Zark and Jones by beardywombat
Zark & Jones: The Forbidden Valley
You are an archaeologist on a dangerous expedition to collect valuable relics from an ancient lost civilization. Search for treasure and gather supplies by day, and defend your hoard by night. See how many artifacts you can collect … assuming you can survive the journey!
Description
Play as Zark, an intrepid archaeologist. Together with your trusty companion (and burden-carrier) Jones, you have five days to explore the legendary Forbidden Valley to uncover its secrets.
Each day, you can collect materials and find artifacts. At dusk, you must make camp and prepare defenses against the shadowy creatures who will come to steal your treasure. Beware, if they succeed in taking everything, they will try to carry off Jones! If you manage to fight them off, you will get a chance to examine what you collected during the day. You must reach the end of the Valley within five days, or your airship will depart and you will be lost forever!
How to play
[W,A,S,D]: To move
[Space]: to Attack
[E]: to pickup
[Q]: to place item
[1,2,3]: select towers
Credits
code: beardywombat
art: Khadia, BlushingCrow, beardywombat
writing: BlushingCrow, Khadia, beardywombat
sfx: BlushingCrow
music by Tom Hackl
Ratings
| Overall | 521th | 3.34⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 517th | 3.16⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 476th | 3.125⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 500th | 3.521⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 316th | 3.833⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 175th | 3.688⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 172th | 3.563⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 604th | 3.18⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
On a side note, the game doesn't seem to fit with Ludum Dare site's resolution, so the top part of your game doesn't show in the window (doesn't help that ludum doesn't allow full screen...), if you have a itch.io account, maybe put it there as well and add a link?
The defence phase is very under cooked, I did not get the resources hooked up or proper spawning.
As for the windowing issue, I am not sure what to change. Full screen seems to work though
It would be cool if there were more guidance because the game has a lot of mechanics, and goes between different modes very quickly. The day and night cycle is so fast that I just didn't feel that I have enough time to figure out things, to explore and collect stuff...
Also, it took me a lot of time to figure out that during the night, you actually have to move away from your camp site to progress. So I just stood clicking on those sheep for minutes. Maybe it's because day and dusk progress by timer but the night progresses by player action.
Anyway, that's a lot of criticism, but it comes from a desire to improve things! It's a fun game, great job!
By the way, I love the way you handled Jone following Zark's movements! It is really happy to see two cute characters jump together!
The animations and art is nice. I really like you added some bird noices, really brings the feeling we are in forest! There was a bug that i could spawn infinite fires during the build phase since i did place it before build phase. Also i failed to enter the night phase 2 times, the game just went black and nothing happening, i could still hear hitting sound if i click it and othre audio, weird.
The game is nice, I liked the audio voiceovers the most :D
I don't have enough time to build any defenses. Piggy also goes somewhere on her own sometimes)
Apologies for the bugs and the lack of time, as @prunus-padis said we tried to cram in a bit too much.
I also really like how the walking feels, really comfy! The ambient sounds and music are really vibing with me too! This is super on theme too!