Bard Summoner by Mark Swinimer

About
Choose one of three guitars and press tab to build your own dungeon to conquer. You will also get to choose from three summons which each grant a unique movement ability to help you traverse your dungeon. Choosing the correct summon will help you beat certain rooms!
This is our first entry into a game jam and our first actual build of a game! There are a lot of bugs and flaws in the movement, camera, and level design so we appreciate your trying of our game. Thank you!
Being a game about a bard, there is unique guitar music and sounds for each summon and guitar you choose.
Play in browser - https://ryaneklipse.itch.io/bard-summoner
Credits
Development | Art - Mark Swinimer
Development | Art - Ryan Child
Music - Mike Child
Controls
Input Commands
| Key | Action | | ---------- | -------------- | | [WASD] | Movement | | [Spacebar] | Jump | | [E] | Summon (click to place) | | [tab] | Entire tile placement (in shrine) | | [Escape]| Open Pause Menu | | [i] | Open instructions menu |
Summon Effects
| Summon | Action | | ---------- | -------------- | | Angel Nugget | Allows you to perform a second jump when in its radius | | Rock Platform | Creates a long platform which you can walk and jump on | | Void Orb | Alters gravity around itself |
Everything was made from scratch (except our movement script which we modified heavily).
There are some small bugs but we've managed to fix most of the big ones. We had some larger bugs around tile placement, but fixed them around 10AM EST 4/16/24
| Link | https://github.com/markswinimer/ludum-tile-summoner |
| Link | https://ryaneklipse.itch.io/bard-summoner |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/bard-summoner |
Ratings
| Overall | 1195th | 2.583⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1166th | 2.552⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 660th | 3.283⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 855th | 3.31⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1031th | 2.667⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 761th | 2.286⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1027th | 2.04⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1155th | 2.596⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 29🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
A very interesting concept, but something got bugged out, probably when I spawned those platforms on my character. Anyway, good job!
However I ended up getting stuck often due to being unable to summon more tiles, I dont know if I just overlooked something.
Still, really solid thing you got going here.
Some other general issues I noticed that are relatively easy to fix:
- The game's UI does not scale with the display resolution. Playing on a 4K monitor exposed this right away. You can force whatever display resolution you want in the Unity editor to check for stuff like this.
- The 45-degree slope I encountered initially was an instant death trap. I couldn't jump or run back up the slope in any capacity. You should be able to adjust your character's physics so that they don't slide down into the abyss.
- Some might say this one's subjective, but I think the gravity is waaaaay too high. Jumping looked and felt kind of janky, even though it technically works.
- The game seems to visually update only with the physics steps, meaning I could tell it was 50-60 updates per second or that the framerate was capped. Not a huge deal, but it is nice to have the game look smoother on higher refresh rate monitors. You also get less input lag with higher framerates.
Cool concept, I would've liked it if you released a finished version sometime in the future! I like this style of sandbox/puzzle/platformer game! Nice job!