Good game.

Thanks, mysterious anonymous!

cool idea. loved the look of the grim reaper! :-) the alter + the features gained through upgrades were nice as well. music could have been a bit darker.

Really enjoyed the graphics, gameplay felt a little bit awkward by not knowing whether you'd hit the enemies or not. Definitely fun though!

Very enjoyable to play. Not sure if the music fits well or not :p

Yeah, the music was last addition, couldn't make anything better, so settled at this

It felt good to take out an enemy and collect a lot of souls in one go. Though I do agree that some indicator that hits were connecting could help some of the ambiguity in combat. I was also sometimes confused by what the thrown scythe was doing if I moved around a lot before it returned.

Thanks for your feedback. I will probably work on the game more after Ludum Dare ends, so any sort of criticism would help

Took me some time to get the hang of it - there's little visual indicator and feedback as to whether attacks are dealing damage / doing things, and whether I'm getting hit, so made me feel like the my scythe was useless at the start. But after I got the attack patterns down and realised I could kill things, the game drew me in.

Fun and satisfying to take down those flying enemies wrecking me a moment ago. Literally a Souls-like experience.

@chin-jieh yeah, a lot of peope tell me about bad feedback on attacks, I added knocback to make it more obvious but apparently it's not enough. Definetly something I will fix after Ludum Dare ends

Nice game i love the idea of enemies camouflaging in souls:D But how to kill this huuuuge red ball:D?

@gassasin the same way you kill all other enemies, just hit it bunch of times. I recommend buying either speed or jump to make it easier although it is possible to jump over it without any upgrades

I get the point of your game but I think you could improve some things.

*Balance the ammount of souls in the game. It gets a little stressing trying to move around with so many evil souls.

*Move the screen to show more room. You could adjust the camera view a little up so the player won't be exatcly in the center of the screen, but a little bit down. That could give more space for the player to see.

Nice game and continue creating!

Nice game! I thought it was a nice concept and well executed.

The store could be more tidy IMO: it's easy to understand for which upgrade each description is for, and it's also easy to understand where should you click to buy them, but you have to think about 5 seconds until you understand, and for this kind of game it should be kind of automatic.

As for the attacks, if you add some hit confirmation SFX it will help the player understand if they hit the enemy or not. But idk, I still was perfectly able to tell if I hit an enemy or not. Congratulations!

The idea are good, and the music is really good. It super difficult to see if you hit a enemy. But overall a fun little LD game.

I like the game in general. It could use a better upgrade menu because it was confusing

Good job with the game. I enjoyed the concept and it was fun to play. It could be improved through better feedback to the player when they hit enemies since it can be difficult at times to tell, and some sort of indicator of where the boundary of the map is. I would love to see this game continued because there is a lot of potential to still be tapped into with this game. Nice work.

The mechanics feel pretty solid. It might be funner with the early enemies rebalanced to be one hit kills, then you can have them more frequently and feel like powerful grim reaper early on. Nice job overall though, you got a lot of mechanics working!

Nice game. Would appreciate some feedback when you hit an enemy besides the small bumping I sometimes could see. I thought they were a bit annoying to hit so I ended up jumping over most of them instead of fighting. Overall think it could be more fun and like the suggestion of basic enemies being one hit kills.
Graphics were good enough.
Good work.

Neat concept. It's fun picking up all the souls and the upgrade system is really cool. I like all the interesting descriptions for the upgrades. There doesn't seem to be much purpose to the jump or it's upgrades, though. Maybe the game could have more verticality? There also needs to be more feedback when hitting enemies. Regardless, the graphics and music are both effective.

@veralos basically, the only use of jump upgrades is to make it easier to jump over red ball enemies. I planned on adding more verticality but had no time to do it

Nice game!

I would have appreciated something other than an invisible wall to limit the area of playing though ^^ Other than that, I think your game is fine. As others said, a bit more feedback when you hit an enemy would be a plus too.
Overall, it is nice and fun, so congrats!

Unfortunately, I was unable to play due to the .rar file format. It would be nice if you also included a .zip option.

@turbulentwinds, done! I hope you'll have a good time playing my game!

@lamossus Thank you!

I'd like it, but the attack could be more effective/fast, creating a fast paced kind of experience.

Hey there! A nice game you have here, what I suggest you to do is to first of all, take some screenshots of the game and add them to your game page here on LDJam and on itch.io, here u can just do it clicking the upload button below the text box, on ithc I'm not sure, but it should be easy too.

Now onto the game itself: It's simple, works rather well, in terms of movement I would suggest lowering the jump height, as it's too fast too high that it's really(like really) hard to jump and attack at the same time the target. In terms of feedback I really suggest you to add more feedback to the attacks as I don't understand when I'm attacking an enemy, how many times I need to attack him, or what he's going to do. I felt like it sometimes just wouldn't get killed but rather take my health anyway. Upgrade system is alright, works like intended. Only question I have is the theme, I really didn't get the "more is worse" feeling when playing, but I could have missed something obvious. Graphics wise it's alright, monsters look nice, just as the character. The ui could be done a bit better though.

