Ludum Dare #52compo

The little reaper who could(n't)!

by timon

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.05

Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.88

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.68

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.34

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.98

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.05

About

Tried to focus a lot more than usual on art, which I am happy with, but unfortunately I ran out of time to finish the gameplay so I'm hesitant to even call it a game at this time. Nontheless, feel free to give it a go :)

* WASD: Move
* Space: Swing scythe
* M: Hold to drain soul for a protective (and lethal!) shield
* N: Close any portal you're hovering

Stay alive as long as you can I guess, because there's unfortunately no objective. (You could always go look for the blue portal that was going to add progression!)

The game runs best in chrome!
Unfortunately having some issues getting it to run smoothly in firefox.

Tools & Tech

The game is written in Javascript using the Phaser 3 framework. I'm not very well versed with JS or Phaser, but the docs are good and they provide a library of code samples so it's surprisingly doable to learn as you go.

For art I've used Leonardo along with some help from Piskel. For sound effects, I've used jsfxr.

CHANGELOG AFTER COMPO END:

2023-01-08:
* Fixed scaling issues to allow playing the game on smaller screens.
* Removed a lot of commented/dead code to increase readability.
* Switched to minified Phaser to improve performance.

2023-01-11:
* Disable death sound on final death to hopefully fix a bug with the death sound stacking

Tools: Phaser, Piskel, sfxr

Comments14

kodingnights8 Jan 2023, 22:47

Fun little game, I like the parallax scrolling but I would like it to move a lot faster. Has potential.

xfinktion11 Jan 2023, 00:53

Decent little entry! I must say that your styling of the reaper has been my favorite of the games I've seen so far, the soul pickups are also very clean. Was a big fan of the stitching to close up the holes, nice touch! I can definitely tell that you put a lot of focus on the art :)

My only real complaint is that when you die, the little "bewooo" slide sound effect is played/stacked over and over before the game is reset. It can get quite loud if the game doesn't reset fast enough. It was a decent jumpscare but I'm not sure that was intentional :)

Definitely has potential! What you were able to finish was nice. Really would like to see more in this style :D

timonauthor11 Jan 2023, 21:29

Thanks for playing and leaving some encouragement @kodingnights @xfinktion!

Sorry to hear about the sound effect stacking, although I can't reporduce it it's probably an side effect of my incredibly ugly hack of just reloading the page when you die, since I didn't have time to make a main menu :) I've made a small patch disabling the death sound on the final life to hopefully save future players some pain, so thank you for pointing it out!

shahinm11 Jan 2023, 23:29

Cool game! I found that standing in the corner and spam attack was enough to practically kill everything so on my run I didn't close the portals.

Great graphics!

Christian Zommerfelds12 Jan 2023, 20:43

The game feels pretty smooth/fluid. The actions where not intuitive, maybe you could reduce the number of action keys (to be just one).

Nice job!

Glaikunt12 Jan 2023, 20:49

Cool game! I couldn't figure out if I could get in the portal or not but I survived for a while closing portal & killing the ghosts :smile: lots of different ways to expand this idea, great job!

Chiranjiv12 Jan 2023, 20:57

I like the game, had fun playing but I couldn't figure out how get in/ open the blue portal at the end.

pauljs15 Jan 2023, 16:39

Nice small game! Mechanics are very simple! But the graphics are really cute, congrats!

Flying Dog Fish15 Jan 2023, 17:13

Great art, the little reaper is reaper is really cute.

Pulni15 Jan 2023, 17:48

Reaper and ghosts are indeed super cute! :heart_eyes:

As for surviving as long as we can... I think I can do it indefinitely with the shield :sweat_smile:

Good job, and better luck with the time management next time! :slight_smile:

island-jam-2-group-315 Jan 2023, 22:08

Nice graphics!

lfreinoso16 Jan 2023, 17:06

I liked the game, the distribution of controls does not help much to play....but the rest of the game is consistent, very cool graphics, congratulations!

See my game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/space-harvest

Harmadillo17 Jan 2023, 22:29

The art is really good. It's a shame you didn't get to finish the progression.