A Forlorn Wizard by Max Amaden



FORLORN - Adjective: Meaning pitifully sad or lonely.
DESCRIPTION
You are a mage, sent to an alternate plane of existence by a hostile mage.
Here in this strange, dark world, you find yourself cut off from the magick of your home-plane -- and evil figures approach on the horizon...
CONTROLS
Left-click to move, right-click to dash. Press escape on the main menu to skip the introduction.
PROGRAMS USED
- Unity.
- Visual Studio.
- Aseprite.
- Audacity.
- Beepbox.
NOTES
Please play the Windows version, if possible. The WebGL version is fully playable (as far as I know), but there are still some bugs that need to be ironed out with it. Also, please play it in full-screen if possible.
Thanks for playing! If you rate my game, leave a comment and I'll get around to playing yours :)
| HTML5 (web) | https://maxamaden.itch.io/a-forlorn-wizard |
| Windows | https://maxamaden.itch.io/a-forlorn-wizard |
| Source code | https://maxamaden.itch.io/a-forlorn-wizard |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/a-forlorn-wizard |
Ratings
| Overall | 62th | 3.893⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 39th | 3.893⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 206th | 3.37⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 156th | 3.821⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 39th | 4.179⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 81th | 3.63⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 58th | 3.778⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 13🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
The art is pretty great too, and the monster's moans are quite funny. Great job!
Graphics are really good.

The fact I was hoping for things that aren't there (like a combo mechanic for well timed dashes) rather than nit-picking what is there is testament to how solid an entry this is.
Good job)
That said, I personally don't care for exposition dumps for teaching the player. I tend to find that it leads to a "reading a manual" type situation with games, where either you read and understand everything the first time (sometimes works depending on the length of the dump) or you have to keep referring back to it as you understand the different mechanics and how they relate to each other. In my opinion, a much better tutorial would be one that instructs the player while allowing them to experiment to get a better understanding of what they're being told while applying it.
The controls would feel a lot better if it were to lock the cursor to the window for the game. Perhaps it does this in one of the downloaded versions, and I'm missing out because I played on the web version (which has its own minor problems), but I'm assuming this is not the case. This is a problem I find with mouse-based games that are faster-paced. The nature of the game may often have the player quickly moving the mouse all over the game's window, and if the player accidentally overshoots, they could easily miss a necessary jump or movement by clicking outside the game's window. If the game were to pause while not focused (another thing a downloaded version may fix, but I also assume not) then this wouldn't be as big an issue, aside from the interrupt in gameplay the player has.
Most of the non-gameplay screens are wonky at best. The Restart/Gameover screen requires you to not click the screen in order to actually restart (despite being the opposite of what the game tells you to do), the exposition dump takes significant time to skip once you've read and fully understand it (rather than allowing the player to just spam left click through it), and the web version's exposition dump actually goes off-screen. It only cuts off one letter on the left and right sides, but it's still an issue that should be addressed.
Lastly, the power is just life/health/hp. There's not really any two-ways about it, this is almost nothing but a life-bar that slowly goes down. The only strategizing involving it is making sure it's somewhere above 0. It doesn't change your offensive power, shorten/length your blink distance, or affect any other gameplay in any way other than giving you a gameover once it runs out. The mechanics fit the theme in name only. Theme 1/5 from me.
Overall this was a game I did legitimately find fun, and would like to see after given more polish to the overall experience, but was barred down by several issues some worsening the first experience of the game, others the entire experience of the game.
EDIT: I did actually go back and try this game's downloadable version, and found it did actually pause when not holding focus. This does help the player get back into the game rather than punishing the player for missing the screen with every click, but still inhibits the flow of the gameplay, and literally pauses the pacing of the game.