good ol classic platformer... whats not to love ;)
great choice for a first jam and great output too, you should be proud.

Walking around to get more summons. The combat was simple but fun. I got annoyed at my skeletons a few times for just standing around when there were enemies to hit but otherwise they behaved well.

The one bit aesthetic is awesome. I know it meant to be cheaper to produce, but I like it nevertheless. The gameplay is good such you feel like you're playing for a necromancer. But the game feels difficult, especially when I met the ghosts that shot projectiles. I wish there were health items. Congratulations on your first entry!

I love the aesthetic of this. It's simple, but super cute! Controls were easy to follow and I appreciate the fact the projectiles aim on their own. Reminds me a bit of Vampire Survivor except you can summon allies rather than gaining weapons. There were lines that kept popping up across the screen as I played which was a bit distracting/took a way a bit from the game, but overall great job!

really enjoyed the gameplay and sound, keep up the good work

Thanks @ballen! Unfortunately some PCs are presenting the distracting glitches, probably due to the web export of our game :( The Windows build is probably fine everywhere.

Pretty awesome game specially for a first jam. My only negative feedback is that

- UI could be a bit more out of the way (I know that is hard as My game implemented the same button combo mechanic to do summons.
- The 1 bit art can make it a bit frustrating to navigate a maze
- Ending was pretty satisfying from a difficulty perspective

Maybe introducing levels as checkpoints would make the maze navigation less annoying

Absolutely love graphics and music!

Hey buddy, I'm up and now chowing down while playing your game. Seriously tough, trying not to die laughing and getting food down the wrong pipe. Your game is fantastic, with the perfect level of challenge and great sound effects – it's incredibly polished. Looks like our team has a lot to learn from you. Hats off, my friend.

@ballen the glitches should be fixed now!

Awesome work! Very enjoyable, I loved the art and gameplay mechanics.

clever little game, I didn't think the DDR summoning mechanic would work at first, but when you need your skellys in a pinch its super effective. very charming, Great job!

The charm of 1bit will never get old, it's really great. I liked the mechanics, the only criticism I would have is that the map could be a little smaller. There are so many games to play and give feedback in the jam, that it is not possible to spend so much time on just one. I ended up dying twice in the boss, and having to go through the entire map again to see the ending was a little disheartening. Other than that, great game, I think you'll score well in the jam. Well done, guys.

Really neat game, I loved the visual style!

hell yah it looks good has a great concept I like the audio all in all fantastic game.

Great job. I especially like the input system required to summon things. The art is cute and charming, 1-bit is cool, but also causes some readability issues. I wish enemy bullets were more visible (*maybe a different color?*), and it was hard to tell when I was taking damage, when I died, I didn't see how, and it was quite abrupt (*maybe some freeze-time and screenshake feedback?*). The allies did their job for the most part, but when I'm just trying to explore and blitz the map, they kind of fall behind (*I wish there was a "call" input I could use to pull them to my location?*).

Overall great job everyone!

love the art and great choice on the audio, only critique is that there could be a better indication of the player taking damage. Kudos!

Simple retro game, iz good

Love the vibe of the game, and its some amazing work for your first game jam! One thing I'd suggest is a buffer period between your death and the game over screen, just so the player can better process it before being switched over.

Super cool game, loved the summoning mechanic. The aesthetics and music fit super nicely too! Only feedback I have is that the first time I tried playing my char wouldn't fire so I got a little confused on what I was supposed to do. Other than that, loved the idea and execution.

I really liked this game! loved the summoning mechanic and simple effective graphics. top notch!

Great job! It's always great when a game jam game finds time to teach you to play it and ramp up difficulty throughout. Hard to believe it's a first effort - it's quite good. Also I love the little necromancer.

The level was designed really nicely, it does a great job teaching you on the fly. Fighting the beholder was really engaging, and the game just feels great to play. It also feels like you all made good decisions around where to spend your time, all the design choices feel super smart!

