Stay Away From The Summoner by manicthenobody

You are a devil who has signed a contract that gives you the legal obligation to appear at a human wizard's summoning circle on request. Only problem is that you just want to have a lazy Saturday. Avoid the Summoner who will make you fulfill your contractual obligation while your buddy Big Mike helps you exploit a loophole to get out of it.
Decoys and miners summon from the position of your mouse cursor
Ran out of time to make background music (and updated art for Big Mike, but his current version is kinda endearing, doncha think?)
Realized too late that I published the version without the increased gem spawn rate I put in at the last minute, so quest 3 is just kinda boring. :sweat:
summoner.zip is the windows version. Others are labeled. MacOS version is not properly signed, play at your own(admittedly low) risk.
I wanted to have a web version, but as I learned at the last minute, Godot 4 with C# does not support it yet. :cryingcatface:
| Link | https://github.com/ManicTheNobody/Stay-Away-From-The-Summoner |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/stay-away-from-the-summoner |
Ratings
| Overall | 272th | 3.079⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 291th | 2.868⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 314th | 2.658⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 228th | 3.368⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 307th | 2.684⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 266th | 2.444⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 140th | 3.083⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 287th | 2.778⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
I did like the added detail that the Big Mike spelled out how many crystals you had if you tried to go back to him with less instead of the numeral. Great use of the rich text stuff you can do in Godot!
I like the timing based mining mechanic. It would be cool to add in some more stealth abilities to give more options to avoid the summoner.
300 did feel like too many crystals to collect, but I could see it being a lot of fun if you could spawn multiple demons to collect the resources, and keep summoning distractions to protect them.
I occasionally had a bug where the mining minigame had the selection bar go off the left instead of bouncing back and forth:

I think I'd really enjoy a version of this with reduced cooldowns (and maybe more summoners chasing me), something that gives me extra room to optimize my movements and decision-making. Oh, or maybe having some risk/reward where mining more times in a row yields extra crystals - something to make me want to stick to a crystal as long as possible even as the summoner approaches. As it is, I spent most of my time in the late game looking for crystals. The spawn rate deficiency issue you mentioned is certainly the culprit there.
That aside, I appreciate that the graphics were easy to parse, and the audio did a good job of communicating gameplay information. There was some good humor in Big Mike's writing too. It's a lot of variety to implement in the scope of a couple days, I can appreciate the challenge of juggling a variety of priorities.
- I think the game should up up pace with the player abilities, having lower cool down or better mining ability later on
- The crystals seemed to spawn pretty slow in the later stage of the game
- Sometimes seemingly on the last crystal mine the pointer would go off screen to the left
- Placing miners felt clunky, I think I had to point at the base of the crystal (the ground), but intuitively I pointed towards the crystal itself