This was a freaking clever concept for a game. It admittedly wasn't perfect but the whole idea of not knowing what is ahead of you was a really interesting idea. The game is unfortunately a little slow paced because of this mechanic and the combat is a little boring and unbalanced. The art for the game is top notch though so really good job on that! I would love to check out a completed version of the game!

Just rated it! Good luck!

Yeah I spent like 3 hours grinding everything until all bosses fell to my might +34 attack bonus.

This is a good game, but a bit slow. It seems like a very arcade-y roguelike with a very hands-off character progression (which I don't really like). With that said, I played it for a very long time and it was very enjoyable, but didn't manage to kill the Wizard and the Two Knights.

I feel like I spend way too much time on this... Even though I agree with what other's have said about it being slow, it still interested me enough to keep playing to the end. On that note, I'm not sure there actually is an end... I beat the Dark Wizard, and uncovered every single area I could find, but there always any princess or win state I could find. Did I miss something? I think if you re-balanced it so that it wasn't as slow, and threw in some more interesting combat mechanics, this could be a great game.

This game has a lot of good stuff going on! Nice progression, leveling, great art, it all comes together for a good experience. I love the exploration/unknown aspect especially at the cost of your health. I was barely hanging on by a thread when I ran into two meats in a row. It's a nice feeling! Finding all these new places and items is really fun!

I'm on the fence about the best way to handle death in this game, on the one hand I was glad I didn't lose all my progress, on the other hand I don't know if it was punishing enough. For ludum dare it's probably better to have it the way it is!

The only thing missing is some music and it's a real nice time, can't wait to see where you take this! Good job!

This was the entry I've spent most time with until now :) It feels totally complete and the premise is very clever. Later on, grinding gets more and more important which I don't think is a good mechanic. But still, absolutely solid game!

A lot of good things about this game. Really solid entry.

The art is awesome. Looks very polished and high-quality. Could very well just be a fully released game. Music is unfortunately missing, but the SFX are okay.
Now the idea is really cool and I had a lot of fun. Every feels quite good and I only found a few minor things I didn't like that much.

- I'm not sure what the point of the timer is when uncovering new tiles, since you can just stand still and wait.
- It felt weird that I couldn't just run into enemies and hold the button down to attack. I had to push it over and over, which was a bit clunky.
- It takes a lot of time until you progress. I feel like this is partly due to the 'temporary attack bonus' mechanic. This is the on thing I really disliked about the game. It felt really bad to lose your hard-earned attack points. Would've rather had the game balanced around a permanent bonus system.

That's actually everything I can say here. Awesome work.

Really nice game. I had a lot of fun fow a while :D! At some point when I re-spawned my PJ was visually 1 tile below his real position. The rest was flawless as far as I can tell. Really good job!

Great game but I kinda lost in the world. Maybe there is but I think there should be a road or something to follow.

like the idea of revealing the map and the battle system was good.

but the times for revealing more of the map just seemed like more of a punishment then it should have, you lose some health and have to wait 20 seconds at times, also if you see those 20 second times you know it's an enemy already so if you want to battle them you have to wait that time, then if you have other blocks getting timed down at the same time as a battle those pause during the battle which is even more annoying them the tile destruction timer

I liked this, but it got very repetitive. I cleared the whole map and couldn't beat the final boss. There were no enemies left to kill so I couldn't gain gold or experience. I found this frankly very annoying. I only have myself to blame for wanting to complete it I guess.
That aside, the game idea is great, and the amount of art is very impressive. I found it addictive to play, so good work!

I really liked the sense of exploration you get when you're uncovering the map tile by tile. The graphics also were very nice, this is a very stellar entry overall especially for a Compo game. I spent way more time on this than I expected, so I was quite entertained!

I'm not too fond of how you lose health for uncovering a tile, it didn't take long for it to be the main source of damage you get and the main reason to backtrack, which I would label as busy work and takes away from the sense of exploration which I felt is the main gist of the game. Also, it felt kinda pointless in most cases to have the uncovering timer, although I didn't mind that too much.

What I really, really disliked was the temporary one-use attack & defense powerups mechanic. They felt borderline meaningless and totally unrewarding, to the point where balancing the game around it brought down a lot of the feel of progression with it. Considering that money was an issue in the beginning, it felt baffling to me that I would ever pay exponentially increasing sums for +1 defense/attack that lasts for _one hit_. For a game based on leveling and progression, I felt this mechanic to be a big, disappointing detriment to the game.

