Game

"You are a warlock that summons fiends to fight alongside you. Your objective is to summon all the 7 fiends by collecting crystals. Each fiend has their own personality, like a greedy one who is after the crystals you need to collect.

You’ll find out fiends aren’t your friend, like every warlock does.

Mobs drop crystals like in survivors-like games. You cannot attack anyone, instead you collect the crystals from mobs killed by fiends."

Idea

All the 7 Fiends symbolize a deadly sin, which is reflected on their unique behaviours.

My initial idea was the warlock would summon the Fiends to help him in a survivors-like battle. The Fiends would be more like "inconvenience", but I noticed they act much more like enemies while coding the game. "With A Little Help From My Fiends" was its initial name, but it was too funny and it didn't reflect the game as good as "Fiend-Zone".

Players cannot attack, the zombies are killed by the Fiends. All player does is move around and collect stuff.

What went right?

* People liked the originality of the idea. * Game objective and gameplay was clear. I knew players would try to cast an attack with mouse button, but the game has none, so I put a "You cannot attack in this game" message on mouse click. * I had limited time to draw the sprites, so I made a base Fiend sprite with white color and then tinted the sprite for each Fiends (excluding Pride, he has a variation of player sprite).

What went wrong?

These are all the consequences of the game not being tested by someone else before submission.

* Deadliest sin of this game was the large colliders, like the one on left. Game became much better when colliders became like right, but this happened in post-jam version. Large colliders made the game much harder and disrupted the flow of the movement. * It was too loud, because I was too tired and forgot to test the game with my headphones. Not only I reduced the volumes in post-jam, but also added volume rolloff to fire projectiles, so the distant explosions would have low/no sound. * I didn't have energy left to add polishes like screenshake or projectile animation upon submission. I dislike the zombie sprites, but at least they do the work. * Pixelbleeding on the tilemap. Still unresolved in the post-jam.

Here is the Ludum Dare page

As this is a Compo game, source code is available.