Nice game

was kind of interesting attacking on a rhythm. i think the leaderboards are broke, i had a score of 300ish and it didnt update. rip. overall was a fun game, the upgrades were nice.

Auto attack confuse me at first time, not bad!

@jcmonkey it's the first time I attempt to run the leaderboards. I got an OSS project and modified it a little bit to make it work on a linux box.. yesterday it had some glitches but then I fixed it. Would you mind to give it another try?

The leaderboards were broken for me too. I played the Windows version.

I liked how I could fall off the map to die. It's the quiet baddie. Good choice of power-ups. I could feel their impact, but they weren't overpowered. I would have liked some way to see how much health the plants had, to help strategize. It was a good challenge to keep the plants in order, since they kept spawning all over the map, so I think you struck a good balance between the map and enemy spawning. That, with the timing of the attacks, made for a fun experience.

Pretty cool! I've never actually played Vampire Survivors but even still it's not hard to figure out what game you're most inspired by here. 😅

Grabbed the first spot for now...


Actually went for another run and managed to improve it by a bit. Now I'm not even getting any powerups at all on level ups, even the crappy movement speed one is gone.


And yes, I am saying that movement speed is an absolute waste of a skill here. The increase is minimal and you're already moving way faster than is needed. I think bumping it much would even hinder as it'll make gathering orbs harder.

Would have wanted to see a bit broader variety of powerups overall. Constantly getting served the same three with magnet capping out fast and speed being quite useless left me feeling like there wasn't much of a choice at all. Splitting the scythe one to be maybe separate damage/area would have been nice and pretty easy to come up with more different ones too. Like attack speed and healing would have fit in absolutely fine here.

So all in all, after the first few damage upgrades, more damage is pointless (just for the area). Movement speed caps at what, four stacks? Meaning 20% increase which wasn't even noticeable. And finally yeah the magnet did kinda work but I don't think it really was that much worth it to go for instead of damage and hit area.

So bigger pool of upgrades and serving three of them randomly might have been fun and obviously way more replayable. Allowing player to stack up the skills more would have been cool too. Of course it becomes harder to balance, especially for online leaderboards, but letting the player feel like they're getting (too) powerful is always a good idea. And all you need to really do to balance that is to ramp up the difficulty even harder at some point.

The early game of the (repeated) runs was often very boring. It picks up pace rather slow and feels grindy to get going. And as there is no healing, even small mistakes stack up. The enemy attack was hard to figure out. Was that on timer like the player one? Player character attack being timed felt weird at first too but I got used to it. It kinda served as a neat rhythm to the game.

Looks like we make quite a few same design decisions as game devs. The bouncy/scaling UI buttons, wobbling texts, the sliding panels on scene changes and even how your leaderboards/name input is setup are all very very similar on how I like to do things. Few things I'd focus more if I were you are color choices, fonts and overall player feedback. You know, like particles, flashing effects and screen shake on hits on so on.

The player character health bar was weirdly in front of the upgrade choice buttons...


Your audio work could have used some more love too. The music was kinda quiet and the sound effects were few and monotonous. Some variety to em would have been nice. And the swing sound started clipping like mad on the "end game" where you were killing dozens of enemies with a single swing.

Not a huge fan of the voxel art style either but that's just me and my taste. A better color palette would have helped here too. Now it looked too muddy and dark to me.

Oh yeah, almost forgot! You should usually add arrow keys too as alternative controls for WASD. And just requiring to use mouse for the upgrade picks while the whole game otherwise was just keys wasn't great either.

But yeah, good job! Fun game. 👍

@antti-haavikko thanks so much for the super detailed review :smile:

> Pretty cool! I’ve never actually played Vampire Survivors but even still it’s not hard to figure out what game you’re most inspired by here.

You can definitely tell that I've been playing Vampire Survivors way too much in the past few days :wink:
I actually didn't plan to join this compo as I was not prepared and there was the Christmas break with friends and family. But in the end I still wanted to give it a try and going with a mechanic that I knew made sense to me.

>Actually went for another run and managed to improve it by a bit. Now I’m not even getting any powerups at all on level ups, even the crappy movement speed one is gone.

Yes, I only added a limited number of upgrades as I did not want to get completely out of hand. I should have added more types of power-ups but I just didn't have time.

>So bigger pool of upgrades and serving three of them randomly might have been fun and obviously way more replayable. Allowing player to stack up the skills more would have been cool too. Of course it becomes harder to balance, especially for online leaderboards, but letting the player feel like they’re getting (too) powerful is always a good idea. And all you need to really do to balance that is to ramp up the difficulty even harder at some point.

I totally agree here. But the time it takes to balance many different kind of upgrades would have just been too much given the time constraint (and I didn't want to go for the jam as I couldn't spend time during working days, anyway).

>The enemy attack was hard to figure out. Was that on timer like the player one?

Yes that's on a timer, too. It's not obvious and I couldn't come up with a good way to communicate it to the player without cluttering the screen.

>Looks like we make quite a few same design decisions as game devs. The bouncy/scaling UI buttons, wobbling texts, the sliding panels on scene changes and even how your leaderboards/name input is setup are all very very similar on how I like to do things.

That's because I like how you do those things and I literally copied your style there. It was a time-saver. I saw that you have a starter kit on github and I used as much as possible those elements. I used to rely on the animation curves but it takes much more time than just slapping some code on top of an object.
BTW I usually go with my own mostly-2D C engine but this time I went with Unity as I was really focusing on getting the game done in a super small amount of time. With my own engine I usually end up working on the engine as well as the game.. which is never a good choice for jams :smile:

>ew things I’d focus more if I were you are color choices, fonts and overall player feedback. You know, like particles, flashing effects and screen shake on hits on so on.

Yes, I completely overlooked that... newbie error indeed!

>The player character health bar was weirdly in front of the upgrade choice buttons…

Wrong sorting layer yeah, for some reason I didn't notice it, thanks for pointing it out.

>The music was kinda quiet and the sound effects were few and monotonous. Some variety to em would have been nice. And the swing sound started clipping like mad on the “end game” where you were killing dozens of enemies with a single swing.

The background music was quiet on purpose. I was planning to have a panel to setup music and sfx levels but it didn't fit. I also had sfx variations but I have been fighting with my audio engine which is capable of playing more than one clip per sfx and also apply small pitch variations but it was bugging out.

>You should usually add arrow keys too as alternative controls for WASD. And just requiring to use mouse for the upgrade picks while the whole game otherwise was just keys wasn’t great either.

Added to the list of things to keep in mind for the next time.

Haha, yeah guess that explains why there were that many same design choices 😆

Good job! Inspiration is obvious, but it works and it is fun. I am not a big fan of the camera angle, feels a bit different to gauge distance to things, and gives you a real disadvantage going downwards, as you can't see far in that direction. Could also maybe zoom out a bit.

@sharploaded thanks for the feedback. Yeah the camera angle doesn't really help in gauging the distance, that's true. I thought about going with a "from the top" perspective but in the end I didn't really like it as it was making everything way too flat.

very addictive! ^^ my score \o/ lets goo!


Fun little game. I opted to max out pick range first and then went with full damage, the base movement speed felt good enough for a while. I did fall off the map once or twice heh. The crops sometimes would stack up on each other but that was fine because it meant more points when my ability went off. I was a little confused by the attacking at first but I quickly realized it was attacking for me and I got it from there.

cool game. Also, I liked the idea for the leaderboards for the Ludum Dare! I'll also add them to my next jam game :D

dommage upgrade wasn't supper usefull since blue ennemy died in one shot after one or two upgrade ! Area being tied to it is weird to. Speed was already extremely fast making me feel like it didn't needed it

My high score wasn't displayed in the Highscore leaderboard, but it doesn't really matter. What matter is that I had some fun :)

@tanis cute little game. Music and models are well made. Very enjoyable :v:

Fun to play and great replayability. Great potential for a roguelike survive game!

I liked the mechanics of this game. Especially the auto-attack was nice. Some more variation with the enemies and some polish on the sound & gfx and this would be something I could play and enjoy for quite some time. Well done!

Awesome survivor style game! The mechanic of needing to be close enough to damage the enemies without being too close to get hit is great. I did manage to find a small issue where you can fall partially off the map, but move towards the wall, and you'll stop falling down (you can basically farm score without getting hit). Either way a great compo game, and very impressive for being made in 48 hours!

Neat game. Well done implementing a scoreboard!

> My high score wasn’t displayed in the Highscore leaderboard, but it doesn’t really matter. What matter is that I had some fun :)

@lex were you playing the Windows desktop build?

> I did manage to find a small issue where you can fall partially off the map, but move towards the wall, and you’ll stop falling down (you can basically farm score without getting hit)

@iminsoftware thanks for spotting this. Initially I was thinking of constraining the player to the walkable area and have some surrounding walls to show that you cannot fall down. But, as usual, I went for a programmatic level generation and it would have required some more time to get that done correctly... and I just didn't have time. So be it... let the player fall off :smile:
And in the end the level generation is pretty much useless as I am not letting you move to a different level.. d'oh!

@tanis Tried on both Web and Windows builds.

Solid game! I would've liked to have seen my own score on the game over screen because I wasn't paying attention to it during the game (just thinking about surviving). The attack every second-ish made for an interesting take on the VS-like game, and you did a great job getting a game from start to finish in the time allotted

Cool take on vampire survivors. Love that you made it in 3D which gives it a new angle already. Would love to see you keep working on it to get more upgrades, enemies, etc. etc! Keep it up!

Cool! Really, I can only play more than 100! :smirk:

Cool game, although I'm not a fan of vampire survivor logic, I recognize it's well done. I reached level 6, nice upgrades!
I love the flowers and their "ground" associated.
Well done!

I finally manage to test you game ;) well done ;)

Fun little bullet heaven with a solid core. The main thing that felt was missing was more variety in the weapons / upgrades as it tended to just become doing the same things over and over but the little polish details such as the wavy text and transitions between scenes were great

Good job with a 3d auto-fighter game. I like the idea and think you can expand it. I felt like the character moved to quick at the beginning and you really didn't need to level up movement.