The Summoners by digital bacon
An attempt to build a deckbuilding rogue-lite.
The player is a wizard who summons minions by playing cards. The minions attack the enemies. As you progress, the enemies get stronger until you reach the big bad.
There is no audio, so can't be rated on that. Everything else was done by me (and it shows :rofl:).
Once again, time and other commitments held me back, but I had a lot of fun working on this. The graphics are terrible, but it's programmer art (I still don't practice that enough).
There's a not-quite-gamebreaking bug that I'm still trying to track down, where your minions' attacks get spread across all enemies of the same time (i.e., an attack against one goblin does the same damage to all goblins). I'm pretty sure the problem is in the way I'm using Godot resources, but there's not enough time (23 minutes at this point) to refactor everything to fix the bug (I literally just figured it out as I'm typing this :rofl:).
There are 15 levels. The map is very much inspired by Slay the Spire, with nods to "Slay the Spire: Map Generation Guide" and GodotGameLab's Godot 4 Intermediate Card Game Course series (a lot of things in this game are half-remembered from that video series). Unfortunately, the map isn't randomly generated each run, it's just the test map I built to make sure everything worked :rolling_eyes:
| Link | https://digital-bacon.itch.io/the-summoners |
| Link | https://digital-bacon.itch.io/the-summoners |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-summoners |
Ratings
| Overall | 944th | 3.24⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 796th | 3.23⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1127th | 2.62⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 676th | 3.56⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 881th | 3.2⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 962th | 2.337⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1106th | 2.792⭐ | 50🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 79🗳️ | 124🗨️ |
The only issue I had was that it was hard to keep track of what was happening because of the lack of animations for visual feedback. Given the scale and complexity of this kind of game, though, I can understand why it wasn't there. Music and sound would also have been nice.
Overall, good job!
I realised how ambitious the scope was about 48 hours in. Right about the time the panic set in :rofl:
The *Sellsword* card is OP due to a bug. I'd been using a Godot resource to keep track of the player's data (health, gold, cards, etc), so didn't think about doing the same for the enemies. Unfortunately, I forgot that resources are effectively singletons (analogous to Unity's scriptable objects), so every time damage was done to one goblin, it was done to all goblins. With the *Sellsword* card, it would take 10% of your current gold, divide it by the number of enemies on screen and apply the portion to each enemy. But since they're all use the same health pool, each enemy effectively got the full damage amount. Basically turning it into a nuke by the time you get to the Boss. I should probably also put a cap on the amount of gold it converts.
Yes, I wanted animations, but I'm no artist and the thought of trying to do animation scares me :laughing: Ditto for music and sound effects.
Thanks for playing!
Working on a post-jam version, I've spent a lot of today implementing bloodsplats that appear on something whenever it takes damage, which goes a way to providing visual feedback. I'd also like to use tweens to have melee combatants dash forward and hit something, while ranged combatants launch missiles.
I've also tweaked the difficulty, so the boss starts with more hitpoints, and can heal himself once during a battle.
Very ambitious stuff setting out to make something this mechanically complex, and it seems you've executed it really well. Fights felt pretty balanced and challenging, progression was solid, and I had to make genuine strategic decisions - more than could be said for most jam games, where balance is a nightmare. Hope to see you make more stuff like this in the future.
@zablas: there's definitely some glitches *in the jam version* around the minions' and enemies' health. It was one of those I-know-how-to-fix-it-but-I-also-know-there's-not-enough-time-left moments, in the last 20 minutes before the jam ended :confounded: I've fixed it in the post-jam version I'm currently working on.
@lachlan-james: Thanks! There's a few things I wanted to add in (artefacts, which would provide the player with bonuses like extra mana; more variety in the enemies and minions; etc.). There's still plenty of balancing to do, but as you say, that's usually not easy to do in a jam for a solo dev. Definitely had fun making this, so hopefully you'll see more!
- Because of that damage bug when the attack applies to the whole class o enemies, the game is very easy. Every unit you have is almost a Fireball :wink:
- Lack of animation feedback makes it harder for the player to know what is actually happening. I know lack of time is a culprit here, and you can still play just fine.
