FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Alien Summoner

Alien Summoner

By garywiss, harusame, Flane, gcake and Kafuka Palazzo

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall274.3236
Fun54.4236
Innovation2353.7736
Theme2034.1535
Graphics634.5236
Audio324.2936
Humor1074.0135
Mood874.1736

Comments

promzona 2024-04-16 12:37

Art is super juicy! Cool submission

have a nice Jam!

linky439 2024-04-16 12:42

Fantastic stuff!

Let's start with the "obvious": the game is pretty, full of colors yet always lisible, and the audio is terrific! The music is great, the sound effects are very nicely chosen and played. On top of that, the premise of the game is simple but terribly effective! It is such a fun time to go on a rampage for as long as possible, and the fact the different army vehicles react in a different way to the kaijus and to your UFO makes for an intriguing and addictive game.

The cherry on the top? The "TV news" text appearing every now and then!

drgcandle 2024-04-16 12:59

Oh. My. Llama! How did you guys pull off this effect? It's mind-blowingly awesome! Did you seriously nail this within 72 hours??? If so, you all must have been mainlining coffee and punching the creative clock like there's no tomorrow!I wouldn't just call it 'experienced'; it's more like 'masterful.'

potatofinch 2024-04-16 13:11

Definitely one of the best games I've played so far! Art, sound and gameplay are great. I was super focused at one point, just trying to survive the onslaught of tanks :smile:

harusame 2024-04-16 18:13

Many thanks @linky439 @promzona @drgcandle @potatofinch

It's great to see that the game is working well!

We really rushed towards the end, and everything fell into place less than 2 hours from the end for the final elements. The balancing isn't perfect, but we're pretty proud of the result.

"How did you guys pull off this effect?"

We're starting to have a lot of experience in jams and we went for a "comfort zone" type of game in terms of code & graphics, which allows us to spend a lot of time on the effects.

dekara 2024-04-16 21:34

Wow. Awesome Game for three days guys. The Pixel Art with all the buildings different Kaju, Military, Effects, Running People, the UI. Great Stuff. Also it plays well and is very polished. Nice Sound too. Maybe a it on the very easy side, but its just fun to overrun the City in a few minutes. :D

boltkey 2024-04-16 21:42

Wow, very impressive. The attention to detail is very good. It is really fun and satisfying.

If I had to change one thing, I would have like to have my cooldowns and energy available visible near the mothership - it got quite hard having to keep looking into bottom right corner to check my stats. And it gets surprisingly tactical, managing several minions, and thinking of where to go next.

But really, great job. I love so much about this. I got 44% destruction and 391 victims on my 3rd run.

kirass 2024-04-16 21:43

Interesting game! I like it!

uniowl 2024-04-16 21:49

изображение_2024-04-17_004200248.png

One of the best games from jam I've played so far. I am a big fan of this kind of art, like it very much! All we needed is the ability to play as aliens and destroy some pixel buildings.

Could destroy the whole city though, it became almost impossible at the end, where I lost all my units and hordes of army just smashed me to the ground, haha

lelek-hunor-kadosa 2024-04-16 21:58

A cutscene in a jam? Wow, you are good. I lost 2 times at first.... then I read the game description and won immediately XD

doonutsaur 2024-04-17 03:12

SUper polished art and gameplay! nicely done!

vorobus 2024-04-17 10:51

Pleasant music and visual, very addictive gameplay. A well-done cutscene at the beginning. And also, the challenging difficulty.

lisek-gagatek 2024-04-17 10:54

Niceee, great submission. Awesome graphics and audio and the most enjoyable gameplay I've seen so far in the jam. I have a few nitpicks though: - My hpbar wasn't working (was empty from the start or after a few shots, but definitely when I still had lots of hp). I thought I was invincible and ended up dying near the end because of that xd - Pickup/interact radius is weird. It seems I'm collecting energy and shooting with my shadow, but dodging with the ship. At least the collect radius could be larger, so that I could grab energy with ship. - You gain so much energy so fast that spamming J K L nonstop is a go-to strategy.

