Dark Altar by Adrien Tremblay
Dark Altar 👹
A demon summoning game
note: Hi everyone! Will respond to comments is a bit! If the chalices aren't appearing it's because my level generation code is kinda flawed. It's RNG. Just replay the game ('s' will skip a level if you want)

Basic Premise
The year is 1329. You play as Cedric Leopold, an ex-monk, expert demonologist and founder of the Society of the Dark Altar: an organization dedicated to uncovering unknown supernatural cosmic and forbidden knowledge by means of summoning and communing with demons.
The long awaited total solar eclipse is in the sky. Now is the time to summon demons. Cedric and his followers have assembled in his summoning chamber deep underground where they have gathered their grimoires and drawn a summoning circle in human blood.
They have brought candles, skulls, and human blood. Cedric now has only to arrange them in the proper layout atop the summoning circle to summon each demon. Will he summon Lord Lucifer himself? Will he uncover the secrets of the world beyond this one? Or will this be his downfall?...
Instructions
The goal of Dark Altar is to summon five demons. To summon each demon, the player must place offerings on the altar in the correct layout. The Altar is a 5x5 grid of squares. A layout being the solution to the puzzle is determined by the sum of the value of the rows and the sum of the value of the columns being at the desired numbers.

The row and column totals are displayed at the right and bottom of the altar respectively. These numbers are red if not matching the desired number, and are green if they are. The target numbers are displayed in white.
There are three types of Offering: - Candle (1 point) - Skull (2 points) - Blood Chalice (+1 point to adjacent non-diagonal offerings)
The candle is worth one point, the skull is worth two points and the blood chalice adds 1 to the value of any adjacted non-diagonal offerings on the altar.

The entire game is played with the mouse. Offerings are initially picked up from offering spawners on the right. The player hovers over them, clicks, and drags and drops the offering to the desired location. Each level has a set amount of offerings available of each type. The amount of offering available for each type is the exact amount for the puzzle's solution.
After being placed, the position of Offerings can be moved by dragging and dropping them to a different location. They can also be removed from the board by dropping them in the trash.

When a puzzle is completed, the corresponding demon is summoned. The demon will speak briefly with the player the the player can move on to the next demon. Each demon's summoning puzzle will get progressively harder. The first two puzzles involve only candles, then skulls are introduced, then blood chalices. The levels are randomly generated (the code isn't the best so difficulty isn't very consistent). The fact that the levels are randomly generated gives the game a lot of replay value though!
I hope whoever plays the game has fun! And heres a little cheat code if you get stuck: the 's' key will skip the level and instantly summon the demon.
Playthrough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yIFlQYJm_w
About the game
- Game was made using the GODOT engine
- All art draw by me using Aseprite
- All music made by me using an online sequencer
- All sound effects generated using jsfxr
- Source code available on GitHub
| Link | https://github.com/adrientremblay/ld55 |
| Link | https://adrientremblay.itch.io/dark-altar |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/dark-altar |
Ratings
| Overall | 50th | 3.94⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 66th | 3.82⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 108th | 3.62⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 28th | 4.28⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 154th | 3.58⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 83th | 3.6⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 48th | 3.92⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
Again, I think you could display the initial story and the instructions / tutorial a bit better than the current one, it kinda is a wall of text but the text is short, so it's pretty fine.
The mood I think is also pretty on-point. Overall, I think this is a very fun game!
And wow, the sfx + the demon appearing caused me jump scares. hahaha
On the puzzle front, I was a bit confused at the solutions. I don't think I ever used a blood chalice? Are there multiple solutions to these?
Yep didn't really have time to develop a tutorial :/ Which is why I recorded a playthough as a bandaid solution!
Also I think there are multiple solutions yes!
This could overall be expanded in a nice standalone game, with handmade puzzles (and why not randomized ones as a bonus) and more demons and new objects. Fun game, congrats!
I was a bit surprised that the puzzles didn't have a unique solution. It was a fun twist with the skull of 2 points and the blood chalice. My main strategy was greedy: start with the skulls at high numbers and in the end move some things around to fix the last numbers.
I like that you took the effort drawing different demon faces, even though they only have a short appearance.
Overall, well done!