Stagnatum by Cosmic Adventure Squad

You play as Stagnatum, a young stag who is tasked with clearing out a forest of evil spirits. Little does he know that his life will be looping in a strange way...
Controls - Arrow Keys or WASD to move - Space to jump - Z or click to attack
Credits - Vu Ha - Code - Rose Peng - Art - Johan Soriao - Music
| Youtube | https://cosmicadventuresquad.itch.io/stagnatum |
| Youtube | https://soundcloud.com/tenlki/sets/stagnatum-ost |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/stagnatum |
Ratings
| Overall | 83th | 4.161⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 310th | 3.768⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 486th | 3.625⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 49th | 4.375⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 16th | 4.696⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 61th | 4.214⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 78th | 4.232⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
Nice game, with wanderfull art style
- Wonderful art style and ambience
- Awesome music & sfx
- Great implementation of the theme
What I think could be improved:
- Art: the enemies could get more love. They look terrible comparing to the rest
- Sound the sudden piano "slam" at the end startled me. Maybe because I'm using headphone.
- Game performance could use a lot of optimization. There's a lot of FPS spike when I run fast so I ended up having to go slowly.
- Story/writing could improve a bit to catch up with the wonderful atmosphere. Right now the writing feel like that in game companion that keep on babbling about meaningless stuff.
Lastly I'm not quite sure if it's a flaw, but I don't like how the character move forward when he attack. It's quite frustrating, like you see an enemy immediately above your head so you jump attack, but the attack move you forward in mid air so you end up getting hit instead.
I agree with most of what @avavt wrote in terms of improvements. I also think the enemy design could use some work since right now it seems to encourage passive play a bit too much (i.e. just standing still and parrying bullets or hitting the spider once and then immediately backing away). I think being able to parry the spider's attacks would be helpful and maybe making a split second flash to white on the enemies right before they attack to help with timing when you're near them would help.
One thing that would have been cool is adding a bigger fight towards the end. I was getting a little low on health in the middle but then suddenly there were tons of hearts and nothing to use them on.
Even so this is one of the best games I've seen in the jam. Very nice Job.
The jumping felt a bit floaty and the game stuttered several times, making it sometimes difficult to adjust your timing/hitting.
And the music is super nice too, love how it's rising in intensity throughout the game.
Congrats!
In terms of gameplay, I wish there was more to up the difficulty - as is I could just mash attack and get through it all. Maybe a tighter timing with shooting back the enemies projectiles? (I did like that you could do that at all though)
The game itself could be runner, so the player only jumps and fights.
Great job!