dhdorr 2025-04-07 01:54
I like the pixel art and the fact that the music get faster as you dive deeper (nice touch)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Wizardry Catacombs
By j4cko16
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 92 | 3.64 | 29 | |
| Fun | 109 | 3.46 | 29 | |
| Innovation | 281 | 2.46 | 29 | |
| Theme | 204 | 3.27 | 29 | |
| Graphics | 122 | 3.61 | 29 | |
| Audio | 48 | 3.82 | 28 | |
| Mood | 157 | 3.34 | 27 |
I like the pixel art and the fact that the music get faster as you dive deeper (nice touch)
nice! good polish! the sound effects caught me off guard lol
got to floor 30!. Feels weird that the best strategy is to just run and ignore al monsters, but I liked the sound a lot, good job
Managed to reach the bottom! The ending made me laugh :)
Anyway, this was awesome! I really loved the graphics here, and the sound effects were funny too. The amount of content here is what blew me away, though - I really did not expect so many floors! And with constant new tilesets & enemies to boot (the later ones were palette swaps but still). Not to mention the ending! Lastly, I appreciate how the enemies actually had an attack animation instead of just bumping into you :)
It did begin to drag a bit by the end, though. While I didn't mind the mana mechanic for most of the game, it made fighting with the summoning slimes really awkward, where it was just a staring contest while I was recharging mana & they were waiting to spawn another slime. Not to mention that fighting two (or even three) at a time was a nightmare. Also, floors 16-20 and 26-30 felt really long - I actually appreciated a lot how 21-25 felt intentionally shorter, since there were no more new enemy types & you were approaching the end anyway, just wish that 26-30 were the same. Still, that's pretty minor, especially since balancing is always difficult in game jams anyway.
Overall, really enjoyed it! Amazing entry!
That is really impressive for a 48-hour project. Nice job!
nice graphics and music
add magic upgrades and something else to the boxes and it will be really cool! special respect for the graphics and music
Some upgrade after X floors and a little faster progression and you really have a solid dungeon crawler roguelike here! Had so much fun playing and I love when there are spoken SFX haha. Music was also great and cool to hear that it gets faster the deeper you go. Great work!
I spent most of my time speedrunning to the stairs, then healing with the boxes in then next spawn area. Only in the last few levels did I have to actually clear the rooms if there were no stairs in sight. This game definitely could use something to spice up the combat some more, but it's totally understandable for a jam game (mine suffers from this as well lol). Pretty fun ending and overall still quite enjoyable. Good job!
edit: why did you remove yourself from the humor category? that ending alone is way above the average jam game :D
@frib the combat is a bit lack luster I agree, the random room generation took so much of my time that I couldn't emphasize the combat as much as I would had liked... I thought the ending I made was clever but I removed myself from humor because that's really the only funny moment in the game and I figured not everyone would see it. I am for sure going to expand this project further, do you have any particular combat ideas that would be good to implement?
Very fun game. Gameplay is very simple, but I see that other aspects of the game (mood, procedural generation, and sound design) are very original, and the game is overall very polished (fluid controls and visuals, no bugs)
Is there any point to killing the enemies? After a certain point I ended up running past them instead of fighting :sweat_smile: The sound effects were hysterical. Maybe a little loud. Sounded like someone was sneezing repeatedly.
I'd have loved to see more spells or ways to fight. Enemy variety and length was great. Music was especially good. Solid entry :clap:
This was some excellent fun, I'm amazed how speical you managed to make all enemies with so few pixels. I loved the visual feedback on no mana, espeically since a I know a few people who struggles to look away from their character when fighting. Hope you'll revisit this project and extend a little on the combat maybe some progressin to give a reason to kill the enemies, would happily play a few more rounds :smiley:
I found a small bug where you can skip a level if you double tap space on the stairs so I happy to report I made it to floor 31.
I've made it to the last level and defeated the dragon (or something like that happened).
The sfx and music are amazing. This is where the money went. :D
Now to some feedback. Don't take it personally, I'm trying to understand what went right here (I might be wrong)
I would personally make every biome last for 2 levels (3 at most), so it has 10 levels instead of 30. It's the same content per levels anyway, so the player doesn't lose anything. For the purposes of the jam, I have a feeling that dragging content is usually not a good idea - it wouldn't be dragging if the player would have a progression between the levels, but there is none (only a new biome can be called a progression, but it's once per 5 same-y levels). So in my opinion, 10-15 levels instead of 30 would make the game better, not worse. :D A real boss fight in the end could be a reward, but 30 levels is a lot in any case.
Since the game doesn't reward the player for kills, at some point you start to avoid monsters and run for the next floor, which kinda defeats the purpose of the game, unless it was designed to be a monster cheesing game. The later monsters are too fast to outrun though, so there is that. :D The simplest way to fix it would be adding a score amount for every kill, making encounters at least a bit more meaningful (you can aim at a higher score). This is a cheap way, but it can work; although 30 levels is still a lot for it to work properly (the player may stop caring unless there is another progression).
