XORN: The Fallen God by ThibaultAr
XORN is a 3D isometric fighting game in which you have to kill ennemies before they kill you.
The only constraint ? The map is falling into pieces because of a huge storm. Collect coins to repair the floor before you run out of space.
This game was developped in less than 3 days by a passionated team of four persons: - Thibault Arloing as Lead Gameplay Programmer, Integrator and Sound Designer - Yann Dubois as Lead AI Programmer, Gameplay Programmer and Integrator - Thibaud Colin as Lead Game Artist and Lead Animator - Alexandre Harbuzinski as Lead Game Designer, UI Designer/Animator and VFX Artist
All FX sound were made by our voices or objects found in our environnment. Soundtrack from Evan King - Enchiridion album (royalty free)
Fullscreen is recommended for better game experience ;)
Controls: - Supports either QWERTY and AZERTY keyboard - Use Q and E (QWERTY) or A and E to (AZERTY) to choose a card from a crystal
Those red spheres are your life points :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12cMKGWWdwI

Ratings
| Overall | 106th | 3.926⭐ | 191🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 192th | 3.684⭐ | 189🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 573th | 3.19⭐ | 191🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 236th | 3.921⭐ | 192🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 89th | 4.339⭐ | 192🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 196th | 3.611⭐ | 186🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 675th | 2.438⭐ | 148🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 107th | 3.839⭐ | 182🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 283🗳️ | 170🗨️ |
Other than that it's a pretty cool game with nice aesthetics !
For the bonuses, it's a really good note, thanks, we will try to do this in the future :)
But anyways it was a great experience. Very well executed concept and well made game. Excellent work!
If you are going to keep working on this game I would add more level layouts, attack types and monsters.
I'll try your game (or one of my team ahah) promise ;)
But the music was really low compared to other SFX. And i think i would like other enemy pattern.
Solid entry !
Feel free to check our game ;)
(Thanks for the azerty mode and the macOS version)
Animations and graphics are very cool and art-style is coherent and smooth!
I especially liked the epic music who match the game mood perfectly, so yeah, congrats!
Maybe the sounds are not that great, especially when the character attack, but hey, it's just a detail and for a Jam, it's pretty good!
Congrats
It's just THAT amazing!
Great art and effects, but the enemy looks a bit under polished?
Such a cool soundtrack! The SFX could use some improvements though..
Thanks for the mac version :)
Minor thing: I think the hitbox on your attacks are not very clear, or not big enough, or not wide enough. Often it really looks like you'd hit but you just don't. It gets quite frustrating. I don't actually like the mouse aiming like this - I would prefer either a second stick type of control where it's not about where you aim the cursor but about the direction of the movement, or just remove the aiming altogether and let the attack happen where you're facing. That would mean the directional movement need to be more responsive, but that's actually a good thing.
Good stuff, congrats :)
I like the polish on the UI and the upgrades you get as the round progresses. There is choice so you have a measure of control on your survival.
Try our game too, maybe you'll like it)
I like the graphics
I've played several times and once I've being pushed of the cliff without dying (on the north-western edge), so that enemies was spawning but can't get me. It seems like it could be a bug. I've played Linux version
I did run into a little bug (or at least I assume so), where one of the players movement vectors gets stuck and it kept me moving to the right despite not having 'A' held down. Other than - ran pretty smooth in WebGL and was super fun to play. Great job, you all!
Thank god you didn't do a movement based on the grid, there is another game that did this, it wasn't as much fun as this one.
My only regret after playing it, it's not nervous enough and there is too much upgrades (in quantity).
Great graphism (very dramatic intro) for a great entry !
Character movement felt to me like it could be faster or include some sort of dash option. It took me a couple of plays to nail the aiming of my attacks. Rotating my character was a little slow with a regular mouse, even worse with my mousepad. Maybe an option to auto-target enemies would be cool. Great work, happy LD42!
Pros :
- Beautiful graphics and effects
- Awesome background music
- AZERTY support, and controls in general are crystal-clear
- Nice implementation of the theme
- Addictive thanks to the card system
Cons :
- Lack of audio feedback when hitting an enemy
- Waves are a little long
- After a while, ennemies spend most of their time falling in the holes
All in all, great game, definitely a favourite.
- It’s easy to play
- Good animation
- Good idea
- Great concept
Very good work
- Presentation/dramatic atmosphere is great!
- Got jumpscared by lightning (lol)
- Enemies remind him of Monsters Inc. multiple-eye guy
- Presentation-wise game is great, but he misses audio feedback (bit more punch)
- Timing when you'll attack is interesting! because you move forward when you do, the stage becomes important :D
- Adding cubes again is a clever addition!
The combat feels a little hard to control (with the moving forward). Its neat that you could get enemies to drop down as well.
The visuals are just stunning. Very beautiful particle effects.
I also enjoyed the background music.
However, the AI for the enemies definitely could be better. It was very frequent to see an enemy falling through the hole.
When I first played the game I got a bit confused by the controls. I thought that the arrow designates the direction in which the **W key** (or Z) will move the character. Only after some time I realised that they are not related to each other :sweat_smile:
Great job.
