hoeleboele 2024-04-15 08:36
Nice game! Amazing sounds did you make them all yourself? :O
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Capture the Princess
By vidim888
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 247 | 3.20 | 32 | |
| Fun | 196 | 3.31 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 253 | 3.03 | 32 | |
| Theme | 219 | 3.41 | 32 | |
| Graphics | 326 | 2.56 | 32 | |
| Audio | 222 | 2.87 | 30 | |
| Humor | 171 | 2.89 | 31 | |
| Mood | 308 | 2.64 | 30 |
Nice game! Amazing sounds did you make them all yourself? :O
Good job ! Nice voice acting too !
@hoeleboele Thank you! Yes, indeed, I made it all myself - just recorded myself doing funny sounds. Glad it turned out good
@robowarrior1982 Thank you!
It's like capture the flag, except with romance and and other team is raiding your castle! It was really fun, and surprisingly difficult. I couldn't figure out a strategy to win, got tips?
@binroot You're right on the nose about capture the flag! In the beginning AI was actually also trying to steal the princess from you (the first draft had you stealing tacos from each-other lol), but it was too easy to counter chads with just a single warrior and I could make AI do the same and then it becomes completely impossible to win for both sides and I dropped the idea - it could work with many different unit types and maybe some unit level-ups etc., but out of the scope for a game jam.
Don't be discouraged by higher difficulties - I'm a hardcore gamer so very hard and impossible are exactly that - I can barely win 1 out of 10 on Very Hard and couldn't win Impossible :'D
For Normal and Hard - The energy growth goes up slowly (for both you and enemy) so it's important to get Princess at least a little bit closer before the whole middle part of battlefield is just a line of warriors fighting. Send Chads from bottom/top side early on so you can move Princess a bit closer for later. Keep the fighting line a bit closer to yourself so you can surround enemy warriors as well as send Chads behind the line. Also good start is to collect some extra energy and ambush early attackers with multiple warriors so yours lose less hp in a fight.
Very Easy and Easy shouldn't be a problem, but if it is you should be able to just quickly overwhelm your opponent with higher warrior count and start sending Chads immediately. Those can be won really fast with only 1 chad bringing Princess back and warriors fighting off the opposition if you get lucky with enemy spawns.
If you want to tackle Very Hard I have a couple of tips, but it's quite luck based on the beginning (whose warrior hits first in a fight and spawn locations). So far I was able to win it a couple of times by letting opponent really close to the Shield and then trying to spawn my warriors right after enemies hit my shield so I know they are on a cooldown. This way you get a couple of first hits in and might even kill a couple if you're lucky enough. Then you should slowly turn the tides by spending all the energy on fighting off warriors. When the fight is stable start sending some chads to start bringing princess closer. And here is when you need luck again because if you get unlucky and enemies spawn next to Chad then you just wasted 100 energy. But it is possible.
Impossible I have not been able to win, but it should actually be possible with similar strategy as I just described with Very Hard, it's just very-very-very hard :D
I actually thought about adding tips like that under Win/Lose message so people might get a better understanding of how the game works, but postponed it so much that ended up not having enough time to implement it. So thank you for asking, now I have a chance to write this out!
Amazing game! It somehow evokes WW1 for me. Clever little flanking maneuvers at the start but then both sides get bogged down and it becomes an attrition war as ludicrous numbers of soldiers fight for every inch of ground. I also liked all the difficulty options, the demo/instructions scene at the start, and of course the sound effects. Very innovative all around!
@noobman64 Thank you for the kind words! It's an interesting comparison, but you're not wrong. The fact that game becomes close to unwinnable when it goes for too long is kind of a design problem, but I tried to make the fight satisfying to look at so even when player gets stuck in this state it's still fun to look at :)
Very fun game mechanic, like a dota ctf style thing. Definite tactics involved, I ended up using some chads as almost blocking or distractions so I could get one through to start moving the princess and using the warriors to maintain overall control of the field. I did have to turn down the difficulty though, even at normal I found it really hard!
Great game!
@magnusfurcifer I do have a tendency to make my games too difficult, that's why I added difficulty settings. I'm glad you were able to enjoy it!
Nice! Turns into a bit of an idle clicker at some point. But what a blood bath! I does seem a bit unwinnable though. Maybe my strategy is just off. Sound effects were hilarious. Especially chad :joy: Well done.
Great job! Love the AI swarm and fun little game complete with funny audio. Noice. ⚔️
I don't know why but I really got stressed when my chads were stunned :smile: Got'em at the end. Very nice entry. I wished for more unit types but fun as is. Gj!
[Screenshot 2024-04-16 093655.png](///raw/673/94/z/637c5.png)
@wubbaduck @byazzle Thank you! If fights go for too long, they are indeed very hard to win. I tend to restart myself if I don't win fast enough
@chuckiee Thank you and great job! At the start I wanted to have more units for sure - giants, mages, archers, golems, you name it - I had ideas for implementation. There is so much to add for different archetypes of units. But when I added just Chads and Warriors, it wasn't fun at all at first.
I had to add a lot of tiny things into the battle system for it to look and feel nice - bounciness, targeting, stuns, random delay before hits etc. And when I made battle system good it was a bit past the 24h mark so I chose to not add any more units, but just to polish everything around those 2 units - so I added sounds, blood splatters, background fighting when you start the game, pause, difficulties and fix bugs.
I learnt from my previous game jams is that if you're missing many QoL features people are gonna call you out on these and rightfully so. I decided this times to spend a large amount of time just polishing the heck out of the game and I felt that I got it once I added background fighting and it was just satisfying to look at :)
Fun concept, very challenging! It took me about 10 tries to finally beat it on normal mode!!
Great game. Short but very precise, you were efficient with your time and I like that about the game. And as ancient as saving a princess is, it feels oddly refreshing doing it in the game.
Bruh :D
This game is so silly :D just an absolute slaughterhouse of a frontline while a bunch of chads try to yoink the princess one step at a time. Very amusing :D
@lightningst @mohammed-kapiel @frib Thank you all for the kind words! Mohammed I'm not sure if you're saving the princess, but I guess it's open to interpretation :sweat_smile:
- Interesting concept, blood for the blood gods - After the line was formed it became very difficult to get the chards anywhere as they would be blocked, maybe have the units die a little faster, and maybe the warriors could respond to chads with a slight delay. Also the chads sometimes picked up the princes and put her down, and sometimes when picking the princess and dying I think they moved her further away. - The game started to lag after the screen got filled with units - I'm not sure about the difficulty mattering, I beat it on normal after what felt like a considerable amount of time, and launched on very easy, but after a minute it didn't seem to differ from the normal mode, just that the enemies started spawning slightly later, but if you won at the very beginning there wouldn't be much of a game in there anyway.
I really liked this game! You guys are great!
@ellaris Thank you for the feedback! I hope you enjoyed the game :) To answer a couple of things: - The line forming in the middle making it hard to get the princess is partly a design problem, partly a design decision. It creates a problem of not being able to win after some time, but it makes a game challenging in a way that you need to win faster before the line builds up. It makes it so you cannot just mindlessly spawn Warriors and Chads, but have to stop enemy warriors closer to your hero and spawn Chads behind the enemy lines. Although it's fun to just spawn Warriors and watch them fight I wanted some strategy and depth involved in the game. - The game definitely gets laggy once you have a lot of units, but I worked a lot on optimization to make it lag once you have a full screen of warriors so I assume you got to this point :sweat_smile: It's actually mostly blood which makes it laggy, I had to make it disappear a lot quicker than I wished (in the beginning I left it forever which looked bloody amazing, but it made game very laggy very quickly) - The beginning is the biggest difference in difficulties indeed since the game is a lot easier to win during early game before warriors take the whole middle of the screen. So the change in the beginning of the game changes the difficulty tremendously. If you're always going for big warrior battles then there is not a big difference between Very Easy and Normal :) - If you went for big fights every time you might have missed that chads actually avoid enemy warriors and that's how you can use them more effectively to steal princess behind enemy lines. It's also how they might grab a princess, try to avoid an enemy warrior and actually start moving further away from the goal - kind of annoying, had happened to me as well, but also by design, it forces you to deal with warriors in the way of Chads. - On the same topic of Chads, they drop princess when they are getting attacked by enemy warriors, this is again by design, they are getting stunned. There is a little stun animation of stars flying around their head after the hit to show that. It's easy to miss in a big fight though should be apparent when there is only a couple of units fighting. Definitely can try to convey some information in a more clear way, though it's always a challenge to convey as much as possible with visual clues and hope that player will understand what developer meant :)
@kirass I'm just one person, but thank you nonetheless, glad you enjoyed it :blush:
It was fun to try and get some good angles on the enemy to pick off weaker enemies. Quite the feedback loop for getting more mana when killing enemies. I was NOT able to beat Impossible difficulty though no matter how hard I tried. Is it really impossible? Any tips for beating Impossible difficulty?
