Tale of a Little Guardian by Morg
The Spirit of the Forest is dying, and so is the Forest itself… You are a Guardian, the Forest’s last hope of survival, summoned to find a solution. The life of the Forest is in your hands, reach the end before the Spirit’s energy runs out!
Refill the energy of the Forest by fighting enemies and collecting mana, then give it back through the Spirit’s roots.
This is a platformer-style game in which you have to complete the levels before the timer runs out... Or, you can take your time, explore the maps and find out more about the story: there are checkpoints and respawns are unlimited!
Everything you experience in-game (from the coding to level design, art, character design, sound effects, music, etc.) was done from scratch for this project. No pre-made assets were used, we took the challenge seriously (and possibly got burnt-out because of it)!
Controls:
- Use directional arrows or “WASD” to move
- Press “Escape” to pause
- Press “Space” to jump
- Press “Z” to attack
- Press "Up" to interact with objects
Note:
Thanks for playing our game! If you find any bugs, let us know in the comments or directly on our github issue tracker.
This game is naturally full of bugs. You kill them with the Z button. :)
The Linux and OSX versions of the game have not been fully tested by us directly, just be aware of that in case you have trouble running them (hopefully not!).
Post-LD Version
Our original release had a series of bugs/glitches that sometimes made the game unfinishable and were overall frustrating to deal with. We have updated it to the 1.1 version with most of these bugs being squashed and killed (just like our main character does in the game!)
You can have a look at the changelog to get an idea of what we have changed.
For the sake of the competition, we're leaving on our itch.io page the original files as well as the new updated files. Please keep this in mind when judging our game, but also please have fun and enjoy our latest and freshest version as much as you can.
💚 Thank you for being awesome!
Itch.io Download v1.1
Direct download version v1.1
Direct download LD46 version
The Team
Morg (@morg):
- Concept & Planning
- Lead Developer
- Ending Track
Daniele Baschieri (@dangerblack) (https://www.danielebaschieri.eu/)
- Story
- Level Design & Scripting
Michele Montini (@sunti) (https://suosunty.wixsite.com/michelemontini)
- Character Design
- Art
- Animations
Etienne Guichard (@nablaz) (http://eguichardmusic.wixsite.com/home)
- Story
- Music & Mastering
- Sound Design
Elena Frabetti (@elfa)
- Art
| Youtube | https://morg.itch.io/tale-of-a-little-guardian |
| Youtube | https://github.com/Morgawr/LD46 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/tale-of-a-little-guardian |
Ratings
| Overall | 755th | 3.685⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1680th | 3.102⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 2065th | 2.823⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1249th | 3.654⭐ | 67🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 82th | 4.551⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 295th | 3.855⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1463th | 2.627⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 295th | 3.944⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 57🗳️ | 50🗨️ |
@pushkan I understand where you're coming from, the information given at the start of the game is probably less than optimal. We might have relied too much on intuition and the info we gave in the game description...
@oldknivestale @nek @shp @oneils Some movement/platforming elements could have been better and we are aware of that. We wanted to improve them, but time ran short and we prioritized having enough content, a comlpete storyline and a fully functional game/experience... Which leads to:
@sheepolution I sincerely respect your opinion and agree with you that we could have improved polishing and fixed some minor glitches/bugs that are in the build (I encountered the same one you did, as well as a few others). We will likely upload a patch that fixes those in the next few days, if you are interested in checking it out!
All in all, we are really proud of what we accomplished in these 72 hours of hard work.
By the way, if anyone is interested in trying to find it, we also hid an easter egg in the build... Beware, you may need to learn how to ride flies in order to find it!
Anyway, there are pop-ups in game to remind you of the controls, but I think their text is too small and easily overlooked... Thank you for your feedback!
Now, I will admit not seeing this through to the end, and what got me was the double jump. While my life felt wonderful for a while after I got the double jump I soon got frustrated by how inconsistent it was. I was never sure where I could actually go with it or not, especially that part where you have to jump from climbing.
Sure needs a good amount of polish to feel like a complete game, but to think you made it in less than 72 hours? Well, that simly amazing!
I would love to see this more as a narrative driven game, getting rid of all fights and making compelling story points to discover instead. While boss figths could be envisioned as the need to trick them into hurting/fighting themselves instead of attacking.
Anyway, I loved the atmosphere, the music and graphics, and enjoyed playing your game.
