The Witch's Dungeon by Wadlo

How to play:
Explore the dungeon you accidentally created and fight powerful creatures!
Then collect their essence to summon them as your allies!
Controls:
- WASD >> Move
- Mouse >> Aim
- LMB >> Shoot
- R >> Return to Witch's Hut
- Esc >> Quit application
| HTML5 (web) | https://wadlothewizard.itch.io/the-witchs-basement |
| GitHub repo | https://github.com/ironcutter24/ludum-dare-55 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-witchs-dungeon |
Ratings
| Overall | 712th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 573th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 469th | 3.477⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 241th | 4.091⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 801th | 3.386⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 617th | 3.114⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 414th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 612th | 3.524⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 19🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
Some feedback though:
1. The game seems to freeze up if I'm in the dungeon for more than a minute or two, which makes it hard to see if anything happens once I clear up the dungeon.
2. There should probably be some grace when you spawn into the dungeon so you don't land in and immediately die - this even happened to me on the witch stage on my second attempt which confused me as to why it appeared to skip a stage until I noticed the same happen when playing as a skeleton on a later attempt.
3. It would make things feel more impactful with a few sound effects, e.g. when your projectile goes out, when it hits, when you defeat an enemy. It actually feels kind of laggy because the animation feels disconnected from firing a projectile because there's no feedback.
A little bit confusing at the start but makes sense eventually.
Great art style, it is very unique.
I really liked the fact that you make the player enter the dungeon, just to fail. And then tutorialize the summoning. The graphics are very charming (pun intended) and cohesive! Overall a very pleasant experience! Great job!
The game crashed when I selected the Archer, but that's okay I still had fun playing it, well done! :smile:
Well done
(As someone with a non-QWERTY keyboard, I really appreciate you including controls with physical keys :pray: )
The graphics are very readable :thumbsup:
I feel it could benefit from some feedback like screen shaking or little bumbing (since you're on Godot, Tweens can easily add dynamism here an [humble example](https://github.com/furan0/ld55/blob/main/scenes/entities/Rig2D/Rig2D.gd#L75) if needed).
The gameplay is fun but would benefit a lot from some sound feedback when you hit enemies, plus maybe an explosion or something - just some more juice in general.
Freezing issues aside, this is one of the more complete games I've played this jam! The little intro that tells a story, a variety of monsters with increasing rarity and difficulty, (I'm assuming) randomly generated dungeons, a lot of nice touches! The main mechanic of playing as a summon that has to gather resources for better summons is quite fresh too, and it makes for a great casual loop.
I think the most obvious avenues for improvement are:
- better precision when shooting (currently there seem to be only a few angles you can shoot at, but there might be a difference in outcome based on your actual mouse position? It's rather confusing.)
- better enemy AI (they clump and get stuck around corners too easily)
- more sound effects (shooting / hitting, and maybe basic monster sounds would be doing a lot already)
Nonetheless, quite fun as it is, congrats!
On the more constructive criticism side, I think the game would benefit greatly by adding some "juiciness" to it which is quite quick to do but makes a huge difference in a jam (it is an actual game design term, google it if you don't know what it is, basically some sound and visual effects when you shoot / get hit in this case)
Great job!
I liked the core of this, it got hard a bit too fast though as I was immediately overwhelmed with hordes of enemies upon entering the dungeon. As others said, it freezes after a short while as well so it's hard to judge the complete package fairly.
But it's a great core and I hope you do some post-jam to clear up the bugs and jankiness and make it into a stable and fun little game,
Nice work!
However the different characters didn't feel very distinct. They all had the same attack just with slightly tweaked stats for the most part.
The projectile direction is a bit off from where I aim my mouse. This was especially frustrating when playing as the archer with his slower fire rate.
I cleared out a dungeon entirely and nothing happened. And I couldn't return to the hub since there was nothing left to kill me.
The game freezes after enough time playing. Here is what I saw in the console:

Now available in the git repo, binaries, and soon on the itch.io web version.
Go on the releases of our github and download 0.1.2 or more recent for your platform.