Forest of the Lost by MartensCedric

made by MartensCedric for Ludum Dare 51 (JAM)

Forest of the Lost

Introduction

Children keep going missing. The only things connecting the disappearances is the forest: The Forest of the Lost. You are a detective 🔎 tasked with finding Lily, the latest of the missing children. This sinister forest holds mysteries never before uncovered by human hands. Will you uncover them? or will you become lost yourself?

Forest of the Lost is a story-driven cosmic horror exploration game. The goal of the game is to uncover the mysteries of the forest while avoiding monsters that hide amongst the trees and bushes. Every 10 seconds they change hiding spots. Try to remember where they are to avoid them.

Lily is Missing

Last known location... I already know...

Hello? Lily?

Where am I?

How to play

The arrow keys or WASD to move
Space or Enter to interact with the world
Look for items on the ground and characters to talk to
Find Lily

Every 10 seconds darkness swallows the screen leaving you with information on the position of the normally invisible enemies. Make sure you don't get to close to them!

Development Information

Children of the Lost is the 2nd game written WizEngine: a custom SFML fork written in C++ that was developed for our Ludum Dare entries. The engine supports porting to the Nintendo Switch (Homebrew) (like our LD50 entry Final Forest). We just focused on the desktop ports for this entry.

GitHub	https://github.com/WheezyWiseWizards/ForestOfTheLost
Linux	https://martenscedric.itch.io/forest-of-the-lost
Windows	https://martenscedric.itch.io/forest-of-the-lost
Original URL	https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/forest-of-the-lost

Ratings

Given

27🗳️

16🗨️

Feedback

voidmist

03. Oct 2022 · 23:04 UTC

The game looks super cool and I loved the way it played. If there was audio, I couldn't hear it :/

William Wells

03. Oct 2022 · 23:08 UTC

@voidmist Hey we just tested on both Linux and Windows and it seems to work for us. What platform are you playing on?

voidmist

03. Oct 2022 · 23:15 UTC

@william-wells About the audio issue, it was totally a problem on my side, sorry. I can hear the music now and it sounds awesome

Krasimir Balchev

03. Oct 2022 · 23:19 UTC

Great entry! Love the idea of having to keep track of where the monsters are. I died a lot in the beginning but I got more patient and that helped. I found Lily but I could only see her mom, couldn't find a way to interact with her sadly. Did I miss something?

Winter2277

03. Oct 2022 · 23:20 UTC

@krasimir-balchev The mom will follow you back to Lily once you found her! Sorry we knew this was unclear but didn't have the time to fix this

Adrien Tremblay

03. Oct 2022 · 23:27 UTC

@voidmist Awesome, glad you like it! We actually went into a forest at night to get inspiration for the music and to get sound effects.

Krasimir Balchev

03. Oct 2022 · 23:38 UTC

@winter2277 Thank you for the hint! I went back and actually reached the credits this time, I can't believe I missed the best part the first time I played haha

JustVanilla

03. Oct 2022 · 23:57 UTC

Major PogChamp

Pusheeneiro

04. Oct 2022 · 00:34 UTC

Great art and mechanics.

kr4ft3r

04. Oct 2022 · 00:57 UTC

After dying for 45 minutes straight, I have decided that rescuing one teddy bear is as good as rescuing all the lost girls in the world. Which is to say I gave up. Can you shed some more tips pls, as it seems the forest is either very big or procedurally generated or looping, or I'm just stupid. I'd rather postpone rating until I manage to get somewhere (all I manage to do so far is talk to Lily).
Update: enemies are not that much of a problem, I manage to walk distances without running into them, I'm just failing to actually find anything, so I was wondering if that is randomized or can you point me in some direction.

Winter2277

04. Oct 2022 · 01:08 UTC

@kr4ft3r Tip: enemies only move every 10 seconds and only hide in specific hiding spots (trees, bush) make sure to avoid walking next to those and make sure you are in a safe spot whenever the 10 seconds hit.

Ines_7

04. Oct 2022 · 01:26 UTC

balls

Adrien Tremblay

04. Oct 2022 · 01:26 UTC

@kr4ft3r Hi! We're getting a lot of feedback about the Lily's mom part being hard to understand. It's true, it's a bit unclear. So how it works is you have to talk to Lily. And then walk around a bit until you see Lily's mom (she looks like a ghostly medusa in a white dress). Once you've seen her, she will follow you. So just walk back to Lily without dying and talk to her to reunite her with her mother! Hope this helps :)

kr4ft3r

04. Oct 2022 · 09:38 UTC

Ah right, I thought that she may be the mother the girl was talking about, but whenever I'd approach her I'd get killed by a ghoul (by coincidence I guess) so I misjudged her to be a common monster. Yea quite nice touch with environment progression. The ending is interesting as well, without giving spoilers away, though I'm not sure if it's the only one. I would say, despite some flaws, one must appreciate the story of what is going on and text descriptions.