@yoan-allibert Nice! You are probably the first one to find it! Thank you for playing and enjoying the game.
@griffin76 You have to go backwards through the level (up) until the very beginning, where you'll find a place in which the double jump allows you to progress forwards. Thank you for the commitment to finish the game!
@plagueofminds @rongefilet Thank you for the feedback and appreciation! If you have the time, could you signal us where exactly you got stuck? We want to release a patch that fixes bugs we encountered and these ones seem to be high priority, as they might prevent players from being able to actually complete the game...
@plantprogrammer We will definitely keep your well-thought suggestions in mind if we decide to continue working on this project!
@madewink We are aware of that issue and will soon fix it. Thank you for reporting it!
Cheers
I feel like you should guide the player more around the world for example with some props pointing the direction to follow, the movement also seems to fast I would decrease the drag of the player.
Overal good job and awesome graphic, fun experience.
And I couldn't save on the first two checkpoints once we unlocked the double jump (a bug ?), which was kinda frustrating :joy: Anyway, great game overall :D
(We played on version 1.1 if that can help you with the bug)
The air control is hard, but the major thing you should improve IMO is the feedback you give to the player.
When I hit an enemy, I like when there are visual effects, animations, sounds, and when we kill a "big" enemy and it is just deleted it feels kinda weird.
I played the new version, but I still saw some bugs (e.g. I found a platform that had an invisible wall)
The font size was also too small for a full screen high resolution monitor.
Lastly, there were too many "leap of faith" moments, were you have to jump into unknown. I undrstand that cameras are hard - my game suffers from the same issue.
I played the Mac version, and I'm afraid the music & sfx were not playing, I didn't hear anything. I had the same problem as @mulberg, the font was small (dunno if it has to do with the Retina display?), but besides that, you guys did a really good job overall.
@suchista @jvdwijk @docgeraud @snowirbis We are aware that there still are some bugs/glitches in the game and that some platforming elements could be improved, we will try to fix these issues in upcoming versions... Also, yes, some better guidance and feedback for the player is definitely in the cards for the future!
@shess Thank you so much for your comment! It really is heartwarming to hear that you liked the game so much! Plus, hearing it directly from Commander Shepard takes the appreciation to a whole other level (big Mass Effect fan here). ;)
@mulberg Thank you for the feedback and for taking the time to post pictures detailing the issues you encountered! As for the info text, it currently doesn't scale properly with screen size and resolution... I also think it should be slightly larger to start with! I have a 4k screen and it is basically unreadable for me, so I definitely agree with you on this... We will fix it asap!
@daniel-moreno I'm sorry that the Mac build didn't let you hear the music... I don't know what went wrong there! I might be a little biased on this, as sound design and music were my main contributions to the project, but I think the audio helps setting the mood for the scenes and improves the overall game experience... But, thank you for enjoying the game anyway!
Cheers!
Other than that I really like the game. The art looks amazing, both background and charcter design! The sound design was great as well. Really nice entry overall :thumbsup:.
I had few challenges when I played:
- Texts disappear too quickly, I had to read everything twice
- Jumping and landing seems to be pixel perfect which leads to frustration
- Save game thingy supposed to restore tree life, but it didn't do anything except of saving
- Monsters are too easy to jump over, you could even take a ride on fly - not sure if this was intentional
- Hints were too small, even when I switched to full hd
- When I was reading scraps of the story on "road signs", tree life was running out which forced me to omit history whatsoever
Rafal from 4Boa Team
@brylamare If you jump from a platform and press jump again while in mid-air, it should perform a double jump. Keeping the SPACE bar pressed should also perform a double jump, at least it did for me!
@morriekken Thank you very much for the detailed feedback! I agree with you on the text, we should have conceived it differently... Initially it was supposed to be just a few words so it worked fine, but we then created a short storyline and did not change the text interaction mechanic for lack of time. On the checkpoint roots, you should keep pressing UP to refill the Spirit's life energy... If not, you save your progress but only transfer a minimal amount of energy to the tree. As for the basic enemies, we didn't want them to be too challenging, so that players could axctually skip the combat if they wanted to. This, however, might be something to revise in future versions of the game, if we decide to keep working on it. Plus, riding flies is fun! In fact, it's the only way to find a small easter egg we hid in the game... :)
Cheers!