Try your best to survive the night in the forest with your trusty musket!
The Lost Rifleman is a quick, fun, 5-minute horror/shooter where you play as the titular lost soldier, who finds himself trapped in a forest surrounded by terrifying ghosts. Can you keep his sanity intact?
My beautiful menu, which I threw together in the last hour. I really hate how the buttons turned out.
That ghost looks adorable, but trust me, it's a menace!
This time around, I tried my absolute best to focus on game feel and atmosphere, which meant spending more than half my time on the goddamn lighting. I still don't know how to make it work properly, so I had to fake the entire darkness using heavy black linear fog that just turns everything pitch-black beyond a certain distance. It's not Penumbra good, but atleast its not Game of Thrones bad?
I'd love to hear what you think of the game! Let me know what you enjoyed, what I could improve, and how long you managed to survive in Endless Mode!
EDIT: I lock the mouse cursor to the middle and every now and then chrome throws an error because of it, weird behaviour I'll look into it in the next few days.
Really cool entry! I played through it and had a great time. Here is a quick breakdown of my thoughts: • Gameplay & Design: The core mechanics feel solid and intuitive right from the start. The gameplay loop is engaging, and the controls feel responsive and fair. • Visuals & Art Style: The visual direction fits the overall mood really well. Everything looks cohesive, and the presentation makes it very clean to follow what's happening on screen. • Audio: The sound effects and audio design add a lot of punch to the experience and help build the atmosphere. • Theme Interpretation: You did a fantastic job incorporating the jam's theme into the core loop in a creative and clever way! Constructive Polish Idea: If you decide to update or expand this after the jam, adding a few extra feedback cues (like juice/particles or subtle screen shake) or expanding on a few mechanics could make it feel even more polished! Overall, awesome job for a jam project! Left you a high score/rating. Keep up the great work! 🚀
There was a nice vibe. The sfx of the ghoul is funny at first, with the accumulation you just want to shoot them so they never speak again. I like the soundtrack, it sets the tone with the wood. It's cool
Not sure how good its fits game jams theme. but atmosphere is great, with sound and low poly. The only thing that's i didn't understand was that were we suppose to stay in one place or move around map.
Really fun atmosphere ! The ghoul’s sound effects are hilarious at first, although after hearing them over and over, you just want to take them all out ! The soundtrack also fits the wooden environment really well and helps create a cool vibe. Great job !
The atmospehe is great with you game, a lot of tensions ! It miss an audio feedback when you hit the ghost, and maybe a spacialization of the ghost laught to be able to aim in the right direction ! The rigid camera is a cool idea !
I really liked this game! I was also reading your dev progress blog posts throughout the two days, and it was great to see the final result! I like how the flashlight range reduces with your sanity. The guns felt juicy to use, and I bypassed the slow mouse speed by increasing my mouse's actual tracking speed >:) These cheeky ghosts kept frustrating me, but I soon figured out the pattern of the sounds they made, and it helped me survive morning with 1% sanity left O_o
Pretty cool game, I really like the overall mechanic, maybe wished there were more types of enemies. I also think a sensitivity slider would be nice, as I felt like I'm playing cs with the current sens. Overall I really like the game.
The concept of sanity being tied into the gameplay is a brilliant way to ramp up the tension. It makes surviving the creepy forest feel much more difficult than just shooting things. Really enjoyed this intense jam experience!
The sanity marker gives the game a lovecraft tone. I try hard to figure out what the "ghosts" are but I can't (and thats really cool). Yeah the cursor bug is spoiling some of the fun for now, as the shots are almost random in direction.
Overall, solid entry, this is the kind of game that I really like to find and play in ludumdares.
@thevasandr Depending on the run length you cannot stand still after a while, you run out of sanity before the morning. @remy-lopez Real 3D audio is a great idea, would make them more spooky too @brimstone@neeko69@tanjou I realized I should of added a sensitivity slider way too late into the second night, I have my mouse on like 3200 dpi... should of made people playtest it earlier 🙁 @eugenik@yupaz Thank you for playing, glad you had a good time 🙂
@ltyrosine I'm not sure what cursor bug you mean, if you don't use the right mouse button to aim, the shots are random on purpose, but you reload faster thats by design.
@noble-goose Thank you for playing! I have to agree with the mouse sensitivity, should of just yeeted a slider under the audio and get it done, maybe in a future version.
The atmosphere is great! Lovely game with some really cool sound effects. I agree with the others that the mouse sensitivity was a bit too low for me. I wonder if a closer camera perspective, or even a first-person view, might suit the game even better.
A neat little game made by one person. The gameplay loop is really simple: you move from campfire to campfire, dodging or fighting off ghosts and keeping an eye on the sanity bar. It's quite fun, dynamic, and refreshingly straightforward: light the fires, dodge, shoot. The audio is perfectly fine, with background music and decent sounds for shots and enemies. Overall, with more time and resources this could become a great game!!
Here is a quick breakdown of my thoughts:
• Gameplay & Design: The core mechanics feel solid and intuitive right from the start. The gameplay loop is engaging, and the controls feel responsive and fair.
• Visuals & Art Style: The visual direction fits the overall mood really well. Everything looks cohesive, and the presentation makes it very clean to follow what's happening on screen.
• Audio: The sound effects and audio design add a lot of punch to the experience and help build the atmosphere.
• Theme Interpretation: You did a fantastic job incorporating the jam's theme into the core loop in a creative and clever way!
Constructive Polish Idea: If you decide to update or expand this after the jam, adding a few extra feedback cues (like juice/particles or subtle screen shake) or expanding on a few mechanics could make it feel even more polished!
Overall, awesome job for a jam project! Left you a high score/rating. Keep up the great work! 🚀