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A jam submission

DracohengeView game page

Hunt the dragon using your trusty greatclub and the plants you gather. Made in two weeks for LOWREZJAM 2022.
Submitted by grasstypefire — 4 hours, 10 minutes before the deadline
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Dracohenge's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Graphics#774.0004.000
Authenticity (use of resolution)#874.6134.613
Overall#953.8633.863
Audio#1193.4843.484
Gameplay#1363.3553.355

Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Did you work in a team?
Nope, just me.

Was the resolution a challenge?
Designing the UI was the hardest part, otherwise the game fitted quite well in the resolution.

What did you learn?
I've learned mostly about animations, and also the whole experience of joining a jam with no team.

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Comments

Viewing comments 24 to 5 of 24 · Next page · Last page
Submitted(+1)

I really liked the dragon animation. I've managed to beat it with only 1 death. And I've found it fun to use the buff items and throwable rocks. It'd be cool to see more bosses in this game, but I know that making a boss fight is pretty tough, since it requires tons of animations and patterns. 

Submitted(+1)

I think you’ve got a really great base for something awesome here. Are you planning on working on it more after the jam?

Developer

I do! I had a lot of fun working on it and I already have ideas for different dragons, weapons, plants, maps and even lore. Plus all the feedback helped me a lot so I can fine tune the game. But all of that after I refactor the code because it is quite messy.

Submitted(+1)

Very simple art but I really liked it. The large sword looked cool, but some of the animations were stiff.

Movement and jumping was a bit stiff, and it was unclear what the plants did. The wind sfx sounded kind of weird.

And when I died to the dragon it just disappeared.

Developer

All of the sfxs and player animations were rushed in the last day of the jam so I really want to redo them all, I only planned for a playable version due to the scope of the project.

The dragon actually moved to another area. But maybe there might be a bug that I haven't encountered so I'm gonna keep an eye on that.

Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted(+1)

Cool game. I really like the way the dragon moves around. It seems to have a lot of variety in animation and attacks. The gameplay seems a bit simple when you can just die and know your damage still counts, but it was fun trying to last as long as possible before dying. The plant system is neat, but I feel it could be made a little more intuitive. I kept forgetting what most of them do, and it was tricky to cycle between them during combat. Other than that, I enjoyed the music and colour palette.

Developer

Thank you!

The whole plant system was the last thing I implemented in the game so it needs a lot of work still. Thanks for your feedback!

Submitted

it would have helped the game experience a lot if the different mechanics had been taught somehow. i figured out the walljump on my own, for example. I ran into a bug where the dragon was stationary, I could keep hitting it, but it never died (at least for the 3 minutes I kept hitting its head :D) The palette is very good, the controls are hard at first but you get used to it.  The design of the dragon is very well done.

Developer

Thank you forthe feedback!

That is quite the worrysome bug there, I haven't even encountered it yet. Do you remember at which point it became stationary? Like it was flying or in the ground, or it was waking up? Or it was stationary when you found it?

Submitted(+1)

i was on the second floor to the right. i think it was in a middle of an attack animation, but im not sure

Developer

I see, I think I might know at which state it got stationary. Thank you very much!

Submitted(+1)

im glad i could help!

Developer

Found the bug! It appears that the dragon tries to reach the player but gets stuck somehow, don't know why and how. Thanks again for spotting the bug!

Submitted(+1)

This dragon is badass! I loved seeing him eat plants, haha!

Gameplay wise, I thought there were just a smidge too many inputs to learn at once. Having many inputs isn’t a problem per se, but I wish they were taught to the player progressively.

Great job!

Developer

Thanks!

I've planned to add a little tutorial area where it showed each input sequentially, but scrapped the idea since the player has like a free zone to test it all out before facing the dragon.

Submitted(+1)

Congratulations on making this game !

I've played your game during a live that you can watch here :

The live is timestamped so you can go directly to your game.

I hope the feedback and live reactions will be useful. Keep it up !

(don't hesitate to follow me on itch, twitter and youtube if you wanna help!)

Developer(+1)

Thank you very much for playing it! The live gameplay helped me immensely!

About the plants, I liked the idea of showing their in-game name instead of their effects when you are near them. I tried to make their appearance a bit intuitive but showing their names makes it way more direct and quick.

About the walljump, you can do it on the same wall too instead of alternating walls. But I'll propably redesign the levels so you don't have to completely rely on walljumping to reach other areas.

And you helped me spot a bug where the win screen wouldn't show up when you defeated the monster so thanks for that! I can say that you defeat it with a very good time actually.

Submitted(+1)

Your welcome it's my pleasure !
I'm really happy it helped.
If you wanna help and are interested in game dev content and more playtest of your games, follow me on itch/twitter and subscribe to my youtube channel !

See you !

Submitted(+1)

I really like the use of a limited color pallete I think it gives a nice atmosphere. The dragon animations are very fluid and convey personality effectively. Everything feels responsive. Great entry!

Submitted(+1)

Pretty tough! The design is beautiful especially that dragon. Challenging gameplay but enjoyable. Even good music. Awesome job.

Submitted(+1)

That dragon is sooooo cooooool! Also I love the ultra low detail character but it still reads against the background. Really nice aesthetics.

