Contracts of Hell by Tesseract

[raw]
made by Tesseract for Ludum Dare 55 (JAM)

Arise qungavdrux, you have been spawned on the scorched plains of Hell. It is dangerous place and you should seek to gain power over others if you hope to survive, but that cannot be done without risking yourself in their service.

A multiplayer real time turn based game, with lots of stupid AIs to exploit.

Instructions

  1. Click "Look for a fight" and it shouldn't take too long for you to find yourself in one.
  2. "Request help" is a good idea once you're in a fight. This asks another demon if they want to join in exchange for a binding promise that you will help them in the future when they need it.
  3. If someone else requests your help, you'll see a picture of a fight in the "Accept Request" column. If you think it's worth joining the fight at the indicated position, click the picture to go there, in exchange you can summon them in the future.
  4. Dying isn't very clearly indicated. If you die, refresh the page to be reborn as a new demon.

Details

The game works on 4 second turns.

If you help kill something, you heal.

The demon at the back of a fight is the leader. Only they have the ability to surrender, giving the opposing leader the right to summon them in the future

Demons act in age order (oldest first).

Summonings happen after shots are fired, although demons that died may have prepared a summoning before dying. If a demon would be summoned by multiple others on the same turn, the oldest summoner has priority.

If the server breaks it may need manual restarting. Let us know

Server breaking bugs fixed post-jam: 1

Let us know the stats of your best run.

Ratings

Overall 1138th 2.868⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1117th 2.763⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 247th 3.763⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Theme 579th 3.684⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 1074th 1.921⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1016th 2.118⭐ 19🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1179th 2.342⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Given 22🗳️ 10🗨️

Feedback

OnlinE_Play
16. Apr 2024 · 19:10 UTC
It's incredible how good this is.
LDJam user 0
17. Apr 2024 · 01:28 UTC
i'll be honest, i don't know what's going on with this game, but i was hooked trying to figure it out. this might be really good, i think i might just not be the audience though.
Eric Nguyen
17. Apr 2024 · 01:33 UTC
I can't believe this is really multiplayer, amazing! This could grow to be really fun with some more polish. Great submission, very unique compared to other LD games.
justking144
17. Apr 2024 · 05:09 UTC
Incredibly rare to see a multiplayer game in a jam that actually works! Really interesting concept and I hope you keep working on it!
🎤 Tesseract
17. Apr 2024 · 09:21 UTC
@online-play @eric-nguyen @justking144 Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you like it. I've had some practice at writing multiplayer - 2 of my previous compo games have had multiplayer and I added it to the post-contest version of a 3rd. The trick is to ignore everything that tells you how to make scalable web servers and write something single-threaded that processes requests 1 at at time (sending messages to other servers if it needs to, which this game doesn't). Computers are fast enough and the games aren't going to get anywhere near enough simultaneous players to cause a problem.
Abynaut
17. Apr 2024 · 20:21 UTC
It's a little confusing, but I dig that it's a multiplayer thing developed in such a short amount of time! Very cool!
RPGWanderer
17. Apr 2024 · 20:27 UTC
@tesseract that's really inspiring to see a multiplayer game made in 48h hours, I wouldn't even have tried it if you didn't do it first ! Maybe I'll try next time. The concept of your game is very interesting, it would be nice if there were more players :) Do you plan on adding bots or do you want to keep it 100% real time and with actual players ?
🎤 Tesseract
18. Apr 2024 · 00:12 UTC
@rpgwanderer As it says in the description, there are lots of bots (about 100 most of the time). Did you assume there weren't many players because it took a while to find a fight? We deliberately decided that it can take a while to find someone even if both are looking as part of making sure that players can't hide forever.

Despite the bots, the multiplayer is genuine - you can check this by playing the game in 2 windows or on 2 machines side by side: If both accept requests to join large fights, eventually they'll see each other (they may die and need refreshing a few times before this happens).

If you want to make a multiplayer game in a jam, I would recommend trying it outside a jam first.
Roitchie
20. Apr 2024 · 19:19 UTC
This is very impressive for a jam game. Having it be multiplayer and fighting against other people is great. Really great job on this. With a little polish and some art this would be incredible but even still for such a short time getting this working is very impressive. Well done!
Pegasus
20. Apr 2024 · 19:25 UTC
This is such a cool concept, took a minute or two to really figure out but this is genuinely really unique. It reminds me of a reddit april fools game (in a good way). The only thing I can really fault it for is the graphics, specifically the feedback on your actions is kind of minimal and it can be hard to really figure out what's going on. Really good job guys!
Custodi
22. Apr 2024 · 23:31 UTC
Intresting concept with multiplayer, but missing UI & art makes game is too hard to understand what happening on the screen
CataclysmicKnight
28. Apr 2024 · 01:48 UTC
I honestly assumed this was multiplayer as in "lots of enemies online that are AI" not actually true multiplayer, that's epic! I was rather confused the whole time I played this, but it was definitely interesting and I felt awesome when I won fights and felt super lucky when someone would help at the last minute, etc.
Tygrak
30. Apr 2024 · 09:12 UTC
Very cool concept! There wasn't too much gameplay so far but it was still super cool to play around with it. When I got into a huge battle I was very impressed. I am imagining how this could work if players had various abilities, it could basically be like Eve :D. It also reminds me of old browser games I played ~10 years ago :).
kjscott
30. Apr 2024 · 21:13 UTC
It took several plays in order to figure out how on earth to play this, once I finally "got" it then the fun definitely increased a lot. Definitely one of the two most unique takes and creative implementation of the summoning concept I've come across so far.