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Swarm of the Necromancer's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Overall | #2 | 3.847 | 3.847 |
Accessibility | #2 | 3.780 | 3.780 |
Controls | #3 | 3.951 | 3.951 |
Fun | #4 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Audio | #8 | 3.756 | 3.756 |
Graphics | #10 | 4.024 | 4.024 |
Originality | #13 | 3.829 | 3.829 |
Theme | #33 | 3.585 | 3.585 |
Ranked from 41 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
3.4.3
Wildcards Used
The more the merrier
Game Description
Collect Peasants to turn them into skeletons. Destroy all the towers to win!
How does your game tie into the theme?
You are combining skeletons in a big swarm!
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username
Cadoink (Chris)#9597, KillerX#3033
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
2
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Comments
Amazing! I wish I had started playing it earlier this week.
I had the same issue as @SpeedyLom had my first time playing, which made me avoid villagers for my next several attempts (to little success, obviously). Besides that and the other small bugs others have already mentioned, I had an absolutely great time playing! I loved both the might of a giant army and the sorrow of seeing them all blown away in a matter of seconds.
Eventually, I struggled with feeling progress (generally around once I was only getting points instead of upgrades), and finished my play session around there. Clearly, upgrades can't go forever or what the solution is, but as it got harder to find enemies and didn't get stronger I was less sure of how to proceed.
Superb work! I loved it.
Hi there,
Thanks for your kind words, And we are glad that you enjoyed the game.
There were so many improvements we had on the Trello board that didn't make it to the game simply because of limited time. As the deadline closed in we had noticed that with a large map and a large number of collision objects, the performance had tanked to <10 FPS. We spent our remaining energy on getting it back to 60FPS which wasn't easy. This task was hard and long enough that we could not get to so many bugs we wanted to fix. Better to have bugs in a playable game, than an unplayable game.
Hi,
This game is really fun, i play it a long time.
For the sound, if you can, on your next project, go try to limit the number of the instance of simultany sound. For example : The skeleton when they shoot, limit at 5 sound max, because, with 20 skeleton, the sound saturate and clip.
For the grunt of skeleton, make sound limit too + delay, for example, 250ms for limit the repeat.
Finally, some randomly pitch for each sound will be better. Be carefull on vlaue of random pitch. For example on Godot, i see max value is 2. So, try 0.1 or 0.2 max. Beyond this value, the sound can be deformed or more different than original.
Thank for the fun and well done.
Thank you so much for playing the game and for the feedback! The sound advice is excellent. We are actually limiting the number of each sound effect, we have a shared pool of grunts, hits sounds, etc., and the objects in the game request that they get played and it cycles through the pool. We ran out of time to be able to tweak the number of audio stream players though, so it ended up not being very well polished. I was surprised by the clipping since we should be skipping a sound if the next available sound is playing. I must have done something incorrectly. 😅 Also our hit sound effect does kind of sound like a clip, so it could be that too.
This was my first time making my own sound effects, but we did use some CC0 ones too. Random pitch is a great idea! If we push an update after the jam I'll give it a try.
Thanks again! :)
That was very fun and I had a great time trying to survive as long as possible. It's not easy at first but after a while you develop little reflexes and tactics.
The last game I played was pretty frustrating because I managed to last long enough but after a while the people I was touching weren't turning into skeletons, so I was losing skeletons without being able to convert any back.
Also, the crowd of skeletons easily tends to get stuck everywhere, in walls and trees in particular.
Finally, the mini map is welcome but it doesn't seem to update properly and I don't always understand what I see on it.
Thank you for playing the game.We did know about all the issues you mentioned. But, given how much content is in the game, we intentionally prioritized making the game playable in the browser over glitches like the ones you found. Our motive was that we MUST make the game playable in a browser at 60+ FPS. Believe me, making performance improvements was really hard. We simply ran out of time to fix bugs we were aware of.
Thank you for checking out the game! I'm glad you enjoyed it! We weren't aware that the peasants stopped being capturable after a period of time. Sorry about that! 😅 As KillerX mentioned we were in a scramble to fix all the performance issues we were having.
I had a weird issue the first time I loaded it which sent me running off the map but a reload fixed it.
It is a very fun game (even though I’m not very good at it), great entry!
VERY good game
Submitted
https://itch.io/jam/godot-wild-jam-43/rate/1449312
this is so beautiful!! really well done. not one bad thing to say about it.
played through all the upgrades. really smooth controls and flow. maybe just the minimap was a little confusing as i think dead monster would still show?
Thank you so much! Yes, the minimap broke at some point while we scrambled to improve performance. Monsters and towers should have been removed after being killed.
Not much to add to the other comments! Great, well-polished entry. I had a lot of fun getting up to 1,400 points with my "yeet squad" (I called them). Stacking damage early felt really good.
One thing I would have appreciated, as a completionist, would be if you removed enemies/goals off the minimap as they were completed. Another note - using ESC in HTML builds is generally not advised. I learnt this myself the hard way. People on hi-resolution setups will be removed from fullscreen which is necessary, as the default windows looks very small. Still, you had an alternate button for pause, so great work
Really well done, guys! A frontrunner for sure.
Thank you! Great advice on the ESC key! That totally slipped past us! We tried to play in the browser as much as possible throughout the week, and we were able to catch many browser related issues, but we missed that one. I'll try to keep that in mind for next time.
The minimap having dead enemies/objectives was a regression that occurred while we tried to fix performance issues in the browser. 🤦♂️
I'm so glad you enjoyed the game! :)
What a game, would be surprised for this one not to win. There are too many good things to talk about, so I think I'll stick to giving a bit of C&C instead.
Your core gameplay loop and game design is fantastic. What is lacking is good level design. I felt lost the whole time as the map is extremely large and repetitive. Some sort of "flow" or landmarks would have been very helpful.
Other than that, you have something insanely cool on your hands.
Keep making games!
Thank you so much for the kind words and C&C!! It is much appreciated. The map design could have used a LOT more work. I ended up making our boundaries a bit too big for what we had time for. We tried to create kind of regions like the city, the forest, the plains, and the mountain area, but I agree we ended up with a lot of repetition.
I think the map would have felt much better if the minimap bug that caused dead units to appear wasn't there. It would have at least been easier to find the next tower.
Thanks for playing it!! :)
Good entry not much to add. Good map with variety. Very polished.
Thank you for playing the game.
Incredible. Great implementation of the theme, fun and engaging gameplay, and great presentation overall. The gameplay is very original, but feels natural and fun. And I love that there's a minimap, I've always wanted to try implementing one of those. Lots of nice touches like the camera shake for the whooly mammoths.
Wow! Thank you so much! I am glad you enjoyed the game! The minimap wasn't too hard, there are some great tutorials online. I think I had it written up in just an hour or so.
Simple idea but well implemented. Hard to fault really, great entry!
I did notice that arrows keys seemed to behave weird in the menu? Perhaps they map also to the default "ui_up" etc. inputs?
We tried to make the menus work with both the arrow keys/wasd + space bar or the mouse, but I don't think we succeeded with all of the menus.
Glad you enjoyed the game!
Very unique and enjoyable! It's a lot of fun hunting down more villages and creating your little skeleton army! I found that a big group of skeletons was hard to walk around with sometimes, they'd often get stuck on things. Overall I really liked it!
Glad you enjoyed it! We tried making the skeletons a little smarter, but we couldn't quite figure it out. The clumping upgrade should help with that a bit! 😄
Thank you for playing our game.
One of the ideas was if you keep the swarm small, it is hard to kill enemies and takes longer, if you have a big swarm it is hard to control them. There is a lot of room for making the swarm act a little smartly, but for the game jam, we only did a simple implementation of the swarm.
