Graphics and controls were amazing and felt really fluid.
I liked the lighting effects, really good art style!

Really liked the game, the lag when fighting near the end made things a little difficult and those little dudes were by far the hardest enemy to deal with. I'm not sure if you win by killing the King skeleton at the end or not since I couldn't do it but I loved how the fighting evolved with the combo-style attacks once you opened enough graves (?) or however it unlocked. Really cool concept!

Thank you both for playing and your kind words! I'll check out your games after I get some sleep : )

@exley Thanks man, much apricated! I used/learned the URP (Universal Render Pipeline) in unity with a couple custom shaders to get those lighting effects. I probably wasted 4ish hours doing things the wrong way but now that I know how to use URP I'm 100% going to be building with it in the future!

@purebe *There is a sudo-combo system!!!* (with a subtle audio cue) that gets triggered when you hit skeletons. Hitting a skeleton also gives a few invincibility frames. I didn't have time to make different animations for the attacks so I'm really happy someone noticed!

Absolutely one of the best ones I've seen in LD48. The visuals are amazing and the whole game feels very smooth. If anything, I find the fight a bit difficult, life goes down too quickly. I truly enjoyed playing it so I've been trying it for quite a while, but I wasn't able to get to the end of it. Still, amazing work.

@lajbert Thank you that means a lot; it's great to hear people are liking the game! You're right about the difficulty, it could use some toning down -- the skeletons with ranged attacks were all implemented in the last 2 hours so their difficulty is as about well designed as my codebase : )

Gonna go check out your game now.

Really solid entry!

The shadows and lighting really brought out the spooky skeleton vibes. I especially liked the bones that get exposed when you dig up a coffin, as well as the shovel animation.

The combat is pretty simple, but gratifying. There are occasional moments that feel bad (like hitting an enemy in a corner, or into a gravestone, where they aren't knocked back and therefore attack you right away), but for the most part it's really satisfying. It would also be nice if there was an animation for getting hurt (like your character flashing briefly).

The sound effects fit the game really well.

I agree that later in the game the difficulty increases pretty steeply, especially since your shovel is the best way to avoid projectiles and it has a cooldown. I got $1132.

What a fantastic entry! I love the mood of the game. The art is just amazing. Everything fits so well together. For some reason I couldn't get over how cool it was that you went from the title screen straight into game play. I thought that was really neat. You did a fantastic job!

Solid entry. Some cool particle effects and just solid visuals all round and the sound is no slouch either. It is a bit tricky getting your attacks to land since they move you so far but that is a plus in my book since it takes a bit to master.

I think a little more feedback in the combat system would have gone a long way, especially in getting the hang of it quicker. The graphics were great! The great pixel art and superb lighting really make a cohesive and effective aesthetic.

The double mechanic was really creative and interesting, using the shovel to attack and also dig. On certain point you could do both and hitting the enemy would reset the cooldown for the attack putting you in a sort of combo situation. When the character digs and it moves the sprite sometimes the collision is not detected and you can clip out of bounds by attacking the walls, using a different type of translation such as adding velocity instead of translating the sprite might solve the issue and not teleport inside the colliders. Fun time digging through some skelly mens. <3

Thank you all so much for the feedback!

@jeremy-ryan I really appricate the kind word and advice. I will 100% make the character flash on taking damage in my next game. Maybe I should make a toolkit to do that kind of stuff...

@breadstix I tend to have the title go straight into gameplay for LD games to save some time but I actually didn't intend to for this jam. My main scene is actually called "Menu" but as time got tight I just built everything directly into it.

@lrl64 I'm glad you liked it - I spent so much time making weird sounds and sampling shovel noises! You're right about the attacks; after the jam I realized the hitbox has a tiny dead zone near the player.

@dirkinz For sure - next jam if I have a combat system I'm gonna devote more time to giving the player feedback and make sure that missed attacks are MUCH less punishing.

@chrisap Thanks for playing it on stream! I wonder how many other people noticed that bug, I found it after the first 24 hours but had SOOOO much left to code I decided to ignore it, probably not the best move in hindsight.

