A Heavy Crown by OddballDave 2024-04-16T00:33:26Z
I definitely want more, but what's there is nice!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Owtuvammo
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Imp Master | compo | 475 | 3.66 | 3.69 | 3.63 | 4.14 | 3.46 | 2.93 | 2.51 | 3.39 |
I definitely want more, but what's there is nice!
The voice acting is definitely the best part. Otherwise, pretty simple but enjoyable enough.
This took me longer to complete than I care to admit, but I enjoyed it. I think this nails the theme better than anything else I have played!
Everyone else has said it already, but the art style for this one is spot on!
The idea here is right up my alley, but I gave it a few tries and things don't always work the way they should. The pacing leads me to be unable to have enough ghosts to make it through the night and they don't reliably defend my monks.
This is a solid start to something though and I expect alot of the shortcomings are due to the lack of time in a game jam. Good work with what is there. I just wish there was a tiny bit more polish to the base mechanics.
I totally didn't realize you could move around at first, expecting some sort of conventional card game, but this was a cute little dungeon crawl.
I couldn't quite tell if the combat was turn-based, but I found myself going through cards really quickly to try and kill them before they killed me.
The art, atmosphere, and music are all top notch and I love the platformer opening in another window. That was a huge surprise.
I ended up just having to pick whichever spirit I went to first each time, though, so I didn't really feel like I had much agency as a player in the visual novel portion, but the idea overall was really impressive and it's very polished.
Happy to come back and give this a shot, but I can't figure out how to run the game from your zip file. There doesn't seem to be an exe?
Level 2 got me. My strategy for these types of games is to build at the thing you are defending and work your way out since everything tends to funnel in towards that point and you clearly saw right through that. Kudos.
I agree that some badguy and tower variety would make this even more fun!
Echoing everyone else that the map is a bit too big, at least for a jam game. It feels really slow-paced, but everything worked really well. Reminds me of a few board games I like.
A little clearer indication on which units still have available actions would be a welcome addition as the transparency works better for some units than others. The living tree in particular was hard for me to tell if it has used its actions or not.
At the time of making this comment, this is my favorite game so far. This is amazing.
I didn't run into any issues and there were several surprises I enjoyed:
-A max upgraded summon does a cute little headshake.
-A carried summon keeps on shooting like a good little buddy.
-I greatly appreciate the decision to let you respawn for free in the context of a jam game.
-At the end of my playtime, my computer sounded like it was making popcorn.
I'd love to see this developed with more upgrade choices and character types. Your art style and minimal game design choices are top notch.
I don't entirely understand what affects the focus bar in the meetings, but I think there's an interesting idea here!
As a former corporate office worker, I absolutely love the slide art.
I like it for what it is. Something I would have liked would be the ability to place towers and dig them back up for a cost to change your upkeep and deal with some of the complaints that people have about running out of mana types. You could do something with that and different maps, etc, I feel like.
I will echo @daandruff and say that I think one-shotting enemies would be better here, but this was a weird and wild time.
I quite enjoyed the toof boy saying "ouch" when I damaged him, the music was zany and fun, and I don't know if anyone else noticed that you can kill yourself with your own traps!
I am a fan of Zachitronics and this has a very similar vibe. I will probably return to it later to explore more in-depth, but this feels like a can of worms in complexity that I don't have the focus to get wrapped up into today.
I played through the first 4 levels and it was difficult to visualize what would happen at first, so I just stumbled through with trial and error, but I got the hang of the systems, which I think is a fantastic sign for a puzzle game!
Like some others, I wish I could enact a strategy against the bosses. I attempted to spread out health from the initial enemies and then use that like a rally to survive the boss fights, but I just couldn't keep it up at level 3. Still, not a bad go for someone that's only been developing for a few months. Well done!
Something that tells you how much mana you actually need for each spell when you have them selected would be good.
As others have said, the drawing is a bit unforgiving, but I really, really like that idea.
I like the music, but the end of it makes the loop a bit jarring.
Very impressive with your timeframe. I do wish there was a bit more to it after a short run, but for 10 hours, I don't know how you could have done any better.
I don't know what to say other than the characters look absolutely delicious.
