yellowrain 2024-04-16 12:41
summon Animals
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Spirit Stone's Summon
By ausstein and Puchkupyara
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 457 | 3.68 | 35 | |
| Fun | 244 | 3.81 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 361 | 3.60 | 35 | |
| Theme | 281 | 4.04 | 36 | |
| Mood | 679 | 3.47 | 36 |
summon Animals
very nice game with a lot of potential :) Really nice idea and the different mechanics work well together. Only criticism I have is that the balance feels a little off. If you get plants early its easy, but sometimes you just get only expensive animals at the beginning and no plants to generate spirits. Also the scope of this game is really big for the time of the jam, which make its even more impressive
Great, I wanted to spend the day looking at and rating games, but after playing this, I have to find myself a copy of a game I played back ages ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZanZarah:_The_Hidden_Portal) and completely forgot about until I played ~~New Unity Project (3)~~ Spirit Stones's Summon. :D
I'm actually lacking criticism here; balancing has already been named (but in 3 days and by only two people... nah, it's fine the way it is) and the only other thing I'd change to make it stick out more is to make the UI a little less generic by using some art or a font/color that is less intrusive. Also, I'd put the casting costs below the pictures of summons so that all text elements are close to the edges of the screen while everything non-text is concentrated in the middle of the screen. And I'd scale down the Level-Up-UI just enough so that it doesn't interfere with the other UI elements - it'll make it look more like a coherent instead of two different things. It currently reminds me a little of old-school CRPG- or MMORPG-UI where you could just absolutely clutter your screen with windows though, which is a little blast from the past as well. :)
That being said: Very nice entry. Games that makes me want to play more of it (or similar things) are always winners in my book.
Good concept, well executed. Really like the artstyle of the different creatures, especially the player character. Always got sad when my bunny got killed. The concept of planting stuff as an "investment" to increase energy intake to become stronger is well done, although I didnt quite get it at first, collected the energy from the dead stuff around me and immediately summoned a mushroom for 20*. That's a fail on my part though and doesn't take away from the game.
But I do agree with the previous comments, the balance is a bit off. Got the choice to go for the 100* Deer, which would have been cool to summon, but way too expensive at that point. The bunny became pretty weak very quickly and unless you summon a lot of plants in the beginning, you'll have a bad time. The music was nice and calming, but some more menacing soundeffect e.g. for when the wave starts would have been nice. A bit odd to have calming music when you're seconds away from being overrun by spiders and snakes :D
Loved the little intro. Even though it was simple, I let out an audible gasp at the prospect of all of the forest life having been killed. Really felt that one :D
Overall a strong entry! Well done! :)
I love this art style! the FX and everything looked really beautiful. Nice job! :D
Its balanced really well and for 3 days you did amazing!
Please can you vote on my game too? :)
I *love* to see more fairy games. :D We need more of them. Well done, I really love the concept.
This game has a lot of potential, it is a very stand out entry. I love the idea and execution, though I do feel that the game heavily favours getting a plant besides grass early into the game.
I really like the aesthetics, graphics, and music. This game definitely requires some work on balance but overall it is a very good job!
Really nice entry, i loved the idea of protecting the forest being a fairy. I think the progression in these kind of games is really difficult to achieve, i felt i was doing poorly in the early game and then after one of the waves i struggled and in the late game i was unstoppable with my tigers and foxes.
I completed the game and it got me engaged till the end. As othes mentioned here it could be interesting to explore the idea a bit further with more waves, scenarios and upgrades.
Overall a great entry!
Very nice game!
Took me a while to understand that we could either gather the orbs ourselves to get mana or let them flow to the spirit stone to get experience! Yeah, it's written in the description but I expected both to do the same thing. :D
I feel like the summons are too weak compared to our basic projectile spell that can be used to kill everything for the first 8 waves at least, especially when they are VERY expensive. Being able to win without summoning anything is sad!
The levelup choices should probably be less random, being able to select a 2000 energy summon at level 1 is useless! I only unlocked the rabbit after my 3rd game, I had no idea it existed before. It's also possible to unlock the tree before the mushroom, which is weird.