Its good looking, short but fun game and I found its look almost polished. I found the game easy to survive. It would be super if markers on the map disappeared after we destroy the towers and enemies. It's also good that the map isn't usually repetitive and has a good atmosphere because it feels cool to wander around and keeps me playing . Good job! ^^
Thank you so much for the kind words! We had those markers disappearing from the minimap at one point, but at the end we were in a frenzy to fix performance issues for the web export and ended up breaking it. 😅
Nice job with the score!
This is probably among my favourite for this jam. Awesome idea, and actually really fun to play. Seems like there are a couple bugs features to chip away at, but overall I loved making a giant skele-ball of doom. Only a few points of feedback: I would have liked if the nodes on the (super awesome) minimap would disappear once they were destroyed. I had a hard time finding the last towers and gave up after searching for a while. Lastly, I think there might be an issue where in the late game, you would no longer be able to convert peasants. I was at around 2500 score when this happens, if it helps. Perhaps just a one-time-thing :) Honestly like this one, some really interesting pieces that I found myself thinking "hmmm, how did you do this?". Excellent!
@brentcrane,
Thank you so much. We are so glad to hear positive and constructive feedback. We simply ran out of time to polish the game more, and fix bugs we were aware of. The last day was the scary one since our final map made the game unplayable in the browser. We took last-minute drastic measures (you won't believe this, but, up to the very last minute). But we made it. It was worth the stress and punishing work-load. There were many techniques we learned, including things like object pooling, dynamic chunk loading. We used .NET as our programming language of preference. We had like ~300 PRs to our repo which I find insane!
If you have questions about the game in general or the implementation of the game, ask away.
Thank you for the kind words! We had a blast making it. Glad to hear you enjoyed it! The tower/minimap bug bothered me too, but we ran out of time! 😅
This is fun and challenging! I liked the different enemy types. The music is nice, with a dark magic feel (although the audio level was a bit on the low side). Moving the skeletons together as a bunch creates some challenges in itself, with skeletons getting stuck, etc. I found it nice that the game recognises this as an inherent mechanic, and provides upgrades (clumping) to deal with this. Although I did wonder whether clumping is good in general against all enemy types. (I think there was one enemy with area of effect damage?). Maybe with enough clumping, they would act in cohesion with the necromancer, so the player can almost control them all as one unit and evade missiles anyway. It was fun to run around some of the towers evading the missiles, while the skeletons would shoot at it :) The minimap is a cool feature! Would have been useful to see villager clusters on the map as well :) I felt the difficulty was a bit high in the initial stages, that I lost a lot of skeletons early on bumping into enemies very quickly. Also wasn’t sure if I could comeback from the initial upsets. Do more villagers spawn over time, or there is a fixed number? Didn’t get too far into the game in a couple of attempts. Will surely play more. Cool game overall!
Hey thank you for the kind words! Loved your game as well!
Unfortunately villagers do not continue spawning. We ran out of time in the 11th hour, so losing all your skeletons and no longer having any villagers is kind of a soft lock. I think adding the villagers to the minimap would be a great idea too. :)
Thank you for playing the game. We are glad that you liked it.
The thorn/trap area mechanic was intentional. It is to hinder the swarm movements through/alongside it to force the player to plan and play.
Cool. This is a good touch. I liked the different enemy types which brought out variety in gameplay.
I had a bit of trouble in the beginning - collecting the first Peasant was launching me north with super high velocity.
restarting a bunch of times, it finally worked.
Overall a solid entry. Well done!
We saw that a few times and ran out of time to fix it. 😅 Glad you got a working run and enjoyed it. Thank you for playing it!!
Great game!! I loved playing this game and it was great!!!!! :D
Great stuff! I played it for a long while making a death ball roaming the fields. It has upgrades. It has natural difficulty. Its got quests. Real good stuff.
very fun game fits the theme as well as the wildcards
great work!
Super fun, loved playing it, it would be better if the skeletons had path finding. would love more of this game.