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Prussian Crusader: The Temple of Romuva's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #8 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Gameplay | #15 | 3.267 | 3.267 |
| Audio | #17 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Historical Accuracy | #21 | 3.733 | 3.733 |
| Overall | #23 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Thematic Relevancy | #67 | 2.800 | 2.800 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Arise, crusader! A short side-scroller action game set during the Prussian Crusade that began in 1230, where Teutonic Knights set out to control the lands of the Prussian Pagans. A time and land steeped in mystery, mythology and conflicting histories.
Created for the Historically Accurate Game Jam 4 by:
JaKayne (programmer and level designer)
blubberbaleen (music and sound design)
Pelinal (art)
SomeGoblin (writing/research).
Have you used assets? If so, please give credit to the creators here:
Yes, for links see in the game description.
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Comments
Great job on the animation and graphics. I'm a sucker for the pixel art style. The audio is equally strong but suffers from something I've noticed in other Unity games where there is an echo effect—possibly many resources are loading simultaneously or volume clipping in the audio manager. Terrific choice with the theme. My only request is to add keyboard or gamepad controls so I can play without a mouse.
Thanks for the feedback! Keyboard controls were something we thought about implemented but dropped due to lack of time, hopefully it wasn't too much of an inconvienence.
Fantastic art, I usually don't say this, but the blood and gore looks really good and part of the characters. The flames in the foreground made me laugh because I at first glace I thought it was a crowd cheering me on haha! I liked the control scheme, it was very unique and wasn't at all uncomfortable. I would like to see you use mouse movement in the future, such as moving the mouse up/down or left/right to change your attack angle.
We discussed implementing mouse movement as part of attacking but as time grew thin we scrapped the idea. Glad you enjoyed the game and the art. Big thanks to the artist for this project he did an amazing job.
Great pixel art! The overall atmosphere of the game, including the sound and graphics, is so good that I have the feeling that it could be released as a product if the game system and enemy variations were refined.
Thank you very much! We really wanted to include more, but time wasn't on our side.
Thank you, it's appreciated. We do wish we could add more dynamics but we added as much as we could.
I found the font super annoying to read, but other than that, the game is really visually pretty. The graphics work well, and the combat feels nice.
It's very repetitive though, and I'm not sure how mythological this is.
Thank you for the feedback! It is definitely repetitive, we wanted to add more enemy types to add some variety but time was against us so it did come out a bit repetitive.
Thank you for your feedback! Yes, in retrospect using this font especially for the longer texts was a questionable decision.
The mythological side is actually pretty interesting. The target of the Prussian Crusade were the Old Prussians, a Balto-Slavic people, who later got assimilated / germanized. The had a polytheistic religion closely related to other Baltic faiths. Most of the sources about the Old Prussians were written at a much later date and introduced several major legends. The Temple of Romuva is one of them and was never actually found, neither in the real world or in the legends. It was supposed to be a holy tree with eternal sacred fire. As the name suggests it is derived of Rome and may have been a propaganda lie by the catholic church to gather support for the crusade.
Like the graphics and combat system for this one. It would be nice to have variety in enemies so the fighting has more variety as well. Still a very good job. Definitely one of the better games I played for this jam.
We really wanted to include a variety of enemies, but with little time and all of us being busy it couldn't happen. Glad you enjoyed it!
This was great, I loved learning about the Teutonic Knights for university and frankly wish there were more games set in the Northern Crusades. The gameplay was difficult at first, but once I got the timing right on blocking (and figured out the exploit of standing on a rock to deal with enemies when at low health) it started to click. For me its that nice balance where you can win but also get to that point of "Oh shit I might die". The sound was quite nice, with the ominous chanting and strings in the background, and the clanging of metal on metal felt nice. The art looks good with the blood covered armor on the main character, and the grass blowing in the wind in the foreground was very nice.
The mythology connection I'd say is weaker than many in this jam, but I do like that its more grounded. On the history side on the other hand, I like seeing Hermann von Salza name dropped in a game.
Excellent work, especially for only one week!
Really glad you enjoyed the game! The team did great with this one and I think our product was good, of course, there was more we wanted to add, but I'm glad you enjoyed what you got.
Thank you for your kind words! For the mythological side we tried to introduce it from the crusaders side of view: Discovering a heathen, "devilish" people, with their own myths & legends. But with the time constraint we couldn't introduce as much as we had hoped for. Great you recognized Hermann von Salza! :)
I like the premise although the link to mythology is a bit tenuous (unless that comes in later). Love the graphics and sound - especially the heart beat on low health. However, I had to give up after the first few battles as it was too difficult to play left handed. I'd definitely give it another go if there were leftie friendly keys.
We wanted to add more mythological ties but we went with what we could. Glad you enjoyed it, despite the difficulty!
Nice one. You can beat enemies while standing on a stone and they cannot reach you.
Haha, thanks for pointing that out, we wanted to fix it but ran out of time. Glad you enjoyed it.
graphics are amazing!
Yes, many thanks to our artist!
Really impressive work for such a short amount of time, the animations and designs where really well made, and the action, though understandably simple was really engaging!
The only thing i didnt like was the font lol, made reading the text kind of hard.
Thanks for letting us know! If we ever work on a revision we'll fix the font issue.