FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Summoner Survivors

Summoner Survivors

By helluin, nicolassand, rapidduck and NemuiKoda

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall7213.4421
Fun6903.3421
Innovation10362.8421
Theme6193.6321
Humor6782.8620
Mood7073.4420

Comments

online-play 2024-04-15 23:32

The game has a cool foundation, but I miss the challenge. I think adding some sort of movement limit could make the gameplay more challenging. I made it to wave 16, but I could easily keep playing for longer.

transkuja 2024-04-16 11:39

Great idea !

mremmele 2024-04-16 11:41

Neat art! I liked cute little fighters. I summoned all my fellas at once, earned some money and died with honor :)

crylica 2024-04-16 11:45

i think the game needs a bit more challenge- maybe some of the enemy pathing could be more interesting (like ranged guys who don't come near you, but you have to go to them to kill them) The summons felt a bit static as well since they stay in the same place relative to you. good job getting the main system down tho, congrats!

ruruie 2024-04-16 11:47

It felt like the only real threat was the minotaur.

antti-haavikko 2024-04-16 12:12

Neat. But it really becomes rather boring and repetitive after a while. There is like no real challenge until at like I dunno maybe wave 20ish the boss appeared and whirlwinded right on top of me and I just couldn't move away from it. Felt really unfair and unfun to lose like that.

And it happened to me again. Now it didn't even spawn with that dash warning like but just immediately on top of me. Not sure which wave it was since the font is so hard to read.

I feel like own attack becomes completely useless after you get few summons and it just hinders you from that point on. And found no use at all for the unit moving functionality. It felt janky as hell and even when I tried to build me a protective layer of melee units, it wasn't any good either as they just broke the formation as soon as I needed to move even a tiny bit. Which obviously you need to do constantly to get money and dodge dynamites.

One more try and now I made it past 20 at least but then the frame rate just tanked to a slide show and it became basically unplayable.

Bit of a z-ordering issue with the trees...

Screenshot 2024-04-16 at 14.37.10.png

Is it just me or is the cheap yellow archer just the best option get get in mass? Maybe sprinkle in some blues if you're too wealthy to spend on yellows but the melee guys just didn't seem any good.

Anyways good job! 👍

picttarge 2024-04-16 14:58

Love the artwork - was also gonna mention not just the z-order of the trees vs UI but also about the y-position not sorted on the trees (in game). Would be ideal if the summoners could also pick up bags of gold but perhaps that would make it too easy. Good to have the boss have some variety of attacks, I really liked that - well done!

spexxilove 2024-04-21 13:59

Very nice game. makes me feel a bit bad for my attempt at a survivor like in this jam ^^ Great art and I like the twist with getting summons instead of upgrading your own power but a mix of the 2 might have been cool too since your own attack is very hard to use later in the game.

even with just the 3 options for summons there is quite a bit of choice in how you want to play which made me try a few times with different strategies to see how melee only or a mix of everything etc. would work out for me.

some of the ui was a bit hard to read like the money counter and the cost of units. they were also very far apart on the screen which made me look up and down a lot.

overall a very nice entry!

quadtree 2024-04-27 23:42

Pretty fun game. Took me a little bit to figure out that I needed to pick up bags of money, but once I did it was pretty clear what to do. The first boss did seem like a bit of a difficulty spike, took me from 80% to 20% health. I guess if there's one thing I'd change, it'd be to have a smoother difficulty curve.

gullyngames 2024-05-01 23:35

Great work on this game! The graphics, animations, and audio fit the game well. I'm not sure if this is just an issue with my computer or browser, but after a while (~12 waves) the frame rate dropped significantly, which made it hard to play. An improvement I would suggest is to have fewer, but harder, enemies, since going around in circles was enough to stay alive for quite a while. Good work!

doot 2024-05-02 20:02

Love the idea of a survivor with summons! The game works great and its nice to have a good variety of enemies to force movement.

I feel like the controls are a bit complicated and could have been simplified. The mouse doesn't really add much, and having to press space instead of auto attack feels the same.

Solid foundation anyway, great work team!

ava-skoog 2024-05-02 21:23

It's quite nice, just lacks something I feel! Looks and sounds great (music is very motivating) and it's satisfying to get rid of mobs, but it kind of feels neither strategic nor quite arcadey.

There didn't seem to be a lot of reason to drag units around (was helpful against the big mobs but otherwise they did well on their own I thought) and I didn't see a need to use my own sword and risk my HP at all when my units were doing what I needed.

I liked the variety in the enemies and the big one definitely caught me off guard the first time! But things just kept spawning way faster than I could deal with them until even my decent computer was struggling to keep up. There probably should've been a cap 😅

I assume maybe you were playing using a numpad but I don't have one so having to let go of my WASD grip to summon units while I was trying to run away from a hundred enemies was awkward.

Overall pretty nice, just needs some balancing/polish to figure out what it wants to be :)

someone 2024-05-02 22:24

I liked the idea of moving the summons around, though in practice it wasn't particularly useful. I played the web version until the framerate made it unplayable.