Gameplay was kinda fun, but got old before I killed the boss. I felt like I was mostly waiting around for him to show up alot of the time.
I really enjoyed this, but I will say that I had a hard time getting the skeletons to go the direction I wanted them to. Sometimes they would shoot the exact opposite way I expected.
Absolutely love the music and sprites.
I wanted more indication on the upgrade levels of the towers, but this felt like a cross between tower-defense and idle clicker.
Might have been nice to have a bit more control over tower placement and such, but this was a pretty fun little game!
This was alot of fun! I couldn't quite beat it, but this is one of my favorites so far! I had a few minor QOL suggestions from a gameplay standpoint:
-Shortcuts keys for the different abilities (1, 2, 3, 4, etc) would be welcome.
-I found myself accidentally using an ability because I was clicking a different one. An adjustment that accounts for that would be really helpful.
-I got used to it, but some way of previewing enemy movement. Maybe this could even be a new ability if you like the idea of keeping that information a little hidden?
-My only real gripe was that I couldn't always tell if my move was going to cause me to hit an enemy. This got me killed several times. Some indication would be helpful.
I can see there is something going on here and it's impressive in the time-frame, but there's just not enough feedback in the game for me to truly get ahold of it.
This is some wordle level. I want this. If I had one note, I would like to be able to use right-click to remove an entry.
My only real complaint is that I wanted to keep going after 50 coins for a little bit!
Very simple, but a nicely polished game!
Very fun idea. I definitely felt like my success largely boiled down to the luck of getting a bunch of souls in one line, but I'm not sure there's any way around that.
Visuals and audio are great and it's a very fun take on the theme. I found it a bit tedious after a while, but the core gameplay is very well polished and it's a fun idea!
As others have said, this reminds me of go. Simple to learn how to play, but the strategy has the potential to be really complex. I found the AI to be a bit easy to game, but I'll have to bug a friend to play it with me later. The sounds could do with a bit of work in my opinion, but everything else about the presentation was spot on and the tutorial was exactly the right way to teach me how to play.
Edit: My first game (tried before the tutorial), I got schooled by the AI and I couldn't play on my turn and the game was bound up. It would be good to add a way to forfeit the game so it doesn't get stuck.
@andrewkennedy Oh, I see that on your page now, so I feel silly for not noticing it. Even so, this thing is alot of fun! Great work!
"I don't know how to pronounce the name of my hammer!"
Pretty funny little game, if a tad shallow. I definitely enjoyed it.
It was definitely a little on the harder end, and the electron attraction was not intuitive to me, but once I got it, it was alot of fun and the art and level of polish is really, really impressive.
The help didn't really click for me until I played for quite a while, but I definitely like the music and general vibe.
I like the art and what I think the general idea is, but I'm really not clear what I am supposed to be doing.
@vortexb aha! Yes, that makes sense now. I was able to get through a few levels. These are some tough puzzles! Thanks for clarifying though. I'm glad I got to dig into it a bit more now.
The vibes remind me of Lethal Company or Scavenger SV-4, which is high praise indeed.
I will say that the gameplay was very compelling to me but fairly tedious. It would be extremely useful if you spent some time making selecting and organizing the slides easier. I don't mind the complicated instructions. It fits very well with the theming of everything, but once I put slides on the projector and then found an instruction that modified it, it was extremely difficult to select the right slide again.
Also, in terms of word-choice, I wasn't sure for a while if "included" meant included on the projector or included in the package of slides that I was given, which made getting started really difficult.
Overall, if anyone is reading the comments, give this a shot and stick with it long enough to truly understand what it's doing. There is a really great logic puzzle hidden behind some daunting instructions here!
The song is a banger and I find the twist on the theme of being summoned at inopportune moments really great.
I did notice that if two of the same letters show up in a row, hitting the key once resolves both. At least, I think that was the case?
Given the nature of the game, I would have appreciated if you could speed up the text or skip through it, but I guess that gets in the way of the summoning timing, maybe?
I enjoyed this!
On the puzzle front, I was a bit confused at the solutions. I don't think I ever used a blood chalice? Are there multiple solutions to these?
I concur with CrociDB. I nearly gave up until I saw their comment about mouse controlling the demon, but boy am I glad I saw it because this was so much fun after I learned that!
