From Dust by Redoxeide
Deep underground summoners gather to compete with each other in order to accrue as many riches as possible. Summon the souls of warriors from the past to posses an effigy to fight for you in this battler game.
Each match you are given a Summoning Sheet with a random arrangement of Stat Sigils. Each Stat Sigil represents a different statistic for your summon (Combat, Defense, Agility, and Vitality). The way you seal your Summoning Sheet determines your effigy's power for the match. Once your seal is complete your effigy will be possessed by the soul of a warrior that will fight against your opponent's effigy until one of them can't keep going.
Try to summon the best soul for each match, win, acquire treasures, arise from the dust to demonstrate you are the best summoner around!
Controls
Left click - Draw seal / Buy
Right click - Cancel Drawing
Note that you can also cancel a drawing by moving your cursor outside the Summoning Sheet area.
How to play
Summon a soul to fight for you, defeat your opponent, spend gold, collect treasure!
Summoning a soul
At the beginning of each match you are given a Summoning Sheet with a random arrangement of Stat Sigils. To summon a soul you must complete a seal on this Summoning Sheet. A complete seal requires at least 3 lines between different Stat Sigils.
Press and hold left click over a Stat Sigil to start drawing a line. Then, move your cursor over a different Stat Sigil to complete the line. Each booster (labeled I, II, and III) that gets crossed by each line you draw boosts the next Stat Sigil you cross.
In the example image above, the Vitality Sigil gets 3 points from boosters crossed by the line drawn, plus 1 point for being picked. Each Sigil starts with a base of 3 points, totaling 7 points shown at the bottom of the image. Note: the first Stat Sigil of your seal also gets a bonus 3 points, which is why the Defense Sigil is also worth 7 points (3 base + 1 for being picked + 3 bonus).
Completing the seal summons a soul to possess your effigy and starting the fight.
Defeat your opponent
Both yours and your opponent's effigies will fight until one or both can no longer keep going. Once that happens, the match ends, rewards are distributed and your next opponent summons their own effigy for your next match.
The more you win, the tougher your opponents get. Be careful not to lose, as you can only do so 5 times before your run for treasure is over.
Spend gold
After each match, each summoner is granted a small amount of gold. This gold can be spent to permanently boost your summoning power or to get a Summoning Sheet replacement.
Note that winning a match earns you extra gold, and winning streaks earn you even more.
Collect treasure!
Collect as much treasure as you can before your run ends to demonstrate your Summoning power!
Stats
Combat: Affects the power of each hit your effigy does.
Defense: Mitigates damage received from hits.
Agility: Makes your effigy attack more often.
Vitality: Affects the amount of health your effigy gets.
Agility and Vitality also contribute to the chances of your effigy dodging attacks.
Tips
- You can look at your opponent's effigy's stats on the right side of the screen before you do your own summon for the match.
- You can see your own summoning stats as you are doing your drawing at the bottom left side of the screen to decide if you want to retry your summon before you complete it.
- Don't be afraid to reroll your summoner's sheet.
Post-jam
The web version on itch has been changed to be the post-jam version. The original jam version is now available as a windows download only.
Changes vPost-Jam-0.2
- Changed difficulty curve to not be as steep.
- Changed the way opponent's stats are generated.
- Added +1 Life item to the shop.
- Added an Ink +2 item to the shop.
- Unlocking Boosters now automatically rerolls your summoner sheet.
- Changed some UI elements.
- Lowered tooltip appear timer on hover.
- Fixed bug allowing player to buy while battling.
- Fixed booster 2 and 3 probability of appearing being lower than intended.
Changes vPost-Jam-0.3
- Raised difficulty cap a little.
Changes vPost-Jam-0.4 (only available on web version for now)
- Changed difficulty hard cap for a soft cap.
| Post-jam Web | https://redoxeide.itch.io/from-dust |
| Jam version download | https://redoxeide.itch.io/from-dust |
| Post-jam version download | https://redoxeide.itch.io/from-dust |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/from-dust |
Ratings
| Overall | 129th | 4.06⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 236th | 3.84⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 52th | 4.14⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 29th | 4.48⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 362th | 4⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 341th | 3.62⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 558th | 3.05⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 471th | 3.68⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
Anyway thanks for the game was fun to summon my sad minions.
i can't go past 7 treasures right now but i'm sure i'll come back at this game later and try to beat it!
great entry, well done!
It was a challenge I really enjoyed solving. I quickly picked up on patterns that felt like they'd be pretty common, but later on (after getting level 2 or 3 marks on the board) I found myself hunting for more unusual combinations to get the most out of the board.
I did find the difficulty of fighting later opponents (after getting to the teens) to feel impossible pretty often. From a practical game-making perspective I can imagine totally legitimate reasons it works this way - the arcadey randomized nature of the opponents is an efficient way to give variety, and it's okay for some enemies to be too strong - the game's gotta end sometime. From a player's perspective, though, it wasn't so fun to get stacked up against an opponent that I could easily tell I'd have no way to beat.