I like the minimalist two colors esign, great job! I'd recommend maybe making the combat more interactive from the perspective of the caster ?
Fun game, keep it u :)

A cute little take on Vampire Survivors with nice 1-bit aesthetic. The boss fight music was a real bop! I only found the skeleton summon before I stumbled onto boss, I assume there are more summons to be found but I still decided to go head on and with some juking and a bit of time I managed to beat the game. It felt satsifying, so great job!

I like the concept and the game was fun! think the level is a bit big, felt like there were too much walking in empty spaces. Loved the use of arrowkeys to perform the summon!

Love it! But i think progression is a bit slow and i think there should be some reward for mob kills, for now i think its better to outrun them.
Great game, wish you luck!

Interesting game! I like it!

Everything fits together.

The controls feel as they should, the "undertale" graphics and the necromancer vibes are super cool.
One of the best entries so far !

Vampire survivors with Underale-ish graphics and an army to summon. Amazing mixture of these things! :)

I really like the atmosphere

Pretty well done. Like the style. The movement felt a bit sluggish.

I love how it reminds me of Undertale! Its soo nice, a little bitch glitch textured map, but the art style is on point!

I liked it, well done. I would love it if there was a map in the game XD It would be enough if it only shows the rooms, it should not mark the character and the chests

Fun time! I loved the summoning mechanic and each upgrade was a boost of dopamine. The art although simplistic was still nice, and the 1-bit style was done well.

I really liked your one-bit aesthetic. I did find my skeleton summons a little hard to distinguish from the enemy skeleton summons, so if possible I'd suggest some tweaks there. I enjoyed the arrow sequences to summon things to help, that was a fun mechanic that kept me paying attention to more things at once and kept my other hand busy. Cool concept, awesome first jam game.

Really dug on it, the button combos to do the summons really felt great especially when in a pinch made it nice and tense. Wonderful sound and music parts, it all fit together great. I'd definitely play a more fleshed out version of it! :)

Your choice of music went really well with the dungeon, ghost-type environment. Black and white is a nice vibe that I think pairs well with the art style. I would say it was a bit challenging at first to know which were the summons, but overall, good job and nice game :^)

Absolutely beautiful 1-bit art!

Game plays smoothly, looks good, feels responsive, and has nice little details like seeing a much later chest behind a wall when you walk by it early on.

Only feedback - if you are watching the corner arrows when you are summoning, there is no visual difference between correctly finishing a summon and messing up the last step of a summon, and you have to look or listen elsewhere for confirmation. Holding on the last arrow or doing a little visual flourish up in the corner might be more reassuring.

Good work!

I love the style! Looks beautiful.

I like having to summon the boss and defeat it when you're ready.

Having a little more feedback on when you successfully summon or fail a summon would make it feel better to play, but overall very enjoyable!

Very nice take on the theme! Love the 1-bit graphics and music is very fitting! :smile:

Good game! The graphics are really nice and I also like the way to summon!

Took a minute to figure out the arrow key combos (i swear i was doing it right but it seemed like it frequently didn't take). Just *one more* bit of color just to differentiate my summons from the mobs and it would be perfect!! gg

The 1 bit graphics are charming. I love playing helldivers so i got used to summoning real quick. My feedback would be that it felt like fighting wasnt worth it, i found running past the enemies pick up the chest and run away an effective strategy, mby some reward for killing enemies like XP (which increased the dmg of ur summons) or health drops could have worked and made me take no more fights. But other than that great work.

A quality game with a minimalistic style. It was fun to play and look for improvements for the summoned monsters. I liked the summoning system too, it's simple, but at the same time you have to memorize combinations and spam them in the fight with the boss!

i love the gameplay (arrows combinaison to call boss / summon skeleton allies).
great pixel art ! great mood ! GG ! :)
(coudnt beat the bosses ^^'')

Good music and art, it's a nice game.

For a first entry, this is a huge accomplishement! Congratulations guys!
The game play is really put together and works well with the music (even if you did not create it yourself - solid choice!)

The idea of doing some keyboard combinations for summoning is neat!
A bit of balancing would be useful and forcing the player to do some work in order to progress! For example have some door that will only open after clearing a room to prevent the player of just rushing and dodging through haha!

