Grave Heart by very dark lord
Welcome to “Grave Heart”, the cozy local cemetery!
A place where you’ll find many dead people. Too many I should rather say because space is tight and new bodies are arriving constantly.
Oh, and then there is Hans! He’s not dead. Well maybe a little on the inside – dealing with corpses 24/7 can make you a little… numb.
So why don’t you help him? All you gotta do is bury all the deceased before too many of them start piling up!
By the way – did we mention that you might encounter an occasional zombie?! If that doesn’t get you on board right now we don’t know what will!
What are you waiting for? Go dig in!
The game is written as an HTML5 browser application so you don’t even have to install anything! Well… apart from a browser, which you obviously have. Lucky you!
Here are the best ways to experience the game:
- Directly playable browser game – this is what you want in most cases
- Downloadable version – if you prefer playing locally or offline
- Source code – if your inner coding geek can’t resist it
The interface is controlled via a few keyboard buttons. To make things even easier for you we included an in-game tutorial. So dive right in!
The team
A few words about us: We are a group of six people working in various IT positions in Germany. Rather spontaneously we decided that you can’t really call yourself a proper nerd without having tried to write your own little video game. Now it’s up to you to decide how good that idea was!
In detail we are:
- Kevin-Alexander Grewe
(coding, design)
- Bastian Lang
(coding)
- Ranjit Mevius
(coding, sounds)
- Markus Over
(initiator, coding, design)
- Jenny van Veen
(design, storyboard, playtesting)
- Matthias Wetter
(music, voices, sounds, design)
Disclaimer
We tried to create everything included in this work on our own. That means the pictures you see, the music and voices you hear, and the overall gameplay etc. have been crafted by us within the given 72 hours.
Just a few audio takes that we recombined to form more complex soundscapes have been taken from sites like Freesound. The few external sources we made use of are all providing these contents under CC0 license.
Acknowledgments
Our special thanks go out to:
- all the people behind Ludum Dare for organizing this great event
- ip.labs for providing free coffee and enough space (haha, noticed that little pun we smuggled in here?)
- and you of course for taking the time to read all this and test our little game. Much appreciated!
Bugfixes
During Submission day we realized there was a potentially game breaking bug and thus made two changes: - fixed one animation frame calculation - fixed bug where leaving the shop would on some occasions render it unusable
One day after, on August 15th, we deployed another small fix, as we realized arrow keys didn't work in Edge because it uses different event names than the other browsers. Game still doesn't run in Internet Explorer, but we most certainly will not change this as it would require way too many changes to the code.
On August 18th we added another fix, after realizing that firstly activated Capslock caused the game to stop working properly (as the game controls only checked for lower letter keys), and secondly there was a problem in the tutorial, where buying something in the shop would end the tutorial due to key conflicts. We thus made sure the capslock problem is solved and the tutorial can be cancelled with Escape instead of Enter.
| HTML5 (web) | http://shellfishgames.com/games/graveheart/index.html |
| Source code | http://shellfishgames.com/dl/graveheart.zip |
| Source code | https://github.com/m2u-84/ldjam42 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/grave-heart |
Ratings
| Overall | 40th | 4.112⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 37th | 4.044⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 150th | 3.737⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 115th | 4.086⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 343th | 3.814⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 69th | 3.972⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 43th | 4.009⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 49th | 4.088⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 105🗳️ | 55🗨️ |
- This felt more like "Running out of time" rather than "Running out of space". I couldn't even dig out the entire starting area before I was over-run with corpses, and things decayed faster than I could bury them (especially once I got the maggots).
- It felt like the targeting was off from time to time, not enough to really be a problem, but noticeable.
- The extra zombies felt more like a late-add rather than adding anything to the gameplay.
Besides that though, the presentation was great... the sound effects added a lot to the fun of the game, and the graphics were solid. I ended up playing through day 5 or so before stopping (can't spend too much time on specific games unfortunately), but what I played was fun and engaging.
Note: we had to update the Web version with a small hotfix, as we realized there was a way players could accidentally but lastingly lose access to the graveyard shop (which would be rather game breaking, as you need the shop to survive).
The targeting is a little hard to get right sometimes, but that doesn't make it any less great :).
Love the voice acting!
I made it to seven days on the first try. I can't wait to play again with my new knowledge. While the first few days are really captivating when it comes to stress, I think they will still be interesting as you plan better and better. Good balance!
Greetings from Germany.
And because the question came up a few times: _yes, we did all the voice acting ourselves and exclusively for this game._ Tools used for this were a Zoom H2 recorder, LMMS, and Audacity.
Keep playing, digging, shopping, and last but not least fighting those inconvenient little zombies!
Meanwhile we’ll continue to discover more of your awesome creations. **Good luck everyone!** :nerd: :joystick:
I would say it does not fit the theme too well, due to sudden ramp up in difficulty and corpse spawns (I did not have enough time to even start worrying about space before getting bogged by corpses). However, that's not necessarily bad thing, I think the current gameplay where it is focused on time & resource management is actually very fun. There is a lot of strategy in optimizing your throughput, and some of it may be lost if the game was more geared to the theme.
Bugs:
-If you have a corpse on your tile, you can't interact with any graves
-It's possible to block off the path to the shop with a hole.
-You can put a torch on the grave through the tutorial.
Feedback:
-The speed zombie upgrade is weird. It can be used in interesting ways (control AI to create a speed-y path). However, it costs a ton, and takes a lot of time for zombies to pile up to make use of it. If you buy it, you have to wait a few days for it to have a real effect. The speed upgrade is also very short in duration. It also counter-intuitively punishes the player if they designed their grave early on to purposely create stray zombies, or if they killed zombies early on. I think I would've gotten a lot further if I skipped this upgrade.
-Because of the importance of time/speed over space, all of the size upgrades seem like a waste of money.
-I wasn't sure if torches or the final upgrade even had a worthwhile effect. Perhaps it should be better conveyed to the player, such as some sort of speeding up animation, or a progress bar of sorts.
-Some upgrades I really wish I had while playing: Corpses tossed closer to entrance, and increasing amount of time in a day.
I ended up playing it for way longer than intended, trying to optimize the strategy and get further. Nice work!
Actually we worked a lot on the balancing, in earlier versions you run out of space because the cementry was full and you need to work on free up the graves faster in order to make space. In the end we pushed the game into fasten up because we knew that you guys won't have the time to play the game for a half hour+ (which was the case then)
Might change for a later version though, maybe.
@dimlyorchid thank you for investing more time than you wanted to, this is the best compliment. Also for all the feedback&bugreports!!! I hope you keep enjoying to perfect your strategy
I did a game similar to yours. Kinda funny :)
The only thing that I played a few times and I think the game needs to speed up the bars, the fill so much slow.
@szekeres-szabolcs your comment made my week! We weren't even sure it was possible to beat the game (which you basically did, because the difficulty curve ceases to grow that strongly after some point) without any cheats, but you certainly proved that with your strategy. :) Sorry about the bug though - if this happens to anybody in the future, it would be really helpful if you could have a look into the browser's developer console if there are any errors that caused the crash, and let us know.
@martintristan we actually considered adding a bit of a backstory to who "they" are, but in the end had different priorities (like, you know, adding references to pop songs of course). Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Great game, the pixel art is pretty good, and the mechanics of the game are great.
I loved that Hans made some coments about the corpses and all that xD
Well done!!
@akeean The Zombies don't really attack you, because they are Vegan Zombies :grin: