itch.io

What a fantastic concept and execution. Each level felt like a puzzle I had to solve, some being pretty clever. I liked the dash as an alternate form of movement. I also liked the feeling of the controls, they were relatively precise while allowing interesting movement such as wall jumping up a shear cliff or dashing mid-air.

Some suggestions: a clear indicator of the size of a campfire's AOE, prevention of accidentally going back to the previous level, dying, and losing progress, and of course, more levels since it ended as I was really getting into it. Maybe a softer difficulty curve as well.

I did notice that this game felt veeery Celeste-inspired (art style, character, dash, platforming-puzzle nature), which isn't a bad thing since I love that game :P

Good work!

Absolutely! :) With every one of these I do it becomes less stressful and more just fun :)

Yeah that makes sense, and is definitely more interesting and engaging than a flat invincibility shield. I think then it just needs some more visual indication that it doesn’t actually “block” the enemy, maybe by using a word other than shield, or making the outline less solid (dotted?) or something? It’s tricky.

Thanks for the feedback Elastiskalinjen (hope I spelt it right). I may have gone a bit overboard with the particle effects, but I like them too. Yeah the slow character didn’t turn out to be as interesting as I had originally envisioned, more just frustrating.

That would be pretty cool. I had doors originally but then ran into problems with collision detection and scrapped them in the interest of time. When I keep working on this I’ll try and add lots of interesting interactions of the lance with the environment :)

Thanks phyw! The conversations were fun to write. Also this was my first time using pixel art properly since I started messing around with it a month ago, and I’ve never been very good with art so I’m glad you liked it. For sure about the restart button. I tried to implement one but got into problems resetting the game state with how I had coded it, and didn’t have time

I indeed used A* for the path finding. I used the Wikipedia page as a reference and basically just rewrote it in C#. The monsters calculate the shortest path to the player (or a random portal if they’re in the spooky dimension) a few times per second. They also add some random offsets to the path to make it less grid-looking. I think unity only has nav-meshes built in, which seem a bit overkill for a simple 2D environment, but they might have been appropriate if I knew how to use them.

Thanks Leyline! The original idea was a game where you only have one projectile/ammo/bullet/arrow, and that you’re completely reliant on it as your only defence against a horde of enemies. I wanted to make that single projectile fun and interesting to use. Then I also added the constraint of there being only a single level, though that was also very convenient for saving time.

Thanks Late Panda.

Haha, that’s great. I think I encountered something similar once early on and assumed I had accidentally fixed it, apparently not :). Collision detection man, I relied way too much on it in this game considering how little time I game myself to fix bugs.

Glad you enjoyed! I’ll definitely continue working on it to make it into something more whole and polished. Though I think I’ll need to code it from scratch, the current code would probably collapse once I added one more misplaced if statement :P

I wasn’t initially planning on a Lovecraftian feel, but it kinda just fell into that once I decided I needed a source of all these monsters and really leaned into the “lab experiment gone wrong” thing

My plan was to make the player intentionally quite slow, to encourage more careful positioning and defending with the lance rather than running away. But yeah, I think it just ended up being more frustrating than anything. 

The lance controls could do with a lot of refinement. I wanted to prevent the player from being able to do a U-turn, so they would have to commit to pathing through the maze of corridors. I might try alternate ways of controlling it, like instead of you turning it manually, it would just turn towards whatever global direction your pressing with the keys/analogue stick.

There was a game over screen but I seemed to have broken it in those last few frantic hours and now it only shows up sometimes. Oh well, just jam things :)  

Thanks for the feedback :)

Thanks for the feedback Scadimal! The collisions were definitely one of the harder things to get working reliably, and as you found there was still lots of issues left. Adding ricocheting helped a lot but if you enter at a sharp angle or hit a corner directly it can still get stuck. 

Yeah, the difficulty is something I didn’t do much play testing of. I mostly focused on the initial spawn rates, but ran out of time testing how the increase in spawn rates changed the difficulty over time. Going back and looking now, if you miss the first or second orange portal then your often just screwed, which isn’t great I agree. Lots of numbers tweaking to do in future versions :).

Hmm, that might be because I have a flag to prevent the lance from being collected until it has stopped initially colliding with the player. Might want to add a timer or something to that as well.

Thanks :)

I really enjoyed this one. It has a nice progression to it, gaining new abilities and re-speccing your dragon for the challenges ahead. The controls were simple and intuitive. The system of distributing your points between the different sliders was cool, added an optimisation aspect to the game. Although it felt like there was really only ever one optimal layout that didn't change much throughout the game. With some more balancing I could see the game really encouraging the player to tune the dragon's settings to the specific kinds of obstacles ahead. Also the dialogue sections do stretch out a bit, I think allowing dialogue to be skipped through quicker and removing extraneous lines like "Cool!" woud help a lot.

Great work! :)

I can't get past the initial screen, regardless of any pushing of keys (including arrow keys), mouse buttons, controller buttons, etc. Both Firefox and Chrome on MacOS. :(

Simple but very well done. I liked how each level was basically a puzzle, and that after solving each, the execution was relatively simple. There are a number of levels with traps clearly designed to make you jump without realising, I found that pretty entertaining. I think that the "insta-death on any mistake" mechanic worked because of there only being 15 levels, but with more than that I would find it frustrating. Maybe it would be good to have some indication of how close to the end you are, so that you don't give up after losing on level 11-15?

In a full-fledged version of this game outside of the jam's theme, I could imagine your battery holding more than one charge to allow for larger levels. Otherwise the bouncy enemies in a lot of the levels basically act like an extra jump anyway.

Great job! :)

Simple but suprisingly engaging. I liked how the player moves orthogonally while the enemy moves diagonally, it made things interesting. Perfect adherence to the theme. My main suggestions would be: an indicator for whether you still have your starting shield or not and saving of your highest score. Also the shield doesn't work if your moving towards the enemy, was this intended?

Good job :D

(My highscore is 0:46)