VaultSmith by DigitalLimestone
You find yourself in a dungeon. Yep... that's the story.
Battle your way through all four biomes to victory, collecting cool stuff and using it to craft equally cool stuff.
CONTROLS:
WASD or ARROW KEYS - move
SPACE or Q - attack
Z - open or close crafting
Good luck!
Ratings
| Overall | 923th | 3.032⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 886th | 2.859⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1016th | 2.484⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 581th | 3.281⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 899th | 2.859⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 590th | 2.806⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 815th | 2.115⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 933th | 2.804⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
It would be nice if crafted items were immediately effective.
@paulo-brunassi I hadn't thought about that before, but I think that's an awesome idea. I'll include that if I ever make a post jam. Thanks for the feedback!
The music is fantastic and the art is charming and funny (I love the slimes!)
I did occasionally die from immediately walking through a door a couple of times though... The other thing is I would love some sort of UI/Feedback for when you gain crafting items. i had no idea I was gathering just from killing stuff.
Seriously impressive for a compo! Congrats on putting it together!
Maybe some story would have been nice.
The crafting system is very cool, the fighting coul dneed some polishing but in general is also fairly nice when you get used to it. Nice game!
@simonl Thank you for your kind words. I think some story would be good and I'll include that if I get around to making a post jam.
Thanks so much for commenting, you awesome people!
The start was a bit harsh, and I died many times before killing my first enemies. A simple workaround would have been to reduce the number of enemies in the rooms closest to the starting room.
However, I would have loved a bit more visual feedback on pickups (so that I don't have to open the pickup screen all the time) and crafting results (e.g. more interesting attack animations).
Also I only found two biomes, so I feel a bit cheated =)
@weine Thanks for your feedback! Those are some really great points and I'll definitely take them on board. Sorry about the biomes: there are 4, but we might have made it a liitle too difficult. :smirk:
Thanks for the comments. They mean a lot!
@ambra @alphaden @humphreysmedia Thanks for the comments. They're really great to read. We do need to sort out the difficulty of the game, and we'll take that on board for the next jam.
Thank you so much!
* music is too loud (in HTML5 version)
* shoes recipe doesn't show that it needs wood
* in later lavels the crafting ui glitched on me (mouse select was jumping randomly to other elements - helped that I died and the ui seams to be working from that point)

Gameplay needs balancing though. More frequently used resources should drop more often, as in "Wood vs Lava". The thing i missed most was some clarity about resource collection - graphically or otherwise, so that player can understand how to get what, and when to expect it. Even if the resources are absolutely random it adds a lot of "involvement"
Overall - very good. I enjoyed it for a lot of time)
The UI could be improved in some ways:
* Need indicator of what resources you pick up.
* Show the player's current stats (e.g. attack power) somewhere
I agree with the need for balancing. Need more wood and less string. Some items (bow, gun) don't seem to be worth crafting.
Also, once you get enough health it becomes viable to run into all the enemies.
A possible extension is to add more enemy variants. e.g. some with ranged attacks and some with different movement AI.
@johnnysix I agree with the scope being too big. We still wanted to add different enemies, better UI, visibly collected items, and checkpoints (which would have fixed the other problem), but didn't have enough time. :face_palm: Thanks for playing!
@enderr42 Thank you for the kind words! We really wanted to get the icons to drop but didn't have time. In all honesty, at the last moment, I realised I hadn't done the crafting to drop, so gave each item a 50% chance to drop. Oops. Thanks for the feedback!
@zuf Thanks for commenting and those are some great suggestions. I hadn't even considered the stats thing before but now it seems really obvious! The enemy variation idea is great as well and we'll try to fit that into a post-jam, if we get round to making one. Thank you very much!
Maybe create all your sprites on one sheet to mock-up their relative size, and when scaling in game or in the image editor, make sure they're consistent. It just make things feel ( even if most people don't notice why ) off.