You are tasked with going into the dungeon to take down the Dark Ashling. To do so you have 10 ashlings to raise. They begin as small infant blobs. Feed them shards you gather from defeating enemies in the dungeon to make them grow and gain new abilities. Once they become a child they will inherit one of the following: Spreadshot (From Red Shards) HP + Speed (From Blue Shards) Slow Enemies (From Green Shards) Piercing Shot (From Pink Shards) Bombs (From Yellow Shards)
From there you can feed them other shards to improve these abilities further with different attributes such as improved damage, more HP, faster movement speed, more range or added effects. Your Ashlings will go from Infant to Child, Teen, Adult and Final.
You can take 5 of the 10 ashlings along with you into the dungeon. If they die they will revert to their Infant form. Also be careful. If it turns to night time your Ashlings will lose their power and you will need to retreat to your hut. Once at the Hut, night will pass, your Ashlings will be healed and you can feed your Ashlings more shards.
Build up a team strong enough to reach and take down the Dark Ashling.
This was a bit too ambitious for a 48 hour project. This is the first Game Jam we've entered and the first project we've created together. We're amazed we got as much done as we did and had alot of fun doing it however by the end, some things didnt work as intended. However there is a game here with a start and finish so thats something.
We've left in our debug keys so if you're struggling you can use these to quickly grow your ashlings and try out the various abilities we've added. Just press one of the keys listed for the stated effect:
K - Reduce All Shard Requirements to 1
6,7,8,9,0 - Increase Amount of Shards you have. Each number corresponds to a different shard.
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Lv. 1enjoyed playing and i love the art, i havent played anything like this before and really suprised me how much i enjoyed the gameplay. Apart from a few minor problems i couldn’t replicate was a solid experience
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Patron
I can see this is a very ambitious entry, there's a lot of text to begin with which can be a little overwhelming, plus when I died I got this error:
*############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 of Step Eventobj_player for object obj_arrow:
Variable Get 54 (100040, -2147483648)############################################################################################ gml_Object_obj_arrow_Collision_obj_player (line 203)*
But overall, that aside, I can see what you were going for here and I'm sure with some polish this will be a great game :) good job!
SubmittedCactus Capers
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Lv. 9
Yeah I understand it is quite overwhelming to be hit with a block of text as the game starts. It was mainly done to save time so we could focus on other stuff but if we take things further we will just ease the player in through the gameplay itself rather than a block of text. I had hoped we had got rid of all the game ending errors but I guess there are still some in there haha. Thanks for playing the game though and I appreciate you leaving the feedback :)
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Patron
Interesting idea! I tried a few times but struggled a little bit. I wasn't 100% sure what was going with some things - seemed that the ashlings just died randomly - but I think that was the night? I found the rocket dudes a bit unfair in that they could shoot at you through walls but you couldn't shoot back through them!
I did like the evolving / leveling up of the ashlings though with the shards. Was quite nice as it allowed you to plan your 'loadout' to some degree and try different combinations out each time.
A bit more work on the visuals and some general polish and I think you've got a pretty good game going!
Great effort for a first time entry!
SubmittedGuarden Gnome
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Lv. 9
The dead ashlings is likely just down to a bug to be honest. We had several issues in our last couple of hours, one of which was our health system falling apart and a lot of it didn't work as intended. I'm glad you liked the leveling up/evolution system. If we do decide to take the game further then we would like to have different enemy types so that planning which ashlings to take with you would have a greater importance. We would also address the shooting enemies being able to fire through the walls as it is rather unfair they can do so. Thanks a lot for playing the game and we really appreciate all the feedback.
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Lv. 10
I like that the Ashlings evolve into different forms depending on what shards they are fed, and that their attacks can be further altered after evolving. The gameplay and graphics style gave me serious Apple II vibes; I dunno if that was intentional, but I approve. It's very impressive how much was packed into this, considering it was made on a time crunch.
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Lv. 26
I definitely like the concept, the exploration and levelling up and using ashlings as expendable troops are cool ideas.
There are a couple issues with game balance, like how you can camp next to a treasure chest and repeatedly run outside with no ashlings to collect it and farm up a ton of shards that way with no risk. Also it seems like the final boss's attacks don't do any damage to you.
With a couple tweaks to game balance, and with some visual polish like making the ashlings move around you or animate in some way, I think this could be a really good game!
SubmittedPollen Nation
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Lv. 9
Thanks for the feedback. Balancing the game was something we planned to work on towards the end when everything else was in place. Unfortunatly we hit some issues towards the end and our last couple hours were spent trying to fix those.
I'm glad you liked the ideas we came up with. Even though it has a fair few issues we're pleased with what we created and hopefully we can return to it someday, clean it up and get a fully functional game out of this.
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Patron
Really nice job. Super ambitous game and it's got some gamejam-roughness to it but it's a cool concept with a lot of systems involved with it. Really impressive for a 1st gm48, looking forward to playing your next gm48 game
SubmittedMy Little Sumo