- Many enemies display their attack strength as 0 for some reason. Don't really get why. So, I only knew how much damage they deal when they attacked.
- In my playthrough, one of the rest spots didn't seem to trigger properly and I didn't heal. The second rest stop triggered just fine.
Still, a really nice jam job :grin: I enjoyed my time with the game and I kicked the Big Bad Bosses ass.
@wheelsx: you say "weird", I say "very annoying". I'm trying to decide between a simple mouse-click closing the dialog, or a proper "close" button.
@fabula-rasa: The damage bug was quite stupid, although I'm blaming lack of sleep :dizzy_face: I had set up a resource to hold details about each enemy and minion type -- their maximum health, their attacks, etc. -- and for some reason I decided to store their *current* health in there too. But since resources can be thought of as singletons, that current health was for *all* minions or enemies of the same type. So if an attack injured one goblin, it would injure all of the goblins. Also, because the current health never got reset back to the max health, all new instances of minions and enemies would appear with zero health. I've fixed that in the current version I'm working on, but I didn't have time to do it before the jam ended. Also working on animations, and I'll have a look at the rest areas too.
When you make an updated version i'd like to play that, if you do get around that. Do me a favor and find some free tracks you can just plop into the game.
Sadly, there's no sound, but it's may be too much for just one person. Also, enemies before boss were kinda easy for me, but the boss insta-killed me which was a total surprise!
Thank you for your game, you did a very great job!
Thanks for the good impressions!
@pacelin: yes, I didn't really do much balancing during the jam. I've tweaked it a little in the post-jam version I'm working on, and the fights are a bit more fair while still being challenging.
@uniowl: Thanks! I've never played *Slay the Spire* either, but I have seen some gameplay on YouTube (I'm not sure if *StS* has summoning), which was where most of the inspiration came from.
@tryam: Thank you!
@bulba: Thanks, I will!
@kaesterin: Thanks! I'm working on a post-jam version, which I'll probably publish after the jam has finished.
- You have a lot of great ideas how to make the game interesting and fun
- You made interesting choice with cards, although there were just 5-6 of them
- There are mechanics that seems you had no time to finish them, like show attacking, balancing, UI of health. So, maybe you would better abandon them, beacuse 3 day is too small for such big tactics game.
- That was fun the boss reward is the smallest reward of all levels!
So, thank you a lot for your game!
@zirconcode: I never thought of having persistent minions. Guess I know what's being added to the future features list :grin: thanks!
@meranolean: yes, the rewards for each level are calculated based on how many enemies were on the level, and since the big boss is the only enemy on his level.... :shrug:
@pattedecanaard: plenty of things to add, including some from suggestions on this page :grin:
Nice visuals! Though a few some simple animations would have been welcome. Nothing fancy just a few "programmer" animations of units attacking.
Great work!
@petr-vejchoda: annoyingly, I figured out what the bug was and how to fix it in the closing minutes of the jam, without enough time left to actually fix it.
@dovodx: I had misread the rules and thought only bugs that stop the game from running (or cause it to crash) were the only ones that could be fixed once the jam ended. I'll remember for next time, thanks! I think I can add some more, especially in providing feedback to the player on what's happening. And yes, I've already fixed the need to use the keyboard in the post-jam version.
@cosmic-dust: Yes, there's a bug in the jam version where the different types of enemies share a health pool, rather than keep track of their own health. I've fixed it in a post-jam version (there's a Windows version on the itch.io page). I like the idea of the minions doing their own targeting, but I'll have a play around with your idea.
@oller125: Yes, there's a bug with the enemies' health tracking which makes the jam version way too easy; and feedback for the player is definitely high on my priority list.
The 0 health bug and all enemies dying in one hit bug are actually the same bug, where I accidentally used a Godot resource (which act like singletons) to store the current health, rather than one each individual enemy.
And there's minimal balancing in the jam version. In a post-jam version, I've rebalanced Sellsword to do a maximum of 5 damage to each enemy.