Concerning the AI, it is intentional. One enemy is dumb and has a chance to fall and the other is intelligent and follow you without falling! We could surely improve this in the future version of the game :)
I really love the main character as well as the enemies and how fluid the animations are. The gameplay is addicting and well balanced. Looks like the final product! Good job!
At times It took me a while to register which way the player was facing. I think it may be due to the fact that the player is all one color. My cursor also faded into the background also. I think I relied on the cursor to point to the enemy so that I can land a hit.
We plan to improve the player by putting white eyes on his face 🙂
"(ノ・∀・)ノ -( BTW )
We also have an HTML5 entry if you want to play it and rate it."
You took time to polish it, it's very beautiful !!
Visuals are very clean, and it's great that you added visual cues for everything that goes on (enemy spawning, crystal spawning, block falling, etc). Gameplay feels nice, and I like the mechanics you've got going on. Audio is also good, it fits! :)
Special commendation for the UI, it really feels professional (are you guys actually professional? :P), and the fact that you can choose between those two keyboard layouts.
I didn't know what to do with the cyrstals at first, I thought I had to hit them and then I could buy upgrades.
On the other hand, the attack animation took a while to get used to. For some reason it seems the visual of it does not completely align with the actual hitbox.
Regarding balancing, I often found myself with not enough money to upgrade the weapon or repair blocks, even though I was killing all the enemies I could (they fall down quite often as well, so you don't get their coins).
There is actually no way for the player to sustain themselves, at some point you just die but you didn't have a chance to play it correctly. Increasing the coin reward / spawning more enemies could alleviate the issue.
You get a high rate from me! Great job! :)
@adultlink Thanls too, we are not professional in game development, 2 of us are student in game design (Alexande) and the other is student in graphics (Thibaud). Thibault is a developer AR but he will be game designer student in september (maybe :)). And me (Yann), I'm a developer engeneer in a compagny that make hologram projector.
@radical-dog support for gamepads will be added in the future as we plan to continue this game, thanks for the suggestion ;)
@martintristan Thanks for the feedback, We will see how to deal with the attack in the future :)
### Pluses
+ Nice music
+ Nice graphics. The thunder effect is awesome one
+ Good concept
### Minuses
- Needs a higher difficulty monsters or new ones
- Difficult to understand how many HP enemies have
- Unbalanced cost of cubes
### Found bugs
- The shop dissapears when I try to buy an item with higher cost than your current gold amount
- You can buy lifes over the limit
- The monsters has no reaction at your attacks. So if I try to attack the monster with 3 HP with 1 damage sword, I take 1 damage guaranteed
- The diagonal movement is even faster than vertical and horizontal movement
In response:
- For monster difficulty, I agree with you, we will imagine more of those in a near future (+ mini-boss :) )
- enemies HP, we didn't notice, thanks for the feedback, we will see how to make it more obvious
- Ok for the cost of cubes, we will see how we can balance that :)
bugs:
- for the shop, it's intentional, the only thing missing is a visual/sound feedback to let you know that you can't afford this (lack of time ahah)
- For lifes, the limit is 5 ;)
- Good point for enemies reaction to attack. We will fix it thanks :)
- Thanks for the feedback on diagonal movement, I'll see how to fix it
Thanks a lot for the feedback :)
I find the aiming exceedingly difficult to control. I think there are several reasons for this:
1. There is no in game indication of where the cursor is (I did notice the arrow at the character's feet, but that's not what I mean). The standard pointer cursor blends in with the black and white graphics of the game and I often found myself swinging in the wrong direction.
2. The character's attack animation locks you in a direction. You need to wait until the end of the animation to rotate. I see why the devs did this, logically, but it may be a good idea to experiment with allowing the player to move and rotate the root bone irrespective of animation status.
3. Sometimes enemies spawn on the protagonist's head and they seem to want to stay there. The camera angle makes this difficult to notice, so the player finds himself swinging the sword pointlessly several times before he realises the situation.
4. The most deaths I experience were not from falling to my death, but rather being hit by enemies, because I wasn't swinging my sword their way, but rather the opposite way.
Conclusion about controls issues:
It seems to me that this game would benefit from a completely different approach to controls. At the moment it's setup as a twin stick shooter, however, in the game one never shoots anything. Perhaps a more Diablo-esque approach to the combat may have been more empowering for the player. Another option could have been an auto-targeting system based on proximity? Take these suggestions with a pinch of salt, of course, as they would entail redesign of the spawning system and who knows what else. The bottom line is I didn't enjoy the controls as a user, and that puts me off of the game forever, and you don't want that as a dev, and I don't want that as I player. :)
I also have a bit of feedback about the audio. The music seemed quite dramatic, enticing, and overall fitting of the setting, however, during gameplay it was really quiet for me. Perhaps its overall volume is set too low in the mix? I'm no expert, but the music felt faint while playing, and the lack of other in game SFX was much more evident because of this for me.
I really liked the purchasing system for repairs. There are a few problems, like less than clear UX for when you don't have enough money and seemingly pointless upgrades, like ATK+, but the repairing of blocks made me feel in control of the space running out situation.
