Reap N' Sou-l by Wolfox121
From the dawn of time, humanity was followed by death in all of its many forms. Accidents, intent or nature - something will take its toll, and after the flesh and bones no longer keep the soul inside, a Reaper will come to do his job. Don't fear him, there's no evil or good in collecting the life's harvest... instead, follow him in the hardest days of his work, as he takes care of the otherworldly side of a whole battlefield, where unbound souls of dying people appear en masse, requiring herding to the afterlife and protection from the malevolent demons swarming the place!
Game is divided into three 3-minute days, each requiring more and more souls to successfully finish: 5 for the first, 10 for the second and 15 for the last. Only souls counted are those stored in the well in the centre of the map, not ones carried by the player! Souls appear randomly around halfway from the well to the map edges, and are picked up by simply running over them; player may only hold 5 souls, any more won't be picked up. Touching a well stores all held souls in it. After each day is successfully finished, you may purchase upgrades for the Reaper and get ready for the next dawn...
Demons will appear at the map edges, attempting to get the souls and run away with them - either by taking unguided ones or directly attacking the player, momentarily stunning and stealing one of the souls held by him, if he has any. They can only carry one soul at the time, but there will be a lot of them! Dispatch of these pests by clicking LMB while aiming your cursor in the direction in which you wish to attack; if you kill one that had a soul, it's granted back to you, given you don't carry a max amount already.
Note:due to issues with openGL, the webplayer build uses a simplified ground shader compared to the Windows executable.
OTHER CONTROLS:
[Middle mouse button] scrolling zooms in and out.
[Q]/[E] rotate camera around the character.
[Space] dashes you forward, ignoring walls and obstacles in the process.
[M] opens a map, showing all the souls and demons.
While map is open, [Middle mouse button] to teleport to a chosen point, however you lose all souls in the progress - it's good for catching runaway demons; pressing it once starts the slow teleportation, which takes a bit. You may speed it up to occur instantly by clicking MMB again on the same spot, however this instant teleportation has a cooldown which is shown in a cyan circle around the Reaper.
[B] teleports straight to the well, however you only keep half of the collected souls.
| Link | https://shortsidestudio.itch.io/reapnsoul |
| Link | https://shortsidestudio.itch.io/reapnsoul |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/reap-n-sou-l |
Ratings
| Overall | 633th | 3.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 643th | 2.905⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 744th | 2.571⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 499th | 3.548⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 304th | 3.833⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 598th | 2.367⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 598th | 3.095⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 43🗳️ | 11🗨️ |
Tried to play a few times, but I kept getting stuck in place and couldn't do anything (same thing happened to some of the demons, too), so I couldn't make it past day 2. Not sure if it's a problem with the animations, or the movement mechanics, or something else.
The music was great, also. Overall, this game was excellent.
But without that, the atmosphere, the sound are really good and the gameplay is very pleasant !
- Music is great (some modern DOOM inspiration maybe in the heavier parts) but tempo doesn't always fit with the game's intensity
- Felt hard to hit enemies sometimes (maybe some tweaks to how the attacks work so it's snappier)
- Some bigger buildings had no collision (and some buildings obscured the character almost completely (e.g. an enemy close to steal a soul whilst you can't see yourself)
- More identifiable landmarks to make it easier to navigate the world
- Consider adding some of the objective / controls (text) available in-game
- Didn't manage to get any further then the first level
- Some sound feedback would be helpful as well to know when you hit an enemy for example
- No crashes or getting stuck on my end
Overall, nice take on the theme and good job on assembling everything up in a short time!
Pesky little imps stealing my property, how dare they! :P
After I realized enemies could take souls out of the well, I decided my best strategy would just be to collect 5 and dump them in all at once. Upon doing so however, the level didn't complete. I re-read your description and realized the day ends after 3 minutes no matter what. This makes the objective feel pretty contradictory, like the best strategy is to hold 5 souls and them dump them right when the day is about to end (unfortunately, I didn't see any countdown to let me know when that would be?).
I'd suggest a slight tweak that the level can end as soon as the target souls are reached. But that's just what I'd find fun. If your goal with the gameplay design was to make us collect and defend, then mission accomplished.