Contract Cleric by Vinay Rao
- I highly recommend reading the controls and ability text below before playing -
Overview
You are a hired healer who gets paid for replenishing your party's health. Keep Sir Whale and Fatstacks the Hunter alive by [Tab] targeting them and using your 4 abilities. You allies are wealthy casual adventurers and will pay you in gold for each point of health you restore! When you've amassed enough gold, you can [5] send 1000 gold donations back to your church to receive upgrades to your abilities. If you collect all the upgrades, you win!
Controls:
[A],[D] or [<-], [->] - Move left/right
[Tab] - Change healing target
Abilities:
[1] - Heal Other: After a 1.75 second cast time, heal your ally for 17% of your ally's maximum health. This ability has a cooldown of 3 seconds.
[2] - Charged Heal: Press and hold [2] to build up a powerful healing effect for up to 8 seconds. When released, heal your currently targeted ally for a percentage of their maximum health equal to the percentage of the time spent charging this ability. This ability has a cooldown of 10 seconds.
[3] - Regenerative Leash: After a 1 second cast time, apply a heal over time effect to your targeted ally. Heals 4% of the ally's maximum health per second for 10 seconds. This effect will end early if the recipient strays too far from the cleric. This ability has a cooldown of 20 seconds.
[4] - Turn Undead: After a 2 second cast time, destroys all skeletons attacking your party. Your allies rely on you to kill skeletons, because they are too frightened to fight back. This ability has a 35 second cooldown.
[5] - Donate to the Church: After a 5 second cast time, you use your divine powers to send a gold donation back to your church. Donate 1000 gold per cast to receive the posted ability upgrade in the top right corner of the screen from the church as a blessing. This ability has a cooldown of 20 seconds.
Global Cooldown: All abilities casts place a 2 second cooldown time all abilities.
Engine: Unity
Art: Piskel
Sound: sfxr
CHANGE LOG:
4/29/2019
BUG FIX: Corrected a game ending crash that occurred before reaching the victory screen.
4/30/2019
TYPO FIX: Corrected the title of the game as appears in game and the WebGL link. The title is "Contract Cleric", not "Contract Healer". (Unless you like the name "Contract Healer", in which case, a typo has been introduced.)
Ratings
| Given | 42🗳️ | 51🗨️ |
That's one of the features I regret not being integrated directly into the game. With the clock running short I was forced to settle for ability text descriptions outside of the game, which is never ideal.
The original plan was to use character banter to gradually introduce the abilities, but I was forced to scrap it for lack of time. The system was nearly ready, but I had no time to actually populate it with dialogue and timing it needed to fit the game.
While I'd prefer to have put in an organic means of learning what each ability does, I'm not sure that it's within the rules to go back and add in a "How to Play" button and page before the game to give a breakdown of the abilities and objective.
I'll see if I can't get a controls diagram to throw on this page with some ability descriptions. For now, I'll have to rely on the written ability breakdown on this page.
Thanks for the feedback!
But you need a tutorial in game XD
This was fun, reminds me of some old MMO's I used to play.
The idea is great! And the execution of mechanics is pretty. However, the game would really gain a lot from some sort of in-game visual feedback and clues, such as partcle effects when a character is healed.
I love your pixel art, this style reminds me of good old DOS games. :D
Oh yeah, totally agree with you on that. In the game files I had quite a few particles ready to go, but just no time to actually rig them up with the skills. I'd hoped to get some generic particles for when the cleric is casting, particles for when the skills complete, and in the case of the third ability, a visible leash between the cleric and the target so it was more obvious when the range was broken.
Thanks for the feedback!
Fair point on the audio. One thing I didn't get around to was normalizing the audio so that it isn't so much of an ear bleed. It's still a sight better than when, about halfway through development, I thought it would be a good idea to put in damage audio. Phew, that was a nightmare! :laughing:
I think most games that use audio for casting keep the audio low key because you're usually constantly using them. Since I didn't get a casting animation or effects going, I just generated a few sound effects to try to bridge the gap between pushing a button and seeing results. This was done probably a bit too hastily. The audio gets the point across, but a few of the sounds are too shrill. The charged heal has a nasty audio click at the end that I should probably cut out.
That this is one of your favorite submissions for this round makes me quite happy to hear. :v:
Thanks for the feedback!
I can't win cause I always sucked as a healer, but this is one of my favourite entries so far.
