Ludum Dare: The Monastery & Bathyscape11

[petri]

Antti, Taneli and me at Almost Human took part in the Ludum Dare game development competition last weekend. The idea of Ludum Dare is to make a game in 48 hours from scratch working completely solo. So we made 3 games in total.

I made a party-based, turn-based RPG inspired by Gold Box games called 'The Monastery'. It was fun but also very stressful to work with so hard time constraints. You can check it out here:
The Monastery Ludum Dare page

I also wrote a rather detailed making of report which you can read here:
Making of The Monastery

If you are into old school RPGs (heh, I have a feeling some of you are ) please check it out and tell me what you think!

[antti]

I gotta take another try at Petri's game... Last time the remnants of my party was brutally slaughtered by an undead monk.

Here's my game:

It's called Bathyscaphe11 and it's a fast paced top down shooter and, well, I think the gif says it all (even though some of the sprites on that are outdated) so I won't bother with further descriptions . You can play it right on your browser too if you've got Unity webplayer plugin installed but there's also a standalone Windows version.

I'm about 90% happy with what I accomplished. I didn't get absolutely everything done that I wanted to but the game's fun, challenging and, relatively speaking, a "complete" package. As an extra, here's a timelapse video of the game's development. Enjoy!

[Komag]

Just played Bathyscaphe11, very fun!

I never died, so maybe it's a smidge too easy. But I had a blast, got into some hairy situations. I was really good at Geometry wars though, so maybe the difficulty is okay as-is. I think the weapon variations are a good balance, made me choose carefully sometimes.

[petri]

If you can also finish The Monastery without anyone dying you are a gaming god!

[antti]

Just played Bathyscaphe11, very fun!

I never died, so maybe it's a smidge too easy. But I had a blast, got into some hairy situations. I was really good at Geometry wars though, so maybe the difficulty is okay as-is. I think the weapon variations are a good balance, made me choose carefully sometimes.

Wow, that's an impressive achievement! I don't think that even I could pull it off despite the fact that I've been playing a lot of Nuclear Throne lately.

[Komag]

I played The Monastery for a while, somewhat fun, love the story so far, but the gameplay is a bit unfriendly for my tastes. Here are my notes:

- "snow stars pouring" should be "starts"
- "Only if you could see it" should be "If only"
- After I told Sancsaron to attack himself it said "Really attack Sancsaron?", should probably have "yES nO" options to be clear of keyboard commands
- should probably mention in readme/game that ESC cancels a command
- I didn't know fireball was a big strong spell. I thought the "1" meant it uses up 1 spell point, whereas the Magic Missile 15 meant it uses 15 points
- So I cast a fireball at a skeleton right by the whole party and ended up frying most of my party pretty badly! Ha ha!
- How can I exit the game, any main menu? Save?
- I restarted
- It would be nice if the battle ended immediately after last monster is defeated, instead of having to skip a couple last turns
- When moving during a battle, there seems to be no way to then attack diagonally, so I have to move one more step to be on a side and the enemy gets a free attack in the process
- I gave up searching everywhere because it just kept leading to battles, surprise ambush attacks, etc.
- I ran around the world a few dozen times like crazy, freezing my toes off, etc, finally randomely stumbled into the courtyard
"A large pond is frozen and snow covered in the in the center of the yard." has an extra "in the"
- all these surprise attacks while searching!
- I'll stop here, maybe play more later, somewhat fun so far

[petri]

Thank you for the feedback! I'll do an updated version at some point and fix these and some other things. The game was a little bit too big to be comfortably finished in the time I had, so unfortunately some stuff slipped in. (actually I coded the whole game in one non-stop 19 hour marathon ).

When moving during a battle, there seems to be no way to then attack diagonally, so I have to move one more step to be on a side and the enemy gets a free attack in the process

You can use the keypad to move and attack diagonally. You can also use the Attack command to target any square in range.

I gave up searching everywhere because it just kept leading to battles, surprise ambush attacks, etc.

The random encounter chance seems to be a little too high... but you only need to search each room once. If there's anything hidden, a single search finds it. btw. the game can't be solved without searching in a couple of places.

How can I exit the game, any main menu? Save?

You can exit the game by clicking on the window close button There is no main menu or save feature but the game is designed to be playable from start to end in one go. It's sort of like a roguelike. It gets easier when you know what the spells do and how the combat works. Also it helps when you know where important things are in the levels.

[JohnWordsworth]

Sounds like you both had a fun but long weekend of coding goodness. Have considered doing a Ludum Dare myself before, but haven't made the leap yet - it feels like it would be much easier to stay focussed if working alongside some other people (even on separate projects) like an in-person jam.

Love both of the games, here's some feedback on each!

The Monastery

- I compiled from sources on OSX (if you would like the binary, just let me know). It worked great and I didn't run into any problems / bugs.
- The game was great overall - good sprites, audio and fun to play. I enjoyed reading the text descriptions, they gave it great atmosphere. I might have to visit GOG later...
- I completed the game on my first run. I lost 1 character, but resurrected him. I visited every room I believe and had a fair share of battles.
- Thought the attack of opportunities against spell casters was cool.
- Without a numpad on my laptop, I felt disadvantaged, as many times I had to take an extra attack if I wanted to move and attack.
- Is it possible to move and cast? I feel it should be! Perhaps you can move and do another action every round (after you've moved, 'move' is greyed out but it goes back to the action screen list).
- An 'Inspect' option in the combat mode would be cool, so you can look at an enemies stats without having to bring up the attack interface.
- You always start against the top edge on the combat screen. It would be cool if you sometimes started 1-2 rows down say so that you can move your casters to the back row if the enemies go first (you will take an AOO, but that's cool).
- Would be nice if combat ended as soon as you killed all of the bad guys instead of having to hit skip a few times.
- There are obviously loads of cool things that would make it better like character gen, loot and XP etc - but you're obviously aware of these and still added a hell of a lot for 19 hours of coding!

Bathyscape11

- Played through the web player on OSX in Safari. Worked great and didn't find any bugs.
- I enjoyed the fast action and dangerous nature of the game. You can die pretty quick, which I like.
- The randomness of the shooting angle was a tiny bit frustrating at times (damn, I missed when I felt I should have hit). Maybe your first shot should have a high accuracy and repeat shots should have a lower accuracy. This would allow you to carefully line up a good shot.
- The shadow idea is really cool - it makes for some good surprises and shocks in the level, which is nice in the 'twin-stick shooter', but I guess the shadow effect is created by cuboids coming into the camera, but it would be nice if the shadows were a bit softer somehow (ie. had a penumbra).
- The assault shotgun is great! Love that you got a variety of weapons and enemies into the game.

[petri]

Thank you John for the feedback! And congratz for completing the game!

The Windows version only got a few reviews, so I've created a Web version of the game. The new version also has some bug fixes, like battle not ending after all enemies are dead, and the possibility to move and cast a spell, and move and attack with targeting in the same round.

If you're going to participate in LD, my advice is to use Unity or javascript or whatever. With the sheer number of games released nobody has time to download games it seems, so LD has mostly become a Web/Unity game development competition.

Play the Web version of The Monastery here

EDIT: title music does not play on Safari, maybe it doesn't support Ogg playback or there is something else wrong. Chrome recommended.

[Neikun]

Just started playing the Monastery. Sancsaron is kill stealing everyone! haha