This is great! A few months ago, I was wondering how to turn aspects of Blood on the Clocktower into a single player puzzle game, but it seems you are way ahead of me. I’d gladly pay for a full-sized puzzle game based on this concept.
The theme interpretation is really great - it’s a fun concept for a game. The 3D environments look nice, the mood is nice, and voice-over was an unexpected but nice surprise.
The user interface could use some polish, and when dying I didn’t see any way to restart other than killing the process and starting it up again. Did I miss something?
Nicely done. I gathered all the materials and left the planet.
The game looks good, and the enemies are nicely animated. Good work on that. (And I know you didn’t just use Mixamo, because it won’t do skeletons rigged like that!)
Know that I say this as a fellow animated movement enjoyer: the movement between cells should be like twice as fast. It feels pretty sluggish right now.
It would be good if you were told how many / what materials you are missing when you go back to the ship. It’s a little too vague right now.
Yeah, the abilities are often obvious now. I wanted to add more powerful abilities which required more dice, but time is always short in the jam. I think keeping the existing basic abilities, but adding additional abilities which are both more powerful but more demanding on the dice rolls would possibly give you more trade-offs to make.
The reactions to the ‘one’ puzzle/riddle have been mixed.
You’ve got all the basics here. It’s a fun little game. Good work.
When your torch is running low, it gets really dark and hard to see. I understand that is kind of the point, but I wonder if the monster damage penalty is enough, and instead you could shift the light to a darker and more blue color, but still allow the player to see the level somewhat. I think this might be an improvement, but it is kind of subjective whether or not that is the case.
The mouselook and colorful textures are a nice change from many entries in the jam. Sticklers will complain that the mouselook doesn’t auto-snap to 90 degrees, but it didn’t really bother me.
The combat feels a little janky. It took me a while to realize that I couldn’t just hold down the mouse button to continuously attack, but instead I had to spam clicks to actually do damage. It is particularly misleading, I think, because the attack animation loops and it felt that I just kept missing or something. The solution here to allow holding down the mouse button to attack and do damage for each cycle of the animation.
I totally dig the lofi horror aesthetic you’ve got going. Good stuff!
I feel the user interface made it unnecessarily difficult to get from starting the game and attacking with the sword. I died three times before I figured out all the steps - getting a body, getting the sword, going to the inventory and equipping it, and using ‘control’ to attack. Auto-equipping on pickup when you don’t have a weapon would probably saved me two of those deaths.
It could use a little more ‘dead zone’ for the gamepad controls. Often when I recentered my left stick, my character was still moving across the screen.
The enemy design and classes hint at a really interesting world. Good job here, I really think this is a strength of this game. I laughed out loud when I called the attacking tree a “Loser”.
The combat system seems to have a lot of options and thought put in to it. I like the idea of duo abilities. But unfortunately it is hard to understand what the abilities do, so I felt like I was mostly just choosing which ability to use randomly, rather than having interesting tactical choices. Putting in text for each ability which explains the mechanics would help a lot here - I suspect there is a fun combat system under the hood, but it is hidden away from the player.
The game is certainly dark and moody, and I like that, but maybe it is too dark, visually speaking.
I would like to revisit the game after some improvements are made to make it more accessible (understandable) for the player!
The game looks and sounds nice. The idea of finding the enemy’s weak spot is an interesting innovation.
The controls could be improved by making them a little more standard - QE to turn and AD to strafe is more common in other dungeon crawlers I believe. And escape to exit a menu instead of backspace. I would also like to use the mouse to target a spot on the enemies.
I did encounter a bug - I moved simultaneously as an enemy, and we ended up in the same space. I couldn’t move away or attack at that point, and even after I died and respawned, I still couldn’t move.
Sorry about that. I can confirm that it does work on Chrome, Firefox and Edge, so if you have access to one of those browsers you could give it a try.
What version of Safari are you using? WebGL 2.0 is required and Safari added WebGL 2.0 in Safari 15. If you are using an older version of Safari, I suspect that might be the issue, but I don’t have a Mac for testing, so I am not sure.
I am organizing a team for this year’s Dungeon Crawler Jam, which starts on April 8. We are looking for a 3D character artist / animator. If you are interested in joining us, please message me on Discord - Apostatic#9058
You can see previous jam games I’ve worked on from my profile.
Neat visuals. I am curious how you did it - did you use Unity’s regular rendering pipeline and do some post-processing to ASCII-ize it, or did you write a custom ASCII renderer?
(You can also see some other game jam games on my profile.)
Things I have some amount of experience with: C, C++, Python, Rust, C#, Javascript, Typescript, Godot, Phaser, Three.js, Raylib, OpenGL, Direct3D, PICO-8.
Code samples here: https://github.com/matt-kimball
If needed, I can do mediocre pixel art or 3D models too. I modelled and animated these characters (based on pixel art done by another artist): https://matt-kimball.github.io/deepdark/
I’d like to understand more about what your web site is doing first. I don’t see discord / twitter links in your profile. If you’d like to discuss further, you can email me at ‘matt dot kimball at gmail dot com’
