Void Scion by TechnoPorg
Void Scion
Defeat those who stand in the path to your god, but be careful! Each attack comes at a cost...

Controls
Movement - WASD
Spinning Discs - E
Melee - Q
Spear - Left Click
Interact - Space (Necessary for the ending and the shop)
Also found in the Settings menu in-game.
Tools Used
- Godot 4.0.2
- Aseprite
- GIMP
- Audacity
Backstory
In Void Scion, you play as a blood sorcerer, trying to deliver a gift to the dark god who has granted you your powers. Each attack you do costs you greatly, however, draining the very force that sustains you. The only way to recover is by absorbing it from others. You also collect XP from these deaths, which is used to increase the power of your spells. Power is bought from the stoic gargoyle, a long since forgotten shrine that has no life for you to take. From the small army of knights and archers to the noble paladin, the universe seems to be against the path to your god. Only you have what they need, and it must be delivered quickly.!
Details
We loved the health bar prompt so much we incorporated it anyway! The game takes between 5 to 25 minutes to complete, depending how ready you are for the final boss. Note that once you enter, you cannot turn back.
This was our first game jam, and it was a lot! Thanks to the whole team - we would encourage you to read the credits! Everyone did an amazing job. Go Team FREINDSHIP!
Please let me know if the Linux binary doesn't work.
EDIT:
May 2: - Small update to the credits screen - Fixed a small bug (literally 1 click) where enemies all showed the same animation - Fix MacOS export
May 3: - Fixed boss death (thanks @peco) - Made music audible (thanks @khaotom) - Fixed health bar texture margins
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/void-scion |
Ratings
| Overall | 1050th | 3.053⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 958th | 3⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1018th | 2.808⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1142th | 2.971⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 913th | 3.103⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 588th | 3.139⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 892th | 2.554⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 970th | 3.041⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 34🗳️ | 58🗨️ |
A complete game with combat, an upgrade system, multiple attacks, multiple enemy types, and an ending, props to the team for shipping.
The guide-able spear attack in particular was interesting to play with.
I wanted to see more development on this theme! I beat every enemy by simply spearing them to death and ignoring their attacks; didn't seem like I had a way to block or dodge the archer's arrows, for instance. Attacks costing health was an interesting mechanic, but the answer was still just to kill enemies as quickly as possible (so they couldn't deal more damage). Always only one enemy on-screen.
The concept was unique and presented well. Nice stuff!
I had some performance issues at the bottom of the map, but I do not know what caused that.
The spear attack is definitely a unique idea and gives players a chance to inlict more damage depending on how well they handle the weapon's limited duration and movement.
What I feel it lacked was perhaps a cost for using your abilities. It would have introduced some more difficulty.
Overall - well done.
Spear weapon is a good idea, the fact that each attack cost you some life too.
I felt the game was too easy, it need more enemies that you can 'chain' with your spear.
I felt Boss was also too easy. Perhaps it need some range attack, or repulsive attack, 2 phases, etc...
Overall, I had a good time. Well done.
Liked the combat mechanics (the void was my favorite) and I found you created a big map considering the jam's deadline.
The music and the SFX were pleasant to hear.
For some reason, some parts of the map dropped the FPS.
Overall, a good job!
Went for another run and found the start knight enemy, two shield ones, bow man and the cavalry. Then it seems to just be a whole lot of empty space to wander around in. That isn't even enough enemies to warrant an upgrade system. The enemies were also a complete joke difficulty wise. Your on attacks did more damage to your health than they did. Few of them also had completely unavoidable attacks so not a great design in that manner also.
The three different attacks weren't distinguished enough to have them all. Should have focused more on making one of them at least feel good and then maybe have other upgrades be for movement speed and health and so on. And of course would need a whole lot more enemies to make those upgrades matter too. My favourite from the attacks was the spear as it was the most polished one and had some interesting potential mechanic on the snake-like cursor following.
The character sprites looked pretty good. And the health bar especially was top notch. The tile set itself could have used some more love. They didn't really fit together and even in the only part that was tried to smooth out the "tiledness" on the road corners, it then was bleeding to the grass and looked even more awkward.
Having just few minor variations for each tile would go a long way to break up the repetitiveness and make it look more natural. And then of course have a more nice blends for going from tile to another which those road corners started to resemble already. And then of course just adding some decorative sprites of stones, tree stumps, flowers and so on every here and there would help tons to make it feel more alive.
It was also sometimes hard to distinguish mountains and the cobble road from each other when coming from a grass or dirt patch and only seeing one of them.