This was really fun! The combat took some time to get used to, but once I got the hang of it landing the combos was super satisfying. I liked all the nice visual touches like the destructible tomb stones and the human hearts for your health. I do think it would be nice if your score stayed on screen for a bit longer after you die, because it's hard to pay attention to it during combat and then once I've died I can no longer see how well I did. Awesome work!

Really atmospheric and has a beautifully done aesthetic. That shovel particle effect is incredible. I'm honestly so impressed with how you managed to realize so clearly a vision in compo. The SFX have that PS1 vibe which actually really compliment the horror. I'd only suggest you add a better visual indication of both invincibility frames and when you take damage (like for example, flashing the death screen visual but at a lower transparency.) Well done!

A fun entry, and the glowy pixel art aesthetic is really nice!

I really appreciated how visceral the animations and particle systems were. Great feel! I didn't get a sense of "going deeper" as such, but I'm not sure if I missed some gameplay elements. Thanks for the game!

Hey played on stream here's the time stamped video:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003143985?t=5h11m4s

Absolutely loved the visuals. Gameplay was fun too! More in our video.

This a very good entry there! nice graphics and audio even if the sound was a kinda low for me. The gameplay feel very smooth in hand. Well done!

Really nice entry, fun and smooth to play, love the big skeletons design, great job.

Graphics are lovely! It's dark and hard to see, I assume that's on purpose =P Gameplay definitely punishes you for mistakes, takes some practice. I like the sort of rhythm part of it. Audio, especially the death sound effects, is nasty, in a good way.

(Plus, the Linux build works! =D)

Great fun! Super neat idea, movement was pretty smooth, art looked amazing, and the sounds created a good atmosphere!

The technical visual effects in this are INSANELY GOOD for compo. The lighting, shadows, particle effects, glowing things, it all looked really cool. The WASD controls alongside just having a dash attack caused me to become disoriented at times. The controls were responsive, but it still felt like I lost control multiple times when playing. I wasn't able to kill too many monsters because the strategy to do that just didn't seem to work for me, I kept getting hurt by foes that I failed to shake off. Maybe also consider limiting the range of the boss projectiles to allow for an attack and retreat strategy. Still it shows a lot of potential and depth that I even had fun trying many times to get as far as I can in the combat. Thank you for the game.

This game is great fun. The smear animation on the shovel is VERY satisfying. Audio is great. The pixel art enemies are just gory enough that to keep the tension high. Great Entry!! Thank you for bringing by my stream. Sorry my setup was a little underpowered to get the full experience.
Here's a link to the VOD:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003360373?t=3h22m23s

Thanks for bringing your game by my stream for playtesting! If you’d like to revisit the play and commentary you can view the highlight at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1006134876

Really impressed by how much you were able to do by yourself!! It was a bit confusing at first to know where to dig (even with the glowing letters, sorry I'm a bit slow), but the second run was a lot better =) I like the tumbleweed looking blasts haha.

Nice graphics and "dark/fluorescent" theme.

Combats seem difficult, because your attack makes you rush, but on a too long distance in my opinion. I was always afraid of ending behind the monsters after a rush, so continuously rushing-backing-rushing-backing etc.

I too noticed the bug found by @chrisap , but it is not too annoying.

It was a great moment of fun, but I did not see any more points in the game after digging and killing skeletons. So, I may not have reached the end of it.

The score should not be named as dollars. I thought I could spend them on a shop or whatever, but it looks like there is nothing of that.

Conventionnally, in video games :

- money (dollars or other) is expected to have an interest in the game, to spend them somewhere
- XP is expected to have an interest too, to gain levels and increase any stats
- score/points is not expected to have an interest, it is just to compare you with the other players.

i liked how you went outside the box with this game, the controls are a little tricky and dont always follow the mouse when you are attacking, maybe i was in a combo though

Really cool style the particles was great and the game was fun I kept trying again and again! The only problem I had was trying to kill those lil skeletons they would go inside you and make it hard to hit them, but it was really really satisfying when you could get a long combo going >:) I wish you could use the graves to also chain combos too!

This one has a pretty nice combat mechanic! The particles and lighting was very pretty looking. It had a few bugs, but it was still a cool game!

Here's where I played it on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1020802507 starting at about 00:40:00ish.