But as I said, I spent a lot of time on this game that you made alone, in 48 hours, and enjoyed it quite much. I do hope to see you take this further. Great job!

I like this game a lot. I'm definitely planning on coming back to it and finishing it.

The art is great, but the sound could use some work. Obviously animations would also be good.

As for the gameplay, I love that opening up new areas costs health. Though, as other people have mentioned, it causes backtracking. I think the mechanic is interesting, so maybe try to find a way to improve it. The game is a little slow, especially with the way combat works. If you expand it, perhaps change the combat system to give the player a little more agency.

This is a great entry!

Wow a great addictive game.
The idea with the timed reveal of the explored tiles was really great... Especially when something big appeared I would become quite nervous :D I only realized quite late that uncovering a tile cost 1 hp when my speed was raised to 3 for the first time and I could uncover new tiles much faster than my HP at that time could keep up.

Graphics are great too. A soundtrack for the different areas would be great.

This is really cool. You took the Small World theme and took it in an interesting direction. The graphics are excellent, and the gameplay, while simple, was pretty effective. Once I had gotten much further in though it felt like exploration was a little slow. Perhaps past a certain level it would be possible to uncover multiple adjacent cells?

Keep up the great work!

Great work!! I can't wait to see if you update this game after LD! I would LOVE to play this on mobile!

For a Compo entry this is just an insane package. Nice visuals, a great amount of content, addictive gameplay and a very interesting theme interpretation. Superb!

I like how you could expand the world by exploring and the battle system was pretty unique. It felt rather bland and repetitive because of the lack of music and the slow waiting times, but the gameplay was enough to keep me hooked! Not to mention the great art. Could make for a neat niche roguelike game if juiced up.

The Art man, it really makes this looks soo good! I really liked the execution of the theme and Idea. If you make this someway random generated it would be amazing. And seeing you make this on stream was a treat. I don't have much critism sadly, as the other ones already pointed out the "flaws" this entry had. Great Job!

Wow i realy love the gameplay. It's very innovative and addictive game. Yes for mobile it'll be cool.
Maybe some music, affordance (explenation by the gameplay, graduation of enemies) and faster gameplay and it's work !!! Art is so cool too.

Good job for this entry. I realy realy love :)

I played this game for quite a while longer than I thought I would, it's very well done. The gameplay feels similar to a mobile game with the world revealing , but without all the excessive waiting for tiles to open (or trying to get me to pay for that..). The game could only really be made better with a soundtrack to suit the mood, maybe it also changes slightly depending on which location you're in.

I do feel that in some ways this game's greatest feature is also it's worst enemy. While I was hesitant to reveal tiles at the start, always trying to pick what I thought was a good one, later on in the game I was trying to hit as many as I could as fast as I could but sometimes had to wait for a 20 tile to tick down.

I really enjoyed this entry, it was a really neat mechanic and it had a really nice polished feel to it.

Wow that was great fun! Loved the artwork! Everything feels very solid, had me hooked for a while. Great work!

A really nice game! Fun, the visual is great, the sound effects too! It's kind of addictive, I really enjoyed it.

Looking for other rpg games besides mine, I've found this little gem. So far this is the game I played longest and enjoyed most among all LD38 games.

Good idea and solid execution, I liked fast-paced y's-styled battles and continius world exploration. Really lot of content for compo entry(sigh, my two lonely enemy types), and most amazing of all - well-tuned game balance that is the most important thing in rpg, imho. Church felt a little op but besides that it felt very balanced, really good job on that!

Really catchy. I played this waaaaaaaaay past my bedtime. I was really surprised by the amount of things to discover, like that fishy king guarding the bridge. :D

This is the best thing I have played on LD38! Thank you for making this game! This is way too good. Now I kinda feel bad looking at my game :D

The idea is good, but it take way too long to play. I have clearly played the game the wrong way, because I could i no way beat the final boss.

Great entry, bit grindy, liked the quick battle system, maybe some usable skills or items to give it a bit of variation. Didn't like losing life to explore. Excellent pixel art, liked the exploration focus. Had a lot of fun. Starting to be in need of a save though

I litterally played this game for hours and I just can't get anough of it. The winner in my heart!

Addictive. I wasted a night of my life on it too.

Well, I am not surprised. I expect so much of you already that I knew it would be something awesome. With monsters.

On the other hand, I am really surprised about the compelling power of **rpg + exploration**. It is really addictive, and it is not even that polished.
I mean, we all know you are a skilled artist so it looks naturally considerably polished. I've watched your stream several times and both of us know your capabilities are far beyond that, given enough time.
But professionally you know what I am talking about: no music, there is some *hurry art*, inconsistent code for player movement, lack of feedback and all of the same problems every compo game suffers of. Because a compo game **cannot** be **actually** polished.
Even so it still reads well and drives us into playing, even though it is a bunch of static images (for it looks like a non-digital card/board game as it is now).
Imagine this game with:
+ Menus
+ Better sound
+ Particles
+ Shaders and other effects
+ BGM
+ Animations to each character
+ Plot
+ Objective/Goal
+ Feedback to actions, events, end of game
+ Better planed mechanic for action points, life, attack, defense
I don't know about you, but I glimpse a super addictive experience.

Congratulations for such a good job, for creating this amazing piece within these overwhelming limitations, and for being so proficient in art and code. You really deserve it. :clap:

:question: I have this doubt:
It took me a long time revealing and killing everything in map. So is this the end, when there is nothing else to explore?

I found the ability to choose when to fight an enemy, and when to stop the progress, recoup the loss, and continue the fight later to be the most compelling advantage to this game's formula. Not to mention the excitement of finding new land, and the mystery behind each of them. I admit that I'm astonished by the amount of content added into the game. The lack of an ending and background music is a minor disappointment. Also got stuck in the end-game where there was no possible way for me to defeat one of the soldiers: I ran out of gold to collect. So balancing seems to be an issue.

It is a bit slow-paced, and I'm not really sure adding a timer for a tile to reveal was all that useful, especially the normal world tiles. Would have appreciated shorter time set on those. Overall, great job!

First things first: aren't you the guy who played our Ascension @ twitch? :p

I really liked A growing adventure. The expanding map got me nervous tho, because the coins are kinda limited and I couldn't find a way to recover HP without them/the apple trees, so when I got to lvl 16 there was this big armored knight that I couldn't beat withouy some blacksmith investment, and all my gold was gone, then I had to give up :(
I guess I would not play the same way in a second run.
Graphics were very nice, I only missed a background music.
You could expand controls for WASD too, it prevents exhausting the hand :p

And this small world of yours is BIG AF hahaha
Nice game anyway, played it for longer than an hour!

It's incredible how much you managed to realize in this game, I liked to cover this world. A few rough sounds, but I still enjoy

Very cool!
This entry was incredible for a compo! Congratulations!
Some hours playing. (:

Good level, graphics, sfx and challenge.

The pacing of the game is really slow (as some people have said), but I kept playing anyway. :)
Curiosity maybe.

The fact that the wizard can be defeated without his guards, but they are available to be discovered ... that was your trickery, I fell into a trap ... hahahahah ...


I found some walls that I could walk through.

I found four chests that I could not open (it was possible to hit it, but it's HP did not diminish).

The mimics did not have health point information (though it was possible to beat them).

At times when I was dying the character was partially offset from the center of the screen.

I don't know if it's the end (no feedback about that). =/


Oh man, I got sucked into this one and played for around 2 hours on stream uncovering basically the entire map :) Great underlying ideas. I don't recommend watching all of the stream but I'll summarize points that haven't already been made.

Ghosts can't be killed without serious atk+, Better indication that you're poisoned would be nice. Poison can stack :(. The spear knights have a bug, they seem to be 2x2, but visually look 1x1, and they're placed in such a way that the coin they drop sometimes overwrites a wall tile and makes it walkable (@gustavo-christino, I think this is why some walls are walkable).

The enemies not really attacking you until you attack is a nice feature, the archers are one of my least favorite enemies :) It's pretty amazing the variety in enemies you have produced in this game, yeah the mechanics haven't really changed but things still feel varied just with different drops and characteristics. I was a little disappointed that killing the wizard in the castle didn't trigger some kind of ending, but overall really nice work.

I played this on stream at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/143780402 - starting at 2:51:40

hey really great game! the concept was interesting, it was a great direction to go with the small world theme. i liked that you kept the controls to the arrow keys, that felt good. the art was wonderful, i think that was the strongest part of your game. at first i couldnt decide if i really liked the temporary attack and defense power ups, but combined with the permanent increase provided by leveling up i think it is a good system. overall there was a fun sense of discovery to the game and it had a great atmosphere. it also felt very clean, its impressive that you were able to make something that felt finished for the compo. this game also kept me hooked which most of the LD games i have played did not. this is definitely one of my favorites, great job!