Spore Valley by GarrickWinter 2023-10-03T14:49:23Z
looks cool and I want to try it out, but the download isn't working! Try reuploading maybe? Or put it on Itch.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → vivid-hallucination
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 58 | Collector | ingest|digest | jam | 304 | 3.62 | 3.36 | 3.52 | 3.94 | 3.07 | 3.72 | 3.38 | 3.31 | |
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | The Fifth Seal | compo | 137 | 3.61 | 3.12 | 3.08 | 4.01 | 2.15 | 1.62 | 2.50 | 4.13 | |
| 2023 | 54 | Limited Space | River City Transit | jam | 723 | 3.41 | 3.39 | 3.52 | 4.21 | 3.19 | 4.04 | 3.45 |
looks cool and I want to try it out, but the download isn't working! Try reuploading maybe? Or put it on Itch.
The fight sequences felt a little out of place, but otherwise I loved it. Fun, polished, entertaining writing and VO.
This is definitely a sysiphean task
Sometimes the eggs wouldn't let me pick them up - it would do the holding animation but with empty arms, and the egg stayed in place. Other times, when I did pick and egg up, it would just roll away as soon as a put it down. Made it difficult to put them near the fire.
I really like the models though, and it was a fun idea!
Fun! Great job. I like to kick the demons and the space felt very limited! Like a minimal, surreal, martial art. Would have been nice to get a bit of variation in the enemies, maybe some ranged attacks or something.
Solid entry that stuck to the theme. Your pixel art is nice, readable and I enjoyed the soundtrack.
Fun concept, beautifully drawn, and I enjoyed the voice work.
Zip off denim jorts are the height of fashion
I made a super rat and it was very fast. 11/10
It took a solid 4 or 5 deaths before I realized why I was dying immediately while I tried to read my instructions lol. Once I got going I grokked the spirit thing though. I had a difficult time finding the things I needed and I didn't always understand what I needed to do with them but it was cool! Atmosphere is on point and I liked the use of the theme.
This is very difficult to play, but swinging that flail around is wild. Good job!
Perfect game 5/5 I loved it
Flowah powah
I dig this. 🖤
Those little flames that come straight for you kept taking me out. Stalkers. They're hard to pick out until it's too late - which I guess is the point lol. Found myself wishing for some sort of defensive manouver I could use against them. Or a way to dodge attacks.
Loved it though. It's fun. I think that rune drawing and summoning system is innovative. It looks and sounds great. Perfect jam game.
I didn't understand the feedback mechanisms until I came to the comments. I saw the red lines while moving stuff around and thought that meant it was in the *wrong* place at first. Made sense with the context provided by other comments.
Horny game with weird controls. I liked it. 🖤
Hits the theme, fun art and I love the presentation.
Fun take on sokoban! I thought I was going to lose for a minute when two circles in a row spawned under piles of boxes I couldn't move, but it came back around.
I CAN WHAT?! Teach me not to read the instructions I guess lol
Loved this. I got a little over half-way before I had to cut off my thumb. Major Inscryption vibes. Moody. Great sound and visual design. 🖤
Gameplay was a little samey, so I didn't really want to start over when I eventually died. Each level was identical, just with a higher number to reach. Some mechanical variance would go a long way.
I bought the gem to give me an extra shard each hand but I don't think it did anything.
The active effects are *very* powerful. My pawns got queen moves right off the bat and it made everything quite trivial. Then they also got knight moves and had basically free movement around the board.
Made it feel less like I was surviving waves, and more like I was an unstoppable invading horde of superpawns.
Well put together though, I had fun.
I like bringing natural beauty back to a space. It's like if Terra Nil was fantasy instead of sci-fi. The slow terraforming speed of the elementals made the equilibrium level a bit of a slog, but it's a solid concept.
🪬
Art is good, the game is cohesive, quite enjoyed throwing fireballs around and disrupting that wizard's ritual. I wish there was *more* messing around with the wizard - like if every room was another ritual you had to bust up or something. Just a thought though I like what you've made here.
Did you draw the cover illustration too? It's fantastic I love it.
