Conquer all the castles!! by Ithildin

[raw]
made by Ithildin for LD25 (COMPO)
As an evil lord, ambition for power knows no limits, and you're feeling an incredible urge to conquer all the castles in the kingdom, defeating any meddling hero in your way.

Of course, you can always count on your minions, and let them do the dirty job for you :)

Known issues
==================
There is a bug with the collision detections causing the player to get stuck sometimes (more frequently on level 3), or minions to appear displaced compared to the right position.

In-game controls:
===================

* WASD keys to move the main character around.
* Mouse left click to attack enemies or destroy the environment. You must be right next to the tile (no diagonals allowed).

* J Spawn a new wave of minions. There is a cooldown of 10s before you can spawn a new one (provided that all the previous minions have died).
* H Toggles the minimalistic GUI: Visible (sort of), Visible with background and Hidden.
* P Toggle pause on/off.
* Backspace to go back to the splash screen.

About the game:
=================

It's been developed in AS3, using the Starling framework (http://gamua.com/starling/) and the "lang" library on AS3 commons (http://code.google.com/p/as3-commons/).

Flash 11+ is required, therefore.

Additional tools, resources and so on:
* TexturePacker (http://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker)
* Tiled (http://www.mapeditor.org/)
* DrPetter's sfxr (http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html)
* M04 Fatal Fury fonts by Miffies (http://mfs.jp.org)

[EDIT 06/11/2016] Changed web link

Ratings

Coolness 71% 3
Overall 2.63 569
Audio 2.16 450
Fun 2.43 558
Graphics 2.39 566
Humor 2.56 356
Innovation 2.26 637
Mood 2.40 564
Theme 3.48 240

Feedback

Frozen Fractal
17. Dec 2012 · 08:48 UTC
Controls are pretty smooth. It's a bit too easy and too much of a clickfest. Why would I ever *not* want to spawn minions? I love the intro screen, by the way :)
jahlgren
17. Dec 2012 · 09:51 UTC
It is frustrating how the character controls. It gets stuck all the dam time. I think it would also be better if you could hold the mouse button instead of repeatedly spam clicking
Jonathan Whiting
17. Dec 2012 · 09:58 UTC
Title screen made me laugh out loud :D

Game was okay, but kind of tedious if I'm honest.
Smaxx
17. Dec 2012 · 13:04 UTC
The title screen definitely adds to the humor. But yeah, it's a clickfest and my poor mouse doesn't approve. Also, the collision detection is a bit off (sometimes not being able to move into free tiles).
zenmumbler
17. Dec 2012 · 13:19 UTC
Click-o-mania indeed. 3 levels is just about right. Minions work well. Not sure if you can lose other than getting stuck. Pretty good.
Lyonsbanner
17. Dec 2012 · 13:24 UTC
I usually play with azerty keyboard and direction arrows. Only play with qwerty keyboard is pretty difficult for me.

However, the game is simple and complies with the theme.
waveon foxdale
17. Dec 2012 · 13:26 UTC
It's annoying how easy it is to get stuck, but you knew that already. It seems that it's because the space between two objects are about as big as your character (including white space)? This often seems to be the issue since you would require to go through the space almost pixel perfect.

The minions don't seem to have a great AI too, they sometimes just wander in a random direction and thus make you fight the guard and castle alone. This is noticeable in level 3. It would be nice if they tried to stay close to you, move in the direction of the caste or something in that direction.

Despite my criticism, it's still a nice game that fits the theme well. I would play it more if not for the few levels.
Cthu
17. Dec 2012 · 15:52 UTC
Yay Starling!
Zener
17. Dec 2012 · 16:36 UTC
Very nice little strategy/action game. I love the main character and the minions, they are well drawn and fit the theme perfectly.

One clear improvement is to enhance the minions AI or to add the option to have some control over them.

