Shay’s Goldem Mob by KriSsS Gonko
Shay’s Goldem Mob
Step into the enchanting world of Shay, a whimsical magic fox fairy whose powers extend far beyond her adorable appearance. With her innate ability to summon delightful golem helpers, Shay embarks on a noble quest to cleanse the once serene fairy meadow from the clutches of sinister monsters. In this top-down game, survival is paramount as players face relentless waves of enemies.
As Shay defeats enemies, she collects 'souls', which she uses to summon helpful golem friends. Each golem has its own special skills. Players can pick and choose these skills by pressing arrow keys.
Will Shay and her loyal golems prevail against the forces of darkness, or will the fairy meadow succumb to the encroaching shadows? The fate of the realm lies in the hands of the player.
Where to play?
- Download - There's a windows and an linux version as downloads here and on itch.io. For the Linux Version you might have to set the file permissions to allow it to be executed as a program.
- Browser play - please check out the itch.io link.
How does one cleanse and survive...
- Use W, A, S, D to move around
- Move the mouse to aim
- Click and hold the left mouse button to shoot
- Press 1, 2, or 3 to start summoning a golem
- Use the arrow keys to customize your summoned golem with exactly 5 inputs. Information on the buffs are visible in the bottom left.
- During gameplay, press M to return to the menu
Summoning golems:
But be careful, if you want to equip your golems with additional strengths, you have to use exactly 5 arrow keys, if you press too few or too many arrow keys, the summoning fails, your souls are gone and no golem will be summoned.
There's an in-game tutorial where you can practice all everything mentioned before heading out on your first cleansing.
Meet the team
Stephanie Kühnl: Art (Kyunru)
Natascha Rauscher: Animation (KriSsS GonKo)
Martin Proprentner: Programming, Level Design (Prepe)
Bernhard Nitsch: Programming, Level Design (Zomo/itch.io: Zom0)
Sebastian Theuermann: Programming (20GOTO10)
We hope you have as much fun as we did making this game! :two_hearts:
Update:
- Version - 07: is the first published entry for LD55
- Version - 08: has the difficulty fixed to better match what we imagined.
- Read more about it in our devlog post here: https://kyunru.itch.io/shays-goldem-mob/devlog/716541/fix-difficulty
- Version - 09: Post jam version with damage feedback for player and mobs.
| HTML5 (web) on Itch | https://kyunru.itch.io/shays-goldem-mob |
| Git Repository | https://github.com/benitsch/Ludum-Dare-55 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/shays-goldem-mob |
Ratings
| Overall | 928th | 3.258⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 746th | 3.288⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 907th | 3⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 372th | 3.939⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 496th | 3.848⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 782th | 2.679⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 870th | 3.268⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 98🗳️ | 55🗨️ |
However, I had fun and it was a good entry.
@hollowbeargames yea we where working on more feedback, but didn't had the time to implement it fully jam stuff and all.
Thanks to the rest for all the nice comments, and yes the balancing is a bit off as we didn't want the players to be able to just spawn an army and steamrole up to wave 1000. Still in this version you can have an army and be nearly invincible at wave 8 and if you keep up the summoning you prob could go on until the game crashes due to to many mobs. I stopped summoning at wave 14-16 and survived up to wave 30 without summoning or moveing at that point.
Liked the graphics :)
- Very cute art, especially love the main character
- The summoning mechanic is interesting, especially the different arrows used to buff them.
- really like the music.
The Not So Good:
- Lack of feedback. The enemies are too bullet spongy and this is made worse by the fact that there is no feedback telling me if I am doing damage (same goes for taking damage)
- The background was cute, but the solid yellow was straining on my eyes.
- A bit too easy to end up just swarmed and unable to move or do anything.
Design Notes:
The game really has a lot of potential, I think the above notes on feedback are the biggest design changes I would make. When I played the tutorial the first few hits I thought I had completely missed the enemy.
It was really unclear to me in my brief playthrough the differences between the golems. Again with the feedback I had no indicator that the golems were doing anything.
When the player is hit I would recommend some kind of knockback effect or i-frames, that way it's possible to escape from being swarmed and locked down in place. The general difficulty could be tweaked as well, I felt like my game was over really quickly because I was overwhelmed.
TL;DR
Really cute art, a fun concept with a lot of potential, needs some polish and maybe a little bit less yellow.
Most of the things you listed where on our radar as we knew that we lack a lot of feedback for the player, but right now we can't add these functions as this would be against the rules of the jam. We where even debating on the balancing of the game. The changes we made for the balance where quiet minimal and we think you can argue that this falls under the umbrella of "not working as expected" part of the exceptions. We would have also liked to add a bit more information to the summons inside the tutorial level, but that would have been to much of a change for now.
We had a few problems with the engine and where not able to address these problems as we needed to fix more important stuff and the balancing and feedback fell a bit short due to this. As this was the first time we worked with Godot, we still need to learn most of the do's and donot's of the engine, but in the name of my team I thank you for the detailed feedback.
The whole team should be super proud of what you accomplished, and I can definitely understand the hiccups of using a new engine (on my team I was the only one who had used Godot before, and I was focused more on art and design than programming), but I hope you had a good experience with it, Godot is awesome.
As for the getting traped I will look into that on the weekend, but the fix for that probably will not make it into the game until the Jam is done with the rating. I know it is probably going to be something trivial but right now I have no clue what I need to do so Godot will allow us to collide with the golems and still allow the player to push them. In Unity I would give the player more Mass/Weight but I have not found a setting for that in Godot.
I am also already working on more feedback for the hits on the Golems, but these changes are also after the rating as they would add stuff and that would be against the rules. Probably going to be a red flash for taking damage and a short slowdown or stop.
The thing that bothers me most is the missing Z Axis handling in the game. This is why shots can pass behind golems without hitting them. But that is a 2.5D problem that should have been handled from the beginning and we forgot to °_°'
I think there should be more feedbacks (for hitting enemy, get damaged, summon effect) to make the game more juicy. Sometimes I didn't notice that I have summoned the enemy or getting damaged.
Anyways, good job! :D
1) Thee monsters seem to ramp up in numbers REALLY fast. Faster than I can have hope of dealing with any of them before an even bigger wave hits me. Maybe tinker with that a little?
2) Audio seemed to be a bit high in the db and was making my sound all staticky. Maybe turn it down a little, or put a volume slider in.
Otherwise, VERY cute game. Well done team! ^-^
@koboldskeep the reason you use the arrow keys to buff is so you stop shooting. It is a risk-reward mechanic. If you just summon you lose a lot of potential for your summons, but in order to survive you need to buff them. Also as mentioned 2 comment ago, we already have implemented that you can push around other entities, but uploading this change now would go against the rules of the jam.
I thank you both for your feedback.
Aiming was difficult as shots fire from center of your character which is not precisely in the center of the screen (it's where the feet start), meaning unless my cursor was directly pointing exactly where I wanted I would frequently miss as the shots would go high/low.
Trying to manage a mouse for aiming and shooting, WASD for movement, arrow keys for buffing, and 123 for summons meant that my hands were all over the place meaning quickly got overrun. An alternative input schemes would be hugely welcome. Scroll wheel to select summon with RMB to summon then maybe switch WASD to buffs would limit having too many controls to manage, alternatively use QE to cycle summons with RMB to summon, or QE to switch between move and buffing. Just something to limit the hand movements XD
Very cool entry though!
The aiming is a thorn in my eye anyway as we did not hanlde the Z-Axis, which as it turns out, is a huge mistake in a 2.5D game.