GHST-PRTCL by LoHii
GOAL
Can you survive the onslaught of endless horde of ghosts? Eliminate a specific combination of ghosts every 10 seconds to keep playing. You must eliminate the combo ghosts in order, from left to right, without touching or hitting any other ghosts in between. Otherwise, your combo will reset. To eliminate ghosts, swat them with your Cyber Broom, run against them, dive kick on them or vaporize them with your Cyber Blast.
CONTROLS
Movement – WASD
Jump and Double Jump – Space (Hold OK)
Attack with Cyber Broom – Left-click
Cyber Blast – Right-click
Divekick – S (in air)
Wallclimb – Hold A (left wall), Hold D (right wall), Hold Space (ceiling)
TIPS
Try cleaning the arena a bit before eliminating combo ghosts. This makes it easier to navigate the arena.
Use Cyber Blast to clear the way. Eliminating ghosts with these abilities won’t reset your combo. It does have a cooldown though, so be careful!
Use Double Jump, Wall Climb to navigate to hard-to-reach ghosts.
You can collect your combo with Divekick, and it doesn't reset your combo either!


Ratings
| Overall | 834th | 3.261⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 844th | 3.087⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 797th | 3.087⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 698th | 3.543⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 741th | 3.391⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 262th | 3.682⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 718th | 3.304⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
I think it would be nice if the difficulty scaled up a bit harder once you get into double digits, but regardless I had a lot of fun with this one. I even almost got the high score at the time of writing this. 😁
I had the game freeze a few times on startup. I'm not quite sure how to reproduce it, but I think it was related to the fact that I hadn't focused the game window when it was starting up. 🤷♂️
Difficulty is an aspect we usually have trouble nailing down. Usually we make our jam games too hard, so this time I think we consciously erred on the other side of the spectrum.
Thanks for the heads up about the freezing. I think it might not actually be freezing, but the name screen is actually an input field that shouldn't be able to be deselected. Not focusing might do the trick. So if it happens for anyone else, try clicking the text with your mouse to see if that does the trick.
I especially liked the soundscape with the effect in the beginning and the fitting music.
Btw, I tried playing the game once in full-screen mode on an ultra-wide monitor and that hid the combo line from the bottom, making things even more challenging to say the least...
- WASD, spacebar, and mouse: good simple controls. Lots of games here require a wall of text to explain their mechanics, it's better that you kept yours simple.
- Bright characters and obstacles on a flat black background is actually very appealing. It reminds me of classic arcade games.
- ... but it looks like the main character deviates from that? I think the player should also be monochromatic, or maybe with two solid colors, but should at least have a design sytle consistent with the rest of the game
Impressions from playing the game:
- Well, it said "Write your name", and didn't allow me to. I had to restart.
- The left-stick broom attack is a bit weird. It took me a moment to notice that it goes the direction of the mouse. having your attack change direction because you ran past your cursor (which happens a lot in a game requiring you to run quickly around the whole screen) isn't very intuitive.
- Seems the attack isn't even really needed because you can just touch the ghosts? I abandoned it entirely on my third play.
- Never got a chance to use the right-click attack, I'm not even sure it's real.
- The randomly spawning ghosts makes it seem more like luck than skill. Sometimes they spawn in a place that makes it literally impossible to win, A few times I had the wrong ghost spawn directly in my path as I was falling and there was nothing I could do about it.
- A little more player bias would make it fun. I say you should grid-arrange spawn-points on the level, never spawn an ghost close to the player, unless it's the next ghost they need, and increase the chances as the time is lower
- The controls are actually a bit too loose. Immediate acceleration/deceleration (like you see in classic MegaMan) would be much better suited for a game that requires such speedy precision.
- Some of the mechanics seemed accidental, like the wall-climbing. I was also able to ceiling-climb.
- ghosts you need for the combo should spawn at the beginning to enhance fairness
- maybe there souldn't be a respawn of ghosts mid-trun, because it shrinks player time to about 5 seconds instead of 10 sec
- particle effects when jumping/landing would probably improve game feel
I'm not really into highscore games at all, nor anything competitive but I had quite some fun with it as visuals and "rules of the game" were easy to understand and allowed for a quick entry.
Movement feels good and bgm fits well. Good job. Nice entry.