I will say that I found the old abilities were almost entirely replaced with the new ones when I got them, which is a little bit of a shame, but overall a fantastic entry! :smiling_imp:
This was awesome.
I didn't have the patience to get the girlfriends soul, but I really like that there is some morale here. Just move on and go out with the cute girl at the candle shop, dude!
If this doesn't win in the humor category, then I am convinced there is no god.
Short but sweet. I like the art style. Wish there was more, but what's there is fun.
It has some nice bits to it, especially the art, but it took me a while to figure out what my goal was and even then, it was a bit tedious to get things done.
This is very fun!
I will say that I could not for the life of me figure out how to get behind him and also attack as I moved up in diffulty.
All that said, you should be proud. This is a really nice entry!
This was fun! At first, the golem felt tacked on, but in the later waves, it was really fun to have a bunch of them running around.
Echoing the other sentiments. I have no idea what the different glyphs actually do. And I didn't even realize the green one was there because of the backgrounds. It doesn't help that everything moves so fast when you aren't in the summon wheel that I don't get a chance to register what I actually summoned.
Even so, I believe that there is something thoughtful happening there. I think some more onboarding / communication would greatly help.
My friend Ian was pretty solid, but no match for girlfriend Alli in the center. Fun take.
The aesthetic is really sweet and it's a fun little auto-battler. I do wish I understood the importance of the different effects a little better, but it was fun regardless.
I'm still not sure what the purpose of pushing eachother is and I agree that it was odd that others.
All that said, this was impressive for a compo entry and everything seemed to work, overall. I'm a fan of the demon betraying the summoner and killing them randomly. (I think that's what was happening?)
I really like this concept! I do feel like the management aspect is a bit shallow, but that's totally understandable with the time-frame of the compo to work with.
One note that I imagine you could easily address is that I didn't realize you could summon new heroes for a long time because I believe it pops up only when you have enough gold and I kept giving all of mine to the first hero I summoned.
I also think that, if there are no events or enough gold to summon, you could skip a day and just have the counter go up multiple times.
Overall, there's a really solid concept here and the atmosphere you made is very impressive in the time-frame!
The scene was really well put together and I especially liked the overall graphics for the dialogue window. The dialogue gave me a few chuckles, but I do wish there was a little bit more gripping drama. Overall, it was an excellent way to spent fifteen minutes or so, though!
high_score.png
Bone dragons + cosmic horror. :kissing:
This was alot of fun! This is one that enticed me to give it several plays. I do wish you had time for some sound effects, but it was really, really fun!
@zoranac @byazzle
I was a bit worried about that. I can try uploading a half resolution version on itch later tonight or tomorrow morning.
Guess I'm not sure what the rules on that are. Sorry for the inconveniences though!
The itch link should now be at 640x640 instead of 1280x1280.
@kaliuresis Nice catch! That was actually a trick I left in for my own playtesting. Could have swapped the order of the levers, but I decided I would leave it in to see if anyone else caught on.
I see what you mean about the darkness level and I don't honestly disagree. I just wanted an excuse to use the light effects on all the different elements, but maybe I should have used a grey shader instead of pitch black.
@semenov huh, I'm not sure how you got there!
It seems to me like the mirror glitched on you. Hitting E might rotate the mirror and knock you free?
Really solid concept and pretty fun to figure out the right order to put things in to optimize the effects. I'm getting some text scaling that make some of the item effects hard to read, but good otherwise!
Very well polished, but I think it needs more balancing work. I'd like to be able to remove my own minions because of the minion cap. There were a couple times where I wanted to summon an upgraded unit, but I was capped out and had to wait, resulting in my anvil getting killed before I could get more defenses.
After a couple tries, I got a strategy that worked for me, but the xenomorph looking snake always got me in the end.
Overall, I really like the presentation and the idea of having to summon at the anvil was alot of fun.
My victory is inevitable
I too could not get a web build.
I got a high score of 220. :smiley:
I quite like the music. The camera rotation was a little bit jarring, but I got used to it pretty quick.
The divinity UI definitely needs some work, but it's a fun little bullet hell!
I didn't even realize there were multiple until I checked the comments here.