@vidim888 - I agree the line forming is interesting, the problem is the line spans the entirety of the screen height and eventually turns into a cube, with a combined span ranging from one princess to the other (or whatever was in our protective ball). I tried your point about spawning chads behind enemy lines, it didn't work well for me, the enemies kept spawning close to the princess and I could only spawn chads only up to half of the screen width, even in groups they would barely make it to the princess before dying, and when I tried to reinforce them with warriors they would go the opposite direction to fight the enemy warriors. I would propose making warriors close to the vertical limits hit harder so the line could have a gap at the top and bottom, maybe you could increase the warrior fighting potency the closer they are to their leader (possibly also somehow limit the enemy spawn). Also the idea of winning fast doesn't sit with me, if the idea is you win in the first 10 seconds of the game and it's impossible after that, then what is the point to keep playing after 10 seconds. - Yeah, if the blood is an object maybe you could add it to a sprite (like the ground one) to keep the blood and reduce the laggines - I think it might be better to have the difficulty determine the chads chaddiness (like hp, speed, size) - I did notice the chads tried to avoid the warriors, I also noticed how ineffective they were, since enemy warriors focused them down, while chads just ran around (I think once they even made a coward line and kinda stoped moving). I felt there was no way of dealing with the warriors as they constantly kept spawning and weren't killed quick enough and b0lined for my chads. Maybe the chads could have a random chaddiness level, making them more or less afraid of enemies, so if you spawn several, one might try to run away, one might try to avoid, and one just push past the enemy, and hopefully one of them would distract the enemy enough, instead of them all pilling together making it easy for the enemy to catch and kill. - I'm fine with them dropping the princess and did notice that, but there is one situation I'm not 100% certain what happened and can't comprehend. Let me try to explain what I remember thinking I saw, however distorted and untrue it might be.
There were two different instances 1. In the midst of hundreds of warriors one, the chaddiest of chads snatched the princess and surrounded by allied warriors defending him slowly slugged his way back to the hero, while those around him suffered the enemy attacks. 2. A chad surrounded mostly by his warriors, seemed to be blocked by them and found it hard ti push through his own allies, and kept dropping the princess on contact with them? while seemingly remaining at full hp (maybe there were several stacked together and just weren't visible?)
Great game. The sounds are hilarious.
@ellaris All very good points, I appreciate you suggesting ideas!
- I don't know how well it will help to make side fights faster. The problem more often is getting princess through the centre. Since I increase energy levels through time, maybe making Warriors just in general more Glass Cannony might help reducing the number of warriors on screen later on. Or limiting opponent's energy growth might be indeed a good option - so if you survive the beginning you can overwhelm him eventually.
I agree that 10 second thing is a problem - it's around a minute after which time it starts to become close to impossible to win. I even though just straight up having a time limit for a round, but thought that it would be very unsatisfying to lose to a time limit, so opted out of it.
In general - this middle-screen bloodbath problem is a pretty complex design problem which has quite a few potential solutions some of which might work and some might make it only worse :sweat_smile: I might play around with the project a bit later, maybe trying to add different ideas.
- I don't have the knowledge of how to add blood to a sprite and if that's even possible in Godot. Didn't have enough time to really explore it so I just opted in for the easiest solution of removing it fast enough so it limits the amount of it on the screen.
- Difficulty could definitely have more impact on different aspects of the game. Right now I made it only change yours and opponent's energy levels and growth. Having tougher chads can definitely be a good idea for different difficulty, maybe warriors as well. Maybe also some more hidden mechanics like radius at which warriors detect chads, their radius of attack etc. could be cool to explore. It's harder and more time-consuming to balance many different variables so I think just energy levels worked good enough for the game jam, but there is more room to improve for sure.
- I absolutely love the idea of randomizing chads AI stats so they behave differently in sight of enemies. It can make game more dynamic and can create really cool moments when some chads are too scared to go for princess and then one chad of chads just goes for it snatching princess and sending it home. Probably should make warriors be more willing to hunt cowards as well - can make for some really satisfying clutch moments.
1. I couldn't tell for sure what was going on. One theory I have is that warriors don't actually attack any single target - what happens is that they spawn a collision box around them which hits everybody in a certain box (apprx. double the size of warrior's size). So maybe there were some enemies close enough that they were able to squeeze the hit on those poor chads?
