This game is really nice. Especially because the animations and smoothness are so amazing. Making a nice 2D game in this age is really challenging and this one really won my heart.
Very fun game. Would like to see some speedrunning score keeping or something like that though so there is reason to play it more. If there was something like that this would probably be my go to game for waiting in loading screens, when I want to play something quick or stuff like that.
There's a fun game in here somewhere, but the retro arcade levels of jank make it not even frustratingly fun. The combined effects of: 1) the sword hitbox not covering much beyond the cardinal direction, made worse by 2) it *looking* like it should, and 3) not being able to swing very fast, and swing speed being inconsistent sometimes, leads to the main mechanic of this game being.... to not put yourself in a compromising situation. So instead of being a badass wall-jumping sword swinging fast-paced samurai slicer, I'm... waiting for creepers to jump to where I can safely slash them before crawling to the next lantern. When I got to level 3 where you can barely see them against the background I was done.
Pretty fun, but too easy for sustained play. Perhaps you could make some harder modes. In my opinion where it fails is that the game becomes very very easy if you simply choose to spend time killing enemies, you can always kill enemies faster than they spawn if you focus on it, so it is easy to grab 2-3 lanterns, kill all the enemies that spawn as they are jumping out of their two spawn locations, and then you have no danger whatsoever as you collect 2-3 more lanterns.
What would be great would be to greatly reduce the "reload" speed of the sword slash, such that just killing all enemies is a really slow porcess and the game is more about jumping around these enemies and living with a screen full of enemies, than killing them as they spawn. In this way the game would get harder and more intense as you collect more lanterns and the enemies pile up.
Personally I found it too difficult, and I really enjoyed it. The difficulty spiked too hard, for me subjectively, once you hit the second level. I hope there's some levels after that. Cause the first level gets easy if you've played it once.
Interesting, huh? Even though you know that there are serious problems with an experience, you keep coming back. Is that the mark of a good game, or just an addictive one?
Well, I just played your game for four straight hours. I HAD to beat it with no deaths, and when I did I wanted to screenshot it for you, but while I was basking in the glory the message disappeared! Please, make it so you have to click out of that! People are still coming off of their adrenaline highs and wont be able to focus enough haha.
Anyways, if you couldn't tell, I love your game. Samurai Lantern is probably one of my favorite games of the year (Honestly. This game is fantastic.). It's so tightly focused and so good at what it does! The screen shake when you hit an enemy, the excellent stage set-ups (I love how the stages wrap around and how that affects enemy pathing. It was brilliant when I figured that out.), the gorgeous retro graphics. I even enjoy the three stage length. This game is like portal where it doesn't stay too long, it just puts forth all its ideas in a coherent fashion and lets the player decide how long they want to spend with it. It's simple and quick, and that is what makes it good for spending hours on.
I'm hesitant to even offer suggestions because this game is beautiful just the way it is, but if I could offer three things, it would be these:
1) I'm just going to echo what other folks have said about the arrow keys on the controller. Please make that an option. I had more than a few deaths due to analog stick inaccuracy.
2) An optional speedrunning timer and a local best times list would be fantastic. This game is going to live on my desktop now and I'd love some kind of persistent score tracking.
3) I know I said its short length is a plus, but any way to get new levels in there would be awesome. Maybe some sort of rudimentary level editor or something along those lines. I'd love to play with all kinds of different set ups well past the three you've included.
P.S. Thanks for making this game. I don't know if it will be widely liked, but just know at least one person loves it. I'm going to shoot you some money when my next paycheck comes in so you can keep up this quality work. Cheers!
Wow this is an amazing comment! Thank you so much! I really do like all your feedback and I feel I must give answers to all of your points.
It's great that you beat the game! 4 hours?! Nice! I've still not been able to do a no death run yet :D. You make a good point about the message disappearing and I'll be sure to make it so the player has to press a key to go back to the main menu!
I've seen the other messages regarding making the d-pad move the player and I'll be implementing that next update (whenever that is).
A speedrunner timer is good but it would be persistent. What I mean by this is when you close the game, your time will be lost. The reason it will be this way is because I have no idea how to save things when the game closes :D. So you might have to make your own .txt and write down your times. I'll also be adding a death counter!
I will 100% be adding new levels to the game! I've already got 2 in the making and I might add a third. So I hope you enjoy them when they come out! (You will have to re-download the game from the same link when the updated version is out)
I'm really glad you had so much fun playing the game! That's really awesome!
Yeah, stats when you die would be cool, even if they're not persistent. Time, deaths, kills (for both enemy types?), maybe total lanterns collected? "500/45 lanterns" would be amusing.
Also I wonder if you should switch the second and third levels: I find the second one to be the hardest. There's nowhere safe to stand; the blue enemies jump high enough to miss your sword when jumping onto the starting platform, and you often have to go through the danger zone at the edges where enemies can wrap and the timing is hardest to predict. You have to judge how fast the enemies are moving relative to the saw blades and whether to kill them and then jump the saw blade or to jump the saw blade, turn around and then kill them. And you have to be very diligent about keeping the enemy population down or you get into difficult situations.
Whereas on the third level you can safely stand by the door and kill all comers. If you stand on the edge of that platform you can reach the blue guys before they make their first jump. From the second platforms on the edges you can get *almost* everybody: you can hit the blue guys as they jump in or as they jump up to where you're standing, you can get the blue guys on the long middle platform; the only real danger is the floating heads coming in from the edge. And you can make it to the top edge platform in a single jump, so the only time you even have to go on the one with the saw blade platform is if a lantern drops there. The only thing the saw blades really do is make it dangerous to jump when you're on the door platform, but you have no reason to ever jump from there, except out to the edge platforms where you're mostly out of the way of the saw blades anyway. And even if you let some guys go by, it's no big deal; they're mostly out of your way and you can just kill everyone coming in and wait for a good opportunity to clip the missed ones from one of the edge platforms.
Can you tell I've spent *way* too much time playing this? :)
It's really fun, but there should really be a way to change the key binds, specifically for attacking with a keyboard. To attack with E, you must move one of your fingers away from the WASD movement keys, disabling your movement for a certain direction whenever you want to attack. To attack with X, you have to hold your hands in a really wierd and akward way, that i find very hard to use without confusing the jump button and the attack button all the time. My suggestion would be to add two more buttons for attacking, SHIFT or CONTROL, this way you can always have all your fingers on all the keys necessary, or something on the right side of the keyboard, for example J or H, so that you can play just fine with two hands on the keyboard. Other than that i love this game and it plays just fine with a controller, though you sort of need to have a controller to enjoy the game, which i find kind of annying.
Hey SoilBeige, thanks for the feedback! Could you have your right hand on the arrow keys (for movement) and have your left thumb on "space" and left index finger on "E"? That way you can have two hands on the keyboard and not in an awkward position? Let me know how that works out for you!
I quite enjoyed this game. Although I do a have a question: could you make it so I can use the arrow-pad on my controller for movement? I prefer using the arrow pad in favor of the thumbstick for my precision platforming.
Hello, I played your game and I really like it (especially the flow of the game). I noticed something in the first level. Unlike the second level I can't switch the players position to the other side of the room when I pass the BOTTOM passages of the room. Don't know if this is a bug or intentional, but I wanted to let you know.
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Decided to do a little fan art. ;)
Also I'm trying to beat level 2 send halp ;w;Beat it without dying! :D
The end screen went away before I could grab a screenshot though. Oh well.
This game is really nice. Especially because the animations and smoothness are so amazing. Making a nice 2D game in this age is really challenging and this one really won my heart.
Awesome game, definitly one of my favourites from itch.io
if this game gets an update at some point in time can it be skills or like a dash move that shows an active cooldown timer at the bottom of the screen
Very fun game. Would like to see some speedrunning score keeping or something like that though so there is reason to play it more. If there was something like that this would probably be my go to game for waiting in loading screens, when I want to play something quick or stuff like that.
There's a fun game in here somewhere, but the retro arcade levels of jank make it not even frustratingly fun. The combined effects of: 1) the sword hitbox not covering much beyond the cardinal direction, made worse by 2) it *looking* like it should, and 3) not being able to swing very fast, and swing speed being inconsistent sometimes, leads to the main mechanic of this game being.... to not put yourself in a compromising situation. So instead of being a badass wall-jumping sword swinging fast-paced samurai slicer, I'm... waiting for creepers to jump to where I can safely slash them before crawling to the next lantern. When I got to level 3 where you can barely see them against the background I was done.
Funny and easy. Like it!
Had a fun time playing this game! It was super challenging! Keep making these kinds!
thanks!
Please make source code /files for this game available. Purely for educational purposes.
Pretty fun, but too easy for sustained play.
