Throw Hands!! by FootLettuce
The Demon Lord has learnt how to summon massive hordes! Now they face your fists!!
https://youtu.be/GGeUldMQyqY?si=sG-2Xbltm8YUyC9B
A complete playthrough takes about 6 minutes.
Move using WASD. Attack using IJKL. * *Avoid clicking the same attack button twice in a row! Keep the fists flowing!
| itch.io | https://kentonls.itch.io/throw-hands |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/throw-hands |
Ratings
| Given | 14🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
- The arms looked like they were pointing towards the character and not outwards
- sometimes there were no enemies so it was just waiting, and also at the end I wasn't sure if the game is over, but nothing spawned for a minute
- The spamming wasn't the most entertaining, it seemed like the attacks looked like they had high and low angles, maybe you could use that to make them effective only against some enemies, and maybe some cooldown on the spam, I would literally stop moving and double hand the attacks.
• There's no proper endgame screen due to time crunch. Rather, it stops spawning enemies after completing Wave 16. But I totally agree: there definitely should be some confirmation when the game finishes.
• For the spamming, you're throwing hands! Spam away! However, you have a good point. Originally, I wanted the player to be able to perform specific combos when the enemies flashed yellow, like Up-Right-Down-Down-Down. Get the combo right, and you could throw that enemy at the other ones. That would also have given the spamming a proper reason.
(Note to self: triple the rat and turkey spawn rates)
♩ ♬ "Let me break it down for you, Mark." ♫ ♪♪
** The horde starts dancing menacingly **
The crabs are strictly for Dwarf punching purposes... but I'll mail a few over to you for the rave!
Anyway, awesome game! I loved the Paper Mario-like style, and all the different enemies (and the dwarf) had such cool & varied designs! Seriously awesome graphics here. And the concept of a buff dwarf fighting turkeys to an epic soundtrack was really funny to me.
As others have said though, the gameplay was very spammy. Since enemies were practically neutralized the moment you attacked them once due to stun, the only real danger was from ranged enemies (who were actually pretty fun to avoid), and when you were swarmed from both sides, which mostly changed it to "spam AD in addition to IJKL". Nevertheless, the focus here was obviously the art & vibe anyway, and it wasn't too bad considering the length of the game.
Overall though, I still really enjoyed it! Amazing entry!
P.S.: Since you didn't make the music yourself, I recommend opting out of audio :)
I would have liked more feedback on hits like staggering enemies or when getting hit. This would add little bit of pauses to the game and make hits feel more impactful.
I agree with the IJKL spamming - I could do something like adding fatalities, where the order would matter, and maybe the player would be given some temporary immunity to do the exact input. That'd give better incentive for the buttons - I'll see what I can do. I will defs keep that in mind for when I polish this as a post Ludum Dare project!
Great visuals! Totally loved the sprites, the god rays (or whatever these are called?), the use of 2.5d, cozy particles flyin' around, plain superb graphics.
Spinning fingers on the ijkl turned it into a battle trance simulator for me, providing a legit hypnotic experience.
The guys above did mention most of my pop-in thoughts on the mechanics already.
About wave 7 is where I started mentally filling-in the kung-fu movie-style punch sounds.
But I'm only writing all this to get to the main point: **HAVING PAUSE in a time-critical-ish-game got me!** For some reason people rarely put it in their games.
9/10, -1 bc no winscreen leaves you all alone bringing dark spec-ops-the-line kinda vibes :^)
It will probably also help with people playing your game in general
Having combat sound effects and validation after you win (maybe even a full-screen splash art thing for the start, and like a true end or death end) are excellent ideas. Would be super cool too if the enemies made sound effects to respond to being punched as well, like a "GWAWCK" or something cool! My dwarf boi will be shredding through enemies as if he were playing death metal!
I am planning on making a post Ludum Dare version with more polish so I can put this in a portfolio. Your positivity is exactly what I needed, and I'll put your advice to good use. Thank you for the feedback!!
I didn't understand the IJKL keybinding though. It seemed to me like punches auto-targeted nearby enemies and directions didn't really matter. So that was a bit confusing. And my first tries, it felt like I ran out of punches and nothing happened even if I pressed the buttons. So unless I'm missing something with the IJKL part, could it not be replaced with a single attack button that just varies the punch directions? Or was I missing something in the strategy?
When I died on my good run, I also felt like I had a lot of health and I suddenly got stuck and then I was dead.
I think a lot could have been won by giving the enemies and character some slight animations if only a bit of stretching and compacting of the y-axis so they were digging the music. And build up to more and more feedback on hits and getting hit the further you get.
A quite small detail, during the start screen, it seems I have to click play with the mouse. And that's not great when the game is played just with keyboard and you want the player to try just one more and one more. If you want to be really evil you just have a countdown from 3 - 2 - 1 and restart from the beginning again.
I had fun playing though! So very good entry.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/OS07apkEWcc
the gameplay is a little simplistic but i think it gets the point across in terms of what the game could look like with more development. really great work on this compo entry!
p.s. i love the deer archer