BloodTrail by kruemelkeksfan
"As the sun rose today, a traveller ventured into our village and told us about a plague, which had killed nearly half of his hometown before he left. His eyes were filled with fear and panic, so that nobody could doubt the truth of his words. To survive we left our village and are now travelling towards the coast and its harbours to leave this cursed country."
Blood Trail is a game about a small band of five medieval refugees who try to reach a harbour.
The game is made of two parts: a map view, where you can command your group across a procedurally generated world with forests, cities and plains and random encounters: while travelling through the lands, you will randomly encounter friendly or evil people, with whom you can communicate or fight.
The game idea was way too big for one weekend, as usual, so expect a bumpy experience at best. We didn't manage to implement things like an inventory system or the plague you are fleeing from, but hopefully the game is interactive enough to be some fun and get some ratings at least.
Edit: By now we released an improved Post-LD-Version on itch.io (https://fluffyvoxels.itch.io/bloodtrail), if you already tried and liked the game or what it could become, feel free to try it out. We also plan to continue working on the project, to see our current roadmap refer to the issue list on GitHub (https://github.com/Alfadas/BloodTrail/issues).
Controls:
- On Mapview:
- Left Mousebutton - Move your Group (Blue Dot)
- WASD/Middle Mousebutton/Right Mousebutton - Scroll Map
- Mousewheel - Zoom Map
- During Encounter:
- Click enemies to select them
- Click the swords to attack the selected enemy
- Click the shield to enter defensive stance to receive damage reduction
@Rhiannon - Artwork (3D Models, Icons, Dialogues)
- @Alfadas - Programming (Encounters and Combat System)
- @413x - Programming (Procedural Map Generation)
- @kruemelkeksfan - Programming (Character Management and Map Movement)
Ratings
| Overall | 817th | 3.05⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 868th | 2.738⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 617th | 3.025⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 796th | 3.038⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 580th | 3.402⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 572th | 2.731⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 842th | 2.821⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 50🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
Great job.
Liked it, felt like creating something similar few years ago, and actually have been failing to achieve my LD goals many times, too...
I'm with you, keep it cool!
What I enjoyed the most about the game were the graphics and the ambition. I know there wasn't enough time to get everything done but I can tell a lot of effort went into it.
Some things that would be good for any LD games at a minimum would be a menu in the game that can be invoked during gameplay that will allow for the player to quit if needed. Sound is never a big deal to me, you either have the people for it or you don't, so no big there. The other thing I've found that is a MUST is clear instructions. Not on the game's LD page, but in the game where it applies. I'm very bad at this, but I've noticed that about half of my negative reviews are that people didn't understand what they were supposed to do. After taking time to provide better instruction inside the game, I saw much less of these types of reviews.
Good work guys, hit me up some time if any of you want to swap notes.
Thank you for your suggestions about the minimal requirments, I fully support the quit-button necessity, it always triggers me, when I can't leave a game without Alt+F4. Music is usually the last thing to implement for us and therefore the first thing to cut, because we simply dont have the time to search for some good music or even compose something for ourselves. Concerning the instructions I was indeed thinking, that putting them on the LD page would be sufficient for most people, as putting them in the game needs more time as well. Thank you for pointing that out, we will try to improve this in future games.
For my own part, I've sworn off of procedural content generation for LD. As a coder, it's very attractive to me to do, but each time I've tried it I've ended up spending at least half of my time creating & tweaking the generator. In each case the randomly generated content added very little to the experience and I'd have been better off just authoring a world explicitly. Did your map generation work out the same way, or did it go much faster for you guys?
Concerning the procedurally generated map we were lucky to be a team of 4, so we dedicated one member just to the map generation. We maybe could have used this workforce for more essential features, but LD for us atm is more about learning, having fun and creating the base for something than about victory, so we didn't worry very much about the time it cost us.
Some days ago we released an improved version on itch.io (https://fluffyvoxels.itch.io/bloodtrail). This version contains a bit more than what we could have achieved under optimal circumstances, so it is kind of the answer on "I wonder how it would have looked like if you guys had more time". Version 0.2 took 2 of 4 teammembers another 1.5 weeks to make.