FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Vampire Summoners

Vampire Summoners

By denismarasan

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall8463.3353
Fun7393.2953
Innovation8553.0653
Theme7123.5153
Humor6092.9851
Mood11022.8052

Comments

almalewis 2024-04-16 11:32

A fun but challenging game. Dynamite really liked it!

thesecondleft 2024-04-16 20:43

It's a funny concept. At first you forget to create your own enemies and get bored. Then, once there were few, you start creating many, and realize that you can't cope with such a crowd anymore Do not like that the number of monsters created randomly and does not depend on the time spent in the game (as much as noticed) Not enough balance. If you spam enemies, they do not have time to attack you, while you farm a lot of points with dynamite and ball, and then quickly get away from them. You can gain a lot of points this way The graphics, however, are a bit hard on the eyes. I see a bilinear filter instead of point no filter. Blurred pixels as opposed to sharp text pixels

kira777 2024-04-17 07:54

cool concept, great game to play solo!

xoreaxeax 2024-04-17 08:02

Cool idea that leads to interesting game mechanics!

abominablescience 2024-04-17 08:03

It's a nice proposition, but the gameplay is sorely lacking in balance, for a game where the aim is to collect as many points as possible. With a little more work, this game could offer something good. A good achievement, especially on its own, but all the basics are there! Thank you and keep up the good work!

ned-murry 2024-04-17 08:14

Good fun! I think the core idea is really great. I enjoyed being able to balance my own difficulty - starting off slow and summoning more at once to try for a high score. Slightly more attention to detail would have gone a long way: seeing how long until the bomb explodes, a more clear indication of enemy health and how they attack you, and maybe a wider camera to keep track of more enemies at once. I felt like I was walking around randomly - anywhere the enemies weren't. The fruit was a good incentive, and maybe pickups to reduce cooldowns or increase health could help even more. Overall, this was a really fun game.

nubels 2024-04-17 08:16

I like your twist on the classic survivor formula. Well done!

ashia 2024-04-17 17:20

вау! я в восторге от этой игры, она полноценная и очень интересная, очень круто что игрок сам может контролировать ее сложность и количество врагов, а перезаряжаемые способности подстегивают к составлению тактики. так же стоит уделить внимание качественному арту и приятным звукам и музыке. таердая пятерка этому проекту!

antonion 2024-04-17 18:46

Good mechanics mix! Interesting theme interpretation)

andrewbyte 2024-04-18 09:57

Good game. I like that enemies have reaction on hitting them. That is what our team failed to implement in time. Good job!

ungarblapp 2024-04-18 20:45

I like it! good mechanics and nice animation and art style! Great Work!

risminator 2024-04-18 23:31

The idea is certainly something! Challenge that the players can decide for themselves - I love maintaining the balance between summoning enough enemies to get a lot of points and not getting overwhelmed by them.

dekisenpaitm 2024-04-19 07:10

Love the idea that I can challenge myself haha:

baseball.png

Here's something I'd like to point out:

- The music is very loud and if you hit multiple enemies it can get painfully load haha - I would love to see some upgrades like bigger blast radius or faster swings

Overall a very cool game & a nice twist on the survival genre : DD

cheesepencil 2024-04-19 16:32

`70,500` haha this was great

The pixel art was really charming, I found myself playing longer than I would have - I don't typically like this style of game but I found this one engaging.

bit-flipz 2024-04-20 13:55

Screenshot 2024-04-20 094752.png Really great concept to let the player control how many enemies should appear, and a perfect fit for the theme. The attack abilities were designed well so that if you do summon lots of enemies you get a good payoff by being able to hit more with a single attack. I kind of wished there was some sort of incentive of levelling up or getting upgrades outside of just going for the highest score, but otherwise a great game. I also made a vampire survivor-like game, however it is a very different take on it than yours. If you are interested, here's the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/unstable-elementals

teddyreid 2024-04-20 14:03

Nice entry!

The movement controller felt fine, was able to be pretty nimble in my efforts to avoid the bad guys, and only got caught when I got too cocky and spammed RMB too many times.

