Mantis Melee by thormoth
Your goal is to defeat the Enemy creatures.

At the beginning of your turn you can choose to Attack or use an Item. You can use an Item before you Attack. Your Turn will End after you Attack. So make sure to use any Items first.


After defeating a couple of opponents you will visit your Guide to gather new Items and Modifiers. You can hold several of each Item type. Modifier effects combine to increase stats.

Defeat the 7 enemies to sate your hunger, optionally continue on to endless mode where the difficulty gradually increases and see how long you can survive!
Known Issues: - Encountered some issues with the WebGL build on Firefox. If you encounter any issues on firefox, suggest using chromium based browser.
Changelog (note a v1 build is attached if you wish to play the original version, the one hosted on Itch.io is the up to date version): v2 - Fixed anchoring of some UI elements - Fixed some typos - Fixed blocked text not displaying correctly. - minor balancing of some items
| Link | https://kudell95.itch.io/mantis-melee |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/mantas-melee |
Ratings
| Overall | 252th | 3.864⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 116th | 3.977⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 898th | 2.795⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 255th | 4⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 176th | 4.273⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 437th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 706th | 2.725⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
The healing bonuses really help getting further, but damn thoses wasps hit hard :smile:
One tiny thing I would say is that I feel like sting is the most useful move. It has the highest DPS (or per round I should say) so I'm incentivized to just keep spamming sting esp with the HP recover buff. Would be interesting to see if other attacks are a little bit stronger to suit different situations.

Nice little game with pretty pixel art and animations. The gameplay was simple, yet engaging.
Here is my playtest:
https://youtu.be/9PUY4YJeBzE
Made it to level 18 on my first attempt, and towards the end was barely surviving on vice hp steal. Great job!
It felt very polished, and I liked the variety of upgrades. The art works really well too.
I found the first 7 prey pretty easy, especially since you get the healing, but the endless mode was fun.