Court Summons by LDJam user 364744

Court Summons
this is a light arcade game about delivering court summons to imps of the underworld. it should take about 15 minutes to fully complete
controls: mouse
about
i used godot, blender, and some synths and drum machines.
do note that there is a colorblind accessibility option. it's not the ideal implementation, but it should help the game be playable for those that need it!
if you want to see the end of the game but are struggling, you can press "M" to clear a round! (may result in some glitchy behavior)
| Link | https://dishwand.github.io/dishwand/LD55/main.html |
| Link | https://github.com/dishwand/ld55 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/court-summons |
Ratings
| Overall | 46th | 3.98⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 81th | 3.74⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 112th | 3.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 105th | 3.88⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 51th | 4.14⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 38th | 3.9⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 46th | 3.833⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 99th | 3.625⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 27🗨️ |
The game's audio, visuals, gameplay & UX are all dandy, is a cozy chill "find-em", certainly deserves more attention!


@warren-fisher argh, I committed the cardinal sin of not adjusting the difficulty correctly! thank you!
@themaskedman thank you for the recommendation! i've been totally burnt out post-jam, so i'm finally getting around to doing anything with it haha.
@azure-drake totally agree! proper AI navigation would have fixed this but it was a bit too much of a time sink
@davidd thanks for giving it a try!
The game is very fun, very good idea of that court summoning. I almost failed Act IV but managed to survive with a dozen seconds left with some super quick and lucky final summonings :D
The graphics are very good, the audio is fine too (if a little low on volume for the music) and it plays very very well. The dark city stages are super tough, sometimes you need to find the correct ear or eye shape and these little buggers simply would not turn to face the camera ^^
Very fun game, I had a very good time. Congrats!
The different stages give nice variance.
EDIT: Adding accessibility option for a jam game is always appreciated.
Good work!
I'm interested how the direction of AI movement is chosen for each NPC. If the direction is random, I would suggest to try to manually design routes of NPCs in open spaces, closing all movement into a cycle (for example), so you could make more complex situations that the player has to detect. Because right now NPCs collide with each other and stare at walls randomly. An NPC staring at wall is a part of puzzle, of course, but it seems to me that you should try to take control of the puzzle to be able to create more complex and interesting levels.
Anyways, congrats and good luck on this project!
@coderaurus thank you for playing and noting the accessibility option!
@flying-dog-fish yeah, totally understand the small window thing. i intentionally designed the game at a lower resolution, and halfway through the compo i was like "wait a minute this is way better suited for higher resolution". thanks for playing!
@asatrain the answer is "not very intelligently" ;) there is basically no pathfinding, hence all the collisions. would have loved to add it with time. thank you!
P.S. Just curious, are the models randomly generated through code?
@yorsh glad you liked act 4!! thanks for playing :)
@wendel-scardua good catch!! i totally forgot to add that
@eric-nguyen thanks for the praise!! there's a couple base models, a texture atlas for the albedo and eyes, and randomized horns. so the models are randomized through code but pretty naively.
There were some problems with loading the web build. At first, the progress bar went to full, got replaced by the loading circle animation and got stuck there, repeatedly printing in the console:
```
still waiting on run dependencies:
dependency: wasm-instantiate
(end of list)
```
After a few refreshes, it added another error before those:
```
Loading failed for the \<script\> with source "https://dishwand.github.io/dishwand/LD55/main.js"
```
Fortunately, after 10 or so refreshes it suddenly loaded. Not sure what went wrong there, I guess it's just one of those issues caused by Godot 4 not fully supporting HTML exports yet. After that, it worked well for several playthroughs.
Really impressive work you've done there. While the concept itself is pretty simple, you've added a lot of variation to the types of levels and targets to find. Mixing them both makes the gameplay never feel boring and it keeps you interested for the whole duration of the game.
I've done pretty good with the first act, but started getting some difficulties on the second and had to restart it twice. For the second time I've enabled the colorblind mode (which is an awesome thing to add, thanks! :D) and I've managed to finish the game with it. One thing I'd like is to have a way to restart the game without having to reload the whole thing, but it's a small issue, as the game loads pretty quickly. Letting you skip through the dialogue is also a fantastic thing, it's pretty easy to miss and leave the player having to wait through it all, especially on repeated playthroughs.
The graphics look pretty cool. I liked the little variations in imps looks, the shapes of their eyes, ears or horns. It made later acts more difficult, as having to quickly find three imps of the same type gets really tough when everybody is constantly moving. One thing that sometimes felt unnecessarily difficult is when an imp stayed turned away from the camera for a really long time, it might be nice to add something like a "nudge" mechanic with the mouse to force them to move. Also, while the colorblind assist really did help, I think it really should stay always oriented towards the camera. Quite often I found imps irritatingly moving sideways, so I couldn't see the numbers at all :P. Oh, and I also enjoyed all the little descriptions on the summoning orders, quite funny and - again - quite a large number of them, so they don't get boring. :)
The audio side is pretty well done too! All actions give good feedback with their own sounds, and the music track is a good background for the gameplay without being too attention-grabbing.
For a 48h game jam, it's a really impressive game. Well done!
I was also hoping for a secret ending if I refused to summon myself, but instead I got to summon a coworker, I guess.
@poppymacaroon thank you for playing, and the meme!
@piero-pbes-studio thank you!!
@henk omg, that's a clever thought about a secret ending. you get props for trying ahha. thanks for playing!