Music was nice and chill, fit the vibe of just wandering around aimlessly perfectly. Even though it was a rather short and repetitive loop, it didn't get boring. It's still playing on the background for me while I'm writing this. The sound effects were good also. Having a small bit of variety in repeated ones like the walking one is so important (and often over looked). Kudos on that. 👌
Would have been nice to have some restart or any option really to get unstuck from the game over screen.
Went for another stroll through the game. Managed to kill the final boss with a single spear swipe by wiggling the mouse over him. And then the whole game crashed. 🤷♀️
And I also had some very weird frame rate stutters at random spots where nothing was even happening.
Anyways, good job! 👍
Nice sound effects and music!
We sincerely regret the lag - we ran out of time for extensive playtesting and just stuck to the area around the path. We believe the issue comes from having collision shapes on every mountain and water tile, and we will be sure to give more care to performance concerns and quality control in future jams!
An indicator of the direction for the player to go would definitely be beneficial for this short jam format, as we have heard it's fairly unclear what to do at the moment.
We'll make our next game even better!
Did the crash you encountered arise when using only the spear on the boss? We had a tester who discovered that the melee attack on a dead enemy causes a crash, but we would like to tease out all possible edge cases to figure out where we went wrong.
The enemy and attack balancing were definitely the biggest things wrong with the game. It causes us so much pain to not be able to tweak a few numbers and re-upload it... We ran out of time to finish an enemy spawning mechanic, so we chose to only place a few, which we now realize was not the right decision to make. I had seen how many games were criticized for being too difficult, so we went too far in the other direction.
With more enemies, the attacks may become more distinguished from one another, as they fulfill the purposes of AOE damage, single-target melee, and long-range pierce respectively. Right now, though, in one-on-one combat, spamming the spear is all one really ends up needing.
>"nice blends for going from tile to another"
Like this one?

Despite spontaneously skipping school on Monday to get the game done, we still ran out of time to implement everything we had originally planned, nice tiles included! We were overly ambitious in our original vision for the game :) The second game jam we end up doing should go much more smoothly, not in the least because we'll have more than 2 months of prior game development experience going in. You're not wrong in thinking the game was incomplete. There was more we would have liked to put in, but overall, we got the important stuff, and are proud of what we created!
In terms of the more technical details, sorry about the frame drops and the crashes. Those always take away from the experience of a game. We had disabled the water tile animation to try and smooth out performance, but some other lag-inducing aspects of the game slipped through the cracks. We have since developed a much faster water animation shader, but it's too late to put that in now. The crash you encountered is because when the boss is hit quickly enough, the hit animation is played after the boss is dead. None of us were good enough gamers to discover that bug :smile:.
I would respectfully disagree that a restart button is necessary, in the context of the jam. Players are meant to walk around the map, defeat the boss, then finally experience the cutscene and end the game. The game is currently not going to be replayed extensively, so we directed our efforts where they would make more difference for the average player.
I'm not going to lie, it's hard not to take the criticism personally after pouring so much into the game, but at the end of the day, I recognize that it's only through honest feedback like yours that we're ever going to improve, so thank you again!
If you don't mind, I would really appreciate your opinion as a more experienced game developer on whether continued work on this game would be worth it.
Have a great day!
So was it your first jam game? Of course better time management and understanding what you're capable of achieving in some specific duration comes with more experience.
Well yeah, maybe restart wasn't needed but getting hard locked in a game over screen wasn't great either. Could also let the player continue roaming around after that too. Of course at its current state, there wasn't anything really to do.
Continuing on a jam project is almost always a good idea. If nothing else you end up learning something more while doing so.
Kudos for using Godot. The mechanics are simple, but polished to some extent (for a jam game) - there is also some narrative, which is always kind of hard for short jams.
I enjoyed mechanics where you pay with blood to cast (inspiration by Vladimir in League of Legends? If I remember that correctly - it's been years since I've played it).
There are few things to consider for next:
- Starting with enemies marching right at you can be a bit frustrating (keep in mind, most people don't read instructions - I've learned it the hard way over past jams, and since then a tutorial 'level' is often a must)
- If one thing is missing - it's a bit more enemies. Balancing jam game is hard (overdo it and no one is going to win), but there is just too few of them. I didn't have problem rushing through.
- Environment could do a bit more polish (I saw the blending post in comments - and yes, that is one of the missing things ... but as usual, sacrifices has to be made to finish).
For a jam game, it's not bad (finishing it and posting it is always a feat).
Keep up the good work!