Lost Temple of the Monkey God by aurel
You are exploring a lost ruin looking for treasure. You don’t have anything with you, so you’ll need to pick up some skills during your exploration in order to find what you need.
As you raid the temple, you may find ancient carvings that will give you the ability to access previously inaccessible areas. Look for the owl, which will give you the wisdom to understand your surroundings (a map), the fish, which will let you swim deeply, the eagle which will let you double-jump, and see if you can get to the Monkey Statue hidden at the end!
Controls
WASD - Move; Space to Jump. Shift to Sprint. C to Crouch. E to Interact. Esc to adjust settings.
Blessings
There are three blessings in the game:
- Owl - Gives you a minimap which may reveal secret areas!
- Fish - Gives ability to swim down
- Eagle - Gives you the ability to double jump and reach secret ledges.
Pickups
Coin: Certain coin doors only allow the extremely wealthy to pass through. If you collect enough coins you may be able to cross through to the other side.
Pots: May sometimes contain coins - besides, what temple explorer does not break ancient pottery?
Relic: Golden Monkey Statue - find this to end the game.
Objects
* Coin Doors *
Coin doors require a certain amount of coins to pass through.
* Pressure Plates *
Pressure plates do a number of things - try to figure out how each one works to solve the challenges that lay ahead.
* Snake Statues *
Snake statues can be pushed around. They look heavy, but their design incorporates light materials used for easy moving during worship ceremonies.
* Metallic Orbs *
Mysterious rusty metal balls can be found in the temple - presumably they used to fit somewhere else...
LD Rating Information
All sound effects and audio was made by clips taken from past LD projects since our main sound guy was unable to compose / foley any new sound effects. We did what we could to use existing sounds to create an effective atmosphere, but we have opted out of the sound category as none of the sound effects used were created during the course of the LD, just arranged and structured.
Level design was done by using a level creation tool we have created that allows us to snap geometry together. We also used a base "kit" of some Unity extensions and tools to allow us to do proper data management and serialization. We reused a settings UI generator we made for past projects, but reconstructed all prefabs to match the aesthetic of this game. The player was constructed by taking the Kinematic Player Controller plugin and writing specific movement states for this jam. All gameplay code and game elements were created for LD45. All models and materials were made during the jam as well.
Post LD Additions: * Added a title screen and ending screen (the original version started you right in the game, and the ending was a simple "you win" screen). * Fixed a number of bugs where builds would bug out with the audio system which caused our scripts to throw exception and most people to not be able to get past the first area. * Changed balance on coin door counts to make not all of the coins necessary. * Added telemetry and metrics so that we can see how well people playing our game did. (Information such as, number of pots smashed, number of coins found, etc.). * Added a loading screen to properly load audio system for WebGL version. * Fixed a bug where a certain door did not serialize its state properly across level loads (didn't affect gameplay, but felt kind of weird to have to open the same coin door twice).
| Youtube | https://www.dropbox.com/s/k3en3z70qsfd0rs/MonkeyGod.zip?dl=0 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/lost-temple-of-the-monkey-god |
Ratings
| Overall | 299th | 3.7⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 317th | 3.571⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 622th | 3.1⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 798th | 2.986⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 176th | 4.153⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 75th | 4.071⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 31🗨️ |
One negative thing: my GPU (1070 Ti) was at 100% with "PC Master Race"-settings and at like 60% with "Web / Console"-settings. I think that is a wee bit high for this game, maybe you can optimize this.
Great atmosphere & graphics. Was fun to explore, though I got stuck on the rolling ball puzzle. It looked like they shot out way too fast to actually use the ramps to control their path, plus the ramps were a bit annoying to move around. It wasn't clear whether that was what I was supposed to do or if I needed some other power to solve it properly, but I didn't find a solution or anywhere else to go so I got stuck there.
At least I didn't get spooked by any temple guards. Would love to play this again if it were polished a bit. Nice work!
Glad you enjoyed the atmosphere, it was fun to work on :D
How long did the game take you? We spent a bunch of time coding the minimap and implementing the other mechanics that our level design was a bit hurried and we had to scrape a lot of content, so we're curious how long you felt the game took you. Were there any really frustrating parts? What can we do to make something like this more fun?
Otherwise, I think a little more direction might be nice at the beginning. By the 3rd time, I knew where to go, but only because I had been to each of the rooms several times.
There was that big room with all the snake statues in a circle and the big door... I was interested in that (and couldn't open the door).
I enjoyed how the sound/music changed when you went to different environments.
The first time I played, I got the metallic ball stuck in the rocks (which I also would have been interested to get past if it were possible).
We intentionally put the blessing there so that players would get the owl right away to be able to have a map showing them the layout of the temple, but I guess there's nothing stopping players from skipping that entire puzzle. Hmm..
Thanks for the feedback! That really helps.
One thing I do remember – when you break a vase, your character recoils. So if I'm on a ledge, and I break the pot, I might fall off the ledge.
Glad it's helpful!
I found the ball puzzle pretty hard and not really fun, since the ball were so fast and "heavy".
I spent some very quality 30 minutes :smile:
Struggled for too long getting to the ledge above the ball puzzle without the double jump as I only had 23 coins at that point. Managed it eventually though.
