LudumData

Occultris by stesim

[raw]
made by stesim for Ludum Dare 55 (JAM)

Occultris - summon your beasts!

There is an eternal battle between the occult creatures of the dark side! It is up to you to summon the right beasts that will dominate the attacking creatures and destroy their portals! Make your beasts even stronger by summoning different upgrades! If you succeed in destroying more portals than you lose, victory will be yours!

https://youtu.be/zAWb3l0P8co

occultris.jpg

You have 4 portals from which you can summon beasts. They will walk straight on their lane to the other side and attack everything that will block their ways. To summon beasts, you have to equip the portal with one of the five beasts runes. Additionally, you can add upgrade runes to make them stronger. Their can always be only one beast rune on each portal. As soon as there is a beast rune, you can summon the beast and send it to the battle.

  • Arrow Up/Down or W / S - move runes between portals
  • E or Enter - place the rune on the portal; you can replace existing runes if the portal is full
  • Q or Backspace - summon the beast as soon as there is a beast rune on the portal

Advanced Control:

  • Arrow Left/Right or A / D - rotate the portal to replace specific runes

Creature Domination

The diagram on the bottom center shows the creature domination relation. Each creature is extra strong against two other creatures. The line in the color of the creature shows which other creature is dominated by them.

Preview

Below the portals on each side, a preview of the next two runes is shown.

Playing Modes

You can play against an AI or a friend or even watch two AIs battle each other - just select the respective option in the main menu.

Attribution

Models and Graphics:

  • Characters by GDM, Character Bundle 2023.
  • Background images by GDM, Merge Defense Game GUI Assets.
  • Icons by GDM, GUI Icons Pack 1.
  • Pentagram icon by Freepik | Good Ware, Pentagram icon.
  • Stone image by Freepik | upklyak, Spielstein-Schaltfkäche runden Rahmen oder ui-Level-Symbole.

Sound and Music:

  • Level music by Dark Fantasy Studio, Haunted (20-Dark Fantasy Studio- Souls (seamless))
  • Main Menu music by Dark Fantasy Studio, Archives vol1 The dark side (Dark Fantasy Studio- Training day)
  • Game lost music by Dark Fantasy Studio, Archives vol1 The dark side (Dark Fantasy Studio- Mououahah)
  • Game tie music by Dark Fantasy Studio, Darkventures (Dark Fantasy Studio- Fallen leaves)
  • Game win music by Dark Fantasy Studio, Darkventures (Dark Fantasy Studio- For the king)
  • Sound effects by Krotos, Animals & Monsters SFX Library.
  • Sound effects by Krotos, Magic SFX Library.
  • Sound effects by Krotos, 4 Elements SFX Library.

Fonts

  • Title font in main menu by Eldamar Studio, 100 Game Fonts Pack (Oseon-Regular)
Link https://stesim.itch.io/occultris
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/occultris

Ratings

Overall 393th 3.739⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Fun 319th 3.739⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 192th 3.848⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Theme 117th 4.283⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Humor 583th 3.022⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 422th 3.739⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Given 33🗳️ 36🗨️

Feedback

Ryaneklipse
16. Apr 2024 · 16:22 UTC
Music/mood are fantastic. Very nice!
Asrata
16. Apr 2024 · 16:22 UTC
Cool concept. Kinda confusing but i've had fun.
Escyll
16. Apr 2024 · 16:24 UTC
Great game, well done. The sound was really creepy!
RaimondoSenpai
16. Apr 2024 · 16:24 UTC
Fun, cool, and mechanically well done, sounds maybe too few of them but fitting, very cool idea you had there.
seems balanced to. the fact that you can play whit another player adds a lot to the flavor of the game. truly a nice realization of a good idea
Telkan
16. Apr 2024 · 16:29 UTC
Really nice game, it took me a while to figure out, but it was a good time nonetheless. Also it's pretty hard to win when the other side only has a single portal left, but you do win if you let him take yours so, it's a bit weird but it works out
Chibiata
16. Apr 2024 · 16:29 UTC
The game looks really good, big thumbs up for the graphics! i was quite overwhelmed managing my own summons tho. the controls are very easy and intuitiv, but i felt like i couldnt take the time tp think about the summon i wanted to set up, i just had to spam any random combination into the slots. Maybe if the player has a little more time to decide on the summons i could enjoy it a little more. still a great game in my opinion
argensis
16. Apr 2024 · 16:30 UTC
I like the idea of choosing monsters and power ups to counter your opponent, but I think the balance is a bit off It feels like the optimal strategy is to just spam as fast as possible to get as many units up and ignore the balance. I think it would be better if either there was some cooldown on placing tiles or if there was a penalty for losing units to discourage that behaviour. That also means choosing powerups feel like they don't have as much of an effect as they could.

