Thanks, again, for all the comments! Getting feedback on what I’ve made (and trying to write constructive and useful feedback to others) is one of the reasons I really like taking part of Ludum Dare! This community is the best!!

There are two main issues that people seem to be having with my entry: gameplay feels clunky and it doesn’t seem to relate with the theme. I’ll write another post to explain all the possible actions and how combat actually doesn’t works, all with animated GIFs to illustrate everything.

For now, I’ll address any lingering confusion about the theme (even though quite a lot of people seemed to get it).

But, before that, I’ll quickly talk about this game’s future. I really liked the original idea, and I’m quite happy with how the combat could work if fixed. Also, finally having big sprites is great after using small 16×16 sprites for so long.

So I do plan to extend this into a “full short-game”. Something that should take around a month to make (and I’ll probably take three or so), just to make it into what it was supposed to be. I may still fail, so it’s more of something I’ll try to do, but don’t get your hopes up (I’ve never been able to  finish a project that requires as many assets as this game will… and I’ve tried quite a few times, already…).

Now, on to talk about the theme! It will be a kind of spoilers, so be aware of that before reading on…

One of the issues is that the theme isn’t clear… and that’s intentional! I like to leave it to the player to interpret the game as they want… but that requires proper story telling, something that I usually fail do.

Adding the story quite late into the game’s development (I did it pretty much before the SFX, which was the last thing I did), also didn’t help. I didn’t want the story to take too long and the small virtual window (160×120) didn’t allow for a lot of text on screen at the same time… So I just decided to make the text scroll quickly and didn’t add a confirmation button afterward… Terrible decisions, I know…The resulting game is quite different from the original idea. It was supposed to be about a hero getting confused and despaired about the current situation (and then becoming a monster), but it came out like this:

You think you are a righteous hero. Sometimes, you do have doubts about yours instructions, but you follow them, nonetheless. This time, you were asked to kill “dangerous” monsters on the forest. When you get there, you find cute little slimes. After so many people passed through here and annoyed them, some of the slimes even did become aggressive. Instead of doing the right thing and letting the slimes be, you blindly follow the orders and begin to kill ’em all. No matter if they fight back or not… You are truly a monster…

Someone said on the comments that this would had been clearer if no slime fought back… and that guy was probably right… I didn’t think about this during the jam, but it would really had helped to tell this through the gameplay…
Well, I gotta keep trying! One day I will make an awesomely polished game that doesn’t fail to tell its story (nor has terrible gameplay).