Solid entry. I did have to faff about to get it running on my laptop (Fedora Linux). Installed glfw-devel and the .NET 8 package, it gave me a purple square off the start, but a resize fixed that, and I had to kill the process after, but it worked well otherwise.
I'm impressed this is your own engine!
Fun little typing challenge. I liked when it gave me an opportunity to chain actions - switch to a colour then do a few different shapes in a row then do another colour of the last shape. It's satisfying.
Love this idea. Feels like a turn-based-tactics take on Magic The Gathering. Pace was quite slow and the map quite large, but the bones are good. This could be really fun with some more time put into it. A strategy game is an ambitious two day project!
Chill gameplay, great pixel work, dark cozy vibes.
🖤
Difficult to play on my trackpad, but that's sort of a me problem. Great job!
Technically impressive. I love the card sprites and how juicy everything is. Music is great, sound effects hit right. Flavor text on the cards is fun. Good vibes here.
The card mechanics were straightforward and easy to understand, after one round of flailing I had it down. Solid entry!
Love the voice over and the script, it was quirky and fun. Music was great and fit the mood very well.
Accidentally summoning a crate onto myself was *chef's kiss* and I loved the way the voice over made fun of me for it.
The platforming was very floaty, which, I think it had to be to work, but sometimes led to strangeness - I was crushed by a box that I pushed over a ledge too quickly. Both wizard and box went over the ledge, but the wizard fell faster than the box and slid right underneath it. The floaty controls made me play much slower and more cautiously than I would in most platformers.
The last platforming section was challenging in a good way. I wish there was more game, and more objects to summon!
I feel like I wasn't supposed to be able to make everything auto-spawn by clicking and holding a button, then moving my mouse away from it. I accidentally did this to the "Pray" button, then purposefully did the same with peasants to keep a constant stream of them coming in, then in later waves, just set all the units on auto and no longer had to look at the screen.
Cool concept though. It would be fun to have a bit of strategy involved, rather than just brute forcing, but brute force feels appropriate thematically.
Fun take on the theme! I figured out which runes to use to fix the bottle and how to enter them pretty quickly, but just had to guess which order they went in, I guessed wrong and thought I needed to use more runes. Tried a few, then I wound up looking at the spoiler section and realized I just used them in the wrong order.
It would have been nice to have some sort of indication on the order of operations, or feedback mechanisms to let me know if I was on the right track. Like drawing the right rune correctly makes it glow a different colour or something.
Similar experience to FFenril. My PC resource usage spiked like mad and made my PC almost unresponsive by level 3.
Your pixel art is vibrant and beautiful though. I loved the illustrations between levels.
I'm running Firefox on Linux.
Fun! Like Shadow Mario, but demonic. Great sprites.
Beautiful illustrative style. I was nearly taken out by the two mice in a trenchcoat, steam rolled the bougie budgie, then got murdered by crime weasels.
🖤
I always jump in without reading any instructions, and thought I understood the diagrams because the gems have shapes that line up with the shapes on the drawing, but I was wrong. Went back and read your tutorial section and figured out how to summon the donkey. Interesting idea though! And great illustration.
Also thank you for including a Linux version 🖤
Beautiful pixel art and use of theme. Fun magic mumbling when you summon the demons, music was great. I got stuck on level 8 but that could just be my smooth brain. I wish I could dismiss a demon.
Fun little snake clone. Great sound effects and music.
Spooky AI Madlibs.
I have to say that the Readme and EULA made me very wary of running this program, so mood accomplished. I hope my laptop is not haunted by this summoning I performed.
I like the floaty movement. Like, clicking to move in a direction then throwing bullets around is fun. I didn't really get what was going on with the letters, but I did manage to explode some things so that was cool.
Art is fun, and the camera movements are juicy.
Cute. Fast pig is best pig.
I am very bad at chess. I found the most consistent way for my smooth brain to win a scenario was to put the queen wherever should could immediately win.
Mjölnir is pronounced Mjölnir.
Fun entry! I felt like I couldn't throw the hammer far enough to be effective, so mostly relied on the call back to kill the vile cretins. Once I got surrounded that stopped being effective too.
I love the idea of being summoned away from your mundane life and having to fight off some wizard's enemies, but I felt like I had to bruteforce the conversation options - like I was just guessing which was the right option to move forward. Really interesting though, good job.
Feels cozy. Lesson 6 took me a minute to break down. If I'm honest I hadn't entirely internalized the logic of the different elements until then (I was sorta flailing about and guessing successfully) so that felt like ending on a real test. It was satisfying to unwind.
Loved the humorous bits of *history* and *science* interspersed.
I loved making my witch and choosing a familiar. This was a weird entry in a really great way. Summoning my credit card back to my pocket. 🖤
My crow familiar absolutely bodied that finale.
Spooky. I enjoyed your artwork and the little bits of lore sprinkled throughout, folklore references like Chernobog, it added a sense of place. The Puzzles were quite simple. I sort of wished I'd had to figure out the scroll-mashup combos myself somehow, rather than it just doing it for me. Solid entry though! I liked it a lot.
🖤
Love the player sprite. I'm a sucker for shadowy creatures *and* pixel art.
I managed to suss out the rules on combining cards after a few rounds without reading the instructions, so I'd call this a success. I like the lane-based combat, trying to keep a good ratio of element vs celestial cards to deploy as needed is fun.
I managed to win my first game in the LD version, but my second game I played your Godot Wild version, and it just dragged on and on. It was hard to push past the point of having the enemy line pushed all the way back to their end, every time I defeated them, they would pop another unit in that space and I couldn't move forward. I wasn't sure how to do better.
That could work yeah. Maybe have limited cards in the deck? More complexity in strategy would be fun too, ranged units, traps, spells. There's a lot of places to go with this if you want to expand on it, it's a solid start and I enjoyed playing it!
I thought my childhood of training via Math Blaster was going to serve me well here, and I almost got through Wave 6, but with multiple baddies comin' at me the three-number-problem ones took up too many threads in my brain unit and I could barely process them lol.
Loved the enemy designs, especially the boss models. Great work!
Looks great, I liked the camera movement and the music gave a good vibe. The speech effects for the characters were a bit sharp, but overall it was good!
@velvetlobster Those are syntax errors on the game-logic bits I missed while testing! If you remember where they were I can fix them.
@velvetlobster Ah, at the Columbarium ending then. Found the error and fixed it!
@kristirose88 Thank you! It *was* a lot of time and effort (~23 hours of work over the duration of the compo averaging 500 words per minute is absolutely draining) but I'm not sure if frantically vomiting out words while in a fugue state can be called "consideration". I'm grateful that my muse came along for the ride to the cemetery, or I'd have produced something unintelligible.
It does start a little slow. I could have reduced the action limit in the truck by one more to carry things along sooner, it's just tough to know how much is needed to set the mood.
@untitled-studios I felt a bit weird about the screeching shadows too, but I had so little time to put on my editor's hat and still submit in time for the compo. Most of the time any words that came to mind just went to the page, and if I was lucky I read them again in a test run and touched up whatever sounded awkward. Honestly, I'm grateful it came together at all. If I do more revisions I'll rewrite that piece for sure. Anyway, thank you for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed. 🖤
@brainbetter As with cooking, mouthfeel is an oft-overlooked quality in writing that can make or break the experience. Thank you for lending your voice to my words 🖤
@kanity Aha sorry for the cliff hanger but I had less than an hour left when I got to the end and I still needed to try and clean things up to upload in time for the compo. I'm glad it left you wanting more, I do plan on writing more. And I'd call your ending a success. You didn't die.
I purposefully left the gender up to the player to decide. You are whoever you are, and I want the story to feel personal, intimate.
There are some scenes that add detail to what you're looking at or change slightly depending on how you've acted up to that point. Your blood loss could come up in the chapel, for example, if you follow the chill in your spine. Depending on how much you've lost when you get there.
Things like that would make it difficult to write a thorough walk-through. Here are the endings though.
1. Columbarium Ritual: you will most likely die here, but it's possible to successfully complete the ritual if the spirits there aren't angry at your presence. They're picky though. 2. Willow Ritual: can also kill you if you've angered the willow, but she will protect you if she likes you. 3. Both ritual locations are affected by your having your duffel bag or not, but only slightly. 4. Die following the ache in your heart 5. Die stealing a doll from the willow 6. You can be attacked and die if you look for an alternate path into the cemetery 7. The event at the chapel kills you if you go there, stay, and don't stop it.