Fun entry :)

Thanks for submitting your game to the stream! If you wanted to watch it again in the future heres the vod of the stream (with a chapter for your game)

https://youtu.be/Foe4js2jhJ0?t=5072

And I'm the host for the ludum dare score chasers tournament this Ludum Dare. Wanted to ask if youre fine if I put some gameplay of the game in an intermission video. Last year for reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_eIvjBmIQ

@ategon Thank you very much for playing our game and for the helpful tips and feedback!

And it's completely fine to use our game footage in your intermission streams, we would be very pleased!

The unique graphics make the whole game look clean and comfortable. I love this game.

Congrats on your first submission! Love the simple art style! Nice to see the game that shares some ideas with ours :smile:

The visuals are clean and simple, the content is complete, and the difficulty level is appropriate. Excellent work!

Thanks everyone for all the feedback! You can read our post mortem blog post here: ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/necrobit/necrobit-a-first-jam-post-mortem-1

I had a fun time playing! Died a few times and had to restart. Getting to the devil summon was the hardest part of the game but it felt like the devil summon wasn't really powerful enough to warrant the challenge of getting him. Overall a super fun time. Great game :)

Great idea and art style you have here.

I was confused when I wasn't able to summon new skeletons, because the UI prompt still showed me the key pattern and the keys could get highlighted even if I wasn't allowed to summon. Took me a while to get 1/1 shows the limit.

The level is a bit too large, but not such a big problem by itself. The boss could kill me instantly, I wish we could restart from the boss fight start point.

Good job!

What a great entry! I really liked the graphics and what I really appreciate is the level design. It was fun to get to the „bonus“ rooms, because you got nice rewards, especially the devil summoning, but also the increasing strength of the skeletons, which helped a lot in the boss fight. The controls are nice and polished too.

In my opinion it would be nice, if you could tell the difference between the projectiles of the enemies and the shots of your allies. I know you only have a 1-bit style, but you could use a different shape for the ally-shot or for example a black projectile with a white outline.
Another thing is that the feedback for beeing hit does not feel impactful enough. Sometimes I just noticed that I was hit, because my health bar went down. A little screenshake or a clear sound and visual effect on the character could help to solve this issue.

But do not get me wrong. I really had fun playing this game. It is one of my favorites so far. :)

This game has many features that I like: top down, monochrome, pixel art, chiptune, etc. I would love to play more, play more levels and have more powers. Here is my suggestion to expand this game and publish it on some platform.

Congratulations and welcome to the world of gamejams.

PS: a comment on the behavior of skeletons. I walked past a ghost and didn't kill it. I moved forward so I could get a grimoire that was on the other side and then go back. The skeletons stayed the whole way trying to get back to kill the ghost. It was a difficult path for me and the other skeleton (who I had summoned later) to fight while focusing on the enemies in front. :P

Thanks for the feedback @euler-moises! And yes, we are planning to work a few more weeks into a more fleshed out version of the game (a few levels, more abilities, etc), but nothing to big.

On the skeleton behavior, yes, that's an issue we've noticed, but couldn't fix in time. Sorry for the trouble!

Great game, lovely cohesive design and music as well being fun to play.

I haven't noticed this in the comments so just to mention I had an X pos issue for my skeleton minions grouping away from me on one play - web build

Congrats on a cool, polished game!

That was a blast. The mechanics were simple and intuitive, and there was a combo-based summoning system I didn't have to memorize or check another menu for. That's something a lot of other games I've seen have done.
It was enjoyable collecting all the chests around the map to get stronger and the controls were really smooth. The final boss one-shot me though which was sad and I had to start over. I did beat it in the end though. Maybe having the player heal over time would be nice.

cool little game ...I like the 1-bit atmosphere and the graphics that go with it... I think the idea works well even if I hate moving around with WASD... it lacks a bit of balancing (normal for a game jam) and save points because the progression is quite slow and the enemies are a bit difficult so it's not easy to return there I think. But the proposition is original and it makes you want to play it.