RED - 23 by louis-denizet

:videogame: CONTROLS :videogame:
- ARROW KEYS to move
- LEFT CLICK to attack
- RIGHT CLICK to dash
Discover a gloomy planet where flesh monsters reproduced... A lot!
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🗡️ RED-23 is a HACK N SLASH 🗡️
Make your way through degenerates monsters, slash and dash your way to extermination.
We're 3 to create the game,
Louis : Prog
Alex : Pixel art
Arthur : Sound design
☄️ THE THEME ☄️
Our bias is more artistic than litteral: You can run but you can't really flee, we feel like RED-23 has a claustrophobic ambiance and overwhelming visuals and sounds.
Let you swallow by the swarm. You won't be able to breath among this mass of foes... You can evolve on a huge map, where flesh nests will more and more spawn. If they're close enough, they'll be able to connect through their veins. That will allow them to evolve (monsters will grow stronger), also, these veins will block your path.
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LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENT YOUR BEST SCORE!
| Windows | https://dark-devotion.itch.io/red-23 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/red-23 |
Ratings
| Overall | 25th | 4.182⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 10th | 4.242⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 882th | 2.894⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 949th | 3.015⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 47th | 4.439⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 5th | 4.422⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 15th | 4.273⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
Overall very well done guys!!
@everyone else, thank you so much for your feedbacks <3
This game reminds me a lot of Amorphous+ and Red Planet, which are pretty much my favourite flash games of all time.
(And by the way, the atmosphere is composed of oxygen and *natrium?*(sodium?) Didn't you mean nitrogen?)

I noticed a bug (or a feature ;) ), you can teleport: when you dash into the wall you can get into the bottom left corner. It doesn't work always, but at the other corners it's pretty often. (I found out this while I was replicating the picture above running-dashing circles around the map, collecting zerglings, hydralisks, and exploding infestors)
Big GG, the audio, graphics and gameplay are great, I'm almost addicted ! Thanks !!!
Next thing I put my cereal in front of my keyboard, I go Mouse on the right, Keyboard on the left. But Arrowkeys.
I ALMOST pour my cereal bowl full of milk all over the keyboard, please include WASD to games like these lol.
Ok so I start the game.
You know I thought x3 things while playing.
1. These look like pixel art zerg
2. Oh god I don't know what the AI is saying because I can't hear her but it feels so good.
3. This looks and feels just like Shrouded Insanity.
I didn't touch a single cereal until after beating that fat-ass-Zerg-mastodon.
I honestly doubt how much you did from scratch considering given time and similarities to your other games, but hey...
A-m-a-z-i-n-g.
Yes, the game looks suspiciously way too polished for a jam, and the theme not matching very much doesn't help... but the game was SUPER CRAZY fun, amazingly paced, the mood was impecable... and the pixel art looked gorgeous. JUST like the one from your pro game Dark Devotion. I bought both in-sanity and DD last month btw :P
Awesome work there! Respect for your team, you are making greater stuff everyday.
:zap: :zap: :zap:
The amount of polish is stunning, the power trip works very well. Controls could be perfected but it's a jam game, what you have is already amazing.
The take on the them is mediocre though. But overall it's excellent.
Edit : I saw a lot of comments wishing to play with WASD instead of the arrow keys. While I understand the complaint, if you decide to do this (or for a future project) please remember that not all keyboard are QWERTY type, and add an option to rebind the keys manually. :)
@kokonaught about the controls we just did not want to handle qwerty AND azerty so we did the lazy thing to set the keys on arrows but yes it is not optimal indeed!
About the theme actually our main design was to have nest popping and link between the nest that prevent the player to move and he would have less and less space. The mechanic is in the game (and it was by far the hardest to code ^^) but as we kill Nest pretty fast we don't see the links too often and we do not lack too much space.
@manusaiz I don't know how you know about DD but thanks a lot for this great comment ;)
About the suspiciously too polished game, actually for my part it's nearly my 30rd game jam (my 2 partners are below 5 I think) but we know how to work together and we really worked hard to make this game the most polished possible. Also I use a software named Clickteam fusion 2.5 (same as Construct 2) which also really fast game development and prototypes which is really perfect for game jam. Apart from blood effect (that I reworked still) and main character 4 directions movement (that I did program for myself long ago but still had to adapt) all have been done during the given time ^^
If you have questions do not hesitate!
Thanks a lot again and have a nice day!
I have dozens of questions about your usual activity specially on DD, I am a huge fan of Dark Souls "genre" and I aspire to do something related myself some day and I'm sure you went through lots of challenges while developing, promoting and funding your game.
Do you guys happen to have some sort of devlog?
Maybe we can talk via mail better so we don't spam Red-23's wall with not-directly related stuff :yum:
- Breath of fresh air to see minimal files on the game (Just Executable) :ok_hand:
- Excellent choice to have the voiced avatar inform the Player for controls, objectives and incoming events.. :ok_hand:
Optional Suggestions:
- Option for alternative controls or user-to rebind controls..
- Variation on Dash Movement (over time commander may improve his dash)
- Allow Chained-combo of Dash'N'Slash (if connected successfully)
- QuickTime alternative attack specials (context sensitive special moves)
- Local-Multiplayer (Co-op and/or Duel)..
Looking forward to its progress on post-jam builds.. :dizzy: