Exorcist Patrol by PeachTreeOath




Description
Send in the Exorcist Patrol! Rid houses of pesky ghosts and power up after each capture. Play with different spell sequences to maximize all your attacks.
How to Play
- Drag scrolls/cards onto a character's timeline.
- Your character will cast a scroll as long as the blocks don't overlap.
- Do enough damage by the end 10 secs to expel the ghost.
- If you don't do enough damage, everything will reset. Try out different combinations and timings!
Dev Notes
It's funny how every jam you go "this time I'll take it easy" and you keep the scope low. Yet somehow you end up filling up that timeframe anyways and push it to the last minute.
For this one we managed to squeeze in sound, animations, and a fancy-ish UI. Hope to keep pushing efficiency each jam and keep cramming more stuff in!
Music credits go to: https://soundcloud.com/dunkelbunt/twodancingcranes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PizU4IZXh4
| Link | https://peachtreeoath.itch.io/exorcist-patrol |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/exorcist-patrol |
Ratings
| Overall | 26th | 4.288⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 34th | 4.215⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 5th | 4.532⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 56th | 4.314⭐ | 80🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 177th | 4.222⭐ | 81🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 347th | 3.279⭐ | 70🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 213th | 3.867⭐ | 77🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 65🗳️ | 127🗨️ |
The art is great, and lots of nice little visual candy/animation elements to boot. I want to add some critical feedback but other than *'it ends too soon'* I am coming up empty. Great job!
Very good entry!
The thought and design that went into this is pretty astounding. At first, I thought it was just about placing attacks on a timeline and seeing how much combo damage I could do. However, I also had to worry about where the ghost was going to be at a certain point in time based off of my attacks. Now you have me thinking about time and space. Damn! I feel like I was playing 4D chess and winning.
If I were to describe this game it's a mix of old school Final Fantasy, a fighting game, and being a video editor.
Also big ups to the art in the game. All of it looked great! The attack cards and the ghost death were my favorites.

I ended up just picking "card game" even though it hardly fits. And thanks, we really tried to focus on more polish this time so @evedoll put in some work learning animations.
At the beginning I wasn't quite sure how it all worked, but once can quickly figure things out. It was a really unique idea and I think it works brilliantly. I lucked out on a very powerful combination of the first three spells eventually that carried me through a few levels. Reordering spells on a timeline was super interesting. It's always great when simple mechanics create meaningful and thoughtful strategy that keeps one's brain engaged (and addicted :D)
I really have nothing bad to say about this game - except that I want more of it!
Cheers @evedoll.
The art, the mechanics, the music, the layout, THE CHALLENGE.
Everything about this was spot on, aside from the point that it was too short!
Which.......... has to happen during a game jam. ;-; Curse you 72 hour limit!
I honestly don't have any room for growth comment to give, the game was a perfectly enjoyable game, which is just so bizarre to be able to manage in the length of a game jam. Your quality control was so on point.
Very well done!
very funny and art and music made me really feel like that i am in a magic fight!
The gameplay is really a very good idea!
(jus one note: maybe our characters become stronger too fast , because i won all my battle first try , execpt for the red panda)
Dragging and twisting around spells on timeline is quite fun to play with - feels like I'm actually working on a music clip in FLStudio. Maybe It can add some dynamic music generating feature e.g. each spell actually represent a virtual instrument and the player's decision will compose a interactive music in the end, it will be even cooler! Love this game overall!
The art is so cute and the music really complements the spooky yet funny and chaotic vibe so well! The game is really cohesive and well polished :)
Some of the effects were a bit tricky to use in a good way; needing to think about cast order and location made selection a lot more interesting. I missed a way to preview or understand cards before selecting them, but managed to make it work anyway. Boulder was a bit tricky though since I tried to use it after squirrel and it wouldn't hit; but I like that I had to reshuffle my combo to fit it in instead of just constantly adding stuff to the end.
Realizing this would be a nightmare to implement inside LD: it would have been nice to have a timeline I could scrub through to better understand where I need to tweak my setup; sometimes it wasn't clear if something hit or not in the chaos.
The art was comfy and the music was a bop. Everything worked as expected and cleared my house of ghosts.
Nice work!
Agreed with the timeline actually. Even something like snapping features would've been nice, but since they were just sprites, I didn't have the time to figure out all the nice math on scaling and transforms in time. A preview scrub would be VERY interesting to try to code :thinking: :thinking:
Nits: switching spells during play sometimes broke the sequence for 1-2 runs, but after that everything went smoothly.
It took me a short amount of time to fully understand what my goal was, that the spells were going to move the ghosts in a specific pattern and the spells would always cast in the same location and my timing adjustments were to control the space. Did you have any trouble making the bouncing deterministic so that it always took the same path with the same inputs? It seems like the idea would have failed if you didn't make that happen, so nice job there.
Once the mechanics clicked in my head though, there was an audible "oohhhh okaaayyy!" It became so much fun that after beating it, I went back through another time to try to make even better combos. I started playing my own meta game to see how I could arrange the spells to maximize all of their hits and it just got so satisfying. How many games do we play where you beat a level, get offered to continue onto the next level, and instead say "nah I wanna stay here and keep watching that replay."
Controls were super smooth too, it was a joy to place spells on the timeline and then be able to slide them by fractions of a second.

Love the gif. IMO lots of speed/bounces + everything landing makes for the most aesthetic ones! Thanks for the writeup.
I liked the art style used for the graphics, and the way the game is presented. Low key really liked how the game itself embedded on the itch page blended very well since the game's background and the itch page background are the same. Elevated the experience.
Solid entry.
All around a really enjoyable experience, GREAT job!
I found the game well polished, and I appreciated the care in the aesthetics as well - great graphics and character design, well written and original music. Honestly, at first music buffled me a bit (not the quality, but rather the genre choice), but the more I was progressing into the game the more it was clear to me what you were after. So, bonus points for the experimentation.
This game went straight up into the list of games I want to master before the jam ends, great job!
For game mastery, I've been pretty impressed at the challenges players are setting up for themselves so there is good opportunities there. Here, someone unleashes a boulder as the 1st attack, but it LANDS as the last attack. He does it by bouncing the panda around in crazy ways dodging the boulder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRCx_JKFm2c
I hope you decide to take this into a full build because I would love to play it. Some thoughts on how to potentially elevate some concepts you have here:
- At the moment there's no punishment for getting things wrong and just gives you a simple reset. I like the low-stress of this but it does take away from the danger of the situation. Feels like I'm just beating the poor things up. Having the enemies fight back seems like a natural next step.
- I like the idea of time being able to pause and rewind rather than just play on a loop. The constant playing of the game doesn't really give me any additional information and if anything just kind of distracts from the task of putting items on the timeline. Being able to place my cards and press play to see what happens can also have a nice surprise element to it - I've just played a new card and I don't get to see it in action until I've put everything down and just get to find out.
Overall I really dig this concept and the art is adorable. I love the UI design and it feels super natural to someone like me that works in timeline-based video and animation software all the time, though I would suggest testing the game with people who have no experience in those kinds of tools to see how well that translates for them.
Great work to you both!
Although it would have been cool if the enemies could attack back so that there was some sort of threat or motivation to move quickly. Also I think the aesthetic could have gained some major benefits from some frame by frame animations for the main characters and the enemies.
Great job, guys!!
I can envision how much potential this timeline system could have.
It's really fun to find the optimal solution over and over again, but the loop has to wait 10s after each start before starting a new test. Or a new round would start before I finished adjusting the timeline.
I know this is crucial to the theme, maybe it could be optimized in a post-game jam version? Add a pause or fast forward or something.
Anyway, this is really one of the best games I've played this game jam, congratulations!
My god finally I found a working solution for the redpanda, took me ages!! Anyway, this was suuuper fun to play, trying to balance time, damages and positionning was challenging (especially on the panda) but very satisfying ! Like the art (and music even if you didnt do it yourself) ! Well played, as others said, I would probably play a longer game on this concept !
I found it really easy and fun to learn what the game even was. (I skipped reading the page until after playing, which I generally like to do). The game is pretty intuitive, but more importantly it's REALLY easy to discover through experimentation. The tweakable-loop core model was very effective at letting me learn the UI, mechanics, timing, etc. Great job of uncovering that and NOT getting in the way of the goodness. Even having a "restart" button press in between iterations would have gotten in the way big time, I think.
The UI letting me pull items out of the timeline and into a card was also nice. Especially with vortex, I sometimes needed to experiment with an effect alone to test its behavior.
The boss also did a good job of forcing me to engage with the game at a deeper level. I had mostly gotten through the earlier enemies by leaving my existing loop in place and just slightly tweaking it. But he forced me to clear decks, set up some early hits, carefully note his position at certain moments on the timeline (thank you, sweep-line UI) to line up the subsequent chain of hits.
I had to go back and play again and try out a different set of cards, and I was a lot more able to maximize my attacks the second time around, from what I had learned in that boss battle. In fact, I had set things up so well on my second run that the boss insta-died on the first loop!
Here is my final setup:

