You play as an evil knight, fixated on kidnapping princesses. The objective is to see how many of them you can successfully store in your lair. Numerous heroes are out to stop you, and your only way of fending them off are the noble weapons: the princesses.
Each type of princess has a unique ability that you can use while carrying them. However, taking damage from a hero will cause you to drop the princesses you're currently carrying, so you have to toss them into your lair eventually!
Unfortunately I couldn't get around to making background music for the game, but I'm satisfied with how the art and gameplay turned out.
This is my fourth time entering the Ludum Dare competition. I had trouble coming up with a concrete idea for this theme, jumping back and forth between concepts in my head for the first 26 hours or so. I'm glad I managed to finish it with the time I had left, with sufficient time to polish it. :)
Details on how to play are in-game, but just for redundancy:
----- Controls ----- <Left arrow> - Run left <Right arrow> - Run right <Z-key> - Jump <X-key> - Princess' ability <Space> - Unload princesses into lair entrance
----- Additional controls ----- M - Toggle muting sound effects R - Quick restart mid-game
Super crate box, but with princesses instead of guns! Neat idea. I liked that the different colored damsels gave different powers, but I wish they could have been combined or increased in power as you collected more. Also would have been cool to have a "bank" to drop them off at (tradeoff between not having a weapon v. cashing out)
This was a REALLY good game for me. Like, I'm not even joking. I'm a sucker for games with lots of different abilities and yours was really nicely executed. I'd love to see a version (if you choose to do so) with more abilities, better graphics/sound and enemies. Good job!
This is very solid work. I especially loved using the flamethrower ability. The controls felt very good, and I enjoyed the graphics and sounds too. Good job!
I enjoyed the art, though playing at 300x300 made it very hard, if I were you I'd make 600x600 the default. Also, I didn't get any bonuses from "depositing" more than one princess at a time, which didn't really make up for the risk involved.
I liked the powers being tied to the princesses. AS has been said, it'd be nice to see other levels and it was extremely hard to dodge the heroes due to the level design. I liked the tornado the most, I actually found myself avoiding some of the princesses (blue mostly) at times so I could keep my current ability.
Really fun game! Although I wish there was some sort of higher score reward for cashing in several princesses at once to make a combo worthwhile. Also, the ratio of number of princesses:warriors spawned becomes too small after a while, the bulk of the score comes from the early parts of the game and staying alive when it becomes hard doesn't give that much reward. Maybe killed enemies could give small amounts of score points as well to compensate for this. But overall it was a really solid entry!
Thanks for the comments so far, everyone. I really appreciate it and currently plan to further develop this post-LD; possibly porting it to Flash.
Summarizing some key feedback that I'm considering: - More maps/layouts - More princesses - More enemy variety - A more refined difficulty curve and balancing - Some bonus/multiplier for depositing multiple princesses at once - A method of rewarding those scoring points in the later, higher-difficulty times - Better audio and graphics (More on audio)
Cool. Don't like the sounds on the menu - specially back. Really like the mechanic of inheriting power from princess, wish I could toggle between them. Controls were confusing - but I adapted. Art was great. Overall, good work!
I very much enjoyed the presentation here, and the mechanic was nice as well. It's hard to come up with many areas for improvement, but if I had to pick one it's that I feel the pit trap detracts from the game a bit.
Other than that, it's an okay game.