Crusader's Cavern

Nice game. Beat it in like 10 minutes with no deaths, but a few close calls from monsters appearing right on top of me.

The idea of slipping into a nighmare-ish void is cool, but I think it could use some improvement. The big black scary thing was less scary once you learn you could kill it without too much trouble.

My suggestion would be to make the wandering black thing indestructible, and randomly place an "exit" object somewhere on the map. So the knight's desperately fleeing this thing while trying to find the exit, with all these little monsters getting in the way.

Also, it wasen't especially clear that you're supposed to keep hitting the giant eye at the end. Maybe you could give it a different animation when the player hits it?

what do you do when you get to the black ball?

PopLava wrote:

- First fading light event nearly gave me a heart attack. The sound was so loud and sudden.

Hehe, good. That was intentional. You should know it's more subdued than what I started with, but I had to tone it down because I didn't want anyone to lose their hearing or blame me for having their speakers rattled.

- After killing the first couple of mobs, I sat there wondering what I should do. Eventually the boss came out. Thought it just took forever but after reading previous posts, I realize that it wanders around in previous rooms before finding you. In the 4-5 times this event happened to me, I just sat in the same room and waited for it to show up and then I would kill it with ease.

I couldn't figure out a good way to get it to spawn. Originally you had to kill every single creature in every single room and then it would spawn, but once you got far enough in that just became a pain in the butt. What I could do is spawn it in a room but not have it stalk you until making visual contact with it.

- Found the puzzles to be a little too easy. / Having more than one switch in a room would be fun.

I had these crates you could push onto switches but had to remove them because of some crazy edge case bug I couldn't solve. Mind you, this was after about 24 hours with no sleep. Same problem with the puzzles, I only had about four rooms actually completed until a few hours before the deadline. I had to slap the rest together as quickly as possible while making sure nothing broke the game. I tried fixing up the puzzles up a little but I didn't want to change too much in the spirit of preserving it as a contest entry.

- I made it to the end on my first attempt but I wasn't sure what I was doing and eventually died. When I was moved back to start, I thought "how brutal" to start me all over again. Then I realized the puzzle was already solved and upon walking into the second room, I realized I could probably walk all the way back. Then I wondered, why would he make me walk all the way back!?! :)

You aren't actually "moved back to the start." Die in one of the rooms and you'll see what I mean. It was my attempt at incorporating part of the story into the actual game.

- The ending leaves you wondering if you should exit or wait for something magical to happen. I opted for X button so hopefully I didn't miss anything. :)

Nope, once the music stops that's the end of the game. I "finished" the final boss about an hour before the contest deadline. A funny thing about that, because I had played through the game so many times when testing it I wasn't able to discover bugs which broke the fight if you happened to die in certain situations. Several people in Chatters pointed them out to me right before the deadline.

- Really nice work for a contest entry.

Thank you!