Crystal Curse by IcyLava

Description
Collect all the crystals, but beware - each time you collect one, your enemies get stronger!.. so it gets worse for you... when you get more crystals... 'cause, you know... that's the theme... *cough*
Controls
- Move/Look - Arrow keys or WASD
- Jump - Space, Z or J
- Fullscreen - F
Tools used:
- Love2D - Framework
- Visual Studio Code - Code editing
- Gimp - "Graphics" (used it only for the tileset)
- FL Studio 12, LabChirp - Music and Sound
- Tiled - Level editing
NOTE - Mac/Linux
You will first need to download Love2D, then use it to launch the .love file.
Last LD my game didn't work on Mac and Linux, I think I avoided what might've been the problem, but be sure to tell me if it worked for you or not ;)
The .love file is actually just a .zip file. Rename it to anything.zip and you can access the source and assets.
Ratings
| Overall | 69th | 3.889⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 53th | 3.944⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 486th | 2.861⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 428th | 3.25⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 166th | 3.763⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 20th | 4.083⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 91th | 3.647⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
> I don't see the theme
Well, the idea is that the more crystals you collect, the tougher the enemies get. But now that I think about it... that's kind of how every level based game is... *damn it*... I mean, I did come up with the idea maybe 10 minutes after seeing the theme, heh :D
> The only thing that annoyed me was that you slide on the ground so much
What do you mean by that? You accelerate and decelerate pretty fast, is that the problem? Does the movement look like the gif I just uploaded? If not, maybe there's a bug...
Anyway, thanks :D
> the **first few levels** are very fun
I see what you did there... just joking, of course :D
But to be fair, I really should have spent more time polishing the levels. Thanks again!
One thing I would like is a "smarter" camera that looks where you need to go, because I was too busy jumping to look up or down.
But the small dust clouds when you land and the way your rectangle leans back while running: Subtle, but great.
> I also really dug the low-pass that comes up under the text cards – did you do that through programming or manually?
Manually, I have 2 versions of the track - one normal, one lowpassed. Love2D can't do that, but it will be able to do that and other effects (and custom processing iirc) in the next major version (0.11.0), so keep an eye out for that.
And thanks!
I think your usage of the theme felt like it was really just an excuse for your game to have a difficulty progression, which it should've had anyways. The text in between levels was good, but when you don't give the player any choice besides to collect the crystals it really just amounts to a difficulty progression.
The other complaint I have is with the player movement. Overall it was really good, but I had one complaint. Maybe it is just me being bad at platformers (I am), but I felt like the jump should've been made more powerful or you should've allowed the player to let go of the jump key after awhile. it felt like I had to hold it down forever to get maximum jump velocity and made me miss my jumps pretty often.
The audio was well done, the dying effects were a great touch and the music fit perfectly. Did you speed up the music at all as the game progresses? If so great touch, if not, do it next time!
Anyways, good game! Great LD entry.
> I think your usage of the theme felt like it was really just an excuse for your game to have a difficulty progression, which it should’ve had anyways. The text in between levels was good, but when you don’t give the player any choice besides to collect the crystals it really just amounts to a difficulty progression.
I just didn't want for the theme to interfere with the fun of the game. This specific theme makes that kinda hard to do. I saw some other entries limit you the more you have of something and that just doesn't seem like fun to me. But yeah, you're right, it sounded better in my head during the jam than it does now.
I guess the idea is that these are the same type of enemies, just stronger, whereas in some other games you would see stronger _versions_ of those enemies that are distinct (and sometimes you see stronger and weaker versions on the same level). Eh, I give up :P
> The other complaint I have is with the player movement. Overall it was really good, but I had one complaint. Maybe it is just me being bad at platformers (I am), but I felt like the jump should’ve been made more powerful or you should’ve allowed the player to let go of the jump key after awhile. it felt like I had to hold it down forever to get maximum jump velocity and made me miss my jumps pretty often.
Yeah, I always seem to have trouble with implementing variable jump height. You have to hold down the jump key until the peak of your jump to reach max height.
> Did you speed up the music at all as the game progresses? If so great touch, if not, do it next time!
No, I didn't. Maybe not a bad idea, but the framework I'm using would only allow to change the speed with the pitch, and the quality would probably suffer. I could maybe do different versions of the track... but I already have 2 versions that make up most of the game's size, and I would need 2 versions of each speed version and...
Yeah, I'm not sure about that... but I'm actually slowly working on a post compo version, I don't know if I'll have the motivation to finish it at any reasonable time (or ever), but if I do, I'll see if I can do something like that.
Thank you so much for this feedback, I really appreciate it!
One response:
> I’m using would only allow to change the speed with the pitch
This is pretty common, I think if you ramp it up slowly and very slightly people wouldn't even notice unless they restarted the entire game. People typically don't have perfect pitch and gradual changes aren't really detectable.
One super minor thing that caused me to lose a lot to an early level was the amount of jump you get when bouncing on the small enemies felt too small. I kept thinking I could use it to bounce to the next platform, and then just.. fell instead. Might've made it feel more fluid to jump across on the enemies.