Game of the Name by kaliuresis
True names have power. The resonances of a name with the words around it define the shape and abilities of ones being.
Game of the Name is an auto-battler where you summon forth creatures to fight an eldritch entity. The names of these creatures are systematically connected to their stats and abilities. For example "walter" has an elemental affinity with "water".
Each creature has two abilities that can be combined with the abilities of up to 4 other teammates to create countless combinations.
Controls
Use the arrow keys to or click on the circles to select which circle to summon in. Type names and hit enter to summon, summoning the boss in the center will begin the fight and prevent further summoning until the battle is completed. You can hover over the names of abilities for a tooltip with their description.
Number keys 123 for 1x, 2x, and 4x playback speed, respectively
Notes on what I've learned (feel free to ignore this if you're just playing the game)
- The game is mostly custom C++ with a few libraries to do small isolated tasks. This was my first game trying out Vulkan for rendering. It actually wasn't as bad as I was expecting based on how scary some people make Vulkan sound. Sure it's a lot of code compared to OpenGL, but most of that code is simple data specification that can be copy pasted and slightly tweaked to do different things. Once I have it better set up I don't see it being any harder than OpenGL, and the better support with gpu debugging tools probably ends up net positive for ease of use.
- This time I decide from the start to ignore music entirely. It usually takes me a long time to make something that ends up not very good. It's a fun learning process but not worth the time with only 48 hours.
- The generation based on names uses a Levenshtein distance calculation and a thesaurus to score a "resonance" between a name and a concept. Game design wise it's likely just a gimmick, but it was a fun experiment anyway. It offers somewhere between complete RNG and full control over stats, but I'm not sure if the control you have is legible enough to not just feel like RNG. About what I expected but I liked the thematic parts of the idea with summoning based on True Names.
- The auto-battler part of the game is a tried and true mechanic from other games, and definitely could lead to some fun gameplay with a bit more time in the oven. I had a lot of fun thinking of different abilities that can interact with each other, although I was only able to implement a few. This has planted the seeds in my head to make another auto-battler.
| Link | https://github.com/kylerNat/ld55 |
| Link | https://kaliuresis.itch.io/game-of-the-name |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/name-is-the-game |
Ratings
| Overall | 158th | 3.552⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 194th | 3.328⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 15th | 4.224⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 18th | 4.379⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 217th | 3.25⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 238th | 2.75⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 153th | 3⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 155th | 3.407⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 43🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
Just entering names of your friends and something for the eldritch monsters and seeing which of your friends is truly worth his salt during a fight with cthulhu was hilarious. Reminds me of these popular hunger games simulator games that were going around a while back, in that it has that quality where you want to share around screenshots of it to your friends to show them proof that they would get oneshotted against [wingdings name here]. Had a great time with this, I went multiple rounds until I found my winning team. Super cool sophisticated system you made here with the name distance and the powers too, again, I think it's really an impressive take on the theme. Had a great time with this game, awesome job!
I like how robust the system you designed is; it's a very cool sandbox to experiment in. it is a familiar but unexpected take on the theme, and makes for a wicked smart game. All of the UI is clean and effective, and really helps to express how much work you've put in beneath the hood.
That being said, I never came remotely close to beating the eldritch being. I found myself hoping for a bit more guidance on the player's part: Maybe a sum of power, or some sort of feedback for coordinating damage types?
Very cool ideas in this game. Thanks for sharing them!
My main complaint is that there are a lot of things to look at for each beast you summon. It would be nice if there were more visual representations of the stats. Like making the font size for a particular stat get larger if that stat has a higher number assigned to it and giving the special abilities visual symbols that represent their functionality. That would make it a bit easier to understand how my typing is affecting the beast's stats in real time.
Nice work!
I really like the idea, giving the power to the name, showing this difference between giving a letter name to people or a glyph name to a monster. I had this awesome experience of writing a glyph name so long that it didn't fit into the screen, but we kept chanting, until we found a name that granted him a low hp value.
I suggest you go for some simplification, maybe finding a way to somehow show the Levenshtein distance (if I understood its' usage correctly) directly to the player, for example by coloring the last letters based on it, maybe switching from letters to syllables. I think this would be great as an arena game, where you summon the demons stronger and stronger still to stand against your squad of better and better optimized characters, maybe with a leaderboard or a story progression. Really like it
I love that experience you had summoning the boss. Things like that are exactly what I was hoping for :)
Better visualization was definitely something I wanted that I had to cut for time. My original idea for that was to have a word cloud showing you the strongest matching words, so you would be able to see words grow and shrink as you type. Combining some of the elements so you have less you need to look would also probably have been good.