This is really incredible idea. It's one of those games worth playing outside of LD :-) Liked the music and the idea itself.

Sweet game. :) I like the concept and the graphics. The music is really nice as well. Sadly I did not get very far, and after several times of starting from the beginning, I became a bit too frustrated to continue playing. But I guess that's the nature of roguelikes, haha. :D
Very solid and well polished entry. Great job!

Seems like a good game. Water tiles are annoying, easy to fall in them.

Nice fun game. Good job. :D

Cool concept

I won everything! The art is awesome! I think you should write the controls somewhere, because I needed to hit buttons randomly to figure out how to switch the potions. Nice job overall.

I want there were more stages! I had a lot of fun with it :)

Nice game! I got to the end eventually through trial and error. In my personal opinion I think the use of the bottles and the effects they have on enemies and the environment should be a little bit more grid based, for example: Always put the bottle in the middle of the tile and have it affect each tile arround it, now it falls exactly where the player is which means it becomes harder to see exactly which enemy is affected by the explosion. Aside from that small nitpick everything else was glorious! I especially like the sound effects and the pixel art, great job! :thumbsup:

@tygrak Thanks for feedback. Controls added to description.

@wildcard Very good points there. Thank you. Made me realize that it's actually kind of semi grid-based. That can be confusing.

@Keppu I almost forgot! I had a problem finding the designated button for the ice-bottle. I am not shure if it was a bug or if I missed something but I did have trouble activating the ice-bottles (the red ones where fine, no trouble there!).

@wildcard It's 1 for normal and 2 for freeze bombs. Also make sure you got more than 0 bombs. If you go through tutorial dungeon there are disarm tiles which take away all the bombs in the end. That can also cause confusion.

If this will not help there is a bug I'm not aware about. :)

I want to like this game, because the trailer is good, the aesthetic is nicely executed, and the mechanics are promising. I can't get past the first level, though, for a couple reasons:
- The bombs are unpredictable in what they'll hit. If I place a bomb in a given tile, I'd like anything in the surrounding tiles to be effected. On multiple occasions, enemies weren't hit by explosions that felt like they should've reached them. Just increase the range of the explosions if nothing else.
- The level has a lot of what seem to be dead ends, traps, or red herrings. You need to have a full understanding of things you can't see until you're screwed. This wouldn't necessarily be a fault; exploring and learning a level can be rewarded, except that:
- Death is easy, frequent, and sets you back longer than I'd like.

In a way this unforgiving nature adds to the aesthetic and brings back memories of older ideas of game design. But it doesn't make for a fun experience in a Ludum Dare entry. I don't see why water should kill you rather than stop you moving over it. I don't see what explicit and unpredictable traps add to the game. I guess at the end of the day it's a subjective thing, and I really wish I could like this game more because everything else about it is really well done (the art, the audio, the aesthetic, the mechanics design). But I can't get far enough into it.

Cool take on the theme! Cool graphics, nice mechanics, music drives the whole journey.

Excellent work... engrossing - I didn't realize how long I'd been playing it! And I really love the sound effects - they're spot on!

Pretty sick soundtrack!!

Pretty sick soundtrack!!

Bom trabalho. Os gráficos são ótimos e os quebra-cabeças são desafiadores.

@amras0000 Thanks for taking time to write this. Really valuable input! :pray:

With your feedback and some previous ones I've decided that the water just blocks the player. What comes to explosion radius. It is locked for mechanical reasons to 1 Unity unit(1 block). Otherwise blast will go through walls. I didn't have the skills to fix that issue. :monkey_face:

There is a brief explosion ring that displays how large area is affected by the blast. Being 1 frame sprite, it seems not to display in HTML5 half of the time. I made it last longer now.

Also the camera now shakes properly when explosion happen.

I hope you can find some time to tell how you feel about these updates.

There has been some interest about the music. You are all free to toy around, mix and use it: https://www.beepbox.co/#6n31s0kbl0be00t7m0a7g0fj7i0r1o3210T0w1f1d1c0h0v0T0w4f2d1c0h0v2T0w7f1d0c0h0v2T2w1d1v0b4x4i04kn0yc04g0000ch8w4h00000h4i4i808N8h4icp23yFzH1y4d8osd8qwP46IeKSMdgqWGwMgq0M8tlJwqwSRl1G3i5j3HT-khE8Q4q2ewzg6Yd96wzkOYebjfzvGJHKIkUQKbGUtp-pN58-98RxgFBI12w2os0E5gawiD6n0ceOgE8aspYO9cvQXU1FEt2E5I1lVNUUKlcKuqS0kRYullOVOULBlaVYUUd0kNe8R4qid97ihF3i6wzihQAqid96AdJuIHm6Azih0

Camera still shake too **much**. Overall, the game have a very good mood. Nice work.

Nice one, solid gameplay. Only nitpick (which has already been addressed) would be the unpredictability of the bomb explosions. But good stuff for such a short time.