The Fifth Seal's physical description and demeanor was inspired by its appearance in a book, _Our Share of Night_ by Mariana Enriquez. Its height and shadowed face are from there. The game's concept was inspired by that scene in that book.
@kr4ft3r Aha sorry about the music. I'm glad you managed to enjoy the experience anyway.
Writing a cohesive work in two days was a mad dash. I appreciate your giving it a go and taking the time to leave feedback.
Being a hamburger demon myself I find this kind of representation very empowering.
🖤
Thank you for this opportunity to create horrendous creatures.
🖤
I enjoyed the writing, the general conceit gave Papers Please vibes, but it's a different beast mechanically. The art style is wonderful, musical accompaniment fitting and refined. Overall good entry.
Dark and oppressive. 🖤
Wow, so many people involved in this entry! Explains the ambitious size.
I loved the statue lore, and the old man who sees the beauty in the world. The writing in general is quite evocative.
The musical score is ethereal and jaunty, fits the setting well, though it was a bit strange that it reverts to the exploratory theme when you cross the final bridge? I feel like the badlands music would have fit the mood better for the conversation with your mother.
The combat was a little bit wonky. Ravi died immediately when I started the fight across the first bridge before he had a turn, felt not great, then the second fight across the second bridge I won without the enemy having a turn. Most of the rest wound up with one character out of commission before they got a move in. Kind of a mixed bag.
Movement felt sort of stilted, and the map felt large and empty. I never really felt like I knew where I was going, just wandering and hoping for the best.
Overall really great though! I enjoyed playing through it. It's impressive to wrangle so many people toward a common goal in such a short period of time successfully at all, really, but it was fun in its own right.
Beautiful artwork! Honestly, fantastic. I would love a tarot deck in this style.
Not sure I enjoyed it as a take on RPS, because the hands are random and there are no indications of what the other player has, there isn't really any possible strategy.
Potato is love. Potato is life.
Love the soundtrack 🤘
I didn't totally understand how to battle successfully. I know I needed to get my dudes to the far side of the field to attack the enemy leader, but whenever they had no enemy to fight they just turned around to attack me instead, so putting one in an empty lane was just like self-destruct, and if I only reacted to where the pikemen were coming out, I could never get to the leader. The best strategy I found was to pump them out in one lane and let another lane get attacked for a bit, and lightly defend wherever else they went, but then sometimes my dudes would just turn on me anyway and set me back to square one.
I think I just didn't get what was severing their summoning tie, or if there was anything I could do to stop it from happening?
Fun twist on a survivors style game. It's interesting trying to find a balance on number of enemies to maximize score but avoiding becoming overwhelmed. Solid entry!
Having just a limited time to put the ship together makes building feel hectic, and the semi-random controls where if you're not careful you wind up doing a bunch of disparate actions with each button press makes for a wild shmup. I did not make very successful crafts, but I did make a laser spewing throwing star out of space junk and that's pretty cool.
Solid! Simple mechanics that are quick to grasp but with quite a bit of complexity as the new pieces come in and it looks great!
Poor bluppo alone in the dark. I only managed par on the last level, and then the first on my second time through. The trick shots were... tricky.
Enjoyed wandering the maze. It was visually cohesive and I love all the psychedelic and wizardly illustrations on the paintings. I collected them all. I don't think I was ever able to have more than one in my inventory though, so scrolling the mouse wheel to select one before using it wasn't intuitive.
Fun game! I enjoyed the writing, it was just the right amount of silly, and some of the puzzles were puzzling. The mannequins took me a minute. I sort of just brute forced the vials, and I had no idea what the time phial was for so I was glad it used itself automatically when I wandered back to the sun room.
Oh yeah, jelly lad and spooky sword. I love those guys.
Space blob was very blob, much enjoy.
cozy. Starts slow but once I upgraded the size a little and bought an autofeeder I was absolutely rolling in eggs.
I think your upload is borked
I don't understand how to be good at this. My best run net me -315 lol
Interesting idea though, I like the phased approach to plan the route then try to suck up all the garbage along your route.