Blood On The Snow by Wolfrug
You are a vampire hunter, tasked with a rather strange thing: protecting someone. When it turns out it's vampires hunting him, though, it makes sense.
Become a vampire hunter in a unique fantasy world; fight the vampire, learn new traits, and Keep Him Alive!
Made for Ludum Dare 46 in 72 hours in Unity, and using Inkle's Ink for the narrative bits.
UPDATE 29.4.2020: Following some comments we made a post-LD version (link below) which fixes a few known bugs and slightly readjusts the combat difficulty, to hopefully make it less unfair and more manageable. For voting purposes the original LD-jam version is still up and playable. Full list of fixes/adjustments are on the itch.io page.
Thank you so much to everyone who has played and commented so far!







Ratings
| Overall | 576th | 3.771⭐ | 87🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1284th | 3.285⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1218th | 3.288⭐ | 87🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1726th | 3.419⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 432th | 4.167⭐ | 89🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1593th | 2.507⭐ | 75🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 244th | 4⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 188🗳️ | 191🗨️ |
Minor nitpick: I found the volume to be way too loud, but that's not important.
Looking forward to some updates !
That said, the core mechanic here feels totally borked. The flavor text says that the vampire cannot move & attack in one round, but it could — and I couldn't get past the first battle.
@petrifiedapple Yeah, I think it sometimes remembers moves from the previous turn somehow. I should look into that (at not 2 AM before submitting)! Thanks!
@nachodlv Full disclosure: as mentioned up there we used Inkle's Ink for the narrative bits, and they literally have a SaveStory function that bundles the whole thing up in a string json file. Sooooo...it was surprisingly easy to implement :-D Thanks!
It also took me a while in the start to notice I had to click through the text lol, but the writing/atmosphere along with the style of the game are awesome and seem like they could be a complete game!
@adamv Watch your APs; try to keep 3 in reserve for a Move action unless you got lucky and got in a Stun/Stake attack. Remember turning also takes 1 AP. You can 100% win by simply taking one step to the side, ending turn, turning to face vampire, attempting a stake/shooting off a knife throw (not a heavy attack though, as it takes 2 AP!), and if the stake works, you can stay and do damage the next turn, otherwise Move to the side, even if you didn't do any damage at all that turn. Sooner or later luck will be on your side.
The battle music is also cool.
:)
It was a little hard to tell because the enemy characters disappeared.
For 72hours this is a really sucessful game and you should all be very proud! x
If it ever releases as a full paid game, count me in.
At first it was a little hard to battle, but it gets more natural with time.
Good job.
I think you had a very interesting design there, really ambitious and would definitely like to see a more polished and more complete game. I want to see where this might go.
The combat took me a couple of deaths to understand (moving was a bit hard as I wasn't comprehending I had to click once to establish the number of tiles and then again to confirm, and a final time to turn around to be able to attack the vampire). Once understood I found it quite interesting as a mechanic and I was able to enjoy the entire thing!
The story is well-written and engaging, and the animations that go along with it have a lot of personality and add to the overall mood.
This is an impressive entry overall. I'm amazed. Good job!
The narrator keeps putting thoughts into my head, yet it is wrong again! I know exactly why I made it out alive:
**Mere unadulterated luck!**
*Positives first, positives first.* You've heard this from the others already: the visuals are spot on and the writing is nice. I'm reminded of Banner Saga and that is a good thing. Unfortunately the similarity to Banner Saga stops at the battle system.
*Negatives second, negatives second.* The battle system layers randomness on top of randomness. Skills are selected randomly per turn (cannot plan ahead), actions rely on random chance to succeed (stun actually works sometimes, but dodge never worked despite the advertised 50% success rate), and the werewolf *can* randomly dodge attacks (even backstabs **when stunned!**). The only way to win these fights is indeed to rely on luck and sheer repetition... Not enjoyable at all!
One layer of randomness is acceptable. Either the actions are selected randomly per turn, but they always succeed; or all actions are available, but they have a chance of failure. A system completely free of randomness (like the one in Banner Saga) probably wouldn't work great with a single character, or maybe I simply cannot imagine it at the moment.
