I like the narrative spin on a Theme! Those pesky Ludum Dare cultist how dare they!

Overall it's a nice idea of a game about multitasking, though I would say that it's a bit too easy because you can just skip all the minigames by smashing space bar (not even that fast). I haven't tried to replay with harder difficulty choices though.

Overall nice little game with an interesting spin on the Theme of Summoning

@vidim888 Thank you for the kind words! Yeah I think I should set more time aside for balancing my game next time. Right before publishing, I noticed that the mashing was too good but at that point I didn't really have time to fix the problem anymore. Hope you had fun!

@noobman64 Ludum Dare cult twist definitely got a chuckle out of me :) Yeah, planning for everything in a game jam is always a struggle. So far for myself I found that trying to finish with the main game loop in half the time works the best and then spend the whole second part just polishing.

Cute game!! I like the idea of juggling multiple different minigames at once, but it never really hit the point of overwhelming, especially since my space-bar mashing skills seem to be good enough that I can just ignore them.

Good work!!

**"The cult known as Ludum Dare"** was pretty great, haha! Even though you didn't have time to balance the difficulty, I admire your ambition to add a new minigame to each level, and have dialogue choices that change the level of challenge.

A multitasking anti-summon game, I really like the twist and mood the game portrays like you are in hell, old and drinking coffee as your neighbor is sucked into a portal to be summoned, your average wednesday, and you said: "Nah I wanna live my life so I will rig all the D20s cast on people I like to roll a Nat 1 (I play too much DnD)

@drainkid Thank you! Yeah my programing is pretty limited and I can't really come up with super complex mechanics, So I tried to throw a bunch of really simple mechanics at the players to make up for it 😅

@mavvy Thank you for your kind feedback. Glad you liked the cult of game developers! I thought if everyone is summoning stuff for this LudumDare, all those stuff being summoned have to come from somewhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@stmate03 haha no such thing as too much D&D ;) thanks for playing my game!

Heh, with all the entries telling this kind of story from the other end (of summoning instead of being summoned), I like to think that we of the Ludum Dare cult are actually summoning this character when we play the other games. Good job, made me laugh.

@tykenn I'm very happy that you got a chuckle out of it! That was exactly what I was thinking about with the "Ludumdare Cult". :D

the multiple minigames at once was a great idea!

I like the art and description of the enemies. In a way we kind of are a cult!

The game play was far too simple to be interesting, but if programming is not your forte then I think you should lean into the narrative as much as you can. The story here was very simple and there was grammar and spelling mistakes. If you have the time you should either proof read or have someone else read it for you to catch those kinds of mistakes.

The music was a little annoying, but I was able to actually have it on during the game just at a much lower volume. Make sure when you test your game you max out your PC's volume since that's probably how most people have it configured by default.

I'm not sure why you allow us to skip levels. Maybe to have more narrative (I only played through it once), but you should never explicitly tell the player to skip content. Sometimes when we play games it's to get good enough so that you can "skip content". But you never want to reveal that to the player because it's a little lie they tell themselves. The moment you present a player the option to skip the content they'll question if the content is worth it if the game itself doesn't want you to play it. Then they'll probably just close the game and go play something else.

Congrats on getting a working game with Unity! It's a pretty complex engine. I suggest you either work on improving your programming skills so you can implement some more in depth gameplay or use an engine like RPGMaker so you can focus on crafting a great story.

Haha, good one with the "cult"!

I like the idea behind the game, but it feels probably a bit too short and as others pointed out, the mashing of the button/spacebar is too powerful! But overall, I think there is something to be made with the foundations of this game: maybe fleshing out the story a bit more with more minigames that requires different playing styles (thinking like Wario Ware or something)

That being said, the multitasking aspect is a fun one you can absolutely revisit later on. Congrats on making the deadline, keep up the work ;)

@bravelytyped Thank you for playing my game, and for the kind words :D

@timidger Thank you for the feedback.
You are correct, though the lack of polish was not due to laziness. I didn't budget my time well and could not spend much time with balance or proofreading. As simple as the game was, It took me the full compo time limit to make it, which is a testament to how bad I am at this 😅

Your feedback is noted but I'm happy with the music as it is. This was the first time I was able to budget the time to have music in my game and I like the tune. I foresaw that some people would not like it so I added a mute button for it. In my 30 years of PC gaming I have never had my computer's audio set to %100 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The skip indicator is to help players in their decision making by letting them know that their narrative choice will mean they will miss something. Its not a particularly new idea. Here are a few example of the same concept in different application: Many games let you skip the starting level. Some games warn you that moving past a section means that you can't revisit some of the previous section, which results in missing some content. Some visual novels will use visual ques to let the player know a certain choice may end the game prematurely. In all these cases the designers let players know that there is a risk of skipping content, but the player still has the agency to skip things if they want to. In my opinion, that doesn't make the content more or less worthy of being played. I should have found a more elegant way to communicate that, but we are back to my poor time management skills again. I finished my games with 5 minutes left to the deadline. Rephrasing the prompts was not something I could afford anymore by that point

Thank you, I will work on improving my programing. Progress is slow but one of these days I'll make something playable :)

@linky439 Thank you for playing my silly game :D
Yeah the button mashing turned out to be way overpowered. Getting the players to "keep a lot of plates spinning" is something I'd like to explore more if I get the chance!

I really like the concept of the game you have here with the multitasking. As you noted, the mashing kind of negates the need to really participate in the other games, but I still found it was fun to try to manage them. The music was rather loud relative to the sound effects, so you might want to do some balancing there in the future. The rune magic minigame seemed to always trigger all four of them around the same time, and it might be better to space things out a little more. I was surprised that I couldn't stop moving in the third minigame. Although short, I enjoyed the story and the options to abandon my partner and dog (of course I saved them both though!). Thanks for sharing.

I enjoyed the writing - especially the little portfolios of the would-be summoners. The gameplay is simple and works well. Even though you noted that you can just mash, I tried my best to do the other parts as well - seemed more fun that way :smile: Humor is the strongest part of this entry. Well done!

The music was quite loud, so I just lowered the volume waaaaaay down :wink:

@bentglasstube Thank you for playing my game! Yeah the runes tended to overlap. I set up each one to a random timer but I should have increased the range of possible values so there would be less over lap.

@fabula-rasa Thank you for the kind words, I'm glad you liked my weird humor :D

Despite the simple look, the story is charming and the gameplay evolves each time around. Good work! (and thanks for the Linux build)

The gameplay was really fun, managing different small games at the same time was a good idea, and the bit on Ludum Dare was quite insightful !

@burnedkirby Thanks for the kind words! I'm happy the build works for Linux. To be honest, I wasn't able to test it and just hoped Unity would handle the Linux version correctly. One day you guys will need to save the rest of us from Apple and Microsoft. When judgement day comes, remember I was one of the good ones! (ElmoRise.jpeg) 🤣

@sevenso Thank you for the playing my game and the kind feedback :)

Great point of view on the topic of jam!

Thank you to each and everyone who played my silly game. I am extremely happy with the rankings, specially the 43rd in humor. Its the best rating I've gotten in anything! Lets gooooooo