towercrane 2025-10-06 22:45
i dont get what health bars at the start supposed to mean...
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD58 → The Lair of K'olekto
By feor, maximumoverkilt, FlyByBrucia, finnzone, SwimDoggo and gloogsquad
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 484 | 3.39 | 26 | |
| Fun | 452 | 3.26 | 27 | |
| Innovation | 498 | 3.08 | 27 | |
| Theme | 556 | 3.38 | 27 | |
| Graphics | 525 | 3.36 | 27 | |
| Audio | 322 | 3.36 | 27 | |
| Humor | 515 | 2.68 | 27 | |
| Mood | 598 | 3.20 | 27 |
i dont get what health bars at the start supposed to mean...
Good graphics and fun gameplay =)
The one hit death is a bit harsh. I like the art in the game! The main menu art looks good, and the models and lighting you have are good as well. Playing this on a trackpad is pretty difficult.
Also it seems like the first time an effect is happens (player death, spell, etc) there is significant lag, maybe freezing on some large asset allocations?
Good entry great job!
Pretty good, albeit a bit spotty in some areas. I absolutely love the menu art and love how similar the models look to the menu art. The one thing that did throw me off is how when I downloaded the game, the game got picked up as a virus by my anti-virus as Wacatac.B!ml.
Really good game and really good team, although the virus detection left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth.
It has a bit of a learning curve, I appreciate the complexity as there are multiple different spells. I do find it a little difficult (I couldn't make it very far), however that tends to be how jam games go
That's pretty cool for three days)
@jipark Thanks! We were really scrambling at the end. Mages weren't even in the game until 2 hours before the deadline. It was an ambitious project for a jam and I'm glad you had a good time with it.
This was a lot of fun!
At first I didn't quite understand the game mechanics (brain being in low energy mode, focussing on reading the help screen was difficult :sweat_smile: ), but after a few attempts (of playing and of reading) I figured it out. Only afterwards I saw the screenshot in the description with the labels, that would probably have helped the most. ^^ Maybe having an easy first level with an ingame tutorial would have been good, similar to the labeled screenshot.
After I understood the game, it was a lot of fun though and it made me want to retry until I've won - which I did! \o/ I don't quite understand the text on the victory screen though - which "secret wave 6 enemy"? :thinking:
I especially liked how the souls have very diverse stats, and that they can be both positive and negative, so you have to be a bit careful which souls you absorb. I also liked how the souls had individual "names" that were kinda funny, however, I couldn't really pay attention to them as much because I was too busy fighting. ^^
Potential improvements / things I would have done differently:
1. It was a bit difficult to read the stats of all the souls while still having to defend against enemies. I think I would have either paused the game while "gazing into the soul lantern" or slowed the game down while doing so (similar to how in Horizon Zero Dawn the game doesn't stop but slows down when you're changing weapons during a battle). 2. Collecting the souls was a bit difficult sometimes. I often saw the souls floating around near me while I was still running around to avoid enemies, and then having to coordinate collecting the souls while not being hit by enemies. 3. Not sure how to solve that, but I found it hard to switch between spells with 1/2/3 or Q/E/F because my fingers were to busy moving the character around in all directions to avoid enemies, so I was only using the scroll wheel which was a bit suboptimal. Maybe my fingers were just too tired though. :sweat_smile:
All in all, I enjoyed it, very nice game. :)
My opinions mostly overlap with @binarydiv it was fun, but also a bit too hectic to appreciate every little detail :sweat_smile:
I also feel like a bit of a larger soul inventory would have been nice, or some system that can still make use of all the extra souls that you can't pick up when your lantern is full. It also feels like a waste to try and still kill enemies instead of just avoid them in the last 30-20% of a wave when you're good on health and spells and they get killed at the end of the round anyway. So if you had some way to fuse/override/trade souls maybe there would be more of an incentive to try and both pay attention to the effects of your souls and to try and gather/combine the very best ones.
But otherwise very impressive what you managed to make in the timeframe of a jam, great job!
Quite a fun game, really enjoyed it and the hectic gameplay of quickly putting in some extra souls from the lantern to not die.
It makes sense that you can't hold infinite souls but also feels a bit weird when you suddenly can't pick up any additional ones and there didn't seem to be a clear indicator what the maximum is.
There is a bit of an annoying bug where the death sounds of multiple enemies will fuse into one ear shattering sound.
Feels like you had some ambitions and yet managed to give a really functionning result, much respect. It got a vibe of some nice old MMO's
The spells were really satisfying, each one had a fun mechanic to learn and try to use in the right scenarios. I didn't grasp the purpose of absorbing the souls, even after reading twice. It was all a bit complex!
Cool game design with nice spells, but i need to get that inventory is limited. Awesome graphics as well!
The only thing I would've liked was a spell UI that showed all of them and currently selected one, I only used the starting spell the entire time. Gameplay absolutely carried this one with good atmosphere to boot. Could be expanded into something bigger with items, level and enemies pretty easily.
Please add the link to the itch.io in the category "Links" beceuse now it's easy to miss it ^^
There are some really cool design ideas behind this entry. It's all about pondering your options, making sacrifices. It's a bit rough around the edges (as someone else said, there are some freezes the first time you instantiate certain objects, look like particle systems, maybe some pooling system could help) and may need some QoL improvements (an active pause when looking into the lantern, maybe reverting to another power you own when depleting one), but I like that's it not just another mob-slashing game, you really put thoughts into the mechanics to make it something unique, congrats!
@vpro thanks for the feedback! we definitely went back and forth on a soul lantern pause and ultimately decided that with our item generation the way it was, we needed a bit of extra pressure to make the players' decisions a bit more 'sloppy'. with more time to really get in there and balance the generation to a point where every item was a tough choice, we probably could have added a pause or at least time dilation to the soul lantern. alas though, tough decisions must be made in the jam.
Nice work! I enjoyed playing it on stream, here's the VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2588456378 Thanks for coming ^^