Crocodial
Windows Download (Post-Jam)
A Clash Between Crocs
Greenie the crocodile wizard is chilling at the top of his volcano home, practicing his spells and generally having a pleasant day. There are no cars, no spiders, and definitely no rabbits to be seen.
In the distance Greenie hears a shout. With some dismay he realizes the shouter is his arch-rival Brownie, who lives on the next mountain over.
"It brings a tear to my eye to see such incompetence in the occult arts! Your last invocation was barely even a cantrip!" Brownie taunts across the valley.
The two wizard lizards trade insulting remarks about the other's magical puissance for some time. Eventually words are no longer sufficient.
"I'll show you a cantrip, you pretentious bottom-feeder!" roars Greenie; he sticks his tail in his mouth and starts rolling down the hill.
If either crocodile comes unstuck and can no longer maintain their magical loop, they will have to yield victory to the other. Get down to Brownie, collect your spells along the way, and make sure you're the one left rolling!
And when you defeat Brownie, well... there is always another mountain and another rival :)
Controls
Move mouse to change direction.
Avoid obstacles, pick up spells and use spells against enemies.
The faster you roll, the faster you will loop through your spell wheel. When your hat points at the active (highlighted) spell it will automatically be cast, and the next spell in the loop will become the new active spell.
When you pick up a spell, left-click at any time to switch it with the active spell. This happens when the mouse button is released.
If the highlighted spell is the same as the picked up spell, they will combine into a more powerful version of the spell. (Holding down the left mouse button will prevent this from happening, if you'd prefer to put the new spell somewhere else.)
Press R to restart. Press Esc to exit.
Comments40
@lamasaurus Thanks :) The game does indeed get pretty hectic as you go further.
If there aren't many enemies around (like near the start of the game) you can slow down, turn across the slope and go looking for spells/sort out your spell wheel/work out what the spells do in a bit more peace and quiet.
Pretty fun. It felt strange to me that you had to click up at the corner to choose a powerup when that also moves your characters. And I wasn't clear on the tradeoffs of choosing different powerups once my circle of powers was full.
Lots of cute/fun art. Especially the bazooka bear :)
@ice9 You can click anywhere on the screen (in fact, where you click doesn't affect the spell switch at all). I've clarified this a bit more in the Controls section.
also absolutely love the bee spell, more bees please
Had fun making builds for my runs and beating my best score!
Great art & fun enemies :)
GameDesign was great and music was very different and cool
All the spells and everything is great .. keep up the good work
- There should be some kind of invencibility frames after a hit. I died a couple of times with full health in less than a second.
- Some obstacles are hard to read at that speed! Specially the rocks, in general obstacle design could be much more contrasty with the background.
- The last problem was specially hard once I wanted to look at the wheel, trying to place a new spell, so in the end I stopped looking to the UI. That maybe is my fault, because there is a way to slow down (risking getting hit by bullets)to look, but when I tried to play like that I felt like the game wasn't at its fullest.
- Moving and rolling the crocodile felt and looked incredible, great work on that.
Congratulations!
> love Crocodial.love
in the command line. It's a bit of a bother but unfortunately LÖVE doesn't have an easier way to distribute games for Linux (that we know of, anyway).
We haven't tested the Linux or macOS distributions; I would really expect the Linux one to work at least since it is basically just the source code, but if someone runs either of them and they work (or don't) that would be good to know.
I will say that there was a lot of things going on - at some point I stopped looking at my spell wheel and just hoped that what I picked up would upgrade my current spells, which seemed to work. Later on, I found myself ignoring the enemies entirely and just picking up health, as I couldn't really focus on much else! I sadly never got to the end in three attempts - too much happening for me!
The music was very fitting and I enjoyed it a lot. The sound effects fit well and helped make everything pop. Nice job!
(I managed to get it to work on Linux - this series of commands worked for me:
```
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bartbes/love-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install love
love [downloaded .love file]
```
)
I liked how the attack speed was attached to your movement speed which incentivized you to go fast, but going fast made it difficult to stay alive which made it difficult to look at the wheel to place spells where I wanted to without getting hit or slowing down.
The basic contols for moving around are easy enough to understand and the small amount of enemies and obstacles in the beginning is nice to get used to it.
Pretty soon it becomes very fast paced though, so I never really found myself actively using the spell wheel mechanics, but instead just tried avoiding obstacles and collecting spells and "heart bushes", hoping for the best , but it's still pretty entertaining :)
I also found that the humourous description added a nice touch to it.
All in all I would say you did a good job :)
The game felt generally pretty fun to play, although I couldn't focus on avoiding obstacles and the spell wheel at the same time, so I'd just collect everything without checking what it was. At some point the difficulty spikes HARD and suddenly the screen is full of enemies.
I don't think the enemies attacking are what makes it difficult, more that I just become completely visually overwhelmed, I can't tell what's going on, and I crash into obstacles. It felt like no amount of collecting power ups could prepare me for those enemies, because just them being on screen broke my ability to see what I'm doing, and I'd die. I think I got to about 11 left as my best score.
Really creative idea!
Overall, really loved this game. Would definitely like to see a post-jam edition.
I thought this was great, really builds up to a manic crescendo.
Nice entry ! congrats
- Spiky rocks are easier to see, and rocks don't spawn behind trees.
- Adjusted the post-rival scaling to keep up with spell scaling (playing enough to tune the post-game has so far been out of reach during a jam).
- End stats (press 'tab', it is prompted if you get far enough).
- More bees.
Link: https://github.com/NeptunianAxolotl/LD47/releases/tag/v1.1
I worry that the game may be a bit hard as I like to err on the side of challenge. The bullet hell aspect is a bit deceptive too, as it is more a game of clearing waves faster than they can breach your shields than it is a game of dodging everything. I find it hard to be particularly sad about how that part of the balance shook out because I think shields are a core part of wizard battles.
Firstly, it does get quite hectic. I find that I can't focus on everything at once, so I just need to sort of "flow" - see the enemies out of the corner of my eye and try to take in everything at once without focusing on anything in particular. And, except at the beginning, I basically ignore the spell wheel (see next point).
Secondly, I treat the game as having two phases. In the first phase, there are very few enemies around, and you spend this time slowly travelling side to side, collecting spells and allocating them to your spell wheel. I tend to look at my spell wheel during this time, and try to avoid trees out of the corner of my eye. Then, once you've allocated each spot on the spell wheel that you wish to, you then start watching the enemies and travelling down quickly. Going down helps to point the spells towards your enemies.
Also, it might be useful to have a list of spells and what they do:
- shield (blue): makes a shield which circles you. Absorbs projectile damage
- energy orb (purple): makes an orb which circles you. Does damage to enemies it hits. Does not kill projectiles.
- fireball (orange): shoots a fireball. Does AoE damage.
- busy bee (yellow): shoots a homing missile that looks like a bee.
- ice shards (light blue): shoots a cluster of ice shards, a bit like a shotgun.
- haste (black): makes you go faster
- serpent (green): shoots projectiles that wiggle through the air.
Generally, spells deal more damage at higher levels. Many also make more projectiles at higher levels.
it starts pretty easy to learn but the difficulty curve never left me feeling super overwhelmed or that my death was the game's fault or anything.
If I could make a change, I'd maybe find a way to move the spell wheel somewhere closer to the centre of the screen as I felt that most times when I went to look up at it to see what it was doing I'd almost, or crash into something.
So I ended up just spam clicking my way down the mountain :P not sure if that was intended.
The sound effects are good! minimal and not too overwhelming, some music would be nice if you end up spending more time on this game. The art is really cute, I loved the bazooka bears? Very scary once they were mounted on cars too. Haha.
Good work!
My only regret was that it's so hectic I don't have time to appreciate everything that's going on. There are a lot of interesting visuals or icons or UI but I only have a slight memory of them because my eyes are hunting for spell orbs or heart bushes more than anything.
Really crazy world you built and the music selection fits it well. Solid experience overall!
Btw, you mention if you use a duplicate spell, it makes it stronger. How strong can it get? It was hard to tell just with experimentation.
@peachtreeoath If you "level up" a spell by combining two of the same kind (this happens automatically between a spell "in the hand" and one in the wheel unless you hold down LMB) they get stronger as follows:
* _Shield_ and _Energy Orb_ get bigger, rotate faster, have a longer maximum duration, and can deflect more projectiles/hit more enemies before dissipating.
* *Fireball* explodes in a larger radius, travels a bit faster, and fires an additional projectile for every five levels.
* *Ice Shards* fires more projectiles (2 per level) in a larger arc, they travel a bit faster, and do a little bit more damage.
* *Busy Bees* fires more projectiles (1 per level) in a larger arc; in the post-jam version they travel a bit faster and do a little bit more damage.
* *Haste* makes you go faster for longer at higher levels.
* *Serpent* (the green ball things) fires 2 more projectiles for every 2 levels to a maximum of 8; they also do more damage, travel faster, and oscillate faster at higher levels.
In general you would have to get a *lot* of levels for most of the damage upgrades to matter much (the Serpent one is relatively substantial, at 40 + 10/level). The bigger impact is in how many more things you can hit with each spell at higher levels, and in increased survivability from high level Shields. If you survive long enough to level it up that far, a sufficiently high level Fireball volley can wipe out most of the screen.
If anybody really wants to know *exactly* how the spells work, the source can be found here: https://github.com/NeptunianAxolotl/LD47/tree/v1.0/spells