Really nice entry, well done!
Cute art style as always! I would have liked some more feedback in the sprite of the ghosts when they are being hit, like a short change in color.
I liked that I could watch a "replay" of the level, to see what actually had happened, or continue playing around with the level, trying new combinations.
It was very fun to play. I played twice, and both times the Lucky Red Panda was quite hard to beat! The second time I had this solution, but it didn't work all the time:

Awesome game! :heart:
First off the UI design is just beautiful! Having two character timelines with the symbols instantly recognizable as the two characters was super easy to understand (also due to the great character designs + the color coding!). The background/notch colors being inverted on them looks really nice and coherent. Dragging cards into the timeline is snappy and I like how you can drag them back out to read more about them. And finally having the match as a timer and lighting up at the end, just gorgeous!
Gameplay itself is great, the spells feel different and it's fun to try to figure out combinations of them. All the spells feel very tactile and physical and seeing them bounce the enemy around just feels good from a gameplay perspective. (also I like how some of the spells are possibly references to other games, Magic Missile from D&D, Landslide / Diamond Dust from FF).
In general the art also looks great, love the varied boss designs and the cover art is cute as heck. I don't think I have any constructive feedback, I could just see this being expanded with more varied bosses from a gameplay standpoint (like shielded from a direction, doing counter-attacks, etc), but the core works extremely well, great work!
I played through twice as the first time I wasn't as aware of the combo system and my spell choices weren't that great, and it did feel a little easy on the second time through, definitely could have done with another healthier enemy type after the Red Panda.
Was a really cool take on the theme though, I feel like with a time centric theme such as this there'll be a lot of entries centering around timing and more frenetic gameplay, so it's great to see a more chill, strategic entry.
Great work!
A little bit of feedback is that the third and fourth level went by super quick for me because I just defeated the ghost using the timeline from the previous ghost. This is not really a problem, but the ghost were defeated so fast that I could not even try the new spells I chose just before.
Another thing which confused me in the beginning was what the difference was between the red and white timelines was. Eventually I figured it out though :)
The last ghost was quite a challenge, and I just barely defeated it with the spells I had. I really appreciate the challenge for the last boss, but I wonder if that boss could be impossible if you chose your spells pourly? Or perhaps you did some trickery where the health is adjusted based on the spells you have? I am curious if there is any safety mechanism there.
Anyway, amazingly done as always! I really enjoyed this one ^_^
I THINK there are some spell combos that might be impossible to beat the game with. A lot of the easy-to-hit-with spells are weaker so picking too many of those might make it mathematically impossible. With that said, I've had a lot of players show me how to beat the game in crazy ways, including using only ONE caster (all spells on 1 bar), so I'm not sure!
What a small cool entry! I love it so much actually playing with timeline etc. The only problem is probably a low predictability, but anyway it was very fun to play in it!
I do wish the cards had some sort of description to them in the selection menu, so I could more thoughtfully spec my build to accommodate my current strategy, but that's really the only complaint I have about this one. It was super fun to experiment around with and equally satisfying to pull off a combo that hits everything just right. :ok_hand:
Very creative, as always. :slight_smile: Nice job!