Perhaps you could make some harder modes. In my opinion where it fails is that the game becomes very very easy if you simply choose to spend time killing enemies, you can always kill enemies faster than they spawn if you focus on it, so it is easy to grab 2-3 lanterns, kill all the enemies that spawn as they are jumping out of their two spawn locations, and then you have no danger whatsoever as you collect 2-3 more lanterns.
What would be great would be to greatly reduce the "reload" speed of the sword slash, such that just killing all enemies is a really slow porcess and the game is more about jumping around these enemies and living with a screen full of enemies, than killing them as they spawn. In this way the game would get harder and more intense as you collect more lanterns and the enemies pile up.
That is more spawn locations.
Win Screen
Personally I found it too difficult, and I really enjoyed it. The difficulty spiked too hard, for me subjectively, once you hit the second level. I hope there's some levels after that. Cause the first level gets easy if you've played it once.
I keep going back to play through this again, so I guess ignore my complaint about sustained play.
Interesting, huh? Even though you know that there are serious problems with an experience, you keep coming back. Is that the mark of a good game, or just an addictive one?
I wish you could remap the controls. Otherwise it's be a great game.
CAME BACK to make it past the second level..... lets just say. I did my BEST lol Really addictive game, might be easier with a controller.
https://twitter.com/RoachFisted
very nice game i would change the attack button to mouse key 1 and the jump button to W
can i change controls?
This is fun and hard as hell! Gonna take this to work tomorrow and show all my coworkers how to waste time by the computers.
This game is super FUN !! Couldn't make it past the first level tho LMAO... Witness my failure here :
How do I enable a gamepad/controller to work on this?
Do I have to play this all at once or is there a save system?
Have you considered a difficulty system? Maybe one where you can have health, fewer enemies etc.
What does the skull in the top corner for?
I think the death animations should make the enemies turn into dust and disappear, not just flash white and fly away...
I do like that you can slash in 4 directions, so I don't have to land on an enemy and start the level over.
Gave it a go....
Well, I just played your game for four straight hours. I HAD to beat it with no deaths, and when I did I wanted to screenshot it for you, but while I was basking in the glory the message disappeared! Please, make it so you have to click out of that! People are still coming off of their adrenaline highs and wont be able to focus enough haha.
Anyways, if you couldn't tell, I love your game. Samurai Lantern is probably one of my favorite games of the year (Honestly. This game is fantastic.). It's so tightly focused and so good at what it does! The screen shake when you hit an enemy, the excellent stage set-ups (I love how the stages wrap around and how that affects enemy pathing. It was brilliant when I figured that out.), the gorgeous retro graphics. I even enjoy the three stage length. This game is like portal where it doesn't stay too long, it just puts forth all its ideas in a coherent fashion and lets the player decide how long they want to spend with it. It's simple and quick, and that is what makes it good for spending hours on.
I'm hesitant to even offer suggestions because this game is beautiful just the way it is, but if I could offer three things, it would be these:
1) I'm just going to echo what other folks have said about the arrow keys on the controller. Please make that an option. I had more than a few deaths due to analog stick inaccuracy.
2) An optional speedrunning timer and a local best times list would be fantastic. This game is going to live on my desktop now and I'd love some kind of persistent score tracking.
3) I know I said its short length is a plus, but any way to get new levels in there would be awesome. Maybe some sort of rudimentary level editor or something along those lines. I'd love to play with all kinds of different set ups well past the three you've included.
P.S. Thanks for making this game. I don't know if it will be widely liked, but just know at least one person loves it. I'm going to shoot you some money when my next paycheck comes in so you can keep up this quality work. Cheers!
Wow this is an amazing comment! Thank you so much! I really do like all your feedback and I feel I must give answers to all of your points.
It's great that you beat the game! 4 hours?! Nice! I've still not been able to do a no death run yet :D. You make a good point about the message disappearing and I'll be sure to make it so the player has to press a key to go back to the main menu!
I've seen the other messages regarding making the d-pad move the player and I'll be implementing that next update (whenever that is).
A speedrunner timer is good but it would be persistent. What I mean by this is when you close the game, your time will be lost. The reason it will be this way is because I have no idea how to save things when the game closes :D. So you might have to make your own .txt and write down your times. I'll also be adding a death counter!
I will 100% be adding new levels to the game! I've already got 2 in the making and I might add a third. So I hope you enjoy them when they come out! (You will have to re-download the game from the same link when the updated version is out)
I'm really glad you had so much fun playing the game! That's really awesome!
Yeah, stats when you die would be cool, even if they're not persistent. Time, deaths, kills (for both enemy types?), maybe total lanterns collected? "500/45 lanterns" would be amusing.
As for saving/loading, you're using GameMaker, right? I think you can just do ini_open('stats.ini'), ini_read_real(section, key, value), ini_write_real(section, key, value), ini_close(), and you can also store strings. Docs at http://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/file%20handling/ini%20files/index.html
Also I wonder if you should switch the second and third levels: I find the second one to be the hardest. There's nowhere safe to stand; the blue enemies jump high enough to miss your sword when jumping onto the starting platform, and you often have to go through the danger zone at the edges where enemies can wrap and the timing is hardest to predict. You have to judge how fast the enemies are moving relative to the saw blades and whether to kill them and then jump the saw blade or to jump the saw blade, turn around and then kill them. And you have to be very diligent about keeping the enemy population down or you get into difficult situations.
Whereas on the third level you can safely stand by the door and kill all comers. If you stand on the edge of that platform you can reach the blue guys before they make their first jump. From the second platforms on the edges you can get *almost* everybody: you can hit the blue guys as they jump in or as they jump up to where you're standing, you can get the blue guys on the long middle platform; the only real danger is the floating heads coming in from the edge. And you can make it to the top edge platform in a single jump, so the only time you even have to go on the one with the saw blade platform is if a lantern drops there. The only thing the saw blades really do is make it dangerous to jump when you're on the door platform, but you have no reason to ever jump from there, except out to the edge platforms where you're mostly out of the way of the saw blades anyway. And even if you let some guys go by, it's no big deal; they're mostly out of your way and you can just kill everyone coming in and wait for a good opportunity to clip the missed ones from one of the edge platforms.
Can you tell I've spent *way* too much time playing this? :)
It's really fun, but there should really be a way to change the key binds, specifically for attacking with a keyboard. To attack with E, you must move one of your fingers away from the WASD movement keys, disabling your movement for a certain direction whenever you want to attack. To attack with X, you have to hold your hands in a really wierd and akward way, that i find very hard to use without confusing the jump button and the attack button all the time. My suggestion would be to add two more buttons for attacking, SHIFT or CONTROL, this way you can always have all your fingers on all the keys necessary, or something on the right side of the keyboard, for example J or H, so that you can play just fine with two hands on the keyboard. Other than that i love this game and it plays just fine with a controller, though you sort of need to have a controller to enjoy the game, which i find kind of annying.
Hey SoilBeige, thanks for the feedback! Could you have your right hand on the arrow keys (for movement) and have your left thumb on "space" and left index finger on "E"? That way you can have two hands on the keyboard and not in an awkward position? Let me know how that works out for you!
I quite enjoyed this game. Although I do a have a question: could you make it so I can use the arrow-pad on my controller for movement? I prefer using the arrow pad in favor of the thumbstick for my precision platforming.
Great Job!
Thanks for the comment! I'll add that in my next update! Good suggestion :)
isnt that jin from roof rage ?!?!
Looking back on it, I probably just sucked at the game. Great game, I think I overreacted.
(WARNING: VULGAR LANGUAGE.)
Nice video! Remember -- It's just a game (developed by the CIA) :-)
Really fun game! reminds me of Super Crate Box a lot, exited to see what you do next.
PS: How did you do the lighting, It looks amazing.
I wish i could pay but Paypal is the only choice from what I see and it's not working here :( I love it!
Great game, all the feedback is awesome!
Hello, I played your game and I really like it (especially the flow of the game). I noticed something in the first level. Unlike the second level I can't switch the players position to the other side of the room when I pass the BOTTOM passages of the room. Don't know if this is a bug or intentional, but I wanted to let you know.
Your tweets make it look easier than it is! :-) So much fun!
Wish list: control remap.
Proud to be a paying customer!
Haha thank you very much :)
Wow excelent game!. Harder then i thought, which isnt a bad thing. You really nailed the gamefeel!
Excellent little game ! I will replay it.
You did it! Game is sooo good, it's quite addicting... Can't wait for what's to come from you! also supported you a little <3
Thanks so much Tocirah! :)
Could you please add a way to use the dpad instead of analog stick to move? That way feels much more natural to me.
I really like the game, and I'm impressed that this is the first you've made! Keep making stuff like this, and you'll make me very happy.
Super fun game! It's really fun when you know you're getting better. Learning the enemy patterns were difficult, but rewarding. Nice job! :)
This game transformed my life.
Played it first thing in the morning, 6am.
Intensity, focus and creativity increased throughout the day.
Thank you :)
Thanks :)