Blood and Bounty by Torami
The prairie stretches endlessly, painted in dust and blood. Out here, justice rides alone - and you’re the last to carry its star. As the frontier rots under the shadow of ruthless bandits and killers, your duty is clear: hunt them down and collect their bounties, no matter the odds.
Each fight unfolds in the open plains, where you’re outnumbered, outgunned, but never outsmarted. Every turn demands foresight; every move could decide your fate. Unlock new skills, plan your tactics carefully, and think for the future if you hope to bring them all to justice.
Out here, every bounty tells a story. And every story ends the same: with blood and bounty.
-----Controls-----
Movement: Select with [Mouse1] from Popup-HUD
Buttons: [Mouse1]
Known Issue: Purchased Skills are only applied on the following floor.
This game was made completely from scratch.
Everything, including graphics, music and code was made by us in these 3 days.
We are two 20 years old developers from Hungary. We have been a part of Ludum Dare’s community over 5 years now, which honestly is a little crazy. We are so happy that Mike was able to make LD58 work and we hope for him to find something stable soon.
About the game.
This is a turn-based strategy game set in the wild wild West. We worked day and night to make this happen and we hope you will enjoy playing it. We are very proud of this game, because this game has a bunch of content already and we almost couldn’t finish. We also have a lot of ideas for improvement and we will likely develop it further. We want to add a skill tree, more enemies and maybe even a boss fight somewhere down the line. We feel like finally after 5 years of Ludum Dare we finally have managed to stick to a somewhat viable scope for these 3 days, which is amazing as for the first time the last day is more polishing than developing last-minute must-add features haha. We hope you enjoy this little game at least as much as the fun we had creating it.
| HTML5 (web) | https://travila.itch.io/blood-and-bounty |
| Windows | https://travila.itch.io/blood-and-bounty |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/blood-and-bounty |
Ratings
| Overall | 180th | 3.818⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 173th | 3.703⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 376th | 3.274⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 664th | 3.097⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 269th | 3.953⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 144th | 3.797⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 486th | 2.759⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 299th | 3.71⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
The skill tree kinda confused me, because I couldn't see what I already purchased and how many levels are purchasable.
- Could be nice if the range was shown on board
- Took me a while to realize how using the gun and knife works
- I think I found a bug? Two enemies stood next to each other, and both showed exclamation marks, and when I planned to use the knife against one of them, the other's exclamation mark disappeared as if he'd cancel his attack for some reason? Anyhow I ended up dying.
- Not sure if it's intended, but the enemy AI could be a bit less random.
Yeah the enemy AI right now is almost fully random, meaning that they prioratize moving in a somewhat straight line but that is it for right now as for the 3 days we didn't have time to make the enemies any smarter but that is definitely something that's coming later down the line.
I thought the game was great! The world assembling looks really nice and the music was just 10/10.
It was a bit hard to find the skill tree and they didn't apply until next round. I think the screen could come up before leaving the map and forced the player to pick a skill before starting next level, that would solve all that. Some indicator on the unlocked skills would be good also, maybe just a thicker border around skills unlocked.
I think the range of the bandits and player would be nice to display on the grid, way just give tiles in sight a slight tint. It was a bit hard to keep track of player range since you upgraded it and also bandit range.
It felt a little bit I couldn't die unless I screwed up. Maybe you could up the urgency by have the bandit AI to always try to step one or two steps towards the player before wandering. That way the player would get encircled over time and would have to strategize a lot more.
Once again, great game!
The blood when they die kind of detracts from the beauty of the board since they just look very static compared to the rest. If you reduce the opacity on the blood pool, it might give a nice "ground-staining" effect and blend it in.
I didn't really feel very threatened by the enemies, they mostly just ran away from the VERY long arm of my revolver. Would have been interesting to have more HP for us and the enemies and having to exchange shots/stabs more back and forth.
I wish there was a way to cancel a single action, like if I click to move but decide not to, the only way out is to cancel and remake the moves. Right click may be a good solution for canceling.
I second the request for enemies to move together, at least for the ones that aren't attacking or something else of importance. I pushed 20 enemies and it became a real chore to wait for them all.
Saw the skill tree was last minute and the game definitely needed it, it adds a good sense of progression and power growth. That being said, it was very tricky to realize what had already been purchased. I had a similar crunch for the Request system in my game, it may be a little underbaked, but it's functional and that's what matters.
The character designs are so cute, I love it, and the level "generation" animation is peak. UI and font really fit the aesthetic. Great job.
Toward the end with 20+ enemies I actually got to make good use of the melee attack to stay out of danger. I played until I got properly ambushed.
As an audio guy, I really appreciate the clearly DIY nature of your score. You've got some technical issues with clipping/mix but I think it's so cool that you decided to record the sounds yourself and build a western soundtrack, rather than just relying on pre-made music.
Great job!
I did have a very hard time understanding the range of my pistol at the start - It might have been helpful to show its range on the grid when you hovered over it while it was disabled, so that it was clear why an enemy was or wasn't in range. I eventually figured it out, so it wasn't a huge deal, but I definitely played a few rounds knife-only because I just didn't understand how to use my gun.
Overall though, really well done, and a very cool game! Great job! :)
Multiple HP yes we have at first definitely planned on doing that, however after we realised just how long this whole thing would take even with the bandits being so simple we thought, we wouldn't complicate the game further, however yes it was definitely planned and if we decide to develop this further will definitely do it.
The right-click cancel and enemies moving together are both around one line to implement it so will definitely do those soon:))
And thank you so much for playing our game.
The gameplay is interesting, though I didn't immediately realize you can buy upgrades in the skill tab. Maybe if the shop was shown to me after the first level, I would've understood about the upgrades right away :)
It involves step and turn calculations and relies somewhat on luck, but the 'cannot be killed' attribute doesn't seem very effective! I can still be taken out by a single bullet, causing a restart.
Enemy AI, well, ... Is it just random? I only had them start shooting me once there were about fifteen of them on the map. Some more purposeful enemies would definitely improve the game a lot!
I did like the map generation though.
Graphics were very pleasant and soundtrack was very fitting.
It did get to be too easy once I was fully upgraded and did not know how many levels were left
The gameplay was pleasant too. It was very intuitive and there was lots of polishing. I found one little bug: sometimes the screen was too small for the level. I could not click the "move" icon, because it was out of bounds when I spawned in level 4. Luckaly there was a guy right next to me, so I could stabbystab him, thus moving one ~~square~~ bestagon and then I could reach the moveicon.
I had lots of fun playing your game!
The enemies sometimes would shuffle around a bit, they did not feel dangerous. That could have been a bit better I think :-) Is that random? Or do they use some algorithm?
Also, I did not really 'feel' the theme in this one. Sure: I collect bounty. But it was also used for upgrades. It felt like a normal game mechanic dressed up as collecting. Maybe each enemy could drop somekind of precious item. Like a golden tooth or a ring; thus collecting loot?
P.s. it took me a while until I found out about the skilltree :sweat_smile: Maybe the button could light up when a new skill is available?
Sorry, normally I have bullet points for my feedback. I like your game very much and I had fun playing it. These are some random thoughts that popped into my head.
The bestagon movement was hard to put together but definitely worth it:))
And yes the enemies now are almost completely random, the only thing is that they prioritize moving in a straight line however other than that, they just move randomly and shoot if they are able to. Our plan is to introduce more enemy types and 'smarter' enemies, however we sadly did not have time for it in the 3 days.
The theme, well yes, right now the game integrates the theme very mildly as yes the concept is to 'collect bounties'. The original plan and the plan moving forward is and was that one or a few enemies will have a star on them and the player only has to kill those bandits rather than all however the others are still there to make the game harder - also with this mechanic the idea was that the player only has a certain amount of ammo so able to fire each round maybe like twice or the number of bounty times. However sadly we did not have enough time to implement this either so for now and for LD we just stuck with needing to kill every enemy.
Thank you so much for your comment and for bringing up so many points.