Summoner's Apprentice by Antisage
Knowledge of the occult always comes at a cost. Unfortunately for the characters you will control, that cost is usually death. Luckily for them, they have a habit of taking apprentices who can learn from their mistakes (supposedly).
In this game, you will have to deduce your own rules for ritual items, and these assumptions will be challenged.
Note - much of the art is incomplete, do not worry when you see a red-and-grey box. This is the default texture.
Images created in GIMP. Music created with BeepBox. Sound created with Audacity. Developed in Godot.
| Link | https://antisage.itch.io/summoners-apprentice |
| Link | https://github.com/GeorgeH049/LD55 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summoners-apprentice |
Ratings
| Given | 9🗳️ | 1🗨️ |
**Music**: Surprisingly easy to create a disconcerting soundtrack using Beepbox. I made use of the double harmonic minor scale for most of this, occasionally contrasting with parts of major scales to increase the dissonance.
**Sounds**: While I recognise that sound is a large part of game feel, I was struggling to find ways to attach it to this game. Some description of sound generator beyond my own voice and Audacity would be well worth looking into.
**Programming**: I wasted slightly more time than I should have on making the programming as modular as possible. However, this did allow me to construct all the levels within half an hour, so in the absence of another team member waiting on me this was a suitable compromise.
**Art**: I'm a programmer. It's not great, but most of it is passable. I'm mainly annoyed that I was exporting with high compression for some of the sprites - this shows in the blurriness.
**Godot**: Reconciling the pixel art look with crisp text is something that I would like to do, but didn't have time to implement. As someone with very limited experience with game engines, I would recommend that anyone else looking to create a pixel art game look into their preferred options for this before the game (I think in my case, the answer lies with subviewports).
In all, a fun experience. I went in knowing nothing, and came out still knowing nothing, but there was a window in the middle where I was in the flow state with Godot, and that's good enough for me.
My initial expectation was that I would get to see visually what I had managed to summon after adding the correct 'ingredient', so I was a little bit let down without that visual feedback.
I like the 'figure it out for yourself' mentality because it gives the player an opportunity to explore the game system.
Suggestions:
- allow the player to summon any entity in any order (perhaps giving an option for a cryptic clue when they are stuck)
- perhaps reduce the initial number of different ingredients available to choose from (otherwise the gameplay pretty much consisted of clicking one item on a dropdown menu and being told 'wrong answer').
Bug:
- when dismissing the 'wrong answer - you have been killed' screen, the hitbox for summoning passes through the text. Therefore, if you click in the middle of the screen to dismiss then you will immediately fail again and 'lose' screen stays up.
Overall:
- The music is nice and atmospheric 👍
- The game concept is cool and interesting
- Well done ❤️
I think I missed the message of actual summon as well at first because you just turn on the grinding mode of trying everything in a row without thinking and when something else appears you just continue going without paying attention...
Overall, I think concept of figuring out the rules is a good one, but brute force aspect in the beginning would be better to polish a bit imo.
I like the idea though, well done!