Heartless Forever by frankiesmileshow
They took your heart to summon the devil, but you still draw breath. Run and fight, and maybe you can survive when the end comes.
An open world top-down shmup where you have 10 minutes to gain strength before a terrible boss attacks. Move with WASD, aim and shoot with the mouse.
A game by Francis Coulombe with music by Askiisoft!

| Link | https://frankiesmileshow.itch.io/heartless-forever |
| Link | https://frankiesmileshow.itch.io/heartless-forever |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/heartless-forever |
Ratings
| Overall | 87th | 4.125⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 75th | 4.125⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 716th | 3.225⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 439th | 3.85⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 138th | 4.375⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 144th | 3.975⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 471th | 3.222⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 143th | 4.075⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 13🗨️ |
- Lot of high quality sprites, lot of differents monsters.
- The music is very good and it change with the environnement !
- The tile is a bit repetitive but the map is huge so it's logic, about that there is no map or minimap to see the player location. It's easy to be lost.
- The pathfinding of the ennemies in general is not very good, and it's easy to cheat to kill them (see my picture).
What happened when the times come to 0 ? Apocalypse demon appear, so i don't have luck i'm in a cavern when he arrived and it was difficult to me to dodge it.
But this is really an overtall 5/5 entry for this Ludum Dare !
PS : I've played on the web version and my game become laggy when i arrived in the spider-cultist cavern.

Found an exit in the desert, i can walk around the room.

Fun core gameplay, great art and music, just a shame the background is so sparse in contrast.
Feels like you tried to accomplish too much and simply ran out of time.
Great submission overall, tho!
I played similar games at a jam, but the opponents were too difficult. It's demotivating.
This game has good balance.
I just wish the minions provided a little more challenge to the player.
Good job nonetheless!
Despite the worlds patchiness & sticky collision, I spent a good amount of time just exploring around looking for new items after defeating the boss, which i found to be a pushover by the time it arrived, I'd only stopped because (running on firefox at least) the game began to get pretty laggy, especially around areas with darkness.
Really fantastic music, I wasn't expecting it to be so groovy.
Not sure if it was rendering issues or what, but were the undead enemies meant to be coming out of matte black squares...?
Also - loved the atmospheric start with the vignette. Really nice touch to set the mood.
Is the source code available anywhere, by chance? I'd love to inspect it!
Some possible improvements: collisions for both yourself (it gets frustrating) and enemies, allow to hold a button (or even auto-fire?) to use different abilities(?), more volume to sfx, music is cool, but you barely can hear what is going on (maybe that's good?).
Overall it's a solid entry, I spent several full runs on it trying to get the grip of the core game, great job!
But there's a slight issue of some lag spikes in some locations, and darkness indoors felt weird and not fun.
Was the game supposed to continue after defeating the last boss? It felt slightly weird to have no ending nor at least some kind of "you won!" pop-up or mark in the right bar.
Other than these (small) issues, there was a bigger issue of getting stuck in the walls - that's how my run of vacuuming stuff post-boss ended, to be honest.
Still, I really liked what I played, and I wish I could explore more. Any plans on having a post-LD version?
@dragonayzer I ran out of time yeah, slapped on the final boss like 2 hours before the end and didnt have time to do an ending screen. There was also meant to be an ending if you walk out of the map, like you "escaped", but also didnt have the time! Welp! Also, yes Ive been working on a post-LD version since the jam ended! Been streaming that on my twitch at - https://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow
@jokku Yeah, I didnt want to dedicate time messing with light and dark stuff for the jam, but ill probably make fancier visual effects for the final game.
@apoly Thanks! Yeah the big map full of content was what I was going for, I love exploration in games, though it was probably a bit too ambitious.
@mr-field Actually the biggest timesink was the map itself, was a huge mess to tile and set collisions for in a short time. Biggest regret for the jam was that I had the map maybe like 30% too big, game would have probably been way more polished if I hadnt gone that far. Another big timesink was not having a good enough setup to quickly import all these assets for the monsters, a lot of time was wasted just doing the most basic asset cropping, importing and enemy setup, let alone giving them unique features. I feel like a slightly smarter setup to quickly go from drawing the art to them being in-game might have saved me like 2-3 hours I could have spent on polish.
@tokarts Yeah its a real shame about the background - I actually spent a lot of time drawing tiles for it, but didnt have time to actually place them other than the strict minimum to tell the floors, walls and different biomes apart. Probably like 4-5 hours wasted on assets that didnt make it into the actual build! Whoops