The sounds of the game are very funny and it has the best title screen ever :)
loren
17. Dec 2012 · 20:14 UTC
Cute, I like the game's size, it's great!
Suese
18. Dec 2012 · 14:04 UTC
It seems I didn't have to move anywhere to win. Just clicked on the castle a bunch of times and viola.
emveyh
18. Dec 2012 · 20:48 UTC
Click it! :D cool idea but the controls ruin it a bit. The minions also seem a bit pointless since i can destroy everything by myself (and even faster then the minions can)
moomoo112
18. Dec 2012 · 20:50 UTC
short, and .. odd
berkano
18. Dec 2012 · 20:50 UTC
Short and sweet, I enjoyed it!
joekinley
18. Dec 2012 · 20:50 UTC
Nice little game. Yeah the collision problems in level 3 were a bit PITA but I still won.
Was it even possible to die here? I didn't see any health bar and was pretty easy able to kill that king.
I liked the graphics and it was fun while it lasted. Good work.
dalbinblue
18. Dec 2012 · 20:50 UTC
The controls are difficult work with; I kinda needed three hands. Might have been better to make the spawn minions as right click so that only one hand needed to be on the keyboard. Other than that it was easy as the hero always seemed to get stuck.
Meep
18. Dec 2012 · 21:44 UTC
I think grid movement would have helped the movement feel a lot. Perhaps some attacking/fireball animation of sorts when clicking something might look better as opposed to a little icon/sound. The idea is good though, and it fits the theme well. Good work! :)
🎤 Ithildin
19. Dec 2012 · 09:48 UTC
Thank you all for the feedback, it is much appreciated and the criticism is really useful, I've learned some lessons for the next LD :D

Some (but not all, of course) of the most important problems you've mentioned can be blamed on time.

For example, the collision issues (this will haunt me for weeks). And, to be honest, I didn't think of changing the level layouts for some more sensible ones, to at least help mitigate the problems with units getting stuck.

Time's also the reason why the AI leaves a bit to be desired. I started with a simplistic approach to have something more or less functional that could be replaced easily later with pathfinding, more complex behaviours and so on, but in the end it made it to the released game.

And the low final difficulty some of you are complaining about is a combined result of the poor AI and the lack of balance time (plus not giving the player attack a cooldown to avoid clickfests).

And I agree that the control scheme can be improved. Maybe mapping attacks to a key, or spawning minions to a different mouse button could have helped. (And, thinking of different keyboard configurations, using arrows rather than WASD if there are no customizable controls).
ananasblau
19. Dec 2012 · 10:12 UTC
Attacking should be happening by running into the opponent, but other than that, a nice, quite literally small game. Conquer all the scores!
Gornova
23. Dec 2012 · 10:15 UTC
Uou already know about collision problems, so I don't blame you for this :D
GagaPete
23. Dec 2012 · 11:41 UTC
The controls are kinda buggy, I get stuck every now and then. And there are to less tasks to accomplish. The knights are to weak. But it makes fun for a few minutes. And that is all that matters for a game. :)
SFX
23. Dec 2012 · 14:57 UTC
I kept getting stuck, which was a bit frustrating.
arhpositive
23. Dec 2012 · 17:31 UTC
A good effort. Minus points are, it lacks any kind of difficulty, and the gui to show the hp and level was kinda difficult to see. Other than these, it's a decent game overall. :)
permanente1600
23. Dec 2012 · 21:38 UTC
The character seems to get stuck sometimes. I love the idea of spawning your own minions to do the attacking for you though.
mangosarecool
23. Dec 2012 · 23:41 UTC
pretty funny
it is a little bit glitchy but what can you expect
like the minions
mangosarecool
23. Dec 2012 · 23:41 UTC
the game was a little short too
Cabral
26. Dec 2012 · 20:41 UTC
I get the idea, but it could be better. The controls aren't very good, because it's awkward to use WASD, J and the mouse all at once, there's no reason not to bind Spawning to a closer key. I don't get why you decided to use the mouse, either. I'm afraid there isn't much gameplay at all, and it's simply not fun. On top of that, there's the issues like the character getting stuck and clicking enemies at a distance.

Not a bad idea, but keep those things in mind next time =)
azurenimbus
05. Jan 2013 · 06:18 UTC
I like it. I'd just suggest working on level design and improving collision detection. : )