St. Exton's Night by aurel
Each year, villagers gather together for a festival, honoring the life of St. Exton, a great wizard that has protected the town for ages. Evil spirits have taken notice, however, and come out on St. Exton's Night to feast on souls. The villagers, unable to see the evil spirits, are defenseless.
Take control of Selena the cat as she defends the town from evil. Everyone knows a cat can see evil spirits.
The game is simple: manage the panic level in the town. Kill evil spirits with spirit arrows, swipe ghosts with your lantern (tip of your bow), to catch them, and return them to the shrines in order to revive the villagers. Villagers get scared if they see ghosts, so catching them early is key. After 30 seconds of not seeing a ghost, they calm down.
Collect the green spirit energy in order to be able to kill the evil spirits. You may need to look around to find it.
Timelapse for the AI/UI/Player guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYdmnEWW8Tk
Post-Jam Changelog
NOTE: There have been some minor post-jam changes that don't actually affect the game/gameplay but we want to be up front about it.
Additions (Don't rate us on these)
- Added a title screen with instructions/credits
- Replaced game over / victory screens with a nicer background and had them take you back to start
- Added a few easter eggs outside the bounds of the level in case players fell out of level
Bug fixes
- Changed the name from "The Town of St. Exton" to "St. Exton's Night" on a few strings in the UI which we forgot to change in the jam build
- Fixed an issue where the audio was not initializing on non-editor builds and causing errors in the build version
- Fixed an issue with the villager's wonky animation
- Fixed a few perf issues by having the villagers not raycast/spherecast on every frame but on 25% of frames as this was too slow on most people's PCs
- Fixed a few minor visual issues with the dialogue system (text going out of frame, sizing)
- Balanced some audio clip falloff (there was nearly no noise for sound effects like shrine/jump-pads)
| Youtube | https://cinderflame.itch.io/exton |
| Youtube | https://cinderflame.itch.io/exton |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/st-extons-night |
Ratings
| Overall | 385th | 3.8⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 757th | 3.375⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 593th | 3.521⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1290th | 3.065⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 204th | 4.241⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 359th | 3.688⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 462th | 3.158⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 235th | 3.94⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 41🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
@jesus-gonzalez The jam rules allow us to make certain bug fixes but not adding new features. The only new "feature" we truly added post-jam was the title screen because we wanted to add some instructions/give credit to everyone who worked hard on the game. I've clarified the changes a bit better in the description but we left the gameplay as is. I can downgrade the project back and get you the original build if you want though
There's lots of janky camera movement with occlusion culling / bad animation logic / issues of balance that I'd love to see fixed, but maybe in a post-jam game. We had to cut a lot of our original plans of waves and spawners (which were partially implemented but not ready in time), and random placement of villagers/enemies, ghost attracting arrows, etc. We might tackle these in a proper post-jam version!
Good luck, and don't forget to be satisfied with your work even if you're not able to get enough ratings in time!
Overall, I loved it! Art was the major highlight, all of it oozes charm and style. Level design was really excellent, with great height variation and density of passages and alleyways to really give that city feel despite being a smallish area.
Gameplay loop seemed really well-designed and fun, though a bit more control over aiming would have been better (though that's at low fps, maybe its better balanced for stable fps). Love how many interlocking unpredictable elements there are to the gameplay, from the evil spirits to the villagers and then the ghosts. The chaos created from having to manage all those AI's is genuinely very fun and makes the whole world feel really alive, a really impressive feat for a game jam.
Would love to see this expanded upon with the rough edges sanded down (maybe some graphics options for low-end rigs too). Had a little idea too. I noticed some villagers chat to you too (a lovely detail) and thought how cool it would be to have a time system so you get a few mins before nightfall and the evil spirits come out, to collect arrows and chat with the villagers/take part in the festivities.
two pieces of feedback are that i felt it was rather hard to aim correctly when shooting the bad spirits, especially with no aiming reticle, and the green sprites that give you arrows are spread too far and thin, making it too punishing when i miss. i would have enjoyed the game more if i felt more free and empowered as the player to run around saving the townsfolk by shooting the bad spirits, instead of spending most of the time running around trying to hunt down ammo and getting really stressed out whenever i miss a shot.
if you could refine the gameplay so i spent more time running around shooting the bad spirits and saving the townsfolk, which is fun and cool, making it easier to aim, and having to spend less time running around trying to hunt down the scarce ammo, which ended up feeling more frustrating and annoying, rather than a "healthy stress", i think it would really improve the game. perhaps there could be more green sprites, closer to where the action is, and they could respawn, and/or making them give you more arrows when you touch them.
overall, it was still a really fun and beautiful experience to play this game! incredibly well done in such a short time frame!
There was so much rushing at the end that we pieced the level together, dropped some pickups, and more or less prayed that it was balanced. I think at one point the player started with 10 arrows, but it was too easy. Now, with 1 arrow, I personally feel it's too hard.
Ah well, it is what it is.