Celia's Lightmare by Aj Jones

Find the light, use it to fight. Find the wand and destroy nightmare fiends in this third person arena shooter. Sacrifice your souls to gain multipliers each run, and see how long you can last in the Lightmare.
Controls
[PLAY WITH SOUND!!]
- Movement - WASD
- Aim - Mouse
- Fire - Left Click
- Sacrifice souls and reset (when prompted) - F
- Exit - ESC
Credits
Developers: AJ Jones and Nick Cadieux
Project Manager: AJ Jones
Concept art: Taylor Reynolds
Character Design & Animation: Taylor Reynolds
Music & SFX: Chris Purse
Additional Modeling: Carsen Kelliher and David Daniel Reynolds
Writer: Rebecca Rost
Logo Design: Jenna Cordova Reynolds
NOTE: Added a couple GUI elements and sounds, as well as enabled a powerup as of 10/26. Original Jam entry didn't have these.
| Youtube | https://ajjones.itch.io/celias-lightmare-ld45 |
| Youtube | https://ajjones.itch.io/celias-lightmare-ld45 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/celias-lightmare |
Ratings
| Overall | 164th | 3.897⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 339th | 3.551⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 683th | 3.025⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 677th | 3.169⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 63th | 4.373⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 75th | 3.991⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 838th | 2.026⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 30th | 4.263⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 77🗳️ | 81🗨️ |
sad i did not manage to take a screenshot of my confrontation with the ghosts
nice camera and visual effects btw

i was immediately reminded of devil daggers
i got a jumpscare of my first enemy^^
The character model is nice and the enemies work well. They were quick though. I would have enjoyed a dot or a crosshair to see where I was shooting. I found that every time I lined up a shot I was actually aiming lower and farther to the left than I expected.
I think lowering player movement speed and narrowing camera FOV will make game even 'scarier'.
Amazing graphics! The style with the 3D is mindblowing! The music/sfx gives me the chills, and the lighting helps the setting. Nice game!
The graphisc fits the game, the gamemechanics are simple and fun. The mood was very nice!
Wanted to leave some feedback, as it looks like this could make a great post-LD game. Not going to leave any feedback about the graphics/art style, since that was pretty solid, but as for gameplay:
- It would be nice to see and hear your health. By "hear" I mean, whenever you take damage, to hear different sounds based on the amount taken or how close you are to dying. (For reference, Overwatch does this sort of thing.) In a fast-paced game, it's nice to be able to hear how close you are to dying.
- Especially in a fast-paced game, I recommend putting UI elements in the middle-bottom or middle-top region, since the corners of the screen take longer to glance at. If you do put things into corners, try to use "virtual corners". For instance, use the corners of the largest square that fits in the middle of the screen. The issue is that some of us have very wide monitors (mine is 3840x1080) and I practically have to turn my head to see the corners.
- The more light you pick up, the brighter the circle of light around you got--but it wasn't enough. I wish it got dramatically brighter the closer you were to full.
- The message to press 'F' should be a bit more prominent. I missed it the first time and spent a while wondering what 'F' did until the next level (maybe I lost some light and the message went away again? I don't know)
- The enemies seem to get faster and faster each level, but having them outrun you makes it basically impossible to fight them, as they always take the same amount of damage to kill (from what I could tell), and the level is a giant open area. Additionally, it was difficult to hit enemies at a distance between you couldn't see or hear them until they got closer, and the vertical auto-aim seemed to stop snapping to them once they were outside a certain range. A good idea here would be to take some ideas from Dead by Daylight. In Dead by Daylight, the killer is faster than the survivors, but less agile. For instance, the survivors can jump through windows or over palettes, while the killer takes more time to go through them. You could do something similar by making some ramps that the player could jump between, or corners that the enemies take longer to go around than the player, etc. That way the player could 'plan their route' while fleeing from the waves.
- I would pull the camera back a little bit to give the player a bit more vision behind them. In addition, I would lower the 'sound size' of the enemies ([AudioSource.MinDistance](https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AudioSource-minDistance.html) in Unity). It seems like the size of the sound is 1-2 meters, meaning that the source of the enemies' sounds comes from a 1-2 meter sphere around them. If you lowered the sound size to zero, you could tell with pinpoint accuracy where the sounds are coming from, which would help with hearing how close enemies were behind you.
- It's a shame we couldn't explore the intro area :( There was a saw and some side rooms and other interesting things.