I know it might not have fit well within the jam's constraints, but having some kind of planned "end point" (win the summoner of the year trophy after 10 victories, show a little splash screen / pop-up with congratulations) with the option to keep going afterward is something I would've liked. Like hands of poker, I think it's not too hard to accept that you won't win them all - having the push to win just enough make reaching for a tough victory even sweeter.
One other chunkier bit of feedback on gameplay: I appreciated that the stats were kept in ranges that made mental math easy. The numbers and modifiers were were small enough to make comparing lines of play pretty easy, and scribbling out part of a plan to spot-check the idea was quick (and good call on having an intuitive way to cancel out). All of those were big positives for me, but a significant drawback (for my tastes, anyway) is that it was very hard to evaluate what the stats I got would actually do.
I get that communicating detailed information like that inside the game interface isn't free (and I think the single-screen UI design of this game is really well-done, by the way!) but having tooltips, a collapsible "help" panel or something for the stats would've been awesome. Being able to know "power 8 = 8-12 damage per attack", or "defense 5 = reduce incoming damage by 30%" would've given me a path to get really engaged with evaluating the tradeoffs of different summonings.
I was able to make up some of my own heuristics (speed is incredibly good, I want to try to be close to my opponent's numbers in other categories) but I have a lot of gaps in my understanding. Do health and defense complement each other in a multiplicative way, so doubling down on both is better? Are there diminishing returns at higher levels of a stat? What were the odds that the opponent dodged three times in a row?! (just kidding about that last one)
I can see downside to communicating too much information (players might sink into analysis paralysis trying to make sense of the math behind the scenes) but maybe it's possible to find a sweet spot where folks like me can get what they need to fuel deeper engagement without any big downsides.
Okey dokey, sorry for rambling on for so long. Again, I think the concept and implementation of the core mechanic was super cool, and the presentation of the game was very clean. You did a lot of great stuff on this project, and I can see lots of ways you could expand a concept like this if you'd like to take it further. Thanks for making the game!
https://youtu.be/Foe4js2jhJ0
And I'm the host for the ludum dare score chasers tournament this Ludum Dare. Wanted to ask if youre fine if I put some gameplay of the game in an intermission video. Last year for reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_eIvjBmIQ
I do think the balance needs some work. I have a lot of ideas that I want to try to hopefully smooth out the difficulty curve a little bit.
About showing actual stat values, I still need to think about how much more info I want to give the player. I kind of like having everything hidden from the player, but I can see the appeal of having more details. Maybe a toggle in the settings would do it, I would just need to find a way to show everything neatly.
Once again, thank you for your comment. I had a lot of fun making the game, so I am glad people are also having fun playing it!
Hey! Thank you very much for playing and for the feedback! Yeah, I wish I had time to do a tutorial, but the time wasn't there!
If you want a little bit of an explanation on the different stats and what to choose, you can keep reading. If not, that is okay, I appreciate you taking time to play the game and leaving feedback!
There are two different types of symbols on your sheet: stat sigils and boosters.
All of the different stat symbols on your sheet contribute to different stats for your summon if you draw a line from/to them. In general terms, the sword (combat) lets your summon deal more damage per hit it lands, the shield (defense) mitigates some of the damage you receive, the green dashing person (agility) lets your summon attack with higher frequency, and the heart (vitality) affects your summon's initial health.
Boosters are the smaller symbols with roman numerals in the middle of the sheet. If you cross a booster while drawing a line, that booster adds points to the next stat symbol you pick. A booster can also be crossed multiple times.
**Generally, you want to get as much damage per second (dps), that is combat + agility, as possible without neglecting your other stats.** But, just getting as much dps as you can is not always the best option, at least not later in the game where the enemy starts getting higher defensive stats. It mainly depends on what you can get from the summoning sheet you are given.
In the previous gif, I went for the most dps and the match ended up in a draw. My summon was able to attack almost twice as frequently as the enemy, and it also had a small advantage in raw power, which should result in about double the "power per second" than the enemy. The thing is, the enemy's summon had much higher defense and vitality, which let it resist enough to end the match in a draw. So as you can see, building full damage is not always the best option.
In this last gif I went for a little bit of vitality, taking advantage of as many boosters as possible, and the match results in a win for me because it boosted my survivability enough to outlast the enemy.
Note that it's the same enemy stats and summoning sheet used in both gifs, the only difference is the drawing on the summoning sheet.
Also note that for the previous two examples, I turned dodging off just to make it more deterministic, but dodging is also a mechanic in the game that benefits from getting more agility and vitality. So, building more agility and vitality to try and dodge an enemy that you are not going to out damage might be a viable strategy. It might also not be, because balance is still a wip :)
Thank you for reading! Hopefully this helped you or anyone else interested!