2. Though one time you saw chad dropping princess without losing hp should be something different. The game is heavily tied to FPS (too heavily to be perfectly honest, I should remember to use physics step more often...) so if your game started dropping fps there might have appeared some weird behaviours? My best guess is that chad got bounced around and couldn't keep up with dragging princess behind him because of lag..
And again thank for discussing ideas, it's always great to hear different opinions and ideas around the game you created :blush:
@candlesan Thank you for playing the game! The energy feedback loop is quite strong indeed. Though I should point out that it doesn't correlate with you killing enemies at all (it was definitely one of ideas I had, just didn't get to implement it). The way energy growth works is that you start with getting one energy per tick and each tick this amount grows by 0.001, so 1.001 on second tick, 1.002 on the next and so on (numbers are a bit different on different difficulties, but main idea stays the same). I'm glad that it created an illusion of a more complex mechanic than it actually is haha :D
It's probably not completely impossible :sweat_smile: But I was not able to win it myself. Though I need to mention that I'm a hardcore gamer, so those difficulty names are somewhat accurate. One of the most often feedback I was getting on previous game jams is that games are too hard...
The farthest I got princess on Impossible is around middle of the screen, so if I was able to get her that close, probably could move her second half through. If you were able to win Very Hard then you probably know as much as I do about getting Impossible won. I have a comment above with some ideas on the strategies.
Some extra ideas to that message since I have been attempting some more Impossible runs (no luck just yet). Main strategy I go for right now is actually sending Chad as a very first unit and hope I get lucky with enemy spawns. After that I try to defend against enemies to the best of my ability. When warriors swing they hit everyone around them including shield. So one new strategy I was using is spawning warriors just a little bit away from shield so enemies go away from shield (warriors have higher taunt than shield) so they don't damage it giving you sweet-sweet extra time.
I don't think there is a way to overwhelm opponent on Impossible difficulty, so you should try to just survive as long as possible while slowly bringing princess.
@thomaszane Thank you for kind words!
So I tried the impossible difficulty
Zrzut ekranu 2024-04-17 160048.png
It did take some time and after like 4-7 attempts I managed to get it.
Also I just noticed the sound they made when being summoned :v: but when the lags kicked in I started to question my sanity as all I could hear is "there is hope"
@ellaris Omg, it has been done! :D Great job and thanks for playing! Maybe you can give some tips to me? I'm still not able to beat Impossible :sweat_smile:
Cool game! I've always wanted to make a war simulation type game and this is the beginnings of one (it seems). I like the idea, though the main strategy seems to be spamming warriors (but hey, I only tried normal difficulty so it probably requires more skill). But, I see a lot of strategy that you could add to this game if there were more types of units and maybe even structures you can build. Well done!
@coatline Thank you! More unit types was definitely planned at start, but I decided to focus more on the feel of the game and QoL features so the game is nice to play with just those two types. Structures are a bit hard to implement I would say in the scope of single screen battlefield (no camera movement), but interesting idea. I was more thinking in just upgrading your unit types. So you can spend energy not only on creating units, but on upgrading them as well. It's a good direction for sure, though wouldn't work that well without aforementioned extra unit types :sweat_smile:
Feel free to download the source code to poke around in the project and use it for yourself if you want! The code is very messy (kind of expected during a game jam..), but with a bit of refactoring can be expanded for sure.
@vidim888 Basically just spawn warriors around the shield (furthest from the enemies, since I think they spawn with their attack on cooldown) for a couple of minutes. then the game starts to lag and enemies start to miss their attacks, so you have more time to deploy warriors in the middle of the screen hope they push out the enemies and create a few chads in the middle of them to push them towards the princess.
I also think it would be great to be able to see the area where you can summon your units, it's a bit annoying trying to find and have to remember the exact spot in the middle.
@ellaris The fact that you're using the lag to accomplish it is hilarious to me :laughing: The strat is interesting, basically creating something like a turtle out of warriors to keep chads safe, if I understood it correctly.
The point about spawning area is a very good one. One of those things which got postponed so far that I ended up not having enough time to implement it..
Great work creating a fun game. I don't have too much to add that hasn't already been said, drag clicking to place multiple units would have helped in the longer games and I agree that the line forming is a bit of a problem.
@mlists Thank you for playing and feedback!
Nice one! I really like this type of swarm mechanics, if one can call it that :smile:
@flightless Thank you! Satisfying swarm fight was the attempt indeed