Halt by Teto
GUARD THE TREASURES FROM PESKY ADVENTURERS!
Ever wondered what it's like for the ones guarding those dungeons you're always trying to loot? This time, play as Security Demon 696 to stop looters going deeper and deeper!
CONTROLS
Grapple walls to move quickly. Grapple enemies to zip toward them and attack on impact.
Control | Action --- | ----- WASD/Arrow Keys | Move Left Click | Attack Right Click | Grapple
OVERVIEW
Maps to important shrines and valuable treasures have been leaked to the mortals. Fend off waves of adventurers with your grappling trident and companion cat. Stop the adventurers from going deeper and deeper!
DEVELOPMENT
Code by @ciaranw . Graphics, level design and story by @teto .
Third jam as a pair thought we'd give it another go at doing a simpler and more polished game. In contrast to the animations all being done in Godot for LD47, each of the characters (except the cat) have about 10 frames underneath the added juice and movement in Godot.
The AI needed to be smart and able to path around the dungeon which took much of the first day to code the navigation mesh. We didn't want to end up with a generic/boring platformer where the enemies just walk back and forth so it was worth it.
Ciaran also decided to try have the game animation driven rather than physics driven which was somewhat stressful for him in the end... Would not recommend! This resulted in "spaghetti code" which is an "absolute disgrace" that he "never wants to look at again". At least we learn from it!
Unfortunately, there wasn't time to add the cat functionality which was intended to be absorbing blood spilled from the ground, turn more red then heal you once he had absorbed enough blood and turn back to white. This also would have allowed us to make slightly harder levels since there is no healing at the moment. On the bright side, you get a cute cat following you!
Happy to have had the time to add in splash screens and a bit of a storyline which is not something I've had much time to do in past jams. Apart from the slightly janky movement, it feels a little more like a complete game, especially compared to our first game together where we didn't even get the chance to add "Game over".
Audio was completely new to me since we ran out of time to do any at all for LD47 so had to learn how to do it all in the last few hours. Still no background music but some sound is better than none!
There are definitely some major bugs that we will iron out in the next couple of days but it will be operational soon!
TOOLS
Engine: Godot
Graphics: Krita
Audio: Ocenaudio
THANK YOU FOR PLAYING!
Post-release Changelog
Fixed bug where you could fall off the map
Reduced stupidly high ninja damage
| Link | https://ciaranw.itch.io/halt |
| Link | https://github.com/CiaranWoodward/LD48 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/halt |
Ratings
| Overall | 1410th | 3.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 741th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1516th | 2.75⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1892th | 2.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1407th | 3.159⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 1143th | 2.75⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 379th | 3.432⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1541th | 2.932⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
Graphics were also nice and very cute. Mechanics were ok, but sometimes I couldn't use the grappling trident when I should have... or maybe the wall was too far. Enemy AI was good, as they could pathfind their way around places and do different attacks.
Anyway, good game and story. I played it all the way through and had fun. Too bad the cat didn't actually help with the raids.
p.s. found your game because you liked our instagram post about Ludum Dare
The animation are very smooth and a nice touch to have the adventures indicate that they are about to attack - a dodge roll or similar to counter it would be a nice touch.
Overall a solid result! ( And bonus points for a fellow Godot-dev ;) )
- The final text-screens would loop if I clicked, so I could loop through the closing (de-)briefing and the final screen.
- The jumping felt a bit unpredictable. Sometimes the game wouldn't let me jump even though I had clearly been grounded. It seemed to be an issue with the way the game handled the checks to determine if the player could jump again after landing, as it felt similar to issues early iterations of my own platformer player controller.
- The grappling hook didn't work reliably either. It would seemingly randomly shoot in a random direction for one or a couple of frames, sometimes connecting to a wall I didn't mean to hit at all.
Those are the more critical remarks I had. Otherwise "Halt" was cute in both the audio and visual aspect and the adventurer-killing itself felt surprisingly satisfying. You get (imaginary) bonus points for the cute cat.
Congratulations on building your LD48 game!
Obviously your missing sound and apart from that your going to hell the game didnt convey the "Deeper and Deeper" theme to me that much.
I liked the funny story as well, so all in all goo effort.
Unfortunately we didn't get the chance to add instructions for controls so we put them in the description instead. As also explained in the description, we didn't get the chance to add the cat mechanic where he would have soaked up the blood and used it to heal you but that's a future endeavour! :P
We did have sound? May be a bug though so if there was definiely none, would be great to know what browser you were using etc in case it can be fixed! Thank you!
Originally, we had wanted to make the dungeons deeper so the idea was to stop the adventurers going "deeper and deeper" into the dungeon but with the size of the players and platforms, the levels would have been far too large so I had to settle on "slightly deeper than it is wide" xD
Thanks again for the feedback and do let us know about the sound in case it is a bug on our end :)
What a super cool and cute game! I really enjoyed it until the end! Sometimes I had issue throwing the grapling hook, I don't know if It's me not understanding a part of the mechanic, my mouse eating my right click or an issue with the webgl version. I know webgl may sometimes be capricious with repeated mouse click on chrome.
Your story is really fun, the graphics are really nice and cute, and the difficulty progression is fair but still challenging! Congratulation, this was really enjoyable :smile_cat:
Thank you for the feedback!