ÁED - The Spark of Life by itsatony
Keep Áed, the final spark, alive!
The fundamental struggle between Light and Eternal Dark is almost decided. There is a final Spark left, just a tiny glowing Ember. The God of Light created it just before he froze, igniting it with his last wisp of energy. The Lord of Darkness will play this game against you, the final Spark. Sure to conclude the war and stump out light forever, he laughs at your efforts.
A mechanics intro
https://youtu.be/2BQD-5JqYA0
tips
Keep a lookout for the "storypoints" popping up when you move - they'll explain (text + some voiced) the mechanics (and they might keep you alive too).
![Mk1Pr7[3].png](/game/img?e=LD46&gid=57778&u=raw/406/c2/z/33158.png)
Happy tree-incinerating! (pressing e will eat a tree... left mouse click on tree will spark you there.. in ethereal form)
Unlock the portal by lighting all the braziers. Just one level so far, but it's pretty expansive ;)
about
This 2D Platformer is meant to be atmospheric and all self-made within 72h as our submission for Ludum Dare 46 - Theme " Keep it Alive ".
Fun Project to learn gamedev. It's the first game we made. We basically started to play around with Unity six weeks ago. Maybe we will make this a real game?
team
Three people worked on this:
- @harlequinsden: art, gamedesign, gameconcept, leveldesign, lighting
- @sebwod: ui, gamedesign, materials, shaders, particle effects, sfx
@itsatony: code, voice, music, sfx
follow the game on twitter : https://twitter.com/GameAed
should this become a full game?
Thanks for the FEEEDBACK! This is really motivating. A bit more and we will make this a steam game and add content and polish!
| Youtube | https://itsatony.itch.io/aed-the-spark-of-life |
| Youtube | https://aed.itsatony.com/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/aed-the-spark-of-life |
Ratings
| Overall | 544th | 3.786⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 485th | 3.7⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 993th | 3.397⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 488th | 4.017⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 494th | 4.125⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 898th | 3.35⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1570th | 2.538⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 619th | 3.717⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
really sorry, but i can't get the web think to work well enough so far.. :(
I would have liked to see a little more visual representation of the change in burn rate. Even just a little shift in the hue or some post processing glow.
The speed difference also did not feel quite as meaningful as I would have liked.
Wonderful concept though, would love to see this one developed a little further!
Greato Jobu! :smile:
Your "Don't" note didn't stop me :)
Performance is not ideal, but hey, better than nothing!
Hope you enjoy!
the mouse action is a "last resort" for otherwise almost impossible chasms. you can only "survive" sending your spark out (left mouse) when you target a tree.
abyss at the beginning: left is death (hence the "Don't" storypoint ;) .. was meant as a joke.. not working well i guess ehehe). to the right, you go down a lot, but that's the "right" way ..
it's a huge level and - as @wans24 pointed out correctly (thanks for that idea, will add it), we should have added checkpoints. it's just that with the limited time, we wanted to see if anybody was able to complete the whole level without that feature.
and .. YES, the pause menu was a very under-time-pressure thing we added and it's very much lacking. will be fixed after LD judging is over.
great feedback from everyone btw - we love this event and the community! it's been a blast taking part for the first time and making our first game!
Hence, we added additional forces to bring down Áed (the character) when moving along slopes, basically glueing it to the ground and releasing the "glue" whenever Jump is pressed.
That kinda works, but i would have needed another few hours to make it feel better and work dynamically based on current velocity. Certainly something we will improve on for the full game to be released.
(and.. as novices in game development, we learned the hard way why basically all platformers use STRAIGHT ground and platforms for most of the game ;) ... it's really easy to overlook the added complexity from what our gfx and game-designers wanted here :D ... [and .. i have not been able to find a good tutorial on that topic .. how about one @brackeys?]
I understand the jumping was hard to implement because of the terrain but since this was such a core element to the game it was unfortunate it didn't work that well. The delay after you press spacebar makes it so much harder to time the jumps, it really should be instantaneous in platformer games. I hope you don't give up the idea and try to make it work for future games or maybe revisit this one.
Solid entry overall :smiley:
First of all, the obvious - this is beautiful, atmospheric, and the UI Style (Font, Tutorial in HUD etc.) really really complement the whole mood :) the gameplay is exiting and sweet what a good idea!
You should continue to work on this with controller support I feel like this can push your game to the next level and become even more smooth (for example, I'd use the arrow buttons to tune the flame up and down), and if you tweak the graphics more (add more assets etc, I know I know gamejams, ain't nobody got time for that haha) this could become a sweet little game with more cool mechanics :)
Btw: I didn't manage the first spark jump thing and got frustrated :( but I will continue to try later on :)
Good work overall!
6 weeks is true and all, but of course I am an experienced overall developer (no c# before though) and the artist is also really experienced. But Unity and the great community around game-dev overall make learning super easy and events like LD make it all worth the invested spare time. A dream to build something others enjoy :)
yeah, you are right but i think we would need to significantly change game content to optimize the web version and that kinda feels like cheating before ld-scoring ends.
The level is just HUGE and it seems that's a no-go for the web version (many many gameobjects, colliders, animations, particles, ...).