I enjoyed the couple of minutes I played the game for, and I understand the hard work needed to create something like this!. :smiley: Our team also worked hard to create a game for the jam. You can check it out [here](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/jazzy-beats)! :whale:

@robinhoodpt, oh wow so much feedback, thank you! A lot of people said about attack feedback and it's fitst on my to-do list for post-jam version, tweaking values like speed, attack, jump height etc is right next to it. About the theme, depending on amount of souls you have, the more enemy types you'll encounter and the more often they will spawn, I guess it's not that apparent because there are only 3 types of enemies at the moment. Do you have any specific suggestions for ui?

Going to check out your game now!

You should add some pictures here and in the itch.io web, i think some people won't even try the game if it doesn't have pictures.

Now, about the game. The game's idea fits the theme pretty well. The gameplay is simple but it got me hooked for a while because of the upgrades. Also i was not expecting the big, red enemy ball lol. However:

The jump is waaay too strong, you really should tune it down! Which basically make the jump upgrades a bad pick, there's no reason right now to pick them. The music also felt a bit off - not really matching the game feel or style. The combat needs some feedback, it's hard to know sometimes if you are hiting an enemy or not. Some kind of visual or sound cue.

Nice game. At first I didn't know wat's going on. But whith time all cleared. Good luck

Nice game, I like the design of the enemies. Just found the game to be a bit hard, maybe make the attacks stronger or the enemies weaker. I found myself running and jumping through all the enemies :p
Keep the good work!

Collecting souls makes the game harder? Doesn't look too hard to m-


Then I found one rolling in the opposite direction and I died :I

Gotta say, while simple in presentation, the mechanics and upgrading does feel just right. The music got a bit repetitive, and yet, I loved the juxtaposition of collecting souls to the tune of a very cheerful melody. The game loop is satisfying, and the many types of upgrades do allow for a lot of opportunities on how to advance on the game.

People have probably already told you about areas of opportunities. Add more reliable feedback for the player. Enemies would hit me and cause me damage without me noticing (since sometimes, there'd be no sound at all for it). And in the downloadable version, add a Quit button if possible. In this page, do add some Screenshots to make the game more appealing to people who just like randomly browsing.

All in all, great submission. It was very entertaining, and I'll probably replay it later to try a different approach for upgrades. [In behalf of my team](twitter.com/whalesandgames), congratulations on your latest Jam entry! Kudos! :whale:

A few remarks about this, it would be good if you added a sound when you hit enemies different then when you swing and miss. Half the time I wasn't sure if I were hitting or not. Also you should add some graphics in the level limits to indicate this, like a wall or something, walking into a invisible wall wasn't what I expected. Last, I am not sure the music fits the mood you were going for, Grim Reaper isn't so grim with that upbeat music.

Congrats on finishing your game for the jam! I liked that you were able to add a purchase system, did the points you spent there also counted for the final points?

@jlreymendez, yes, every soul you bring to the altar counts, even if you spent it on upgrades

I haven't really played my game after uploading it and now I finally decided to playtest it more... Wow, it's hard! It's waaay harder than I thought it was. But at least I got new highscore (627)

Also, I'm going to fix few bugs, so there's probably going to be new version tomorrow/day after tomorrow.

Also, also, I would really appriciate if you could tell me in the comments what your general strategy was and how much points did you get, because right now, judging by my own experience, buying base attack damage as much as possible with some health upgrades for safety seems to be the best strategy

Cool game, however I would add some more visible representation of hitting the enemy (maybe red color, blood or particles?).
Moreover I would also make map boundaries as something that you can see, like mountain or something.

And is there any possibility to quit game? I couldn't find any button that would do this, so I used Alt+F4.

And lastly, I think that this game fits the theme very nicely :wink:

Would be awesome if this was available for other platforms as well. Especially a web version would be great!

@finntastico now the game works in web! I haven't got time to playtest, so there might be some bugs, but I will do it later today.

Nice job. The art and music is so fresh that I like them. The actions are smooth. My best score is 280+. No idea how you get 600+. The mechanic seems good but I think it's more score-driven. I mean if you don't tell me you got 600+, I would not spend time researching how to get that high. When I know a 600+ is feasible I start to think about how to go there. My be this score-driven thing could be enhanced so that it could be more addictive.

@yishalee here are some tips for getting a high score (I'm sure there is a better strategy but that's how I got my highscore):

1) Obviously, don't die. If you die, you lose all collected souls, so it's easier to just start again.

2) Only souls you bring to altar count towards the score, so make sure you get to the altar before time runs out or you will just lose those points (I might change it in the future).

3) Buy at least one health upgrade and one jump upgrade for safety, it isn't necessary but it will be much harder to not die while collecting large amounts of souls without them. You can also buy regeneration ability later on if you want to play it even safer.

4) Buy main attack upgrades, this way you'll be able to get souls faster.

And this is pretty much it. If you will think of a better strategy I would love to hear it!

Hi Mikhail! I finally managed to play our game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoYb4Qywy04