TasJam: Aspiration (September 2022)

Controller and Keyboard support
Arrow keys/left stick to move and aim
Left click/West button to attack
Kill all enemies to open the door to the next level.
Enemies can drop health pickups and new weapons!

Source code available on my Github.

Comments

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Hey this is a cool game.

I think with some improvement it can be quite successful. And I have some tips:

  • The aim was always in front of my character, I don't know if that was the idea or if it was a bug, but I had to face the enemies to attack them, by clicking with the mouse. If that's the idea, I'd also add the option to attack with he space bar, so there's no need for the mouse. But I think a better approach would be making the character attack in the direction of the mouse, giving much more freedom to the player;
  • After I got the throwing knife the game became super easy, maybe add some enemies that shoot?
  • It looks like the difficulty doesn't reset when the game ends, my first enemy was a cyclops already, and it took a while to kill.
  • The blood splats could vanish from room to room.

I have a similar game, and I'd love your opinion https://beorgames.itch.io/hero-battle-fantasy-arena

Hey, thanks for playing!

This game was part of a 3-day gamejam, and I probably won't modify it further to preserve its authenticity as a jam entry. I might explore this game further in a separate project, but I tend to leave my jam games in the state that I submitted them in.

That being said, here are some things that I would have done/added if I had more time:

  • Twin-stick style shooter, left stick/wasd moves, right stick/arrow keys attack in their respective directions
  • More enemy variety, currently they all have the exact same chase behavior with slightly different stats
  • Difficulty scaling, currently it literally just gives you one extra enemy per room and it's completely random which type
  • Buffs to choose from at the end of every level that persist/stack until the player dies
  • Permanent buffs every 10(?) levels that persist beyond player death
  • Increase enemy spawn rate as the player progresses, it currently spawns a new enemy every 1-5 seconds
  • On the fence if I want to add some sort of room generation that the player progresses through, or hand-make several "arenas" that the player stays in for the duration of their run

I actually went out of my way to keep the blood splats, I wanted the player to see the carnage. This only works in a single-level design though, so if I added more rooms I'd need to make the splats even juicier. It does currently replace the oldest splat once 1000 have been spawned to preserve memory.

Yeah all that sounds great! And that's exactly what I did, my game also started as a Jam submission, and then I improved and turned it into a new game :P
I think this game has potential, it reminded me a lot of Gun Knight.