I think the abilities are nice conceptually, but I would have reduced the cooldown on the LMB attack to be basically 0 and nerfed it's damage to compensate. The feeling of doing constant DPS in these kinds of games really adds to the juciness.

aivaxela 2024-04-20 14:14

interesting take on the vampire survivors genre! kinda reminded me of those tower defense games where you could choose to send new waves early for extra challenge.

madr 2024-04-20 14:36

Very nice! Loved the possibility to summon the enemies and the visuals looked great!

vivid-hallucination 2024-04-20 18:12

Fun twist on a survivors style game. It's interesting trying to find a balance on number of enemies to maximize score but avoiding becoming overwhelmed. Solid entry!

denismarasan 2024-04-20 18:32

> but I would have reduced the cooldown on the LMB attack to be basically 0 and nerfed it’s damage to compensate. The feeling of doing constant DPS in these kinds of games really adds to the juciness.

Maybe you're right, but I want to add a point.

The selection of LMB ability cooldown wasn't easy. I tried reducing it, but the less it was, the more it needed to change from "on mouse down" to "on mouse hold". Coz otherwise the player is forced to spam-click the LMB, which doesn't feel right to me.

The problem is that playing with LMB pressed down continuously didn't feel right either. IMHO there's something that you should continuously spam-click or hold down, it should be at least automatic. Like all the attacks in Vampire Survivors. Why? Because it's not a choice anymore, just an muscle activity. And I personally like choices.

So I ended up with melee auto-attack and a LMB attack with a rather long cooldown. So that the player could press LMB periodically.

Instead I tuned cooldowns in such a way that you can activate TNT, summon enemies, use LMB to fight your way from enemies if you get surrounded, and then use LMB again while TNT is still on cooldown. Then, after TNT is ready, repeat this tactic over and over again. That is using the LMB ability for defense (to break out of encirclement after summoning enemies for the sake of higher score) and attack (to get more score points).

Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate it :thumbsup:

thomas-gelman 2024-04-20 18:52

Fun little game! cool that you get to decide when the waves come, so you can pace yourself however you feel like you need to. Ended up spamming right click just to see what would happen and I couldn't be happier with the amount of enemies on screen at once! Good job!

spexxilove 2024-04-21 15:03

interesting concept to have to make your own difficulty basically. I think it just doubled the enemies every time I clicked which was a bit much but I'm not sure. I managed to get them stuck between things so they can't get to me and I can just kill others with lmb. got a few million points that way^^

anton-florey 2024-04-21 15:20

This is a very interesting idea. I like the pixel art and death animations of enemies a lot! My best strategy so far is to spawn as many enemies as possible and then hiding between objects to kill as many enemies as I can before I die. Got a score of 1m with this

netguy204 2024-04-21 16:29

Very solid survivor-like. The UI didn't sell me on how raising the stakes helped me so I didn't. If there was a very visible multiplier pressuring me to press my luck more it would help.

denismarasan 2024-04-21 16:33

@netguy204 good point, btw.

mortith 2024-04-21 18:29

Easy to understand, good vibe and the summoning mechanic is great, i can challenge myself with big waves or play safely wave by wave ^^

scrapmetal 2024-04-21 19:58

It's an interesting concept... and the art is super cool!

I was a little unclear on what the swipe effects meant that kept appearing next to me...

And maybe I missed it, but wished I had some short range or melee ability I could use in a pinch, along with the timer abilities.

Great entry!

buloz 2024-04-22 21:55

nice devepolement

thelastslowpoke 2024-04-23 13:31

Hahah, that's a fun idea for a game! Let me try again. Przechwytywanie.PNG Damn, the scaling is crazy. It's totally possible to go for 10 million. Funny strat I used - spawn more enemies just before the dynamite blows up under a horde following you, and have your ball and run ready to get away from those new enemies. A million a minute, just don't take heavy hits. Awesome game, great work!

(edit: It just so happens that I had to try a few more times, but couldn't actually survive the whole 5 minutes that way, always made some mistake Przechwytywanie.PNG )

denismarasan 2024-04-24 05:58

@thelastslowpoke that's exactly how it is supposed to be played :thumbsup: Great job cracking the optimal strategy!

digital-bacon 2024-04-24 21:41

Interesting game. I like the switch in summoning enemies instead of something helpful. Nice graphics. Seemed to run into a bug where the timer ran down to "1s" and stayed there; never got the game over screen.

Good work!

denismarasan 2024-04-25 08:04

@digital-bacon yeah, my bad! Fixed now!

myse 2024-05-03 23:30

Super fun! I got like 195.000 so I was pretty bad lol. Probably because I didn't quite understand how to use the ability on shift though