Ballad of the Bard

Story

You are camping alone at night, and nature doesn't seem to like the disturbing lights from your fire. Play them some tunes on your lute to keep the beasts away, but beware! The bears are awfully musical and will not tolerate a missed chord. Others join to put out your fire, such as moles, wolfs and wizards. How long can you hold them off?

Gameplay

Keep the fire going by fueling it with branches.

Play the chords that appear over bears to keep them away from the fire. Chords are represented by their respective keys on the keyboard, as well as holding Left Shift to play in Minor.

* Use your precious branches as toys for the wolfs to calm them.
* Whack the moles with either branches or hammers to keep them from making a dirt pile out of your warmth!
* Complete the wizards challenge to reach a checkpoint and unlock magical (and musical) spells!

Be resourceful and quick!

...to finish all the levels and finally get some well deserved rest!

Features

* Full-fledged tutorial to show you the ropes (aww yeah)
* 9 Levels that get much harder as you go! (that's plenty!)
* CHECKPOINTS! (woohoo)
* Beautiful pixel art and animations (*gawks*)
* At least 15 minutes of gameplay! (if you are good, that is)

Controls

* A, B, C, D, E, F and G to play chords...
* Hold Left Shift to play minor chords.
* Click and drag on branches and hammers.
* Escape to pause and open the main menu.
* There's a tutorial in the game, so just play that c:

DISCLAIMER!

The game has been patched and updated AFTER the Ludum Dare deadline. If you really want to give us a score fair to everyone else you can play the somewhat buggy (but still playable) version 1.0 on itch.io, which unfortunately is currently only available as a download.

Known major issues in the Ludum Dare version:

* Playing the tutorial, losing and pressing "Try again" will cause the game to restart but no enemies will spawn. Restart the game to fix.
* The last level is uncompletable, consider the game over if you play level 9 and enemies stop spawning.

No content has been added in the updated version, just bug fixes and quality of life improvements. If you just want to play because it looks fun, play the newest version!

Changes made since released are posted on our devlog: https://filipbergkvist.itch.io/ballad-of-the-bard/devlog