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Loressa1 year ago(+1)

Notes from gameplay:

- Nice music, but very short and no loop?

- Cute pixel art

- LOTS of background infodump text in a font that's not easy on the eyes

- Intro text switches between present and past tense at random.

- Intro animation with screen shake is effective

- Score is different font from rest of the game

- Info page feels kinda messy, could use with nicer layout and maybe outlines around blocks of text to visually separate it

- "Heal yourself quickly" - how do I do that? Is that the same as the ritual results?

- Gameplay is very swarmy. 

- Character doesn't always turn in most recently walked direction, so it's hard to see where I'm aiming

- Casting ritual makes character face the player, even if she's still aiming in a different direction for projectile

- Game over screen is beautiful pixel art. Music here is nice

- Definitely some balance needed, after you kill enough enemies you can just spam space/control over and over without any effort needed

- After around 150k points, the countess' animation breaks and she doesn't show animation for movement/ritual, just becomes a static sprite

- What does the cross do?

- Are there any more levels?

Overall, I think this is a solid prototype for future development. The art design is strong and consistent and there's an intriguing story core here which could be lengthened into an overall dark narrative about revenge. The mechanics need balancing but there's a fun core loop of kill/revive which adds some complexity. There's a lot of decent stuff here to expand on for future development!

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Michel Castilho1 year ago

Thank a LOT for the thorough review, I'm really happy you enjoyed it enough to care to write all that. Let me try to adress those.

  • Yeah the music is not looping, because I thought people would get tired of it and it would be nice to hear the SFX in silence for a while. Maybe I was wrong.
  • I'm also happy with the art! It's not ideal, we will need to put more work into that, but it's acceptable for now.
  • Yeah I was really concerned with the starting story, I've made that whole intro in one morning. I would like to have more scenes with the characters and deliver the text piecemeal, but there wasn't time. And the font is not what I hoped for. I need to find a free pixelated font that looks a bit better.
  • I've wrote that info in such a hurry, unfortunately I had to deliver it as it is.
  • I'm happy with how that screen shake turned out!
  • Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to change that font in time
  • It does look messy. I was thinking about presenting those texts one by one and you press to see the next. What do you think?
  • You heal youself every time you turn your foes undead with you Ritual. Each one gives you a bit of health, with diminishing returns are the number grows higher. If you go into Frenzy, all you need to do is have some health before the Frenzy ends and you will revive.
  • Yeah, it's swarmy because we wanted to go way overboard with number to see where it would break. In future versions the numbers will scale less, but the enemy power will scale.
  • I'll look into that direction thing, but I think it has been corrected on recent updates.
  • The Ritual doesn't make you face the player, that's the Frenzy and it's intentional. It's easier to differentiate if you download it to play instead of playing the web version, because there's a flame effect that's not present in the web version.
  • I love that game over screen haha but I need to figure out a better way to present the score, because there will be a High Score board. Props to my buddy with the soundtrack too, this was 100% him.
  • It's awfully unbalanced, and probably will be until we release the Beta and focus on balancing each arena.
  • It breaks? I've never seen it, can you send me a video? In the latest gameplay I go almost to 1 million points and that never happened
  • Which cross? Maybe you're playing the newest version (1.2.0) instead of the jam version (1.1.0)? Anyway, for now the dropped items (cross and bible) increase you score and give you a short speed boost. But there will be buffs and collectibles in the future.
  • There won't be a level progression on the same run, each run is a fight to the death. But there will be more arenas, and you unlock new arenas by achieving a higher score.

We were awfully aware of all those limitations when we released this version. There's definitely lots of things we still need to finish before the game reaches Beta. We've released further updates but, unfortunately, I can't upload it here yet because the game is being rated on jams, so I've made a second page for that. Check it out!

I've released an update that enables you to shoot while you move and adds new controls. Now you can also shoot with your mouse or your gamepad's right stick, which makes it so much nicer.

Thank you so much for taking interest in our work, we hope to reach Beta before the year is over. So stick around, I hope you'll like it!

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Loressa1 year ago(+1)

The animation breaking could be due to units on the screen versus anything to do with score. I basically just sat in one place, rotating which direction I faced, while spamming both ritual and projectile, so I had a ton of enemies and ghost allies. I'd move a little bit every now and then, but I didn't have to dodge or anything because the ritual was healing me fine, so tons of units were collecting on screen. After a point, the ritual animation stopped happening and movement became just floating versus the animation triggering. 

Re the intro, you could try something like telling the backstory during a tutorial, so the player is learning the lore while they learn the commands and get their first (easy) experience with the mechanics.

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