Floyd's Fire by BinaryPrinciple
After thinking about it for a long time, you finally decided to give spelunking a try. You arrive to the location and everything was fine on your descent, when suddenly your ties got loose and you hit the cave's rock bottom. Your equipment is gone and you only have a torch. Just try not to think too much of the old tales about how the cave is haunted by the deceased spelunkers.
[ Objective ] Your torch expires but you need to go as far as you can before the flame dies, your best options are: 1. Grab the flames that appear in the cave. 2. Fight the ghosts to slow down your flame expiration.
[ Controls ]
Movement: WASD / Arrows Pause = Escape
[ Ghost ]
Each ghost have hit points (yellow squares) but they have a flame cost (yellow number), is it worthy? well check how many seconds will you gain (blue number).
Hit them by sharing your fears and sharing the same tile has many times as hits are necessary.
[ Finally ]
Sadly I couldn't add audio in time. Have fun and thank you for your time!
Ratings
| Overall | 847th | 3.034⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 939th | 2.67⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 690th | 3.091⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 834th | 3.267⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 483th | 3.511⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 773th | 2.156⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 500th | 3.232⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 61🗨️ |
The game gets repetitive though. I found the combat boring and often unnecessary. I straight out ignored 90% of the ghosts I encountered. This feels a lot more like a prototype than a short game. I would remove the ability to skip levels and add either a final objective or make a highscore showing how far you made it.
Good job
I agree with your assesment.
I wanted to build it up to an exit or final boss, maybe RPG it up a bit with stats, also sound is something I wanted to add.
I thought about the skipping levels, I thought, well if people get bored they can skip up just to make the board more interesting.
I was thinking on continuing to work on it later on, add different type of enemies, high scores or survival.
For the ghosts, I also ignored as many ghosts as possible, as it seems never worth to fight them, as you always use more fire to kill them that waht you can gain of them (because of the several hits). You also lose some precious seconds moving back and forth several times to kill them.
But in any case, the game was still fun, and I enjoyed playing it! (Quite sad that you weren't able to implement the audio!) Good job!
Battling ghosts seems pointless, since they seem to always cost more than they give. It also seemed that the light will not go out if you keep moving. Finally an end goal would be nice.
All in all nice work :)
Battling ghosts seems pointless, since they seem to always cost more than they give. It also seemed that the light will not go out if you keep moving. Finally an end goal would be nice.
All in all nice work :)
Very atmospheric game, especially the lighting and the design of the caves, they make you get really absorbed in moving around the ghosts. In later levels it seemed like ghosts were blocking the only path forward more and more, so they became a good challenge later on, where one had to balance the need to move forward and the need to collect flame, I thought that was neat. All in all very enjoyable, great job!
I had no issues with bugs, but I had a hard time with the flame spawner. The flames were really really really scarce. I think it could be interesting if they had fixed strategic spots, instead of randomly spawning. Also I ended up avoiding almost all of the ghosts. Considering how rare the flames were, I couldn't fight them more often.
Great work! You did a great job!
Thank you very much for taking the time to play and rate Floyd’s Fire.
I’m so happy (and proud) to hear so much positive feedback, I’m not the best at modeling or animating, so I went for a clean style hoping it would save me time in the long run. Adjusting the lights took a while; used to be darker, so I decided to made it more visible considering the brightness and monitor types (TN, IPC, etc).
The fire spawning.... yeah it should be better. I completely agree. Here is how it was coded: a flame will last X amounts of seconds and those are equivalent to X amount of points, the lower the light, the less fire points you will get. The spawn time should be better, also, smaller flames could populate more often. The spawn time, flame duration and prefab are in a scriptable object.
Ghost fighting animation was in my todo list. Facing your fears by been in the same spot was a decent work around in my mind, but it could use more juice or weight.
I was thinking: well, what can ghost give you? How can I balance it against fire? What if they increase the amount of time that takes for the torch to go off. By default, loses 1 point every 2 seconds. Meaning that you need to take a strategic decision: can I afford to lose fire as long has the flame last longer? Can I wait enough for new fires to spawn?
So at the end of the LD here the list of things that I could not implement in time:
- A difficulty manager.
- A sound manager (background sounds and random noises, like the wind or raindrops).
- Better spawn rates.
- Different enemies.
It was my first time building the project, so I regret not building it for other OS or a HTML5 version.
Your feedback is great, and I love how LD feels like a true community of people having fun, providing constructive criticism, giving a chance to everyone, a time to show you creativity in any way possible. To all of you thank very much. All of you put a smile on my face and a sense of proud that honestly I lost a while ago.
I will continue to work on it, polish it and who know, maybe one day release it.
Oh,..... the cheating button, well I had it for testing but then I was afraid that people got bore of the difficulty curve and wanted to give a way to speed them up and try it under different scenarios.
The gameplay is nice but gets repetitive after a while. There seems to be no reason to risk fighting ghost because the fights take more fire than they give back. I found that just by going straighet to the exit I get the most progress. I think that making the ghosts chase you or block the way fighting them would feel more natural. For this short time reaching this nice a mood in such short time is amazing. Great entry!
But overall it is great. :v:
Thank you very much for your time and feedback, still very excited to be part of this community and have a chance to do something new.
I'm taking into account your feedback, and I decided to move forward and keep on developing a better version of Floyd's Fire, who know where it might get me, but I'm having a lot of fun.
I'm glad you enjoyed the overall look and feel, and as you mentioned there's room to grow on game loop and mood.
- I implemented sound in the newer version using a mixer and scriptable objects, and currently evaluating the gameplay based on your comments. @lazzydev72 you are right, oxygen would make more sense... what if it's taken from the ghost's last breath.
- @norris-eldridge truly I need to make significant improvements in the UI and setup a tutorial. I think that after sound this might be next point (UI), to make it smoother.
- Maybe setup different types of caves and challenges like a time challenge ( @runuchok ).
- Balancing needs to be done ( @barelos ) and set better purpose for the enemies.
Again, thank you!
@emperor-eagle I'm working on some changes where the level start and end point might be on a different position and added a timer. Next step, cause a disaster once the timer is done.
@khaoz-fang Yeah, I need to polish the game loop, give more reason for fighting the ghosts.
@generictoast Thank you!!! Now that I added sound the atmosphere got better, make me think of directing to a type of "horror-action".
@notan-lemon thank you! True, I'm working on setting difficulty levels and improve those spawns. Maybe add new enemies.
Feel very happy to join the community and share a bit of my effort. I'm waiting for the new LD.