Wizard Malikens spell failed by rohezal
You are on your way to the tower of a powerful wizard, your village needs protection from an orc army on the march. But when you arrive the castle is empty. Something went wrong. What do you do now? How to find out what happened? And how can you bring Maliken back to save your village? What will be the sacrifice?
This is a Gothic / Risen style game. Unlike Oblivion / Skyrim you don't have quest markers guiding you from A to B. You actualy have to read, listen and think to find the next place to go to. Where would you place a building with an important function? Near the center or far out? Would you prefer to carry buckets of water up hill or downhill? Would you raise smelly animals near the living rooms of people or far away?
Spoilers (base64 encoded): VGFsayB0byB0aGUgYW5pbWFscywgbW9zdCBvZiB0aGVtIGNhbiB0YWxrLiBCdXQgeW91IG5lZWQgdG8gZXF1aXAgaXRlbXMgdG8geW91ciBoYW5kIHNsb3QgdG8gdXNlIHRoZW0gKGV4Y2VwdCBmb3Iga2V5cyku
Additional hint / spoiler if you have trouble to solve the first riddle:
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First steps, where to go first, what to do first. If you are stuck read this(B64):
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I wanted to make this game a long time ago. Created some assets, thought about a bit of the story and a background informations. But never actualy build the game. Ludum Dare was the perfect chance to get it done. This game uses a lot of big assets. They are from the ue4 market place and self created. It is story and character driven and should have around 30 minutes play time. You have to combine items and solve riddles. And to be honest: I would have prefered the "magic, but at what cost theme", but this game has a few sacrifices in it, maybe even the most classical one. So have fun :)
Filesize: 1300 MB
| Windows | http://104.129.2.56/download/maliken_final_2.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/wizard-malikens-spell-failed |
Ratings
| Overall | 536th | 3.413⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 705th | 3.022⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 606th | 3.043⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 791th | 3.045⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 401th | 3.25⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 428th | 3.026⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 582th | 3.239⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 18🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
Screenshots look amazing. Will give it a go tomorrow.
Spoiler (base 64 encoded, https://www.base64decode.org/):
VGFsayB0byB0aGUgYW5pbWFscywgbW9zdCBvZiB0aGUgY2FuIHRhbGsuIEJ1dCB5b3UgbmVlZCB0
byBlcXVpcCBpdGVtcyB0byB5b3VyIGhhbmQgc2xvdCB0byB1c2UgdGhlbSAoZXhjZXB0IGZvciBr
ZXlzKS4=
Do poke me whenever the file is uploaded on a faster server and I'll gladly give it a shot ;)
I really like the world you've built here. The setting has a nice mood and the characters are a bit deeper than in the usual LD games. :) However, I noticed there was a bit of a discrepancy between the diaries of Ulla, Herbert and Albert.
Overall, a solid and enjoyable entry.
*invalid*
For your server being fast, I'm sure it is ^^, but depending on the location and distance, it can be really slow. I'm not downloading at more than 100KB/s on your server, would literally take me days ;)
P.S. You've probably already had enough with all the file size B.S. but even at 1.3Gb it still feels strangely large. Still took a good part of 15 minutes to install, which is still a bit unreasonable. I can imagine compression to be a pain, but it will invite extra reviews :wink:
First: You almost got it. Here is the hint you need to progress and finish the game.
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dGhlIGhvdXNlLg==
The combination was correct, you can only combine correct items. You got a hint that the bear doesn't like the meat. The idea was to give it to someone else. And the bear does not like the meat combination too ;).
Linear level design is boring IMHO. But you are right, you are a bit lost in this game. Maybe restricted access to areas would be better. There are some restrictions since you walk from house to house and get keyword after keyword. But the start area is too big and you have to much ground to cover. Should have made the start easier.
PS: If you know how I can decrease the filesize in UE4 please tell me. I read lots of tutorials and was able to decrease it by over 80%, but I am stuck at 1.3GB (from 6.7GB). There is a lot of audio, maybe I should convert it from wav to ogg.
Level design doesn't need to be a huge funnel saying "You do this then this", but can instead act as a general guide. With all of the different mechanics in your game, I think this is essential. As it stands, the player doesn't know if they need to combine items, find new items, discover new puzzles or simply explore. To some degree, that is O.K. but on the scale of your game, I just felt lost. Maybe simply limiting the scope of the available area initially. With your extra hint, I'll see how much further I get :wink:
P.S. To decrease file size, I would imagine it would be a case of deleting some assets. I would imagine that you used a large asset pack, and probably a lot of those assets are unused. Find the big unused culprits (Maybe big castle assets or whatever) and delete them.
EDIT: Even with your new tip, I quickly became lost (again). The fox seemed to give a key, but none of the doors were able to be opened. It seems a door on a balcony opened, but I'm lost as to how to get up. I spent quite a while looking (not willing to admit defeat), but here I am. I imagine it's got something to do with the rabbit and its love of carrots, but that isn't helping...
May I ask where you are from? Just curious.
Got further, to the point where an ice vortex was summoned, was warned not to go in but touched it anyway and was forced to restart. By that point I had had enough and quit. You probably shouldn't have put an insta-death so late into the game, as it felt very frustrating. Another thing, you do all of this naming stuff, telling me to 'go to Rufus's house, but I don't know which one is Rufus's! Also, I'm not here to 'beta-test'. I'm here to give feedback to be used for future games. The point isn't to improve this one but rather your upcoming ones. This was a particularly ambitious project, and in future projects, I'm just suggesting that you spend some more time on the level-design. In general if you are told 'not to do something', then you should expect the default reaction to be the player doing that thing. These are just some of the general design flaws that I warn about, that I believe you should consider. Good luck with your future development, just don't rush the level design. Remember that the player doesn't know as much about the game as you, and you can never assume any knowledge!
For future, I would advise against using hiding as a game mechanic. It's very tricky to balance scavenger hunt games, because as the maker, you know where everything is, but as a player who has never seen the game, it may be infinitely more difficult to find the item. We ran into this problem during another LD entry ourselves, where we had keys and locked doors. Lots of strange things came out in play-testing. For instance, if you have a level with two locked doors and two hidden keys, a player may find one key, and instead of assuming the existence of a second hidden key in the same area for the other door, the think that they have to make a choice between one of the two doors. Then they get to the end of that area, and they're totally confused where to go, so they restart, find the key again, and choose the other door. It takes a long time for them to realize that both doors need to be opened and that they just haven't found the second key.
A better approach is to place 'hidden' items in easy-to-find places that are out of reach, like a key that's hanging from a chain on a ledge somewhere high up. That allows the player to realize that the key exists and that it's an important item. In your game I'm still not sure if I was supposed to be looking for keys, or if I needed to turn the animals back into humans and then they'd open the doors to their houses themselves, or if I was supposed to find a clever way to break in through the roof, etc., because I never saw so much as a single key or witnessed an animal transforming back into a human. So I didn't know which approach I was even supposed to be taking to get into one of the houses.
If you want to try it again, you don't have to search any key in this game. And most items are in plain sight. You have to combine some of them. Added a big hint to the description. And will add more hints in game in the post LD version.