The Demon Ate My Homework by very dark lord
Ahhhh! You're late for your big demon summoning exam! You're supposed to fight your nasty fellow student Milfoy, but everything is going wrong today! First your alarm frog malfunctioned, and now your spellbook has disappeared! Can you turn things around and pass this important exam?
Controls
Control mostly with arrow keys and F. In case the summoning minigame is too difficult, you may sneakily skip it by pressing Shift+Enter. Your goal there is to wait until the glowing dots move towards the 6 letter keys, and then press them accordingly in the right moments.
Credits
All the code, pixel art and voice acting are done by us. :) The ingame music tracks were created for this game by Volker Hinzmann (check him out here: http://the-hinz.de ). Only the start screen music had some AI assistance, everything else in this game was hand-crafted by humans. We also used one sound (squeaky toy) by user Bart from opengameart.org.
Technology
- Engine: self-written with Typescript & html (canvas)
- Graphics: Aseprite
- Voice processing: Audacity
Screenshots
Playthrough Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDF6Ys1uFN4
Changelog
V1.1, 2024-04-18: - Bugfix: fixed bug where the title screen soundtrack sometimes kept playing through the game - Accessibility: now allows waiting for key press after dialog lines rather then autoplaying everything directly, as the pace may have been too fast otherwise for non-native speakers - Typo: fixed one typo in the intro dialogue
| V 1.1 (recommended) | http://shellfishgames.com/games/demon/ |
| V 1.0 (original upload, no fixes) | http://shellfishgames.com/games/demon_ld_v0/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-demon-ate-my-homework |
Ratings
| Overall | 79th | 4.146⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 66th | 4.146⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 104th | 3.957⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 24th | 4.522⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 489th | 3.864⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 62th | 4.159⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 2th | 4.667⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 20th | 4.458⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
The visuals fit the point & click -like vibes very well.
The summoning minigame was perhaps the weakest point of the game, but even it was still fine. It felt a bit frustrating (even if it really wasn't that hard overall IMO). I think that was because it was hard to focus on the dots as they started to move towards the key icons, maybe? Like it was really hard to focus on so many things so far apart, compared to the traditional "Icons approach you on a straight line" mechanic from rhythm games.
Really liked it, overall superb!
You could lose all the gabbing in between and just focus on the puzzles more.
All in all a very nice experience.
Graphics and audio were good, very adequate to the game style (feels like the old 90s games)
My favorite this jam.
The gameplay was interesting enough, the graphics were good, the music supportive, but the stand-out aspect of the game was definitely the cut scenes. Their writing was humorous, the camera zoom hilarious and the voice acting the icing on the cake.
Other things I thoroughly enjoyed were the nice soundeffects in the summoning minigame, the end-scene picture and the lisp of the teacher character.
Really nice experience playing the game! :grin:
It seems to me that two different pieces of music are playing at the same time.
Great voice-acting (the music was a bit too loud for my taste), really good work!
I've just pushed a fixed version of the game with two changes:
1. The two-musics-at-once bug that happened occasionally should be fixed (in case this still happens to anyone after starting the game, maybe reload and try again, as I don't think it happened reliably)
2. As the dialogues were quite quick and hard to follow for non-native speakers, the game now waits for pressing any key after each dialogue line. For those fast enough to understand everything though I'd recommend pressing Q for the originally paced experience. :upside_down:
@chrisaltoft Thanks a lot for your feedback! :pray: Please note that there's also the option of skipping the summonings with Shift+Enter, which we added from the beginning due to our experience of balancing in jam games being really hard to get right. :see_no_evil: And as mentioned above, the music bug should be fixed now, I think.
@liu-pa-yueh Thanks so much for playing! In case it helps, the latest fix version allows waiting for key presses after each dialog line, so there's more time to process the subtitles. Not sure if it helps, but maybe worth a shot in case you want to give it another try. :blush:
@k-toll Thank you! And sorry for the music issue. If you have a minute, would be terrific if you could check if this still happens, or if you get the proper audio now. :slight_smile: :pray:
The bug with the two music tracks has apparently been solved, I only made one attempt. It was just after the introductory dialogue, I think.
Thanks for all your hard work!
(Side appreciation: I love that items bounce back to you if you accidentally toss them to an unreachable area.)
I liked how you made summoning mechanics to bring variety to gameplay and invented a nice interface to make it feel you're actually summoning something and not just pressing buttons.
Nice story-rich entry overall!