Ballad of the Bard by Filip Bergkvist
Story
You are camping alone at night, and nature doesn't seem to like the disturbing lights from your fire. Play them some tunes on your lute to keep the beasts away, but beware! The bears are awfully musical and will not tolerate a missed chord. Others join to put out your fire, such as moles, wolfs and wizards. How long can you hold them off?
Gameplay
Keep the fire going by fueling it with branches.
Play the chords that appear over bears to keep them away from the fire. Chords are represented by their respective keys on the keyboard, as well as holding Left Shift to play in Minor.
* Use your precious branches as toys for the wolfs to calm them.
* Whack the moles with either branches or hammers to keep them from making a dirt pile out of your warmth!
* Complete the wizards challenge to reach a checkpoint and unlock magical (and musical) spells!
Be resourceful and quick!
...to finish all the levels and finally get some well deserved rest!
Features
- Full-fledged tutorial to show you the ropes (aww yeah)
- 9 Levels that get much harder as you go! (that's plenty!)
- CHECKPOINTS! (woohoo)
- Beautiful pixel art and animations (gawks)
- At least 15 minutes of gameplay! (if you are good, that is)
Controls
- A, B, C, D, E, F and G to play chords...
- Hold Left Shift to play minor chords.
- Click and drag on branches and hammers.
- Escape to pause and open the main menu.
- There's a tutorial in the game, so just play that c:
DISCLAIMER!
The game has been patched and updated AFTER the Ludum Dare deadline. If you really want to give us a score fair to everyone else you can play the somewhat buggy (but still playable) version 1.0 on itch.io, which unfortunately is currently only available as a download.
Known major issues in the Ludum Dare version:
- Playing the tutorial, losing and pressing "Try again" will cause the game to restart but no enemies will spawn. Restart the game to fix.
- The last level is uncompletable, consider the game over if you play level 9 and enemies stop spawning.
No content has been added in the updated version, just bug fixes and quality of life improvements. If you just want to play because it looks fun, play the newest version!
Changes made since released are posted on our devlog: https://filipbergkvist.itch.io/ballad-of-the-bard/devlog
Ratings
| Overall | 19th | 4.377⭐ | 71🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 33th | 4.239⭐ | 71🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 19th | 4.397⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 81th | 4.301⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 40th | 4.64⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 222th | 3.855⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 24th | 4.47⭐ | 68🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 78🗳️ | 92🗨️ |
The game seemed to freeze when the "Strange little man" walked up to the fire.
Update - I'm just stupid :) Beat it :)
A completely unusual game and, moreover, uses music as a mechanic. You can even hear the slide of the lute strings. I, as a musician, love games that use music on your spine. Really an excellent idea and very well developed and built. This game will be saved on my computer for me to play in the future.
Congratulations so much!
Well done !
Concept and setting were instantly appealing for me, and I found graphics and sound to be among the best I've seen so far this edition. Loved the palette in particular, it fit the overall camping in the forest mood perfectly!
Mechanics were simple, but introduced at a decent pace, and it even has a tutorial!
A couple of relatively minor things to improve:
* To play minor chords only L-Shift worked for me, which made combinations sometimes harder to get right fast.
* I accidentally burnt the stick we got by lv.3 before the explanation for moles. I don't know if stick generation is scripted or randomised, but it could be cool in terms of pacing to make sure the player has a stick available after they've seen the text.
Other than these things, congratulations to the whole team. This was super cool!
The stick spawning is scripted, and designed around giving the player sticks only when needed to not allow stockpiling too many sticks, but I completely understand that it was frustrating to lose like that, we'll keep that in mind too.
And yes I agree that the hammer is hard to pick up, but you don't need to grab the handle, which makes it a little easier to pick up. I wish I hade made the handle collider more forgiving.
If you want to know the timestamp of when your game was played you can see it in this spreadsheet:
https://tinyurl.com/yau8hjzn
And then look in my latest videos and find your game being play (after the current stream ends)
https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos
It goes the same for the concept of your game ! Such a nice idea !
I have no criticism to do, except, an easy mode for me please, the Wizard guy is too tough for me :P
Overall excellent work !
I'm guessing you just wanted to post a small comment, but I felt like telling their story so here I go:
They were intended as a boss in the game. The player would have to switch instruments to a flute, which used 1234 and 5 on the number row instead of letters. This would give some variety, and since the way a flute is played is very different to a lute, we could make notes that required several keys to be pressed at once, say 3 and 5.
Lots of art and audio was made, a new background palette, music cues for their appearance and defeat, the flute was fully implemented!
Sadly, we didn't have have enough time to implement the actual bats into the game, so it was shelved. In a last minute decision I chose to spawn them without functionality anyway, since the art was made and we really liked the look of them appearing from afar.
This did however cause the "ending not triggered" bug that I fixed the day after submission... So maybe it wasn't the best idea to shove it into the game without the time needed to test it. Oh well :)
I had the same issue as Ithildin where I had just burned the only stick when the mole explanation appeared, which felt kind of unfair. Running out of sticks was how I lost every time, unrelated to the typing sections (which were my favorite part).
Mechanics are really smart, using stick as a ressource for multiple action is really fun to play !
What's more, the pixel art is very cool and the work you did on the sound design is amazing ! Great job !
The stick shortage is a gameplay issue, however we chose to allow the player to run out of sticks since the theme was to keep the fire alive. If we didn't make that an actual threat, then we thought that we would miss the point of the theme. So we made sticks a scarcity. But they should not be too scarce at any point, since all of the spawns are scripted by us and have been tested many times. I know for certain that our level designer created a few moments where you are supposed to not have enough sticks if you refuse to use the spells, because otherwise there would hardly be a point to the spells. So I'm guessing that you didn't use the cage when we intended for the player to use them. Of course, this can feel very cheap, and nothing is ever the players fault. I guess it's just a limitation of the time we had to make the levels, and the time given to teach the mechanics being somewhat short.
We are currently writing notes and ideas for a full game based on this concept. We'll keep this feedback in mind if we end up developing it further, so again, thank you c:
Enjoyed playing the game, even though I was too dumb to hit the right keys. Well C and G look a bit too similar to distinguish. Probably it would be cool for slower players - like me - to start with a bit more time to press the keys.
I lik the idea to play with music and the multitasking. Even in first few round I sometimes almost forgot about that fire!
Regards - The R-Shift-User ;)
Art looks stunning, the palette is superb, and the animations beautiful (that peeing wolf, damn), sound design is on point, and the bear lullabies always sound great. I absolutely love everything about it. The gameplay is very enjoyable too.
There were a few annoying bugs with the v1.0, but they seem to have been fixed. Just in case, I'll list some I experienced : shift key not triggering minor note, game not starting after clicking begin (and "part 1" hamging in the air), menu unreadable when opened on credit scene.
I appreciated that the music was actually musical, expanding on that could turn into something interesting with a bit of educational content.