hystaf 2024-04-17 10:58

Ok ! One of the best so far ! Really nice :) I made a terrible score but I liked it :D

smoky01 2024-04-17 11:05

The gameplay mechanics in this game are so intuitive! It's like the controls become an extension of your own instincts. Plus, the art style adds a unique flair that keeps you engaged throughout. Definitely a gem worth exploring!

hystaf 2024-04-17 11:05

image_2024-04-17_130453254.png

Ok I did it !

the4thcircle 2024-04-17 11:16

Very well polished. I'm terrible at bullet hell so didn't get very far but I could tell it was well constructed. Wish there was a way to fight back against the helicopters.

quasilyte 2024-04-18 15:07

It's funny that during these jams you get all kinds of feedback. Some people can't beat the game while others may say that it's too easy.

I'm for one didn't feel any challenge while playing. :D

This game feels very polished otherwise. A difficulty setting is probably the only thing I would like to have to make the game last for more than ~4 minutes.

Btw, I used the controller and it worked. It didn't work in Firefox, so I had to switch to Chrome.

Here is my playthrough of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqJw0AmZ6Kc

floke 2024-04-18 15:19

Very nice entry! This was very fun. I managed to wipe out the city on my first try, was really cool to see the army of aliens I summoned walk through the city (even if I had to watch them at 2 FPS at times). Nice graphics, fitting sfx and soundtrack, just a really well done submission in general!

My HP bar seemed bugged throughout being transparent, but that didn't stop me from destroying everything.

gcake 2024-04-18 17:21

@dekara @boltkey @kirass @uniowl @lelek-hunor-kadosa @doonutsaur @vorobus @lisek-gagatek @hystaf @smoky01 @the4thcircle @quasilyte @floke Thanks a lot for all your positive feedbacks !!! :smile: :star2:

@the4thcircle We didn't have time to add an in-game tutorial, but everything is documented in the description page. Only __Medium Kaijus__ can fight back Helicopters !

@quasilyte Thank you for the playthrough !

@lisek-gagatek @floke About the HP bar, we actually discovered that bug yesterday as well. It's weird that it sometimes disappear :sweat_smile: . We will try to take a look into it. Thanks for the report !

bobbie 2024-04-18 18:10

really fun entry, I love the little news flash segments and the music is very catchy

I do wish there was some sort of occasional dash/dodge the UFO could do, at a certain point all of the bullets felt too overwhelming, even being able to dash rarely would have made me feel like I had more of a fighting chance

historymaker118 2024-04-18 18:21

This game is extremely polished and well made for something made in a weekend. I really enjoyed playing this game. The art is excellent, as is the sound design. I feel it's possibly a little too difficult at the moment due to how quickly the enemy starts overwhelming the player with bullets, and how slowly your shooting attack recharges. Overall a great job, and I will definitely be bookmarking this one to play again!

dekisenpaitm 2024-04-18 18:22

MOM I MADE IT INTO THE NEWS!! 10/10 honestly

paulsams 2024-04-18 23:41

A real quality game. For some reason `Colossatron` immediately came to mind, though there are games that are closer, but still, xDD). It was a lot of fun to play. The only problem was that for some reason game in browser didn't show my health, and also it was very hard to notice that the laser had recharged, but those are minor things.

racts-studio 2024-04-19 06:32

It just need some Human Scream and The Voice of a reporter

bloodbane 2024-04-19 08:02

I wish I could skip the intro. But anyways, it's a fun game destroying buildings and stuffs. Might need to get used to it but I got the basics of it and might do better next time.

badpiggy 2024-04-19 19:56

Alien Summoner 20-04-2024 00_37_48.png

Absolutely adore this.

Controlling the ufo and watching your kaijus wreak havoc is an absolute ton of fun in general. The difficulty also scales pretty well the further you get into the city. It doesn't start out too slow but also still allows you to get used to how to play the game.

Love the variety of both enemies and kaiju and that they all had different behaviours. They fit pretty well into the difficulty curve since you need to start strategising about which kaijus you really need in the heat of the moment. As I got further in, I found myself spawning in the small and large kaijus to deal with buildings and ground enemies, then I'd go back to get more energy and spawn the medium kaijus to deal with the enemies in the air. That, and also destroying stuff with my laser was damn fun as well. There's definitely a lot of strategy involved here, but at the same time, you can still turn off your brain and just have fun if you want to lol

It goes without saying that the presentation as a whole was absolutely amazing. Let it be the visuals, audio or even the humour injected in pretty much everything lol. Especially the news forecasts. Love the designs for everything, let it be the kaiju, the tanks, helicopters, buildings etc. This game's got a great feel to it.

However, my biggest issue with this game also lies in it's visuals. As great as they are, I think the overuse of light blue in the game's art hampers readability a LOT. Energy being blue, the kaiju's main outline and some parts of their design like the medium kaiju's head and the large kaiju's eyes, the ufo itself, the windows of buildings, the outlines of bullets etc.

All of this kinda caused many things about the visuals to really blend together at times, to the point that I could hardly tell if a bullet was coming at me or not sometimes. It also took me a little bit to really notice that I had to move the shadow over energy to collect it, but that's more of a skill-issue on my part lol.

I do also kinda wish that the ufo had some way of dealing with flying enemies specifically. Maybe an emp attack that gets charged the more buildings get destroyed or something along those lines. Mostly because I feel like you needed atleast one other option to deal with them apart from medium Kaijus

That said, most of the issues I mentioned above still managed to add to the overall chaotic nature of the game lol. And at the very least, enemies themselves didn't really suffer too much from any readability issues.

Also loved the 2.5D intro

Seriously though, kudos to your entire team because all-in-all ...

This game rules

brainles-etertainment 2024-04-20 15:36

Screenshot 2024-04-20 at 18-32-24 Alien Summoner by GCake harusame17 Garywiss.png

OMG GUYS! This is the best game I ever seen in LD!! The game immerses me in an indescribable gaming thrill. The gameplay breaks the fourth wall and tightly ties you to the buttons on the screen. Just 5 out of 5 in all categories, I wish you victory in the event - it will be absolutely deserved!

randomhuman 2024-04-21 12:56

This is great! Deceptively easy at the beginning but it becomes quite challenging over time. The music is amazing, really adds to the excitement.

harusame 2024-04-22 11:06

Thank you for all the kind comments, it's very much appreciated!

Thank you very much for this very detailed feedback @badpiggy, a lot of very fair points, indeed the blue to recover energy is confused with a lot of things, we didn't have time to adjust that.

@bobbie, we thought about adding gameplay options to the ship, but we preferred to keep it very simple to keep the "summon" aspect at the heart of the game and not add too many elements to the ship. Maybe that would be something good for a more complete game ;)

The remarks on the balancing are very true, it's something we did in a hurry at the end and it's the least worked on part. Which means the game can become very easy once you understand the winning strategy.

nekuake 2024-04-22 15:11

This entry looks sooo professional and looks and feels increible. Love the concept, the execution and how cool it looks. Good job from all your team! ✨

tetrapteryx 2024-04-22 19:18

I really enjoyed this game! Great concept, great execution. The kaiju designs are super cute. The energy was a bit hard to see. Maybe a different color, an outline, or a bigger pickup radius would make them less easy to miss? But overall, a fantastic game that I'll probably come back to play again!

wdebowicz 2024-04-23 20:29

Looks like I'm a real alien summoner! Had a lot of fun playing it!

hikiyoshi 2024-04-25 16:23

This game is really fun. I really enjoyed it.

mikropiru 2024-04-28 15:51

This was a nice experience with some serious retro vibes! Everything worked well and the graphics, audio and gameplay fit together nicely. It was also challenging, with the laser cooldown time and the kaijus not offering much of a resistance against the choppers. So it felt evident I would lose, and I definitely didn't help my cause by flying deeper and deeper into the city, with suddenly being surrounded by what felt like a hundred choppers. :smile:

A nice entry. Great job!

neontropics 2024-04-29 22:05

Yep this is one of my favorite entries of the jam so far! The intro is amazing (loved the use of black and white) and the graphics are very charming. Reminds me of Sim City. I really like the small little houses with red/orange roofs.

I think turning the shooting into automatically doing it once it recharged might be cool, and move it more towards a Vampire Survivor-like game? It'd probably go a bit against the summoning theme but I would love a more survivor-like version of this that upped the craziness