Life of a Summon by someone 2024-04-20T21:00:00Z
This felt like playing someone's fever dream, and I mean that as a compliment. Definitely a unique experience.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → litterattus
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | The Old Summoner | jam | 422 | 3.71 | 3.92 | 3.75 | 4.23 | 3.59 | 3.07 | 3.34 |
This felt like playing someone's fever dream, and I mean that as a compliment. Definitely a unique experience.
As others have mentioned, the gameplay leave something to be desired, but did I enjoy the music overall vibe. The kind of slow movement + music + moving over the desert map is a bit hypnotic.
The art was pretty nice and consistent but yeah, like others, I've found that the game is too easy and doesn't really have much strategy to it.
And as a fellow "build your own tech" person I felt like I have to go hunting for technical bugs, and of course I discovered that resizing the window to a different aspect ratio stretches/distorts the frame and messes up the cursor position tracking :D
Notes from playing: - The description of what all the structures generate needs to be in game of course :D - Instead of first person controls, drag + rotate controls would probably be more suited for this type of game. - Some highlighting for resources required for building something vs what you already have of those resources. - I liked the the ominous music, the background of the cosmos, and the overall aesthetics of the game. - If this is not supposed to be an "idle game", a way to fast-forward time would be good. - Definitely needs more balancing, got soft-locked when I had no space left and not enough mana to build any new ground.
Overall I enjoyed my time with the game, I like the idea of a short game where you're racing against the clock to accomplish something.
Damn (pun intended), the overall aesthetics of the game are off the charts. One note is that for a game where you're supposed to feel like a badass the guns are surprisingly "tame", I would expect much more powerful firing sounds along with some knockback to really sell it.
Didn't manage to kill the boss but here are some notes: - It was a bit hard to understand what's going on in the beginning, e.g. can/should I try to shoot the monster that's behind me and how the refueling works. - Not sure if being able to fall off the raft adds anything substantial, especially if it's instant death. Maybe it could just take time for you to climb back up, during which you cannot defend your raft, or something like that. - I'm not sure how much randomness there is when it comes to generating the pickups themselves but whatever's the case, it's sometimes hard to spot them, barely a corner peeking out of the water. I feel like it's already hard enough to harpoon them while defending the raft without the additional challenge of not actually seeing them. - This is more of an aesthetic choice, but when I think of fighting Cthulhu, I imagine it taking place at night while the full moon is shining over foggy water. This is more like just a foggy afternoon :D - Overall enjoyable experience.
Pretty cool, the epic music definitely makes the game feel way more intense. Technical note: I wanted to play it full-screen but the graphical scaling gets messed up in full-screen.
I always approve of more friendly rat themed games.
Overall I liked. Very similar to Storyteller.
The graphics are nice and consistent, and the puzzles are pretty cool.
Notes: - Some of the interactions are not very obvious, so towards the end I felt more like I'm just guessing at random instead of trying to figure out the puzzle. - Would be good if the objectives were visible inside the level as well. - Would be cool if all interactions had some meaningful result, but that's probably too big for a jam game. (Storyteller does this with an actual simulation system, not hardcoding.)
Technical note: the graphics don't scale very well outside what was probably the intended resolution. Here's how the game looks on a 4K screen (scaled down):
Screenshot (83).jpg
Love the drawing while moving bit. Cool game.
The art style is pretty cool but at times inconsistent (for example the really pixelated sword). The fact that you can do the ranged attack only on the line that has your character seemed weird since I have full movement on the gameplay plane, but maybe that could be made work. On the whole, a pretty enjoyable game.
Overall I enjoyed this game. Some notes: - This sort of game could probably use full 360 degree movement with mouse or joystick, sometimes it's a bit tricky to get the right angle for exorcising the demons. - The exorcism part felt a bit shallow and could require more strategy, otherwise you can almost just walk around with the cross exposed and not get hit. Maybe allowing full 360 movement and narrowing the affected arc would do this, that way you need to focus on a single enemy. Also adding more elaborate ritual for getting rid of the portals would be cool, thought maybe there just wasn't enough time for that :) - Technical note: the game doesn't work well with different resolutions: on a 4k monitor the initial game window is tiny, and when I maximize it, I can see a much larger area, giving me an unfair advantage.
Got score of 45.2; at first I didn't think I'd enjoy this because it's so simple but by the end I was in the flow state.