HEART LORDS by Spooky

Survive ten gruesome waves of knights to defend the almighty heart and set hell lose!
Remember, speed is on your side.
Keyboard controls:
WASD - Move
Left mouse click - Swing sword
Hold left mouse click - Double attack
Right mouse click - Block
Space bar - Dodge
Collect the gifts of your saviour for extra hp!
| Youtube | https://jamesdornan.itch.io/heartlords |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/heart-lords |
Ratings
| Overall | 1311th | 3.468⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1747th | 3.073⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 2065th | 2.823⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 867th | 3.81⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 520th | 4.102⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 797th | 3.427⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 9🗳️ | 7🗨️ |
I did not enjoy on the other hand the combat that felt slow and grindy. To kill an enemy took way too many hits and felt like a chore. Since the combat is at the center of the game, I think this is really too bad.
Strenghts :
- Fluid movement and great combat system
- Consistent graphics
- Simple bot great take on the theme
Weaknesses :
- Killing enemies is a bit long
Nice game!
But sometimes the enemies take way too many hits until they die, this got me quite confused because I didn't know how many lifes they had left. Maybe a small healthbar above their heads would be nice :)
Good job with this game!
Gameplay is a little strange, I think enemies should die with 1 hit in the beginning, and maybe be faster or have more enemies to make it more dynamic.
In this scenario enemies could also do a bit more damage to the heart for balancing issues.
The sound your sword makes also doesn't feel good, the bounce BOING BOING would feel cooler if it had more impact to it, maybe a BONK or SLASH
Very cool graphics & sounds, I love the style!
As some people have already mentioned, killing enemies might be a bit frustrating as it takes a big amount of hits to actually kill them.
I would really love to see this grow post-jam, multiple enemy types & upgrades would be so noice C:
p.s. there's a little bug, some enemies just start staring into walls:

I just regret that the character is so slow.
Great game !
I like that it can be played in the browser - my team ran out of time to do it.
Controls felt very clunky. Even more so because I played with a macbook touchpad so blocking was devilishly difficult. Well, even attacking and aiming but these were really my own faults more than the game's. The walking speed was waaaaay too slow and and I think you had this bug where the diagonal movement speed was faster. If you just plot down the input x and y to a vector, you end up like that. Pretty basic maths here, sqrt(1x1 + 1x1) is not 1. The enemies had too much health too. Those two things combined made the game feel very slow for a action packed game it could have been.
Also did not see any use for the double slash at all and it was weird that one slash couldn't hit multiple enemies. Well of course major part of this clunkiness came for the lack of real mouse, I do understand that, but in my opinion it would have worked better as a twin stick shooter anyway.
The dash was quite fun but the cooldown was so quick that it would have been pretty much the equal as having movement speed be faster. Just requiring less key presses for the same effect.
And lastly a very minor nitpick, it was quite hard to see/hear the difference between a hit and when it was blocked. Resulting in wasted time on a blocking enemy when could have been focusing elsewhere.
Anyways, very nice job! :thumbsup:
I do wish there was a better visual indicator that you are hurting the enemies.
My only gripe is that it's pretty slow and tedious to defeat the enemies, no matter how many cool double attacks or dodges I did, I had no agency over the fact that I had to end up punching each of them many many times :sweat_smile:
All in all, good job! :grin: