Decaedia by arzi
Discover what's left in the ancient elven city of Arcadia. Corruption is spreading and every 10 seconds changes the tide of combat. Explore a handcrafted pixel art world with RPG elements in a nostalgic Isometric perspective and art style!
| Link | https://arzi.itch.io/decaedia |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/decaedia |
Ratings
| Given | 28🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
The "every ten seconds" theme does not seem very prevalent, some cut scenes seemingly randomly triggered and didn't make much sense for the story, and at one point I just got sent back to the beginning of the game again (starting with the cutscene), so I got a little frustrated and stopped. I can totally tell that with more time to work out the kinks, this could be an awesome game. But right now it's hard to get a handle on.
I would love to try playing again after a little bit more time is added to the game however! I'm really liking the direction.
Other than that, the artstyle was great and the battle mechanics were interesting!
After trying the game a couple times I think there are a couple bugs I noticed, but some of it is just the messaging of how to play the game. I'm just going to list things I noticed, there's probably a lot you may know about already.
- It's not really stated that the game is turn based. First couple times I was playing I was just clicking around and trying to attack the enemies as fast as possible, but clicking a lot gave enemies more turns so I quickly died.
- The game locks up if you die and you can't restart.
- After talking to the merchant and getting the quest one time, I went right and got teleported into an evening area, and got the password. Upon returning I was back at the beginning, and after i killed the enemies again the game locked up.
- After talking to the merchant and getting the quest, I went up, which led me talking to a scientist and I got another quest. I accidentally talked to the scientist again and got the quest twice. After walking around again, I got teleported into an area where there were a lot of enemies (guy with a chain saw) but they were all noninteractable, and then eventually was teleported into what felt like a last battle. But there were two of me and a little wizard guy. I thought maybe they were all in my party and so I got killed by the wizard guy.
- corruption I assume is the dark miasma that grows during battles and prevents you from moving, but I'm not sure.
Level design wise, while I liked a lot of the environment and tiles, most of it was empty dead ends.
Overall really good art and it feels like there is a lot of content in the game, but as a player would like some more direction. nice job!
The positioning when battling wasn't that easy, maybe with target tile highlighting it would have been easier to execute a tactic having in mind (but getting thrown over because I was one tile off).
Moving around is a little bit annoying when your character jumps back to the previous tile when selecting a new position while currently moving (I guess that's because of "hopping the first tile" upon starting movement, so I assume either disabling the hopping on the first tile when clicking during movement or queueing the inputs would solve this).
But nevertheless - solid entry. The water shader is amazing.
After my first fight I didn't know what to do, and I got into lengthy conversations that I wished were shorter and to the point, and I didn't face any other fight despite moving what I believe the whole map.
Other than that, I think this is a solid entry that deserve recognition. Keep doing games!
@diego-teran Thank you! Happy you like the art and music!
@satacat yeah, making a rpg was definitely quite a challenge considering the time restraints. I'm happy you liked the art and music!
@tanner-shelton Thanks, we worked quite hard on this and a huge props to @arzi for creating a story and rpg system during this short time.
The art was top tier. Good designs, and GREAT direction - I liked how visually distinct the areas look even though they reused the same art.
Story was neat too. I liked that all the characters had their own "voices" in the way they were written. The dialog read well, like it could feasibly be spoken aloud by real people, which is rare in this genre! :D
I liked the battle system. It felt snappy to control which is important in SRPGs (and isunfortunately is often overlooked), especially ones where the battle arenas are arbitrarily sized. Having said that, I felt like it was a little too easy to get turned around. In the third area I got into a fight and my 3 party members were spread out quite far apart when the battle started. It meant that the camera was flicking back and forth across quite long distances which was a little disorienting.
Other than that my only criticisms are about pacing and hand-holding! Took me ages to figure out the crate holding the gem was an interactable object, because the first thing I did in the game was click the crate in the starting area!
Overall, great work!
We certainly ran out of time, so the onboarding could have been better and the spawn points were a bit wonky in the last battle, as it was originally designed to be multiple small battles, but I couldn't get that to work reliably enough.
One other issue I'd like to bring up: perhaps there should be some kind of compass indicator or minimap for quests? I think I got lost after saving the alchemist and ran into a fight I wasn't supposed to encounter yet @_@;
Good one!
We used sprite masks to hide objects when characters are behind them!
The water was made using ShaderGraph.
-In combat it would have been nice to have a visible grid given the positioning requirements (no diagonal attacks)
-The aforementioned onboarding issues/gem hunt and readability of the environments.
-The overworld player movement had a bit of a jitter to it, but that's a polish issue rather than a flaw.
Excited to see what's next from this team!
- Walk cycle instead of bounce,
- More battles in the beginning,
- More stuff to do instead of just bouncing around
That is all I can think of for now. I would love to try this game again when there is a walk cycle because I found the bouncing a little too much for eye strain, but otherwise I love love love the dialogue, the art, and the whole idea of it!
The art is even nicer than your previous games, and that's quite something! And with soo much content, that's very impressive.
Having a mix of exploration and turn based combat is fun. The exploration feels good. The combat was a bit messy to me. I had trouble with understanding the position of things, and the dice roll mechanic felt a bit unintuitive and unimportant.
Impressive jam game nonetheless, good job!
@jag Thank you! I think @arzi did a great job on the story. I love creating little shaders thingies like that to push the pixel art medium forward.
@skel3ton I'm happy you like this. The future of this project is uncertain at the moment, but who knows.
@n-n Glad you enjoyed playing our game!
@artofluba yes, one of our post jam fixes is tracking the character's position without factoring in the bouncing. :)