its current state.
@baluj / @sevenso - I'm glad you both enjoyed the game! Thanks for the feedback!
I get what some of the others are saying, but I really enjoyed the games look as it is now. I thought the mix of of 2D drawings over the 3D world, sound effects, and wacky music did a great job of creating a fun mood.
Aside from some of the UX improvements others mentioned, I thought the combat system was great and had enough variety between the different units to have me rethinking my strategy as the battles got more difficult. Great job!
The game felt a little too easy but I do like the mechanics here. The actions could have all happened a little faster and the ui was mostly stock unity things. The gameplay is well done and the 3d environment is cool. Great entry!
Neat game! I like the concept of reanimating your enemies into a party a lot. Some good variety to the guys, and funny sound effects. Good job!
I'm going to contradict previous feedback and say that I actually really enjoyed the 3D world. I think if you gave the trees and buildings a bit of a cel-shaded look, it would blend nicely with the cartoony style of the billboard characters. The world felt very mid-2000's MMO to me, and I loved that. The encounter system, while appearing basic, also was fairly fleshed out. Spawning the battle in the 3D location where it actually happens is really cool.
I do agree however, with most of the other feedback given. The game actually has a good bit of potential. The turnbased JRPG combat is all there, just needs a bit more refining. Player felt glacially slow, especially going up and over that bridge, dear (necro)lord.
Overall the game felt pretty easy, I might have lost 1 basic skelly the entire playthrough. Due to gamer knowledge I kinda guessed what the status icons did (poison, stun, etc.), but I think some text describing what is going on might be beneficial in this scenario (damage output, health healed, status, etc.).
The idea of earning the units you defeat in battle is cool, but kinda felt like you needed one more mechanic to have the units be a resource instead of a collectible. So maybe if they died again, you would lose them permanently. In future versions you could even name units, almost like Darkest Dungeon.
Overall good job! But I swear if I "wolf sound effect. wav" one more god dang time...Cheers!
A really cool jam entry! Made me think back to all the time I've spent playing Chrono Trigger and old Final Fantasy titles. :D
I'm not sure I'd agree with others commenting that the mix of 2D and 3D didn't work. Sure, you could go for either a fully-2D or a fully-3D game (which would definitely be easier), but I think it could definitely work and make the game pretty interesting-looking. Right now the biggest problem with it is that they seem to have totally different aesthetic, but that's something that can be fixed with more time. I'll agree with the other sentiment, namely that the world is too big for the current method of travel and character speed.
I don't know if it's just a bug or an intended thing, but you can pull enemies from a group and defeat them one by one instead of having to fight the entire group. On one hand it is interesting, in that it makes you move more carefully, on the other I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a game about precision movement :P. It also makes the game ridiculously easy, especially given the fact your army gets fully replenished after every combat.
The game definitely needs a lot more player feedback. For someone familiar with jRPGs it should all feel pretty intuitive, but it still feels like you need to stumble into the right thing to do a couple of times. It wasn't really clear how the game works and what it wants you to do. For example, when I found a village with some enemies and an entry to the castle town, I didn't know whether it's better to keep going forward, or maybe explore the current area and build up your army first. In the end it turned out to not be needed. In a much bigger game it might be alright to leave such a thing for the player to discover, but I think in a jam game it should probably be more straight-forward. Kudos for putting two entrances to the town on both ends of the map, though, making sure the player definitely won't get lost! ;)
The turn-based combat works really well! The only issue with it I encountered was that I didn't always know when my summoned units would act - it feels like sometimes they could take action immediately within the same turn, and sometimes they were delayed by a turn. Not sure if there's a bug there, or it's just an issue with the lack of feedback. Other than that, it felt pretty nice! I enjoyed the large variety of different attacks and status effects, and all of them were pretty intuitive for me to quickly get what's useful in what situation.
necro.png
Oh, and one more thing - I liked that all the units had their own specific sound effects, that definitely made the game feel more complete. And bonus points for having the most realistic wolf sound effect ever. :D
Solid turn based combat, It was fun growing my army. I liked that the different units had their own sound effects, though wolf sound effect.wav was a bit much. The encounters were very easy though, there was not much strategy required to win which was a shame. Often encounters would only end up being with one opponent instead of the group they were in making it even easier. Moving around took far too long as movement speed was slow everything was really far apart. Stabby stab guy was the most useful.
I wasn't able to get to the gameplay, sadly. All I could find was the 3d open roaming part of the game.
Nice game! The mechanics feel quite deep, although little one sided. For example taunt on player side didn't seem to do anything and. Sometimes poison didn't seem to tick but there might have been something negating it. Also, auto targeting an enemy by default would be a nice quality of life feature. Then you could change the target if you wanted to. Targeting your team implies interesting skills that could be implemented in the future.
I'd probably change the movement velocity to static value instead of ramping up, now it feels little sluggish.
I like the sound effects and the battle music!
Good job!
Movement speed was way too slow for the size of the world. The graphics when it comes to lighting and textures could have used some more love as it felt like the realistic terrain textures and volumetric lighting clashed really hard with the look of the character. I like the idea of a 3D world with 2D characters like in Paper Mario, but the execution felt more like it was quickly slapped together than a deliberate art direction.
Of course this is ludum dare so there's never any time to really polish anything.
The combat had an impressive amount of work put into it, and while I didn't play long enough to unlock all the summons (due to the painfully slow walk speed), the fact that there are so many, each with unique attacks is very impressive. I did run into a glitch I think where the skeletons would attack the wolf that died and miss the living one even though I had it selected. It was also kind of confusing at first figuring out how to attack enemies. It wasn't clear that I had to click on the enemy to target them and that the order my summons would attack was fixed. Because of this I kept clicking and targeting my own skeletons trying to select them.