Keep your sanity by Lorthal
Description
Keep Your Sanity is a 2D horror-shooter where you need to look out for you flashlight battery level and... your sanity. Nothing is real, everything is merely a projection of your mind. But it doesn’t feel like something made up. Guilt is taking over you, bringing hallucinations. Will they be too real to bear?
Your sanity is what keeps you alive. If you experience too many disturbing things – you die. You lose your sanity constantly, more if your torch light is dim. Every weird sound, every haunt that touches you, or personification of your guilt may lower your sanity. And the less sanity, the more strange things happen… Restore your sanity by standing next to candles. You need it.
Be on the lookout of chests. They contain weapons, and batteries for your torch essential to lighten up endless darkness. If it runs out of power – you last resort are matches.
Use weapons you find, swap weapon with 1,2 and 3 keys. If you can’t find one then well… you always got a hammer.
Gather keys to open doors, and maybe you can keep your sanity to the end.
Features
- carefully crafted pixel-art graphics
- scrupulous use of light to create horror atmosphere
- scripted jump-scares and events
- music that changes with your sanity
- unique torch – sanity dependency
Controls
- Movement - WSAD
- Aim and shoot - Mouse
Weapon Swap
- 1 - pistol (if collected)
- 2 - shootgun (if collected)
- 3 - hammer
Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbZca8u7aNk
Screenshots
*not sure if macOS and linux builds works, let us know about that
We are sorry for not putting everything on UI, but we ran out of time. Please read description for clarification.
Ratings
| Overall | 373th | 3.436⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 438th | 3.127⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 576th | 2.8⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 579th | 3.255⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 505th | 3.309⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 273th | 3.333⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 156th | 3.722⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 80🗳️ | 81🗨️ |
So, leave me alone, I need to finish the game :D
Keep up the good work!
Like:
- proper menu, very amazing font
- great lighting
- fluid movement
- interactive environment
- enemies spawn everywhere.... arrrrgh
Try differently:
- player moves and stops with no inertia. this makes the game play a little jaggy.
- it's hard to tell if I'm really breaking something with the hammer
- consider adding more juice (see video at the bottom)
- enemies are really tough
- am I dead?
Overall:
- elaborate horror game
- dark and scary ambiente
- very moody
Here's a video tip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkgkIXZ_13Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmznA58Eel0
Thanks for being part of the stream :)
The sounds also fitted the game, enemies can only spawn in the dark by what I realized (which is cool!), and the "game over" scene was well made! (but you can still fire at them and the moving animation keeps playing. You can't kill them, but it would be nice to not be able to shoot them either)
Also the ending fading white is wrongly positioned. The far right corner of it is at the middle of the screen, so only a quarter is turned white. And you can keep the red key after you die. Probably the other ones too, but I didn't check...
Overall, this is an awsome game! I just have bugs to report. In gameplay I found nothing wrong, and that is very hard to achive! Good job! :smile:
I like the of a lovecraftian style sanity mechanic for this theme!
Keep up the good work!
Shooting and hammering felt a bit slow to me, but overall controls felt really nice to play! Level design is really great, but what if you could make it roguelike? The experience could also become totally random, and you could even jumpscare a bit! :D
Overall, I did like the work you've done here and it's great! The lighting also looked really great for me here!
Congrats! Cheers! ;)
Neat game. I like the concept of losing your sanity, it really does add to the "horror" side of the game. I was pretty spooked in my dark bedroom.
I know there's little point to suggesting changes, I can't know if you'll keep working on it, but what the hell ! The idea behind the game is cool, and the execution of that idea could be vastly improved upon !
- Randomly generate the layout for extra replayability.
- Add some random events like jumpscares to knock the player off-balance.
- Balance the combat a bit more or lower the spawn rate so that you don't get overwhelmed early on.
- Add a reward for killing enemies, like extra sanity : right now the best seems to be to avoid them and run for the next door.
There you go mate. Great work indeed !
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Keep Your Sanity](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=2h3m22s)
It was not always very clear what was going on in this game. Obviously the darkness should hide a lot of the enemies, and that's alright. But I didn't realise the meter above my head was my sanity. I suppose the flashlight losing charge was a scripted event? Reading the description now I can see you explain some of these mechanics, but it would be nice in the game as well. A UI for displaying all the weapons I am carrying along with their number on the keyboard would have been nice. A lot more variety in the enemies – as far as I can tell, there were only two types, and the second was a very short appearance. Little problems like this made the intended horror atmosphere less visible. Making the enemies much more rare and individually stronger, adding shadows cast from objects, adding line of sight, hiding areas of the map which aren't visible (i.e. behind the walls), varying the map a little bit (different floor types, more house-like / dungeon-like layout), having to conserve ammo – all of these could potentially make the atmosphere better. And a proper ending of course :) Having said all of that, I still enjoyed beating the game. Good job :)
I like visual style of your game. I love relatively simple and uniform graphics! Your work with the light/darkness is really nice and it forces the player to constantly rotate around and look for threats.
When making horror it is the work with the sound that makes the most impact at the end. I would recommend spending big part of your time on sound design. The audio in your game unfortunately felt quite repetitive after a while and as a result it didn't have the effect that it could have had. Just imagine something like this:
1. You enter the dark room and the music slowly fades away until there is complete silence. You can hear only your own footsteps.
2. There is only one doors on the other side of the room so you go there.
3. When you try to open them the doors explode and some huge ghost attacks you screaming and destroying everything in its path.
I know it is a lot of work to implement similar behaviour into the game, but I think it is completely worth it!
If you want to create horror games, try to think about them same as you would think about a horror movie.
Check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuvJuLs6eBA&t , it could help you design powerfull jumpscares and at the end create really scary games!
I hope I'll see more scary stuff from you soon! Thanks for sharing the game with us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuyTJ8KSXPM (15:00)
# Eval
## Gameplay
* Funny fast game, need to make decission quick :D.
## Music/audio
* Nice scary music :D
## Graphics
* Not bad, light was sometimes glitchy
## Summary
Cool game i liked it :)
check out my all time fav horror game Splatter House 2 the sounds have white noise to create distortion as well as some reverb/delay to help make the sounds interesting even if they only allocate 1 or 2 sounds per enemy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGnMtGEOti4