Heartless Forever

robowarrior1982 2024-04-16 07:03

Amazing ! The content is insane for a 72h gamejam game ! - Lot of high quality sprites, lot of differents monsters. - The music is very good and it change with the environnement ! - The tile is a bit repetitive but the map is huge so it's logic, about that there is no map or minimap to see the player location. It's easy to be lost. - The pathfinding of the ennemies in general is not very good, and it's easy to cheat to kill them (see my picture). What happened when the times come to 0 ? Apocalypse demon appear, so i don't have luck i'm in a cavern when he arrived and it was difficult to me to dodge it. But this is really an overtall 5/5 entry for this Ludum Dare ! PS : I've played on the web version and my game become laggy when i arrived in the spider-cultist cavern. heartlessitre.jpg

Found an exit in the desert, i can walk around the room. gate0tre.jpg

tokarts 2024-04-16 19:16

So many monsters, so many power-ups - in so many places!

Fun core gameplay, great art and music, just a shame the background is so sparse in contrast. Feels like you tried to accomplish too much and simply ran out of time.

Great submission overall, tho!

jcmonkey 2024-04-16 19:42

if there is a way to fix the character getting stuck on the walls. maybe have the character slide down walls and not get stuck. other then that this was a really fun submision. nice job!

semenov 2024-04-17 18:53

Definitely one of the most fun games. I played similar games at a jam, but the opponents were too difficult. It's demotivating. This game has good balance.

zyntist 2024-04-18 01:29

Man this game is amazing, hope you keep polishing it and I'm definitely activating notifications of this chat. I want to play the final version!!

negator2vc 2024-04-18 21:39

Excellent game. Very good art, lots of different enemies. I just wish the minions provided a little more challenge to the player. Good job nonetheless!

mr-field 2024-04-20 21:13

A lot of fun, pretty good balancing for a jam game - it's impressive that you managed to pack in so many unique enemies, each with their own little death animations, although I assume that ate a lot of the time that would've been spent on the presently semi-abstract (and surprisingly huge) world map.

Despite the worlds patchiness & sticky collision, I spent a good amount of time just exploring around looking for new items after defeating the boss, which i found to be a pushover by the time it arrived, I'd only stopped because (running on firefox at least) the game began to get pretty laggy, especially around areas with darkness.

Really fantastic music, I wasn't expecting it to be so groovy.

psv-games-studio 2024-05-03 00:58

Nice game! Good job!

lildyll 2024-05-03 03:40

Super cool! I love the art especially the icon in the top left lol.

lachlan-james 2024-05-03 03:47

Wow, this was tight man! Really satisfying loop - loved the progression through biomes and the different 'soul powers' that came with it. Art was awesome, as was music - loved it. Not sure if it was rendering issues or what, but were the undead enemies meant to be coming out of matte black squares...?

Also - loved the atmospheric start with the vignette. Really nice touch to set the mood.

steffo 2024-05-03 04:38

A w e s o m e !

Is the source code available anywhere, by chance? I'd love to inspect it!

derpmeowmeow 2024-05-03 06:20

The game is super fun and entertaining!

apoly 2024-05-03 07:11

I really liked this one. Music is spot on, especially that it reacts to what is going on, a lot of different abilities (which I only discovered how to use *after* I've killed the final boss), different zones, enemies, it's really cool what you've achieved!

Some possible improvements: collisions for both yourself (it gets frustrating) and enemies, allow to hold a button (or even auto-fire?) to use different abilities(?), more volume to sfx, music is cool, but you barely can hear what is going on (maybe that's good?).

Overall it's a solid entry, I spent several full runs on it trying to get the grip of the core game, great job!

kjscott 2024-05-03 09:24

Probably just my computer, but until I plugged in an external mouse (as I was using inbuilt mouse) I could just not get the touchpad to work properly. When I finally plugged in a mouse it finally worked properly. Really cool game, I'm just going to bookmark this as I would like to play a lot more of this!

jokku 2024-05-03 15:50

Hit animations and sounds were great! It's really satisfying to shoot those daggers. I would have loved to see some 2D lighting effects but unlit is a style too :) Enemy sprite work was great but in comparison world tiles could use a little more detail. Great work!🙂

dragonayzer 2024-05-03 15:52

I like the game! I really-really do! The graphics work amazingly well, and the audio is decent (although I had to turn the volume down, as OST was rather loud)

But there's a slight issue of some lag spikes in some locations, and darkness indoors felt weird and not fun.

Was the game supposed to continue after defeating the last boss? It felt slightly weird to have no ending nor at least some kind of "you won!" pop-up or mark in the right bar.

Other than these (small) issues, there was a bigger issue of getting stuck in the walls - that's how my run of vacuuming stuff post-boss ended, to be honest.

Still, I really liked what I played, and I wish I could explore more. Any plans on having a post-LD version?

petitcoke 2024-05-03 16:12

I love this but how do I defeat the demon without running away at the same time. Very cool art style and I enjoyed playing the game

frankiesmileshow 2024-05-03 16:28

Thank you all for the comments!

@dragonayzer I ran out of time yeah, slapped on the final boss like 2 hours before the end and didnt have time to do an ending screen. There was also meant to be an ending if you walk out of the map, like you "escaped", but also didnt have the time! Welp! Also, yes Ive been working on a post-LD version since the jam ended! Been streaming that on my twitch at - https://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow

@jokku Yeah, I didnt want to dedicate time messing with light and dark stuff for the jam, but ill probably make fancier visual effects for the final game.

@apoly Thanks! Yeah the big map full of content was what I was going for, I love exploration in games, though it was probably a bit too ambitious.

@mr-field Actually the biggest timesink was the map itself, was a huge mess to tile and set collisions for in a short time. Biggest regret for the jam was that I had the map maybe like 30% too big, game would have probably been way more polished if I hadnt gone that far. Another big timesink was not having a good enough setup to quickly import all these assets for the monsters, a lot of time was wasted just doing the most basic asset cropping, importing and enemy setup, let alone giving them unique features. I feel like a slightly smarter setup to quickly go from drawing the art to them being in-game might have saved me like 2-3 hours I could have spent on polish.

@tokarts Yeah its a real shame about the background - I actually spent a lot of time drawing tiles for it, but didnt have time to actually place them other than the strict minimum to tell the floors, walls and different biomes apart. Probably like 4-5 hours wasted on assets that didnt make it into the actual build! Whoops