Raise the Dead for Fun and Profit by ben_burnes
Combat rival necromancers by harvesting resources from a graveyard. Use the puzzle grid to match tiles to collect gold or summon creatures to fight for you.
HOW TO PLAY
Use your mouse to click and drag across similar icons to collect them (you must have three or more highlighted to collect). You can drag in any direction, including diagonally!
- Collect 5 or more dirt to find coins, match coins to collect them.
- Collect 4 or more bones to summon skeletons.
- Collect 5 or more flesh to summon zombies.
- If you have enough coins, you can unlock additional board space by clicking the locked tile.
This game is not exactly challenging at the moment, mostly because I ran out of time to better tune the difficulty. However, it serves as a proof of concept for more mechanics and depth in the future!
This game has been updated on itch since the jam's conclusion, however the original jam ZIP files are available for judging purposes.
Tools used
- GFX: Unity, Aseprite
- SFX: Ableton Live, Famitracker, Audacity
- Font: ChevyRay - Classified
- Color palette from Loop Hero
- Misc: Trello, Google Docs (Organization)
Ratings
| Overall | 45th | 3.942⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 54th | 3.865⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 172th | 3.308⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 223th | 3.385⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 46th | 4.154⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 39th | 3.92⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 168th | 2.688⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 89th | 3.692⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
Congrats!
@zonoxx Thank you! I threw the soundtrack together so fast, but it was fun XD I agree that the game's mechanics means you miss a lot of the autobattler stuff, but I love seeing all the monsters getting flung off the screen out of the corner of my eye haha
@arscene You aren't wrong! I have plans for adding more tile types in the future that would give you more monsters and (maybe) powers over the battle, so being able to expand your board outward is important. But for this proof of concept, I do agree that it's kinda pointless. I wanted to have a use for dirt though! haha
The animations on top are very good. Right now later on the game with the new spaces it gets a little bit easier.
---I'm unable to complete this: I keep spending all my money and end up with a board state without any possible matches. Am I missing something?---
IMMEDIATE EDIT: watching the gifs, I realize what I missed. Oopsies!
Realizing the game allows diagonals, I won on a first try(hard). Whuzzah!
Immediately recognized the loop hero/ deceiver colors ;) Nice tune, surprisingly polished UI, good work!
At the very beginning I had difficulty recognizing the goal of the game, also which guys are my guys, but it was great fun! I was surprised when I realized I can darg diagonally as it is mentioned many times in the comments lol
If I had to critique it, I would say that my entire attention was focused on the board and none of it was on following the action on top. Maybe if the skeletons had a chance to drop coins when defeated and you had to click to pick them up? Some mechanic like that that would have me checking on my army up top occasionally. :)
@monoh-behavior yeah the gameplay is a bit light right now but I'm glad you had fun with it :D
@miltage thanks for the feedback! I agree that splitting your attention can be tough and you kind of miss out on all the weird action in the autobattler side of things. I really like your suggestion with resources dropping up top to get you focused on the chaos a bit more!
@kodingnights it's not designed to be tough. This is more of a proof of concept than anything else. I agree it's too easy though haha. Glad you had fun with it though!
Buying spaces didn't feel very impactful, but does seem like a cool idea in theory. Maybe if you got bonuses for certain arrangements of tiles (like 7 in a row) having a wider play area would make those more frequent, or even possible.
Visuals are all super well done and the audio fit perfectly! Well done.
I would love to do a campaign mode and I have some thoughts on how I want to approach that. I think there's a lot to do with this game once I have time to work on it more :D
@soonthespoon I'm glad you enjoyed it! I got that feedback a lot where you're so focused on the bottom screen you miss out on the top. I like the idea of a timer or something that would help pull the player's focus to the fighting up top.
Gameplay is interesting and fun, but "not quite there yet". It has a lot of potential though and I'm happy to hear that you have quite a few ideas where to go from here already :)
The core mechanic of connecting tiles works pretty well, but could benefit from a bit more smoothness when selecting the next tile. Maybe you could try making the collision area of unselected tiles of the same type a bit bigger or something like that.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this already and could very well imagine it being developed further into a full game for both desktop and especially mobile. Great job!
I agree that it could be a bit smoother to select tiles. It's a tough balance because if you make the hitboxes too big, it creates problems doing diagonal selections. But if you make them too small it causes problems with ALL selections 😅 I'll put it on my list to check again and maybe try some different collider shapes to give clearance for diagonal matches.
https://tallbeard.itch.io/raise-the-dead-for-fun-and-profit/devlog/479955/raise-the-dead-feature-update-v20230122-03
I also played (and didn't rate this based on it I swear!) the post-jam version and WOW you added a lot since then! It was also waaaaayyyyyy harder lol, but it seemed like if I played a few more times I'd get a more firm grasp on the new additions and be able to rock it :D Well done!
Two of the additional gameplay modes make the game a bit easier, so if you're struggling you can flip those on it makes things easier. The game definitely might be too tough right now though. Lots of numbers that need to be fiddled with.
Thanks again for the kind words! I'm glad you liked it.