LDJam user 276121

04. Oct 2022 · 14:09 UTC

A neat concept, but the slow movement speed conmbined with the (seemingly) random movements of the nighttime enemies really slows the pace as you path around any potential crossings between bushes and trees. Perhaps a health system rather than an instakill might have been good.

Winter2277

05. Oct 2022 · 00:52 UTC

Hey @hexyvexy we did implement a full health system at first but we decided to remove it. We didn't want people being able to tank damage and progress through the game that way. This is why instead we implemented an extensive checkpoint system. Anytime you die you should respawn basically at the point you were at in the game.

Adrien Tremblay

05. Oct 2022 · 01:42 UTC

Thanks for the comment @hexyvexy! To add on to @winter2277 's comment. We received feedback that the movement felt janky/slow so you're not a alone. The monsters go to random hiding spots every 10 seconds, but they aren't able to kill you while traveling between hiding spots

justabread

07. Oct 2022 · 10:18 UTC

Nice concept! I thought the movement was a tad slow and I maybe would have picked a bit smaller map. After some time of walking around and not finding the next clue it became a bit repetitive and I found myself getting impatient. I thought it was very smart how you introduced the player to the mechanics in daylight with harmless animals, so that when it became dangerous at night you already knew what to do without having to die a lot figuring it out.

jonmerrin

08. Oct 2022 · 00:22 UTC

Hey! Fun game, fun concept, and great job doing a story game in a jam! That's tough. I felt sometimes that the hitboxes for the monsters was generous to the monsters, when I feel they should be generous to the player (allow for a slim margin of error). Aside from that, I thought it was really nice!

Winter2277

08. Oct 2022 · 03:10 UTC

Thanks for the feedback @justabread! Yeah the clues/items are randomly generated so you might have been unlucky there. They should spawn in every chunk of 20x20 blocks but they might not if there is water or something else! Our random generation could definitely be improved to be more fair

Winter2277

08. Oct 2022 · 03:11 UTC

Thanks for the feedback as well @jonmerrin ! The monsters only attack you when you walk next to a tile they are hidden at, there is no actual hitbox, everything is 100% grid based. Either a tile is dangerous (adjacent to a monster) or it isn't. We definitely could have made this more clear with some visual indications though

Connor Munro

09. Oct 2022 · 18:54 UTC

I love mood and graphics of the game, story is simplistic but solid. I think the only thing that is bringing the game down is that the 10 second aspect of the game is working against it, as I got killed on Lily a few times trying to read what she said.

LDJam user 233347

11. Oct 2022 · 05:35 UTC

Quite moody, but the audio is a but lacking imho (not the sfx). A mood-matching tune would go a long way.

Nonetheless, good entry.

davidsheadgames

11. Oct 2022 · 06:17 UTC

I liked the horror aesthetic of the game and the concept. However, it felt a bit brutal in terms of monster placement. I'm grateful that the game was forgiving with checkpoints because after a while it was more trial and error, especially once I found out that monsters can randomly cross and kill you during the transition phase between plants, even while the player is standing in an open area.

I think there's potential in this idea as a one-off in a horror game, but it needs some polish and balance.

eptwalabha

13. Oct 2022 · 17:14 UTC

Very nice entry,
The bit with the mother was not really clear (I thought she wanted me to follow her), and some placement were kind of odd (I counldn't interact with one of the kid because he spawned inside a bush).
Appart from that, it was a nice game that I enjoyed playing.
Good job.

nanolotl

16. Oct 2022 · 05:51 UTC

Dodging the monsters was a bit annoying, but you really nailed the atmosphere. Good job.

xand

16. Oct 2022 · 19:04 UTC

The mood in this game is well executed. The monsters can be unforgiving at times, but I did like how the animals during the day teach you how the enemies will end up attacking during the night. Good entry!

Paul Nadan

19. Oct 2022 · 17:04 UTC

I enjoyed the spookiness of the game, and the different camera effects were really neat. The enemy location swapping mechanic was pretty innovative, although it would be cool if there were some harmless enemies mixed in as well, so you could keep track of where they went as safe locations. I think the items and ghosts/monster children you have to interact with were sometimes hard to tell apart from generic monsters/obstacles, it might be nice to give them a bright outline or something to visually distinguish them. Overall I really liked this entry, great work!

LDJam user 299091

20. Oct 2022 · 12:07 UTC

Mood and concept are great, though I also had the same problem of not realising how to deal with Lily's mom, but the other comments helped. Glad there's checkpoints, otherwise I'd have probably ended up dropping it. I think I beat it though. Got to the point where I was stuck in the red dimension.