FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Summoner's skirmish

Summoner's skirmish

By cleverdumb

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall3112.9022
Fun2483.0722
Innovation2832.9022
Theme3172.7222
Graphics3292.5023
Humor2842.0020
Mood3302.3921

Comments

yochti 2024-04-14 20:45

Hey nice game! I've loved the player movement and how fluid the player is. Just one thing, I would have add the survive timer while we play and not just at the end.

Best Score: 2min36sec

vegeo 2024-04-14 23:52

Took a little moment to figure out what was going on. Realized that you could summon all of the divinities whenever, you just get one of each. The movement and bullet hell was fun. I made it to the boss fight, but died immediately. Overall pretty good!

rcxa 2024-04-15 01:04

I really liked the variety among the enemies in the game and the boss phase was good. I also appreciated how the density of projectiles was balanced, it felt like a bullet hell without being cluttered to the point that it feels unfair. Good job!

warren-fisher 2024-04-15 01:05

Pretty fun, I made it about 2 minutes longest! Maybe add some more clarification for how the divinities work, it was just a bit complex. Also, some basic sound effects would go a long way, even just something small like what BFXR can make.

pilottk 2024-04-15 01:25

This is really fun bullet hell! I think I almost beat the boss before I died! The controls felt so good and I really liked the ability to stop and shoot.

patbgames 2024-04-15 01:37

Fun game, I killed the boss before I understood how to summon divinities, but it's OK. Like already said, a few sound effects could have been cool, even basics one. Keep up the good work.

owtuvammo 2024-04-15 02:01

The divinity UI definitely needs some work, but it's a fun little bullet hell!

I didn't even realize there were multiple until I checked the comments here.

myse 2024-04-15 02:06

Super fun, it was really hard to shoot at the boss though - something didn't feel quite responsive enough with the mouse!

joua 2024-04-15 02:15

That was a funny one! Great time playing it. Nice job!

mrventures 2024-04-15 02:40

I didn’t really understand how to play! That said, I liked all the movement and the variety of character types.

ollie-d 2024-04-15 06:21

Got a 7 minute run! I'm a big fan of dodging games like this. I think I could've essentially gone forever since I got the hang of manipulating the enemy's bullets. I honestly wasn't even shooting them or using the divninities because I was happy just dodging haha

cleverdumb 2024-04-15 06:38

@ollie-d ohhh 7 mins you beat my pb lol

cleverdumb 2024-04-15 08:29

@myse maybe its the cooldown (to prevent spam shooting), if you want to halve it use the red divinity

ooboob 2024-04-15 11:27

Pretty cool game. The divinity placements feel as bit more clunky than it needed to be, but it get the job done. I think it could use some progress bar, to show that something is happening, and when it is. I almost stopped playing before reaching the boss.

cleverdumb 2024-04-15 12:44

@ooboob lol the boss spawns randomly after 40 or so kills, and chance increases as you kill, so there is not actually a timer or something lol, and the boss is not the end as the game is more like a 'how long can you survive'

ooboob 2024-04-15 12:48

@cleverdumb , even so, I think having a progress meter would be an improvement

cleverdumb 2024-04-15 13:00

@ooboob yeah good idea maybe like a timer and stuff

literally-void 2024-04-15 23:01

I have a 144hz monitor and that made the game a *lot* more hectic before I turned my monitor's refresh rate down, haha. I love the positive feedback loop of more bullets -> more dodging -> more bullets, too---it really feels like you're on the knife's edge of surviving the whole time.

There's a bug where if you press `ESC` it just shows the menu and doesn't pause the game---you have to press it twice to actually pause.

On the topic of divinities: I found myself placing them only at the start of the game (to be fair, this was *because* I was trying to see if using divinities were helping or not), and one problem that crops up is, it's hard to judge if they're helping between one run and the next---there aren't any obvious points (in my experience!) where I can go, "oh hey, if I placed/didn't place [X] divinity maybe I could have survived!", and the moment-to-moment gameplay is the same whether or not my bullets are larger.

And that's reinforced from it being tedious to place/destroy divinities during gameplay, which incentivizes a per-run choice instead of being a moment-to-moment thing.

That being said, I still found the game enjoyable! And I was surprised with how fun the core shoot-where-you're-moving-to mechanic is; it seems like other games generally use a joystick-style control loop, and I feel like the single-room global-mouse thing works really well. (Although now that I think about it, that's probably *because* it's a one-room game!)

I survived to 4m26s legitimately! ~~and 7m with one exploit and 16m with another sorry for brutally critiquing and then breaking your game so much :')~~

cleverdumb 2024-04-16 16:19

@literally-void thx for the comments i will probably add more divinities later lol, and i completely didnt catch the ESC thing so thx for telling me

olddog 2024-04-17 10:17

so simple but interesting,love this game so much,wish to see more weapons or other contents to play

burnedkirby 2024-04-22 07:42

The game gets pretty hectic as more enemies spawn. It seems having a bigger screen gives more of an advantage I think. Being able to stop moving with spacebar is a nice quality-of-life touch. There doesn't seem to have much incentive to summon the helpers since they also come with "curses", and I ended up with the poison-removing one only. Maybe if there was some kind of "overuse" system instead of direct pros-and-cons I think would improve the game. Good work!

kroltan 2024-04-23 21:43

It's a bit unclear if the placement of the divinities makes any difference at all (besides the poison puddle one), I suspect it doesn't? In that case I'd just have buttons to enable or disable each.

Also, there are way too many enemies on the screen, in 10 seconds my screen is pretty much full of green blobs with no escape path. Could be framerate-related, I'm on a 165Hz screen.

Besides that, fun game, straightforward in a good way and the graphics are very readable.

rekiem 2024-04-24 14:28

It's a pretty fun game. It could be a little better explained how the divinities work, and I missed sound effects, I think it would make the experience more satisfying.

asieke 2024-04-25 04:00

Super fun! The chaos of trying to dodge around was pretty thrilling.