Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Summony Flute
By amolker, maxds98, bugord and Annanastya
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 758 | 3.34 | 27 | |
| Fun | 844 | 3.00 | 26 | |
| Innovation | 192 | 3.75 | 26 | |
| Theme | 619 | 3.58 | 25 | |
| Graphics | 248 | 4.13 | 27 | |
| Humor | 786 | 2.55 | 21 | |
| Mood | 395 | 3.68 | 26 |
Love the drawing and playing music to summon troops ! And the art style is amazing ! The loop is clear and interesting, summon to mine, mine to recolt, recolt to summon... And then battle ! I did not really get what the 2 last units did although ? Think they were healing me ? Not sure since I did not lose that much life Great concept, great art direction, it would be a great base to extend :D
@kelda Thanks for feedback! Glad you enjoyed! The 5th unit is healing and dealing damage in radius arround him. And the 6th is speading other units up.
I really liked the concept and the abilitys of your party. The easy controls made it easy to get involved into the game. And the art style was fitting the game pretty good 🖌️. It takes a bit of time to realize the mechanics, but everytime you find out about how one of the abilities works, you get a new boost of motivation. Great game 👍 Reminded me a bit of Magic the Gathering 😉.
i cant seem to draw circle or square, only the triangle gets recognized sometimes. So im stuck with flute sounds and a nice background. Haven't voted, because it seems to work for others, maybe i did something wrong.
Very nice mood, and very original Idea, the pattern recognition is not easy to work with but I managed through the game. I think the pattern for the last two units are reversed ? I wanted to do the cat and I got the bard (even though the pattern was recognized). However the game crashed before I could do any batteling :( Maybe it was me, but maybe your game has a crash hidden somewhere? I might try again later, to see what thoses creatures can do.
The mood is really good, full of potential!
There are a few concerns I found though: - you can go through the bamboo forest and end up outside, on a big green meadow with nothing, it would have been nice to completely limit the area I think at the beginning - There's a vein of gems that gives a loop of them, I don't know if it's intentional, but in any case the zone feels extremely laggy after a while. (And i can stack gems more than the limit ?) fd1.png - Two drawings are reversed for the summoning, it's really just details but hey :D fd2.png
But apart from that, it's a really good idea, well done!
@winic it may work better on fullscreen and when you draw figures slowly. But yes, thats a problem :(
@tomtomgome for now I saw game crashes when the fox dies. But maybe you have some other case.
@pierre-marie thanks a lot for sush a detailed feedback! We knew about some of these bugs, but the others are surprising.
I like the idea, but the implementation is currently very bare bones.
A single thing that should be quite easy to implement is a more gradual enemy. Make the player face a single enemy so they need to do a small scale 1-on-1 battle. Also, I would like to either see damage numbers or health bars just to know how good or bad some units is doing. This is not the only way to do it of course, but these methods are the simplest ones for the game jam format. This way, the player can recognize facts like "our 1 melee unit worth 1.5 enemy melee units", etc.
Maybe lock most of the units for summoning before a trigger happens (a group of enemies are defeated). Then it will be easier for the player to learn every monster type in a more controller environment.
With a slightly improved game flow described above, this game would be a very solid game jam entry (all games are flawed here in their own way).
So far, this game excels in graphics and artistic choices (sound design is included in this definition).
I'm going to look forward to your post-jam versions of the game. The comments below are my opinion how could a ~60 minutes (theoretically) could have been spent to make a single subjectively most important change.
Wow this game is really creative! Maybe the lack of a thumbnail was putting people off checking the game out? I hope not though as it's stunning! The art is beautful and the flute music is magical! I did notice that the last 2 flute songs were reversed though:
oops.png
A really, really good entry and one I'm interesting in following the progress of!
I really like the idea and feel like it can go far, but I really struggled with the game recognising what I was drawing. For me it was the triangles causing the issue. And also just general polish of the game. I also think that you should have locked some of the units behind some sort of progress as well as just giving us as users more information about going on during battles and otherwise :) I also had a thing where my guys weren't attacking the enemy when I was near them until I get hit. Is it supposed to be like this?
But again, a lot of potential, if you decide to work on it further and I enjoyed the idea behind summoning creatures and all around that. Very lovely game, keep up the good work!
Great game! I loved the art style and the mechanic is fun. I think it would work really well as a mobile game, so you could draw with your finger and not a mouse. I also had problems with the drawing mechanics, for me the circle was really hard to get. Also sometimes a line that I drew would randomly get further drawn to the bottom left of the screen.
I love the drawing to summon creatures!
I liked the diverging path; it gave me a sense of choice in the path I could take. I am guessing the mask on the ground are a hint of which creature I should summon.
Are you using a 1$ recognizer for the shapes ? I am drawing with a track pad, and it was not always easy.
In terms of progression, It's hard to guess what each creature will do based on just their pictures; maybe you could have added a Statue of the creature instead of the mask with hints of their property (the pick axe, the (as I am writing I don't really know what the power are yet, I am still waiting to see anything else than mining stones) Edit: I have encountered the oni! I feel like my unit are invincible ?
When drawing the owl and the cat the wrong indicator appears (the cat for the owl and vice versa)
Overall the game is beautiful, the units are really cool and the summoning mechanism neat. Unit movement is well done. The progression, difficulty, sense of direction could be improved (maybe adding some increasing tension, doom sensation of the shadow getting overwhelming by increasing the darkness or something)
Very solid entry well done!
I feel like this control setup and premise could work really well as a mobile game. I struggled some with drawing the right shapes with my mouse, but I think touch controls would go a long way. As far as the gameplay itself, I liked letting my troupe of creatures all do their own thing while pointing them in the direction I wanted. The art and overall aesthetics were nice and I really liked the interactive musical elements. I THINK I killed/mined everything on the map and got to the exit gate, so it did a good job of keeping my attention.
This was a really cool premise and gameplay loop. As others have mentioned, maybe having a smaller enemy to encounter first would ramp players into the combat part? My first group was massive and intimidating. (And honestly felt like a mini-boss), and I had barely summoned a bird.
I love the idea of playing the instrument with gestures and summoning creatures that way, but I had some bug where it was trying to draw off screen at times, and didn't recognize my shapes then. (I also think drawing the shapes with a mouse was difficult, touch controls would be easier). And I think that part hindered my experience a bit.
But this is such a cool entry! And very unique.
Fun idea! I struggled a little bit. At first I didn't understand how the gems work when summoning. Then I had a hard time getting the game to recognize my squares. But I love the flute sounds and bamboo art and I liked parading around with my animals :)
Really love the art, the setting and the core loop with resource gathering and battles. Was a bit inconvenient to cast triangle+circle which could result in casting circle+triangle simply because the order got wrong.
I am going to play more as see you have more units on others screenshots. I only unlocked three.
Here is my attempt:
https://youtu.be/5dlqpld2o9g