One Spell at a Time by dopplex
Controls: WASD for movement.
X to pickup/switch spells.
E casts the current spell at the target under the mouse.
G uses stairs.
One of the first place my mind went with this theme were roguelikes - their permadeath inherently gets at the idea that you only have one shot to get things right, and if you don't then you are starting over.
Since the design was necessarily simplified from most roguelikes, I added two other 'only get one' portions to keep some urgency/intensity - You only get one minute per floor, and you only get to carry one spell at a time.
The game is in javascript, entirely from scratch (other than a tiny tiny bit of requirejs and jquery, but those are irrelevant to the game parts).
And now should be live on the attached link! ... Hopefully my last set of notes didn't go away *sigh* (It did. Argh).
Anyway, as this was my first Ludum Dare my goal was mostly to finish. I'm not sure if I did - it's a working entry, but there's SO MUCH MORE I would have done with more time. But I have a feeling that if that's the criteria for finishing, nobody did...
X to pickup/switch spells.
E casts the current spell at the target under the mouse.
G uses stairs.
One of the first place my mind went with this theme were roguelikes - their permadeath inherently gets at the idea that you only have one shot to get things right, and if you don't then you are starting over.
Since the design was necessarily simplified from most roguelikes, I added two other 'only get one' portions to keep some urgency/intensity - You only get one minute per floor, and you only get to carry one spell at a time.
The game is in javascript, entirely from scratch (other than a tiny tiny bit of requirejs and jquery, but those are irrelevant to the game parts).
And now should be live on the attached link! ... Hopefully my last set of notes didn't go away *sigh* (It did. Argh).
Anyway, as this was my first Ludum Dare my goal was mostly to finish. I'm not sure if I did - it's a working entry, but there's SO MUCH MORE I would have done with more time. But I have a feeling that if that's the criteria for finishing, nobody did...
| Web | http://www.dopplex.net/LD28OriginalSubmission/index.html |
| Source | http://www.dopplex.net/LD28/LudumDare28.zip |
| Original URL | https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=30571 |
Ratings
| Coolness | 45% | 1141 |
| Overall | 2.67 | 766 |
| Audio | 2.38 | 561 |
| Fun | 2.29 | 862 |
| Graphics | 2.75 | 588 |
| Innovation | 2.67 | 648 |
| Mood | 2.63 | 588 |
| Theme | 2.83 | 511 |
One thing that would improve it (but I ran out of time) is having more monsters - then I could ramp the monster difficulty over time. As is, the 'only one health point' piece may have been theme over game design here, as it punishes bad luck or misclicks quite severely.
However, some parts are badly designed and make it somehow frustrating.
The pathfinding is terrible, which make it more balance in a certain way :D
You don't really have spells information, I though I had a bug with fireball whereas it is just because it has a limited range.
As others said, you mostly sit on place and shoot to everybody before move on.
Not sure if the time limit bring something to the game.
Anyway, don't stop here, implement/fix everything you wanted and I'm pretty sure you will have a great game !
- It took me quite a while to realize I could shoot through the walls. My first five deaths or so, I kept thinking I had to get line-of-sight before I could shoot the monsters. If you do try to get in view to shoot, you're too close by then and you are dead meat.
- The monster AI I think just moves to the absolute-value closest to the player, without regard for whether there is a wall in the way. I know that fancy AI and pathfinding can be a real problem. I cut "walls" as a feature before I even started for this reason, and I *still* spent more time on AI than anything else in my game. My point is that your monsters got totally stuck, and as a player exploiting this was my main means of killing enemies harmlessly, which is no doubt not your intended feature. I think that if you add walls and enemies, you are almost forced to use basic pathfinding. Try Dijkstra's algorithm for a really simple one that is easy to implement and probably would have been enough for this game. A* is the other biggie I guess, but you can use "Dijkstra Maps" to solve the pathfinding problem for ALL the monsters at once.
Finally made it to level 7 once I realized the spells could go through walls. Otherwise, I was stuck on level 1.