Submitted(+1)

The dragon looks amazing! ^^ I got it to fly away, It never came back and no doors opened up so I think I beat it? I would have kept playing if there were more bosses to fight, great game! :)

Developer(+1)

Thank you! You can walljump to access the upper areas, the dragon when it gets to low health goes there. That's on me cuz I forgot to tell that the player can walljump so I added that to the page.

I have already ideas for new bosses (harder bosses hehe), but before that there's a lot of refactoring first and of course more polish.

Submitted(+1)

Heeeey this is like monster hunter! So cool! The animations are so well done and the gameplay felt a lot like monster hunter, playing it was super thrilling. Definitely fun.

Other than what people already commented, only thing I found a bit confusing was identifying the plants at first and figuring out what they did, but after that, everything went super smooth.

But hey, that's absolutely on me (I didn't read the whole itch page and just found out you had the botanical guide there haha)

Great job!

Developer

Thanks! I really like the monster hunter series and when I looked at Plants as Tools the idea just matched.

About the plants I forgot to add outlines on their sprites. I could also add an indicator to when the player is near a plant to help identifying it.

Submitted(+1)

really fun game, the animation and art is really great.

the gameplay remind me of monster hunter but it's 2D.

great job.

Developer(+1)

Thanks! Monster Hunter 2D was exactly my initial idea, but since I focused only on the main aspects of fighting the monster I didn't want to call it a demake.

Submitted(+1)

I love it! Looks great and it's fun. I do believe the monster has infinite health tho :P I dealt so much damage but still nothing. Also at first I was very confused when the monster dipped out, it took me some time to figure out that you can jump on walls into higher levels. Overall, one of my favorites.

Developer

So glad you loved it!

I swear the monster does not have infinite health. But there was a bug when I was playtesting before submiting where the monster could not die, fortunately the bug was just a dumb math mistake and was fixed right away.

Now the only way for the monster to get infinite health is if you get unlucky and the monster eat the heal plant every time so eerm yeah be careful with that.

Submitted(+1)

This is a very spectacular game for a game jam! Graphics and controls feel very polished and the plants are a neat idea. The animations must have been a lot of work. I think the dragon could do with less health (or a health indicator), I bashed it for about 17 minutes until I won and I wasn't sure if I was making progress. How does the dragon AI work? It seems like a complicated thing to do.

Developer

Thank you very much!

In my opinion a health indicator takes away the tension in the fight, but I wanted to add at least a damage indicator for when you struck the dragon so you might have a notion of progress at least.

The animations were a lot of work indeed but the dragon AI took way more work. During development, I tried to study about behavior trees to make a more flexible AI but I wasn't able to make it work, so I just structured the AI with a basic state machine which is way less complicated than behavir trees.  It is composed of a main state that chooses what kind of attacks to make and the attack states controlled by animation (Godot is perfect for this btw).

Submitted

Thanks for the info! Behavior trees are a thing that I always wanted to learn about, but put off because they seem so complicated. I've noticed that Godot's animation system is pretty powerful, and I've been thinking about using it for similar purposes (different attack, block and stagger animations on a player character). Now your dragon makes me want to give that another try.

Submitted(+1)

Very cool game. It was like u are playing Monster Hunter in low res.

Developer

It was my main inspiration actually so I'm glad I achieved that. But I didn't wanted to make an actual demake because

Submitted(+1)

this one is impressive, the animations on the dragon are so fluid, character controls are limiting but still gives the player enough freedom, the entire thing feels like a mini dark souls boss fight

Didn't find much use for plants even after reading the descriptions tho, I just spam used all the good ones and didn't pick up the bad ones, throwing them at the dragon is not very viable as it's flying around constantly. The heal flower thingy was fun tho, it makes you vulnerable while you are healing up, and the dragon also has to use them to heal up which is pretty cool

would highly recommend changing the way we start the fight tho, hitting someone while they are sleeping just feels wrong :[

Very solid game regardless, good job

Developer

Thank you for playing!

Yeah the throwing is a bit wonky cuz in the last minute I decided to apply a drop so you couldn't snipe the monster with items and it didn't worked as I expected. Also there's very little balancing with the items so I'll get to it first thing when I continue with the game.

Changing the the way the fight start  is also on the list too so the monster is roaming about instead of sleeping. It's an easy adjust but I didn't get to actually doing it in time.

Submitted(+1)

Good game! I really like the graphics and the palete you used. I couldn't kill the dragon :( maybe you can simplify the controls to use only a few buttons, that would help to make the game more accesible.

Good job!

Developer(+1)

Thanks!

At first I wanted to use as few buttons as possible but I couldn't manage to think of something in time. Also I planned the control scheme thinking more about gamepad than the keyboard so I might be careful with that next time.

Submitted(+1)

i took me so long to kill him, like more than 10 mins it was fun but so looong.

Submitted(+1)

Pretty cool game! I enjoyed the combat, but I never quite managed to kill the dragon. That must be a pretty hefty health pool lol. Nice job!

Developer

Thank you! Not only its a hefty health pool but the dragon can actually heal itself if it eats a healing plant. I might remove that tho, haven't spent a lot of time balancing the game so I'll need to adjust some of the stats.

Viewing comments 24 to 5 of 24 · Next page · Last page