Good work guys.
We hope that the gaming experience that we proposed at the end of these 3 days of development gave you a lot of fun any way!
-The XORN team
One thing i noticed, first time you play, its not clear you have to chose the bonus pressing a key since the panel has the same sprite as the controls button you have to CLICK before the game start. But it is no big deal at all
@tontonpizza @annie-owl More enemies are planned but not yet implemented in the game (maybe in a post-post-jam version ahah), we plan to integrate mini boss too. If you want more informations about future improvements, you can read our post-mortem [here](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/xorn-the-fallen-god/late-post-mortem-xorn-the-fallen-god-1) ;)
Otherwise I like the animation and the special effects. Super fun survival game.
In general, the game is *very* polished. The 3D art and animations are outstanding, I love the visual effects. I just wish it wasn't so grey... so very, very grey.
Excellent music, but very serious-sounding compared to the more cute-looking graphics. Where you could have made a big improvement (also to fix my issues with the UI) is in the sound effects; they feel like they're missing, except for the sword swipe and two damage/impact sounds? Off the top of my head, it's missing:
* Footsteps
* Successful purchase
* Failed purchase
* Blocks dropping
* Blocks getting replaced
* Damage feedback
* Kill feedback
* Monster spawning
* Crystal spawning
* Coin pickup
* New wave announcement
* Game over
When the game is this polished, the lack of sound effects stands out more I suppose. Nonetheless, it's an excellent entry.
The pace of the game works perfectly, I liked buying cubes a feeling saver for a while while avoiding enemy attacks. You can "jump" over holes without much problem, which make the space part a little less important.
Congratulations, with some polish this game could turn into a truly fun game.
@flaterectomy Thank you for your very detailed feedback. for upgrades, yes I think you didn't have enough (sorry we didn't had the time to integrate feedback about this :/)
Concerning the grey theme, it's an intentional art choice as we are in a strom and so the weither is grey :)
Thank you very much for the list of missing sound effects, it will help us a lot for the post-jam version !!
@le-slo Thank you for your feedback ! In a post jam version we will take into account all the feedbacks about player controls to provide a better experience :) For cubes, we will probably enlarge them but we have to deal with the fact that we want the terrain to be seen entirely in the camera view, so if cubes are larger it may have less cubes (We have to think about it to improve that part too)
> Concerning the grey theme, it’s an intentional art choice as we are in a strom and so the weither is grey :)
There are better options than drab grey though. Desaturated colour tones, cold blue tinting, etc can work just as well without greywashing, and still give the game life. If this is the final choice for the palette, so be it. Real storms don't make the world *actually* grey, so all I am asking is a reconsideration. :smile:
The mouse cursor is easy to lose track of. I'm on linux and with my desktop setup it's blue and blends in with your game. I feel like it would actually improve the game quite a bit if you added your own targeting cursor on the arena floor much like the indicator under the player. Cause of death was usually just losing my bearings.
The graphics are good, and you have established a mood with your particle effects, lighting, and music selection. Overall solid entry, great work guys! :)
Special thanks for the AZERTY keyboard layout (I don't need it, but care of players is visible. And it is cool).
Some of them could be improved (aiming, for instance, is a bit tricky because of the character model making difficult to tell the angle despite the white arrow), but overall you've pulled a great entry. Sound and graphics fit well with each other, and I like the mechanics overall, even if I haven't been able to progress a lot yet.
Good work!
The gameplay was straightforward, but worked nicely. Would have loved a ranged weapon / secondary weapon too.
@trevor-hayes Oops sorry about that, I'll fix it for other persons. For the cursor, we will consider your feedback to improve the experience, thanks :)
@alexey-akulovich Thanks for the feedback. We are french so the AZERTY/QWERTY switch seems essential for us ^^' And you're right, we have to do some balance on cards cost especially :)
@sarah Thanks a lot :)
@ithildin Thanks for your feedback! We plan to put eyes on the character and on enemies to improve the visibility of character current angle. if you have other ideas feel free to propose :)
@joror Thank you for the feedback :) Yes we would have loved a secondary ranged weapon but ... you know ... Time ^^
Especially storm light that is synchronized with enemy spawn.
Gameplay is very dynamic and keeps the player in a tone all the time.
Game design is well balanced (in my opinion) in terms of rising of the hardness.
Great job!
This is a really cool submission, congrats :)
@philstrahl Thanks for playing it on your channel and for this awesome feedback :)
@nerzal Thx for your feedback, to buy powerup, you have to put the a or e key (in azerty) or q or e key (for qwerty). The bonus is consumed when you buy it
Q or E for Qwerty and A or E for azerty. For the next version we will work on choosing upgrades with mouse click 🙂
@wrenpirate hello, thanks for the feedback! If I understand maybe we should integrate a kind a tutorial!
Concerning crystal we doesn't plan to simplify the crystal as it's the main mechanic of the game to choose beetween player upgrades or repair the floor! But as you say maybe we should have a look at the gold cost of card! Maybe have a look to crystal by freezing a little the game when choosing to simplify the choice?