Nice game! Looking at the feel, I was expecting a bit more of a Bomberman kind of explosions, but the current execution is fun as well. Those skeletons are annoying though ;)

i really like the trial and error style here, i liked learning and figuring out the best ways to progress! not too keen on the music and the dungeons would benefit from some more detailed graphics to get the mood and atmosphere better. but the gameplay here is solid! fun! and very well thought out! :)

In the spirit of keeping grading fair, you should probably keep hosting the version you had at submission hour. Just add a second link and mark the new version as "post LD" or the like.

With the changes you made I was able to complete the game pretty quickly (I knew the route from my previous play-through). Some of the design decisions still get on my nerves but that's entirely subjective. Seeing the radius of the bombs helped a lot; killing the skeletons is still difficult but I managed to finish the game without having to do so.

Regarding making the bomb avoid walls, you could probably do a quick raycast between the bomb and anything it's supposed to hit. Or lock the bomb&explosion to tiles, and draw explosions explicitly on nearby free tiles, bomberman style. But I understand that there's a limit on how many things you can fit in your scope during the compo.

Oh, and since I forgot to mention it last time, the trailer for this game is really well done.

@amras0000 Thanks again for your time and valuable input. I'm thinking of reverting the build to 1.0 from 1.0.1 now that you mentioned it. I reviewed the rules to refresh my memory and it's allowed to fix some things:
>"You can’t add new features, but if something broke or didn’t work correctly as you were finishing up, you can fix this after the deadline. "

I would love to have other people comment on this also to reach some consensus should I revert back? I kind of took away a feature now that the player can't drown anymore. Also camera shake can be thought out to be an added feature, however I had that code ready, but failed to apply it. Can this go into fixing stuff not working correctly? Tweaking blasting radius visibility should be okay at least.

First thing I did when I started coding this project was to make decent raycasting system that would register all the stuff around the explosion. With numerous failed attempts(:baby:) I ended up using Physics2D.OverlapCircleAll class(Unity C#) which has it's limits. Game is kinda awkwardly semi-tile based. Environment is grids and tiles, but everything else work freely and not tied to tiles in any way. This would mean refactoring a lot of stuff to get that Bomberman style. That would be cool thought. :smiley:

@gemberkoekje Are the skellies annoying in challenging way or would you improve on them somehow? Criticize freely. :ok_hand:

@dumivid I toned the shake down now.

How I've usually seen the after-deadline rule interpreted is that if people are physically or realistically unable to complete your game because of a bug, then you can fix the bug in the first few hours after submission and update the game. For anything less major: aesthetic, quality of life, re-balancing, etc., or anything done well after LD is over, the standard I've usually seen and followed is to have both versions available with a quick note explaining the changes.

@amras0000 Sounds fair. I reverted the changes and made that version the default. There is also 1.0.1 download link now.

Nice backgound music and gameplay. However for a "tutorial level" i would like not to have to restart the whole tutorial if i did something wrong.

@Keppu annoying me in a challenging way ;) That said, I wouldn't mind another way of defending against them, getting them into an explosion somehow is a little annoying, but it's quite possible that would take too much of the gameplay away, so it's a fine line.

Fun. Man did I get frustrated starting all the way over. I would play a full version of this game. Good graphics, really smooth gameplay, easy to understand.


This is a really solid entry, with lots of polish - especially in light of many of the other roguelikes submitted for this LD. Add to that the fact that this is all the work of one person and I think this is in my my top ten. Really awesome work.

@jfraser314 I thought this game could be good to play with your students. How did they react?

I think there's a lot of potential in this kind of rogue/rpg/bomberman mashup. Good work!

very cool idea, I like the simplicity that still has room for complicated puzzles

I like the concept of this game. If it had more levels I would have kept playing! I'd love to see this sort of game with 50+ levels of varying length and added elements (more potions!) over time. It's casual fun! The tutorial level was humorous.

It worked fine for the jam, but if you keep developing this, I'd suggest tweaking blue potions so they don't blow up cracked walls, and put careful thought into level design.
Some examples:
* There are several areas where there are skeletons trapped behind cracked walls that you have no reason to blow up. You gave out potions liberally enough that it was an unnecessary risk.
* There are no (in my memory) walls that you have to "accidentally" blow up in order to get through a nearby wall, other than the barrel trap.
* The barrel trap discourages exploration, and teaches the player to only blow up what they absolutely have to. That design element was a great opportunity to let the player have fun with the barrel concept, so it should have been rewarded in my mind. Traps like that also might lead to making the game feel unfair.

These design elements aren't problems by themselves, they just don't collectively seem to work together, and lend toward a play style of only doing what you obviously have to. You have the workings of a great casual / puzzley dungeon explorer, so I'd recommend you lean into that! :)

The only category I couldn't rate you well on was theme. I enjoyed your theming, but I couldn't see two incompatible genres here. Well done, Keppu!

Thanks @arden for your deep analyzis. I pretty much agree with everything you said. :slight_smile:

I've been developing the game little bit and fixing things. I update the HTML5 version after voting is done.

Thank you everyone for playing and rating. It was fun LD! :smile: