Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Zowie
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 55 | Summoning | Sokoban Summon X | compo | 38 | 4.04 | 3.83 | 4.07 | 4.17 | 3.88 | 2.71 | 4.11 | 3.66 |
A nice little cellular automaton. Drawing a square I get the impression that the neighborhood rules aren't being applied in the same way for all directions (some corners stay stable, some don't!). For turning the lines into pixels you might want to look into Bresenham's algorithm. That would help get rid of the gaps between the pixels.
Really fun! At first it was very difficult to get anywhere but eventually I got a really strong economy going. I managed to beat the game with a really small deck with tactician & spy, which pretty much breaks the game because you can just keep grabbing them over and over. Kind of cheating.
Difficult! I couldn't figure out how to reliably kill the tooth spitting guys. Also found a bug: Killing an enemy while he's punching you can crash the game with the error "Attempt to disconnect a nonexistent connection from 'Skeleton3D:
I only had it happen once to me, it might be a freak accident. I'm on Linux Mint, x86_64, but it doesn't impress me as a platform-specific bug, just an unlikely-to-trigger one.
Played all the tutorial levels in about half an hour just now. I like it a lot! Only snag I felt is that clearing slots isn't as convenient as it could be, as Owtuvammo already mentioned.
Very nicely polished! I couldn't get past the last level but I enjoyed it a lot nevertheless. The freeplay ending is a nice touch — I'm guessing that's a repurposed developer tool though!
That was really high quality! Only pain point was that knights were pretty overpowered and made my run pretty easy, but that's been said plenty often.
Played for about half an hour. I liked it, but it's very difficult. The best strategy I found was to build a cross of pots with spigots inbetween, and even then I couldn't get past the third floor (as opposed to dying on the second floor which seems to be the standard outcome). I didn't use the summoning mechanic very much... It seems you need things *more* on higher floors than on lower floors so losing out on something on the next floor isn't a great trade-off, although I didn't mess around with the clock and the other thing much.
I'd appreciate a Linux build if that's possible. I tried it with Wine but it didn't seem to work
Very enjoyable and definitely the most complete game I've played so far. Really impressive you managed to make this much content in so little time. I'm overall very positive about this game but here's some snags I hit: - Some levels felt somewhat tedious to me, like the "central courtyard" level where you have to move all the way to the other side to beat up some of the slimes (which is a pretty damn long way because it's a zigzag level, made worse by the fact that you have to wait each turn for the slimes, who don't even actually jump because they can't move diagonally where they spawn) - I played it on itch.io where the size of the game window generally didn't display the full level and I couldn't really see everything, which wasn't a problem by itself but the camera panning was really slow for me, so it turned out kind of tedious. I think ideally the level should automatically be zoomed to suit the size of the viewport so you always have the whole level in view. - The fact that newly spawned enemies attack immediately sometimes added a level of unpredictability that didn't really mesh with the rest of the gameplay (which was otherwise very fair and predictable) - I didn't personally have much trouble with the inputs but you might want to consider some visual indication of which direction counts as "up/W" and which is "left/A", like a little decorative north-indicator on the ground next to the character. If you point out in the tutorial that the little marker always points north/up people have something to base themselves upon.
Still 5 stars despite all that, easily one of the best games in the jam
I liked the graphics, music and sounds a lot, but the character controller is very janky. In my opinion it's important for a platformer that the character controller feels nice, so this is kind of unfortunate. I also got two bugs: I had a summoned skeleton get stuck in a hole, softlocking the game, and the cursor got way too large at a certain point (I think after moving it out of the window and back into it, this was on the web version).
mrskeleton.png
@lightningst Thank you! The offerings part is probably too difficult. I meant to add more different summons which would make it easier to find a combination of offerings that works, but two summons was already pretty ambitious... I also meant to add a text speed selection thing but time pressures prevented it.
For anyone else having trouble with the offerings [SPOILERS]: The deer is a valid offering for both creatures. Also it's pretty easy to lock yourself out of being able to get one offering for the succubus.
@ugly-robot Thank you!!! A lot of the dialogue is currently actually pretty hacky (cutscenes especially) and abusing Godot's Tweens for timing mechanisms, so for the post-jam version it's gonna take a bit of work to add features to that hot mess, but I'll probably be fine. Thanks for the offer!
@boltkey I'm really sorry about the slow textboxes! There's definitely too much waiting but it will have to wait until post-jam to fix it. Glad to hear you still liked it!
@phlip45 Thanks for the recommendation! I'm not sure if typical dialogue managers would have been a good fit for this game because almost all of the dialogue is completely intertwined with the gameplay mechanics & object interactions, but I don't really have experience with dialogue managers so I'll take some time to look into it!
I went over the rules and apparently you're allowed to make some type of fixes that don't add new features. As of this comment I've uploaded a hotfix that doubles text speeds. It should test your patience a lot less now.
@drgcandle Thanks for the kind words buddy!! Glad you liked it!
@torte478 I'm happy to hear you liked it that much! I was already planning to make a post-jam update with a couple more features and a little bit more content. Not sure about anything like a sequel but maybe if this somehow gets popular. It was a lot of fun to make and I got lots of great bad ideas for things to make with these mechanics, but I've also already got other projects that I probably shouldn't be neglecting, so I'm not so sure about it. I'd like to, though.
@sonnybone @sariiger The endings are kind of feasible to find by yourself, but it's probably pretty tough mainly because trying out different combinations of items would probably take a while. I didn't have this playtested by anyone but myself so I didn't really get to see how difficult or frustrating some parts were until I watched a streamer play the game, but I'll probably make a post-jam version that's got some "rebalancing"/redesign of sorts which should be a little easier to figure out maybe in a couple of weeks. Thanks for playing!
@goldyxen @niterich The game doesn't give you any feedback when you place the wrong items on the circle, which is definitely a point of improvement. It's not really a bug, just a flawed design. I was of course a bit strapped for time so it's got a lot of rough edges design-wise, but as far as bugs go it's pretty decent — I've only found one bug in the game since releasing it and nobody's really mentioned it. I'll definitely add some beeps and boops to the post-jam version. Thanks for playing!
P.S. the bug is that if you're unpacking the car's trunk and there's no free space around you, the tome can fail to unpack & disappear (the game does at least tell you that it went wrong, so maybe if someone did trigger it they just restarted)