Devil Elimination Party of Tactical Hunters by Teto
The Devil Elimination Party of Tactical Hunters (D.E.P.T.H.) must once again delve deep into the depths of hell to eliminate the wretched hive which is spawning troubling numbers of devilkind.
Delve to the deepest level, kill the boss, plant the hellbomb and escape!
Tactical turn based strategy.
Instructions: Ability hotbar at bottom of screen for selecting abilities. Upgrade in top right once a level has been cleared. Use the drill ability to descend to the next level.
Generative AI was used heavily in the code writing for this jam (vibe coding) - as an experiment by me (Ciaran) and it was an extremely frustrating experience that's difficult to claw back from. The complexity totally spiralled out of control, so we totally missed the deadline - just got something together in time for the 'extra' deadline. Its a very easy to misuse tool, and it seems even a literal "weekend project" is very difficult to manage when the tool is frequently hallucinating and losing track of itself. However in many ways it is also a very impressive tool, that definitely helps with certain tasks... it just makes many other tasks I would normally enjoy a lot more frustrating!
All of the content was made by humans though.
- Art by ScorchHawk, CiaranW & Teto.
- Music & Sound by James
- Level design by Jed
- Code by Ciaran+Cursor, ScorchHawk & Jedontrack
| Link | https://github.com/CiaranWoodward/LD57 |
| Web | https://ciaranw.itch.io/depth |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/devil-elimination-party-of-tactical-hunters |
Ratings
| Given | 12🗳️ | 8🗨️ |
The "End Turn" button took me a while to find. The semi-transparent wall can be a bit hard to tell unless zooming in enough.
It's funny that the drill ability confused me for quite some time until the underneath floor is revealed. But that twist is such a highlight of this game! Also great execution since there're quite many systems to be in place in order to make this "drilling" mechanic shine.
@pauldee427 Huh, I hadn't seen that... although I think the game crashes when you win (by clearing the 5th level - with the 4 exploding barrels), So congrats for beating the game! I'll try and fix that bug, it didn't happen when I cheated my way to victory for testing :P
@superpokeunicorn Thanks, the abilities were quite the feature creep! Good idea with the increased movement upon level clearing. You are also able to buy more 'movement points' in the upgrade menu, but I appreciate that's not very clear!
Thank you everyone for playing & giving feedback!
I think it is very ambitious that the team created a whole tactical RPG strategy for the game jam, with update mechanics and interesting twist on the formula, but i also feel that the scope maybe was just too much for the timeframe and that resulted in game being unfocused and unpolished somewhat. I really hope the team will not be discouraged by my feedback (and the fact that they may potential not get 20 ratings, but i hope they will) and will create more projects in the future!
@mod-wiz Thanks very much for the detailed feedback! We definitely went too big on scope for this one, and I was trying a new tool for writing the code (Cursor + Claude LLM AI), which was very tricky to use well, and made it very difficult to polish at the end since the codebase was such an unfamiliar mess. This is an 'extra' game, so I don't think we get ranked even if we do get 20 ratings - we're just doing this for the feedback, so thank you very much for your comment!