Instead of having 3 random choices, we could select between unlocking the next summon (rabbit -> fox -> ...), unlocking the next gathering plant (mushroom -> tree -> ...) or a random upgrade (move speed, less cooldowns...).
Overall a good game, just not very balanced or polished yet!
(I love that the executable is called "New Unity Project (3)" :'D)
The first impression was not great, an archive to download (eh I'm lazy), a game named "New Unity Project (3)" then for some reason while playing I did not have any UI until I pressed escape, so I was very confused.
But I tried again, in hard, and I got the hang of it. It was actually quite fun. I won my second try with a few mushrooms by sending projectiles constantly as I thought summons were not worth it. But I tried AGAIN a 3rd time, focusing on early farming behind the crystal and I won with only summons this time.
It's not a very original concept but it works and I had fun so I'd say it's a success in the end!
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It's an interesting concept. Good job!
Need some optimisation, but the idea is great!
This was genuinely the most fun I've had so far this jam. UI and balance could be improved, but there's a lot of space for expansion here. Good job!
I like it! Really nice gameplay, I like VFXs and I think that game has a good potential 👍
love the concept and the art style.
Overall, really fun. At first, the UI seemed to not be showing up... but once it did, the game started to make a lot more sense. I enjoyed the farming aspect of it as well as the creature summoning component. Really fun way to do the summoning rather than something dark. This had a nice, positive vibe. I think I'm going to play through it again. Good work!
It's definitely a good game, it was interesting to use the mechanics of alternating energy between the character and the crystal, I missed more interesting summons and more powers to cast, the balance of the game is a bit fragile, but it's a very small detail to a jam game. The audios not being in the right layers drove me a little crazy. It needs some polish, but it's a lot of fun until you become a walking powerhouse.
Apologies for all the rough feedback on stream, I hope it came off as helpful rather than negative, but regardless, I wanted to give some further thoughts that I wasn’t able to express. A game of this length really needs safety nets, in my run it felt like one small thing went wrong and irreparably ruined an otherwise very strong run. If enemies would take damage when hurting plants for example, then they could only destroy so much of your base and would give the player a chance to learn from that.
And with the structure of waves, there isn’t much feedback given to the player. I would suggest speeding up the enemies or spawning them closer, then wait for all enemies to die before starting the next wave. This way I can see that uh oh, my base barely made it through this wave, I need to go on an upgrade frenzy! And I can quickly see that lots of enemies are getting through on the right, so maybe I need more defense there. But because it took so long for enemies to reach the base, by the time I’d realised my base had these issues, there was simply too many enemies piled up that there was no chance for me to respond.
Anywho, hopefully this is useful, I have a hard time explaining my thoughts in the moment, which is why the feedback given in the stream felt so scattershot. Good luck with your future games! :heart:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2126502001
Absolutely perfect, I spent there like an hour and I want more! You really need to polish this and release. The mechanics was perfect polished, the currency was balanced, the monsters was interesting, this is 5/5 no doubt. Keep it up, please, me and my team really want to see the final result. Thank you for this beautiful entry!
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Nice entry. I enjoyed playing it.
Interesting mix of a third-person perspective and tower defense game; I'm echoing most of the other comments here on things like game balance, lack of clarity in some objectives, and personally I think in-game, the orbs either being collected by you or going to the stone for exp was not clear to me. It's pretty enjoyable overall, but just addressing a few of those points would make this much stronger for me. Nice job overall!
Lovely game! I really appreciate the variety of different spells, animals, enemies and upgrades.
I would prefer if tutorial messages didn't obstruct the list of spells. At first, I didn't even realize that it's there. But once I figured out how to play, it was very fun!
Great job! Good luck with your future projects!
I returned to ludum games rates and today I get that your game is the only one that I really like to play many times again=)
A really pleasant surprise! I loved the concept; it's a bit addictive... Maybe I should consider changing jobs to become a gardener... In 3D well done ! 😄
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A few things I noticed: - After reaching the full bar and acquiring all passives, there’s nothing to gain on leveling up. It would be cool to have an infinite upgrade passive system. - I can't click on "Keep playing" 🙃 - I've experienced some minor freezing (on downloaded version, on RTX 3080 Ti)
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@roman-dubrovin thank you so much I love it 💕