Given that the battles are half of the content available, they should be stellar. Well, good effort of course, yet a shame.
Nevertheless, good luck!
I cut it short and am holding off on voting because I couldn't get past the control issues to win the first battle. I could barely get movement in and it was near impossible to turn the character in the correct direction to actually attack the vampire bat character.
It's amazing enough to make a good story-centered game, but you went and add a nice gameplay on top of that.
The combat mechanics could have deserved to be more explained (especially the part where the vampire cannot move, turn and attack in the same turn) but that's really nitpicking at this point.
Congratz on the submission !
Cons: The combat is insanely difficult. I managed the first encounter through dumb-luck (after about 20 attempts). The encounter outside the inn seemed to be unbeatable. What might work is being more like an old Amiga/PC game called Blade of Destiny; it's worth looking up the turn-based combat system it used on Youtube. That used AP to do various things like attack, move, change weapon, cast spells, use items, etc. It had a lot of complexity and worked really well.
UI is polished and looks great.
Combat was maybe a little more difficult than I would have liked, but I am kind of bad with strategy games.
Anyway, really solid game! It's worth a subscription
When the first battle started, I was clicking the battle UI a bunch and didn't realize I had to advance the dialogue before I could interact with the UI. It seems like the UI should be faded out or something until you can use it, or give you a message "read the dialogue!" if you click on it before finishing the dialogue.
I was surprised that it allowed you to confirm move orders before you execute them, but if you clicked attack, it just ran the attack and spent your AP without a confirmation even when you weren't in range of anything.
Maybe it could detect if your attack probably isn't going to hit anything and warn you before executing the command.
There seems to be some sort of bug where if you use right click to face an enemy you somehow enter move mode and are forced to move again when your intention was to turn and then attack.
In general though really impressive!
The wrong opening typographic quotation mark (the closing one used as opening one) in many places was bugging me a lot :laughing:
In some fights, depending on the positioning, UI elements were obscuring battlefield stuff, so I couldn't see - fro example - what the Vampire is buffing himself with. Maybe the UI elements should have some transparency or just be moved completely to the side of the battlefield.
I think the UI will likely get a complete overhaul by the time we're through, but adding some transparency is a great idea. Thanks so much for playing and commenting, it's much appreciated. :smiley:
@g-a-gamestudio That's a pity. Not sure what it could be. Did you make sure the player character was facing their opponent? You right-click to turn, and it costs 1 AP. That might be the problem. Otherwise had you clicked through all the text that was showing on the right side of the screen? The fight doesn't really engage until all the text is gone (and I always forget about that myself XD). We've released an updated version with some fixes so you're welcome to give it another go. Either way, thanks for taking a look!
@red-ash The combat is definitely a bit more difficult that we expected. We've made some updates that hopefully make things run a bit smoother, but the path to success does involve a bit of strategy. The vampire can't move, turn to face you, AND attack, so generally it's best to exploit that and move around accordingly. It took me a few tries to get the hang of it as well. But I'm so glad to hear the game caught your interest! Hopefully you find the time to give it another try. :smile:
@larsspawn The best strategy I've found is to exploit the fact that the vampire can’t move, turn to face you, AND attack in one go. Move around with that in mind and you'll get the hang of it. But things could definitely be clearer, and it's something we'll be working on in future. We originally had at least three separate locations planned (but then realised that was completely insane for 72hrs), so there will definitely be more content at some point. :fingers_crossed: Thank you for playing!
@davidsheadgames Ha, thanks for holding off. We definitely had a couple of issues with the fight system, and some layering issues causing invisibility etc. But we've just released an update that hopefully addresses the most obvious problems. To turn the character you need to use right-click (costs 1 AP), and also keep in mind that the Vampire cannot move, turn AND attack in one go, so with some strategic manoeuvring one can generally get the drop on him. But yes, if you want to give it another try we'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks again. :smile:
As others have said, it's a bit too difficult, do it seems you fixed this in the post LD update. Some sound and more feedback when landing attacks would be great - they could easily be a lot more satisfying with some juice. I thought it was fairly hard to outsmart the enemy.
Love the writing though, really well done and a very impressive scope.