Good call on injecting humor into the game. There is a little code in there I used for testing to spawn enemies in a set sequence, which was meant to double as a means to have the characters banter with each other. I very much on purpose didn't give Sir Whale a shield, haha. I had a few ideas floating around like Fatstacks the Hunter leaving to get arrows every so often, however I didn't have time to balance the game around these things or write all the dialogue and script the encounters to allow for less activity for the player to read the text. Something to think about for the next version.I'd like to get closer to the original idea which had some story to it, stage transitions, flying enemies, things to dodge to avoid casting interruption, and a couple boss encounters. I got pretty ambitious, and toward the end of the time limit forced myself to scope down.
Oh, and the game is tough as nails exewin, haha. It is winnable though! Sometimes a bad encounter and split damage output can be nigh on impossible to recover from. In theory an encounter can scale to infinity enemies, which is something I'd like to put safeguards in against for a future version.
Thanks for the feedback and kind words!
Oh snap, you beat it? Shoot, guess I'll need to get working on the enhanced edition.
You know, your game made me wanna play warcraft again, just few days before important exam. :stuck_out_tongue:
Ah, what you ran into wasn't so much a bug, but a situation which isn't handled. There are scripted breakpoints to give the player time to clear the enemies on screen, though the total number of enemies that can spawn are based on uncapped dice rolls. Enemies will spawn until the enemy generator rolls a "break" encounter. The plan for the one skeleton + "clear all enemies" encounter is that using the character banter system that didn't make the final cut, the knight and hunter would refuse to pay the cleric if the last enemy on the board is a skeleton. I didn't have enough time to telegraph that this was happening, so I left it as it is. When I make the enhanced edition I'll be closing this loophole.
Good eye spotting that though! I was hoping that most folks wouldn't notice that exploitable spawning behavior.
Study hard! Good luck with that exam!
Its a shame that the spell tooltips weren't in-game, but once I learned the 5 abilities it was easy to remember what they do!
Good call on the character spacing. I'll see what I can do about improving visibility in the enhanced edition. A bit of feedback I got outside of the comment section to that end is that it would be nice to see some more visual feedback on who is currently being attacked and by how many enemies. If I play around with layering and perhaps put in a bit of a depth difference to the characters in the scene, I think I can better show the player how many enemies are currently attacking a character.
An in game tutorial and tooltips to show the current state of an ability are absolutely on the expanded feature list. I never leave enough time for that kind of thing in game jams! :laughing:
Thanks for the feedback!
@copper-aardvark-games
Hey, glad you liked it! I'm feeling energized to work on a bigger and better version of the game. I'm not sure if I should wait till after the voting period or start messing with it now and throw out updates in a separate link on this page.
Thanks for the kind words!
Thanks! I just saw the title of your jam game and I've got to admit, I can't not give it a try. You've got quite a hook in the title, haha. Will have a look as soon as I've got a free moment.
@c0d3d
You can't please everyone! No sweat. Plenty of people don't find healing enjoyable in MMORPGs, which is what this game is wholly modeled after. It makes sense that this game wouldn't appeal to everyone. There are a couple ways to exploit the enemy spawns that can make the game a bit stale too, as exewin discovered. If the player bypasses these tricks, the general intensity of the game is on average very high, though still prone to randomness. I'll be making sure to add some spice to the enhanced version to make the game flow much more lively.
All feedback is good feedback!
@tddawson
Glad you had fun with it! I had quite a lot of plans for moving the cleric around, but at least right now the cleric's movement only affects [3] Regenerative Leash. After the cast is finished, the effects lasts 10 seconds or until the affected target is out of range. It's possible for you or your ally to run out of range and break the heal over time effect. I'd have hoped to telegraph this more with some visual feedback (as with all the abilities). In the enhanced version, visual feedback is certainly going to be a thing.
I ran out of time well in advance of getting around to it, but the intention was to add some flying enemies that would drop bombs the cleric had to dodge. The bombs would interrupt casting and cause the cleric to become increasingly dizzy after subsequent hits. Thing is, the pressure of finishing something cohesive in the time limit made me cut the idea. In addition to all the assets and code to rig it up, I'd have to find a way to balance the game around being interrupted, which I felt hurt the overall balance in the game I'd already established.
Thanks for the kind words and feedback! I'll get that skill tutorial into the followup version!
I wish the instructions were built into the game, but I eventually remembered what everything was.
Nice work :D