Merge Dungeon by ScottDev

My first Ludum Dare Gam Jam!
A 2048 type game with some combat in it, click and drag the tiles to kill the enemy and see how many you can kill!
Thank you for playing <3 Scott
| Youtube | https://scottdev.itch.io/merge-dungeon |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/merge-dungeon |
Ratings
| Overall | 489th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 203th | 3.738⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 650th | 3.071⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 817th | 2.952⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 442th | 3.714⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 27🗨️ |
But I think all you have to do is fix the feedback to the player, and then you'll have a really satisfying loop. Plus, the graphics are awesome.
other than that, awesome concept
not that I can make changes to the entry, I just want to know what I did wrong :sweat_smile:
I love the art and the sound! The idea also fit the theme and ... I simply like it! :)
Only thing as a gameplay perspective... is easy to go on forever by simply press in succession wdsa in the order, until a skull appear and then a little bit more (to gather more value on the checkboard). The skull will always appear no matter what (I killed a good number of enemies).
Other than that.. GREAT entry man!:D
I've thought about it for a bit, and here's an idea. What if each time you attack, it attacks back. No slow health drain, only way to die is by doing too many attacks. Maybe there could be a smaller board, to make it easier to get locked up, since currently that is not possible since you can discard anything. That way, getting locked up would actually be an issue, since that would force you to waste a valuable tile, and take the hit.
Another idea: Or rather than damaging the enemy by sacrificing a tile, what if you instead attacked by merging the tile, so that 128+128 deals 128 damage? If you are going to go mobile, this could be better, to avoid the game accidentally registering a swipe as an attack (which is currently the same motion). You could remove the 'attack' gesture all together, which would probably make for a simpler, and more mobile game.
I hope you can find a solution that works, but currently the main mechanic is kind of broken. I really liked the sprites and animation, so I hope these ideas can help you improve the game!
That said, this was really really fun! I played it longer than any other game in the jam so far!
I'd recommend adding information about how much damage is the player actually doing and how much health the monster actually has. The player has to guess whether or not this tile is enough and IMO guessing damage isn't a good thing.
I'd like to see this idea expanded, I didn't feel any sense of progress, only levelling up, but I don't know what that means. Maybe more monster types would do the trick?
Games with attacking mechanic often have some sort of upgrading the attack, so maybe you could expand on that if you intend to make more of this :slight_smile: .
A good game overall, attacking 2048 surprised how enjoyable can be.
@carraka @shigor @koemeterion To everyone who mentioned the issue with the healthbar not updating and being stuck at 100%, I believe I have found my issue!

As you can see from this, I found out the enemy was being spawned twice sometimes, which when this happened the top enemy wasnt getting attacked and so the bar would appear full. I added a quick bool to the enemy that when it dies, the death method can't be called a 2nd time, which would have caused 2 enemies to respawn next time.
I am still looking into how the method is being called twice in the first place but at least I know how to stop it so far :P The game won't be updated now, due to the jam, but at least I know what was going wrong :)