The crates could be replaced by hearts directly without losing too much of their functionality, if they would not be picked up at full health, that is. I think one of the benefit of a container is an element of uncertainty ("what's in the box?"), but it disappears if 100% drop is a heart. Even a 80% chance to get a heart would make it more exciting, if you insist on having boxes. :D An upgrade or something else would make it even better.
Since it's a compo game, I would not suggest any alternative attacks or bonuses for progression as it would take extra time. You invested that time into the music and it pays off in its own way. But I did mention some other stuff that would take 5-10 minutes to do, but the overall experience would be better, at least in my opinion.
You might be annoyed by the idea of stripping down the 30 levels, but if more than 1 person tell you that the game is too long for its gameplay, you might want to give it a second thought. :D And to be honest, I fell for this trap myself - I added more content instead of giving more polish to already existing one. I tried to counter-balance this extra content by adding more variety, so it could be rewarding for the player to play more; it was still better to focus on a smaller core with more polish and bells-and-whistles, and maybe even music.
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I've read the comments above. It looks like this game has random generation. I had an advice from someone before that random generation for LD rarely pays off. "People will not play the game for the second time" If we would make this game have only 10 floors, it would be possible to make these floors by hand. Given that they're quite simple in nature (small amount of varying objects), it could take less time than making a generator, but I'm not sure how easy it is for your engine to load a map (you would probably need to make a scene initialized from a serialized map, etc.). I made a small randomizer for my game as well, but it doesn't create actual mazes - just random tiles and random enemy placement; this was very fast (20 mins of coding). Making a maze/dungeon generator is much harder.
I forgot to mention something. I really liked the fact that enemy projectiles are quite slow. :D Usually, people tend to make them too fast and it makes the game unplayable (or very annoying to play). This game does it right (at least if the player has no way to counter it, the projectiles should be this slow).
sound effects are amazing!
Nice! The movement was great and the increasing difficulty meant that I had to improve my skills to progress. I wish there were more depth to the mechanics, like upgrades. The music and SFX were spot on.
@quasilyte thank you so much for your feedback. I agree with a lot of the things you said with the boxes and such but I don’t agree when it comes to the floors. Have you ever played Pokémon mystery dungeon? If not I suggest you give it a look! The floors aren’t individual levels but part of a single level. I wanted to represent the feeling of climbing down deeper and deeper. My generation is very similar to mystery dungeon mainly because it is one of my favorite series :) thank you for your feedback and perspective however, a lot of people absolutely love this kind of generation especially in mystery dungeon so it’s interesting to hear the other side of it.
This was pretty great, I like the music and all the juice. It'd be nice if there were something motivating me to stay on each level for longer, since from what I can tell the best strategy is to make a beeline for the exit.
I notice the source code for this game is not downloadable without paying for it. The compo rules require that you provide source code, and I'm not sure charging for it is in the spirit of those rules.
Good game, but I'd like there to be some kind of a reward for going through and killing enemies (apart from different background and enemies that have higher hp and take longer to kill making it a bit of a slog later on) because they just became annoying and I tried to avoid them.
Having the shots come from the book made aiming while moving hard sometimes, like shooting straight up while moving in the same direction made the shoots at an angle, which is not what I would expect to happen.
The music felt out of place and random at the beginning, I liked the speed up with the scenery change, it eventually felt really good before going "out of sync" again.
Nice pixel art!
Cool game! Very impressive escalation for a weekend jam. Well done!
@henk I believe it doesn't matter how I give access to the code as long as it is possible to obtain it. I have seen quite a few top 50 games in the past also charge a dollar or two for their source code, there was never an issue. In the past I did provide everything for free but this time I just feel really attached to the scripts I created
EDIT: The source code is now free... The games I were referencing that were charging were entered as "jam" games not compo, sorry for my misunderstanding
Screenshot 2025-04-12 at 7.01.09 PM.png
Nice ending cinematic... woof.
I found the idea of a rouge like without upgrades or items interesting, it focused the game differently than how I would normally play. Normally I would kill everything and search everywhere, but this game it is advantageous to get to the stairs and move on. That made for some tense "do I risk it" moments.
The "eye" enemies (both red and purple) seem to have broken hit boxes. Many times my fireball passed right through them. It made them harder than I think they should have been. By my estimation, it seems the collider only covers the bottom half of them. Still fun though!
Our first reviewer o7 sorry it took me so long to get to you, but hey I made it in time :D
Procedural generation gang what up! I got puked on at the end is that normal :P?
MAn I never know what to type in the comment section below when it comes to compo games. It's just incredible to me there are are people who can create art and music and code at the same time. Got through entire 30 levels, almost died twice, sweating bullets. The outstanding part for me in this entry was def musix and sfx. Especially music was fing great brother. Good job man!