I think the core concept/idea is solid though, so with some more time to balance it so player choices matter more, I think it could be good
🎤 stesim
16. Apr 2024 · 16:50 UTC
Thanks to everyone who played and commented on our game. :)

@chibiata @argensis Thank you for the constructive feedback. You're right regarding the balance. We were not able to figure it out on time. It will definitely be a lesson for next time.
TomasAquistapace
16. Apr 2024 · 17:36 UTC
Love the art, fun game
TheLastSlowpoke
19. Apr 2024 · 08:04 UTC
Fun idea! I feel like there is too much upgrade runes and I just had to rush through them to get anything spawned, but other than that cooooool!
Blue Pin Studio
19. Apr 2024 · 10:59 UTC
Nice and brief! I'll admit, i just spammed enter until the circle was full then pressed backspace. If it didnt work, i replaced one thing until it worked. That got me the win! It seems like a lot of effort was put into the complexity of the game so my bad for cheesing it :D
retrome
19. Apr 2024 · 14:39 UTC
Wow! Really cool entry! I like the concept of filling and summoning, it is pretty engaging :thumbsup: It was quite hard to understand combinations, but still very fun to play. Good job!
MAR Zockmeister
19. Apr 2024 · 22:09 UTC
Thanks for your comments @thelastslowpoke @blue-pin-studio @retrome Yes, you all found one of our biggest problem during development. We had big plans for different runes and upgrades and thus more complex tactics. But when we playtested it, we had the same issues - just spawning as fast as you can is usually the key to victory and unfortunately we had not enough time to tweak the balancing or try out other things.
LDJam user 983
20. Apr 2024 · 13:01 UTC
could not rate it, it keeps crashing both chrome and firefox on my mac after about 10s of gameplay :(
Doonutsaur
20. Apr 2024 · 16:24 UTC
i think this mechanic has good potential! good job!
Kitira
21. Apr 2024 · 05:27 UTC
Too bad, but thanks for the info, @jerre! Unfortunately we couldn't test it on Mac, but I would have assumed that it should at least run on Chrome. Too bad it doesn't :( But good to know, so thanks for letting us know!
Fupi
21. Apr 2024 · 14:30 UTC
This is a really nice idea! As other people have said, the winning strategy ends up being to just spam everything without thinking, because everything you can put in your summon is good, so there's no reason not to! x3 I think this could have worked better as a deck-builder kind of game, where you can build a strategy around specific kinds of runes. I also think it'd be very important for the runes to have drawbacks, like, maybe one rune is *really* good against one type of enemy, and really bad against all the others, so you have to be more strategic as to where they go. Cus right now, since all the runes are boosts, you can just stack them up forever and make your monster really OP with no thought. Maybe another way to combat this would be to have a price associated with each rune, maybe with something like mana, that regenerates over time, or when you beat another monster, idk just throwing out ideas! As it stands, the game is still really polished and feels nice to play
MAR Zockmeister
22. Apr 2024 · 01:18 UTC
@fupi Thanks a lot for your detailed comment - I totally agree with your analysis. :-) We tried to solve the problem with the domination aspect - each monster is much stronger than two others. But even this did not help in our tests and then we ran out of time. So for a postjam version, we might try something else. I like your idea with the price/mana. :-)
eugene-b
23. Apr 2024 · 21:10 UTC
Great entry! I like that everything works so good without bugs and inconvenience!
We actually, tried to do something pretty similar, but were out of time to create such good UX!
Dymino
25. Apr 2024 · 15:41 UTC
I like the gameplay idea, however I think there are a few issues. I feel like the way you summon beasts leads to you just spamming E and then summoning when the circle is full. This could be fixed by creating a cost of adding upgrades but that would only make the fact that the beast runes and upgrade runes are together more annoying because you can't choose to upgrade, you can have to use the upgrades that are given until you get a beast. I also feel like the combat being on one lane doesn't make much sense as it means that if an altar is destroyed, that entire row is unusable for both sides meaning that both the winner and loser are using the same amount of rows. It also means that a strategy you could do is to just give up on one or two rows because if you get two rows, your opponent can't beat you.