The Last Wisp by Mordokay
This is a game about survival. You play as a Wisp, an ancient creature made entirely out of light. Your objective is simple ... stay alive as long as you can until your power runs out. Try it out and see how long will your light last!
Basic Rules:
Use W A S D keys to move around.
Your life bar is the light around you. When you move, shoot (left mouse button), swing(right mouse button), or use an item ( keys #1 and #2) you lose your light(life). You can hold the right mouse button to keep swinging.
Your main source of power is harvested through glowing rocks scattered around the map. To harvest their energy simply get close to them. If you do not consume the full energy from a glowing rock , they will regenerate and go back to normal. It is also important to note that glowing rocks when fully charged can sometimes spread to other rocks around them.
Another good source of energy is the ones gathered from light particles. Light Particles are droped by every enemy when when they are killed. Those light particles can be harvested by the player if he comes near them but they also dissipate over time so be quick!
There are 2 craftable items:
-> Beacon : Atracts shadows / enemies
-> Barrier: They are obstacles that prevent enemies from atacking the player by blocking their path (ranged enemies cant shoot through barriers. Even though barriers prevent enemies from atacking ... they allow the player to shoot through.
Both items have a time limit and are upgradable. You gain XP (experience points) when you kill shadows and once you reach a certain ammount of XP you gain a new level and the item's button will change to green. At that time you have to chose what item you want to upgrade (both are upgradable 3 times).
Upgrades:
->Beacon Level 1 -> Duration == 5 Seconds
->Beacon Level 2 -> Duration == 7 Seconds
->Beacon Level 3 -> Duration == 10 Seconds
->Barrier Level 1 -> Duration == 5 Seconds
->Barrier Level 2 -> Duration == 7 Seconds
->Barrier Level 3 -> Duration == 10 Seconds
Tools:
->> Unity,
->> Audacity,
->> Blender,
->> paint.NET
->> Inkscape
Screenshoots:
Ratings
| Overall | 463th | 3.302⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 412th | 3.163⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 326th | 3.209⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 418th | 3.488⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 348th | 3.721⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 244th | 3.419⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 436th | 3.19⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
Likes:
- beautiful music & okay sound fx (what did you use to make them, just audacity? any plugins?)
- effective lighting
- clean low poly art style
- "seed your own adventure" generated levels.
- pretty swirly particles, oh my!
- supports glorious 3440x1440 @ 100Hz with "Fantastic" quality, even though it suggested minimum details on first launch. :)
Try differently:
- have you considered some hit feedback and general "juice" (see video below)?
- brutally hard, I never survived over a minute. Took me a while that maybe Seed 122 was a bit hard. :)
- the sticky item controls really threw me into a loop a few times. many other games just have tap-key-then-place before resuming normal operation
Overall:
- very nice entry
- the seed mechanic actually adds replay value! I'm going in one more time... damn, it's hard.
The talk about game feel:+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
That aside, graphics look nice - low poly rocks and particles, enemies could be less sphere-like.
You should generate seed randomly, asking that from player every time is a bad idea,
keep this as option.
Fog of war looks really creepy when you've run out of light, but yeah, i don't see a straightforward solution for this.
Really cool game, the items were took too long to use for their benefits and I was too concentrated on my own moves to learn how to use them. Something you could do for that is not have them both at the starts which forces you fight without them at first to learn the basics, then you xp allows you to play with one then the other, instead of having to learn everything at ones. I really felt the theme here, great job !
I was very flustered the first time it started to turn dark and then about the 2nd try started realising that the light level is tied to my health / power - having just the one resource was quite an interesting choice.
I found it quite easy to survive for 3 minutes or more - mostly by running away - didn't use the items much, they were a bit too clunky to activate while running away and the short durations made them not feel worth the effort... Likewise with the light particles from killed enemies - it wasn't worth running into the mobs of ranged enemies to fetch the particles, nor was it clear if killing and harvesting was a net gain of energy.
The biggest issue I have is that the game is all tension all the time... some form of pacing would've been nice, like escalating waves with breaks in between or perhaps some higher level objectives like kill all the monsters; kill all the monster generators; or have a certain amount of rocks turn glowy.
Really promising entry though - lots more you could do with this one...
The gameplay does feel a bit strange to me. I start out and wander for a few seconds to get my bearings. Then before I know it I find myself getting swarmed. I did manage to survive about 90 seconds once.
I found item usage a bit awkward... it seemed fairly complex to use them (first press the key, then find a good spot, and click again, then press the key again to disable placement mode). I'd think in a fast-paced game like this, item use should be a bit simpler. Maybe you press the key, and it places a single item at your position?
I find myself agreeing with @thygrrr who made an excellent post above.
Thank you for sharing this. I would be interested to see how it is developed further, if that is your intention. Good luck! :-)
I look forward if there is a development after jam ! o/
(for my game just in case : "BEST VERSION" is crappy one made at start of the jam)
So there are some game aspects that could be further developed. The particle system was great, you fit the theme, music and sounds were fitting. And I didn't find any game breaking bugs other then being able to right click enemies on the other side of rocks. In the end, a solid effort for a 2man team.
cool game nice job.
The feeling is really good and it fit very well the theme. Goob job :)
Here is my playtest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKVaJYezGyg
*1234 seed is the best!*