Soul Harvest by MiltonNH25

[raw]
made by MiltonNH25 for LD 43 (JAM)

Soul Harvest is a top-down action game in which you much sacrifice the people of villages you pass through to gain power. You can use this power for powerful abilities that can be augmented through the sacrifice system at the end of each level.

Controls:

  • WASD to move around

  • L Mouse for melee

  • R Mouse, E, Shift, Q for skills

  • CTRL to sacrifice health and empower attacks

  • F to toggle fullscreen

LD43<em>2.pngLD43</em>3.pngSH<em>1.pngld43</em>4.png

Ratings

Overall 560th 3.389⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Fun 324th 3.5⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 728th 2.889⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Theme 531th 3.444⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 779th 2.972⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Audio 451th 3.139⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Humor 426th 3.028⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Mood 395th 3.472⭐ 20🧑‍⚖️
Given 23🗳️ 3🗨️

Feedback

fre
04. Dec 2018 · 10:53 UTC
Nice game!

The diversity of skills and enemies is great, gameplay feels pretty deep.
I like the sacrifice/tradeoff mechanic, there seemed to be lots of combinations but giving just three choices was perfect.

As a push for next time, I'd work on making the world/story more coherent. There are already good elements there (the map gets more complex each time). One way to do more could be to implement a progression through e.g. forest > village > city > castle, and adjust the art/enemies accordingly and with more contrast (e.g. animals > farmers > soldiers > elite guards).

Well done!
🎤 MiltonNH25
04. Dec 2018 · 19:19 UTC
Glad you enjoyed it @fre and thanks for the feedback. We originally planned to have more progression through farms to more complex city areas but time got the best of us :smile:.
mobiledev
08. Dec 2018 · 01:22 UTC
I had a great amount of fun playing this game. The variety of abilities is great, although the Q ability is OP, reached the 600 kills portal only with it. Nice job.
ZozeR
10. Dec 2018 · 01:31 UTC
Gameplay is pretty fun but the visuals feel very weak. also except for the skill choosing system, the theme wasn't represented enough I think.
You might want to change the soul variable to integer instead of float.
Adding different enemies, weapons or skills would make it more fun also visual effects are very important for the game feel.
Overall good game, great job guys.
JUSTCAMH
10. Dec 2018 · 02:09 UTC
Awesome game! Feels surprisingly balanced! It does lack innovation however, and is a fairly generic top-down shooter. Feels incredibly similar to a youtuber's game; https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/battling-madness. Although I personally think you did a WAAAY better job executing this idea (This is quite the feat!). The stats in this feel really good to play around with and the gameplay is truly awesome! I often felt like I was actually sacrificing something to gain another. There were times that I felt that the sacrificing was really just a pointless shuffle, as I would downgrade abilities that I didn't use to upgrade something else.

I would also reconsider the control scheme, as I really only used the left click and right click attacks in battle due to their ease of use. I found it quite hard to move around and press E or Q at the same time. Maybe you could have a 'hotbar' system, where only a few weapons are active at any time?

Also the game lacked animations, which wasn't a huge problme, but it could have certainly gained from even some simple animations. I also found trees quite OP, as they would destroy incoming bullets, whilst my melee attack could go through them. This made myself near invinsible whilst I could easily kill all of the annoying archers and mages.

Otherwise however, this is an awesome game, of quite incredible quality! I loved it :thumbsup:
Lyrcaxis
10. Dec 2018 · 06:04 UTC
Nice game! Well done!
MerpADer
16. Dec 2018 · 15:49 UTC
Nice looking game! It does look earily similar to BTP and Sykoos game like @justcamh said. It felt like the music was very repetitive and I would've liked to see a better death screen but this was otherwise really well done!
Istalri
16. Dec 2018 · 16:39 UTC
Like it was written above, the game is balanced and the diversity of skills is really nice. It's also nice to have a little music for having an atmosphere and not have a feeling of void. The only thing which bothers me was the graphics, but it's a good surprise so :thumbsup:
minelsaygisever
16. Dec 2018 · 17:43 UTC
Like this game!
AFlatThrasher
17. Dec 2018 · 16:49 UTC
Overall, good job. The music added a lot. I would have liked some of the enemies to take fewer hits, but that's just personal preference, not really a strong critique. Was a lot of fun, controls seemed to work pretty well for me. Could probably have made it cost more souls to use the items, as it was I was mostly using the Nova and never really felt like I was close to running out of souls after the first couple of levels.
pelicanodepico
17. Dec 2018 · 20:55 UTC
Loved it, cool concept and art style!