Ten Sec Dread by davision
You die every ten seconds!
No, really, your whole body regenerates all its pieces every ten seconds. And with pieces I mean your bones. You are a skeleton and you better like it! Because that is what you are for the rest of your live. That lasts 10 seconds.
Better make the most of it and play this game!
Features: - A big heart! - Many skeletons - Pumpkin chain explosions - Bones - Bone Physics - Bone aesthetic - Your Death
Controls instructions are in the game. (Mousewheel lets you zoom)
Update: - Added options menu - Reduced the default graphic settings from Epic to High - Fixed gamepad only working partially - Fixed extra wide aspect ratios cropping the view - Fixed grabbing sometimes not choosing closest object
You are a skeleton trying to get rid of the evil pumpkins plague
You die every ten seconds and with it all left pumpkins explode devasting the very ground you stand on and the layer that protects your heart
Creating chains is most effective and grants precious extra seconds in your short lifes
When they get through the clock shell to your heart its actually over, you are dead dead
UPLOADING FILES IS BROKEN here so you have to follow the Itch.io link: https://tocogames.itch.io/ten-sec-dread
| Link | https://tocogames.itch.io/ten-sec-dread |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/ten-sec-dread |
Ratings
| Overall | 197th | 3.895⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 551th | 3.417⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 265th | 3.694⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 216th | 4.053⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 10th | 4.711⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 445th | 3.083⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 282th | 3.765⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 4🗳️ | 4🗨️ |
The sound and appearance of the heart beating are very well described.
Ba Boom Ba Boom!
The graphics are out of this world, I'm very impressed. Also the noisefilter fits your game idea very good!
@Wouter52 and @Erlioniel
ahh, sad to hear that you had problems. What you can do is press Alt + Enter to go into windowed mode which should also fix the ratio. Scaling the window then smaller is a bit tricky though. In the game you can zoom a bit outwards using the mousewheel.
I think the main issue with ressources is the destruction and the clock being made out of a 1200 piece physX destruction asset. I should be able to make a patch with reqular grahics options though.
I struggled a bit with spatial reasoning, trying to get the pumpkins to orbit the meat clock and blow up the others. It was also hilarious when the skeleton got blown into the void :smile:

Although I criticize some points of the game, I really enjoyed it.
postscript: sorry, not being good in English, this is a Deepl translation from the French language
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
This game need a some type of cursor, the GreenLight of your hand sometimes missing in light of clock.
On the gameplay side, I think it is fun, but it could be improved with a few things :
- I found the controls a bit strange, I think the control scheme could be simplified (why grabbing with RMB and throwing with LMB ? One button would be enough). I know it would require to change a lot the gameplay and ask a lot of new design questions, but maybe using the mouse is not really necessary ?
- It is very hard to predict where the projectile will land when you throw it, and the throw distance is a bit low in my opinion, which does not incentive the player to try skillshots. I ended up throwing pumpkins directly to the ground, because it's the only way I managed to be precise with it.
- The knockback on explosions is a bit too strong at times, and feels a bit random. I once had to wait for ten seconds waiting for the skeleton to get back on the ground.
- The clock arrow is hard to cross, mostly because the platforming physics feel a bit unreliable. It is great to indicate the time before the next explosion, but as an obstacle it is a bit too big.
- The combo system is cool, but currently it feels like you have not a lot of control over it. Pumpkins align only when the game decides so. I wish I could stack them up before exploding them all at once, it would feel pretty satisfying.
I hope this feedback helped, keep up the good work and see you next LD !
Thx, yea, staying away from a combo explosion is a good rule of thumb to avoid getting launched into the void. I might make that more forgiving
@demogia-av
Thx, if you would rotate the clock instead the interesting part of the environment changing would become meaningless. Yea, pumpking explosions force can be extreme which is simply because the force add ups per amount of pumpkins in radius. I would have to come up with a custom system to get better control over that.
@durkagames
Good point with the green light, I might just need to make it more to the front.
@epicgamefan
Optimized for maximum graphics
@perrin
The environment can make it harder to navigate but if you are doing well from the get go it can stay easy. Might need to add something for that.
@jrevel
Controls are that way because you can also drop pumpkins without them exploding. Mouse is required in any case for aiming and grabbing the object you want. Its a bit much for an arcade game but adds a lot to the physics aspect of it all. I guess what I could do is getting rid of having to hold a mouse button.
Yea, physics are hard to predict which comes down a lot to the orbiting nature of it or rather gravity to the center. One easy skillshot to do is throwing at a floating pumpkin to let it fall down there. How far you hold the object away from you also controls the force it gets thrown to some extent.
The knockback is just add up of the force of amount of pumpkins in radius. It adds up to a lot because I wanted a single one to be significant. Maybe I will still find a good solution for this.
For the clock arrow you just have to multi jump a couple times. You can actually infinite multi jump but often going the other way around is the better strategy.
Yea, combo system came later into play and its hard to do anything with lineing up bc of that very small time window. Not really a chance to tweak that 10 seconds value. What you can do is pushing the floating pumpkins but that only makes sense when you have that extra time left. You can also push the pumpkins on the ground but again the time is running fast. Thanks for the feedback!
For the keybinding, I think what bothered me was the fact that the first action I had to do was right click to interact with an item, which is unusual, so it does not feel natural for me. I tried left click, e, shift, and then came back to the control instructions. A big part of UX is using the same rules as other games so the player does not feel lost, and there I think it can be considered as standard to use e or left click to interact with an object.