Got dead-ended in the room with the river as I did not have dive yet, then had the bug of coins not appearing on restart.
Being launched by breaking pots was irritating, also broken pots being in the way and having to wait for them to disappear.
Final score: 58,38,3,16:07.
I didn't find the map useful. Missed it entirely on my first attempt. Interesting height effect on it though.
Great game! I love the graphics!
Bug reports:
* The aforementioned crouching area could get blocked by the pottery that's destroyed in front of the entrance, and the only solution is to restart the game. I consider this a severe issue.
* There is no proper introduction of the controls, e.g. the E key to interact, and the About menu goes against a de-facto consensus, as there are usually just some credits under About. I would expect the keys to be mentioned in settings, as if to re-map them.
* When closing the About menu, an accidental double-click causes the player to press the Exit button - that's some unfortunate button placement. I sure hope noone does that in the middle of the gameplay :) I guess that's why people usually do a double-check before quitting the game.
* There should be a mouse sensitivity option in the game, as your constant is just too slow. It takes the camera the same time to rotate only 45 degrees as it takes my cursor to go from left to the right side of my screen. (This is a good choice for some pro-games within FPS games, but in a puzzle game it's just annoyingly too slow :)
* By the way, I'm not too experienced in occulsion culling myself, but wouldn't that prevent the need to load the next part of the level? (The character sometimes does a glitchy jump after the load. It reminds me of the loading in Half-Life games :p)
I hope this'll help you in your post-LD endeavor, good luck! :)
1. So honestly, the crouching tunnel thing is... well, a bug, or put another way, we ran out of time and thought we fixed it but each person thought someone else fixed it :smile: The pot pieces do get smaller and disappear when you're not looking at them, but that is not well conveyed to the player.
2. Very valid points. An intro area that teaches the E key would have been wonderful.
3. Thanks for pointing this out. Normally we reuse our menus from a previous game, so we pre-test them, but this time we made a new one, and failed to test it properly.
4. The old menus we used to use had a mouse sensitivity option, but we... forgot it this time :/
5. So, this particular issue is... a big one. Unity ships with an occlusion culling that works in theory (and we did use it), but each shadow-casting light seems to slow down the scene, culled or not culled. I think this is because Unity re-renders the entire scene from the point of view of the light (6 times for a point light!) to generate the shadow maps, and due to how big light radii are for a decent-sized lantern, they rarely get culled out. There's some nice optimizations we could do, such as bake our lights with a shadowmask setting, so that it fades between baked light in the distance and dynamic shadowmapping up close. Honestly, we just didn't want to deal with baking lightmaps in an LD entry, since getting those parameters dialed in takes time, and baking lightmaps each time you update the level also takes time. It was easier to just write a nice level transition system and split the level into pieces. The splitting of the level also made it easier for different people to work simultaneously on their own part of the level without having to share a scene file and worry about scene file merges. Hopefully the loading areas didn't affect the experience too negatively. We tried to make it as seamless as we could, but you know, LD only has three days :slight_smile:
Thanks a lot for all your feedback, there's some great takeaways here! Good luck on your score!
I had wanted to have some UI pop up during the Hard Load, but alas, time.
As I did the UI this time, I also am sorry that I didn't add the slider for Mouse Sensitivity. I kind of just forgot. Oops.
Yeah, this time we didn't have the time to work on a Tutorial Area, mostly because I spent almost an entire half day working on getting a dynamic map to work, and writing custom shaders for that was not my strong suit. As a result, we ended up cutting any tutorial-like experience.
That said, thanks for the feedback. It's really helpful to see how we can improve. Can we ask what you found to be the most "fun" part of the experience? We're really doing these LDs to learn about what makes a game fun.
Overall it's a nice exercise to look for solutions with minimal hints, but it honestly gets frustrating very quickly. On the upside, the atmosphere was so great that it felt authentic for the entire time, just like a player that would be left to second-guess himself if he were in a real temple. Most of us can only dream of making such an immersive level over the course of a few days without stealing tons of assets like free models and textures ;)
Still, I would expect a little bit more of complexity when it comes to the interaction with objects, and maybe some feedback in the form of a story progression, so that the player doesn't aimlessly wander to previous rooms where there is nothing to do, before I would consider this worthy of some official post-LD release :) Though when it comes to coins, I appreciate that the level can be completed even if some of them are missed, so that there is no need to strictly point the player to the missing ones (if a player won't notice them once, he will probably miss them again, e.g. if they are right above another platform that he had cleaned up). It is really challenging for a mind to properly memorize the entire level though, as one will get very easily lost if he doesn't hold everything in memory. The minimap would greatly reduce the difficulty, even though it would reduce the immersion a little bit :) What about making some simplified version of a map, so that the player has to understand the associations himself anyway?
I must strongly complain about the last door though. When I first played it (that's when I blocked myself in the crouching area), I saw the "33 door" in an unapproachable area, but when I played it later, I was no longer so focused on pushing all the random snake statues, so I completely ignored the one that you have to push down in order to unlock the door. What if the player pushes it to a wrong direction? I had to come here and read the comments in order to learn about it, as I remembered the "33 door", but had thought that it was simply somewhere else :) I would definitely never find it on my own.
Anyway, here is my score for the record :D It was fun after the worst part was behind me :P
