The Sky has been blacked out into an endless night with the stars constantly shifting and falling.
The Nightmare Knight has awoken and breaks havoc on those who try to sleep through it.
It's up to the starborn Safire and her two magical friends to stand up and put an end to the endless night!
Jump and fight your way up through this vertical platformer through variouss short levels.
But watch out, dying means starting over!
Choose between 3 characters that have varying abilities that gets stronger as long as you keep up a combo streak:
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Safire has a short range fireball, maintain a combo to make her fire stronger and regenerate faster.
[8x8] -
Kalynn uses arrows at a long range, but can resort to her melee weapon when she gets too close.
[8x8]
However, her arrows can't damage dark enemies without her combo power. -
Serene can create a bubble shield around her, dealing damage to any enemies nearby, she also deals extra damage to dark enemies.
[8x8]
Controls:
Player 1:
Arrow keys: Move
Z: Jump
X: Shoot
Player 2:
ESDF: Move
W/Shift/Tab: Jump
Q/A: Shoot
Enter: Pauze, reset
Defeat enemies in a row to unleash a combo streak, the abilities of the combo depends on the character.
It's also uploaded on Itch.io!
https://ppowersteef.itch.io/fallen-star
Nice game, i usually play Serene because of the combo power.
For anyone starting out in this game and suffering once you get a few levels in,
@Shadow_Blaster6 : Thank you for the advice, Serene is the only character I've completed the game with.
I found Kalynn easier to explore the early levels with, but once the dark enemies became standard she had a lot of trouble.
I like the variety in the characters and their play styles, so this isn't a request to change them. It was fun but a bit repetitive having to play from the very beginning on death.
I really like this game. It looks good and plays well, although sometimes I fall off platforms when I didn't think I would and some of the fire jumps seem impossible without losing a heart. It is a challenge but I like that. It is punishing that when you die you do have to start again but I think that this is important to this game (although I haven't finished it yet).
One point though is that I've found though that unless you get to the end there is no reason to kill any enemies. The Max Combo is only displayed then so currently I am just getting through the levels as fast as I can without stopping to kill everything. Maybe have the time and "max combo" displayed when you die?
Hey there, thanks for the feedback so far!
So far I've noticed that Serene is quite the fan-favorite and easiest character, where Kalynn struggles the most in the later stages.
I do think it's a good thing that there's a difference in difficulity per character, but I will probably balance them out by a little bit.
Having to start over is an essense of an arcade/roguelike. But I think the lack of lives/'extra tries' makes it perhaps too much of a "trial and error" experience. I'll try what I can do with the remaining code space.
The lava stage is perhaps the most extraordinaire one. But the enviroment can be harder or easier depending on the character. (if anything, it'll be the hardest for me to balance it out. :D). Every lava pool should be avoidable, but I'll see if I can make changes there.
Killing all enemies is not a neccesary thing, but I could add the combo counter on defeat.
Once again, thanks for the feedback!
Nice little game with a cool concept and good character designs! I feel like it's rough around the edges in parts, namely some collision issues and the bossfight having unfair moments, but it has nice potential!
Gave it a spin on the last stream if you are interested
Yay! It has an ending animation! Its always a nice treat to get more than a just "you won" message at the end of the game
Thanks!
Fallen Star is inspired primarly by 2 games:
- Kid Icarus, for it's Vertical level design and angelic theme.
- Kamiko, for the cute pixel art style, the simplicity, having 3 characters with different abilities, and the combo feature.
I'm a big Nintendo/Terraria fan, so some smaller things may also be blindly inspired by it.
Last week I've given the game a balance update, you can read the changes here:
https://ppowersteef.itch.io/fallen-star/devlog/511336/update-11-reset-and-balance-changes
@ppowersteef I was curious how you had handled the title screen, suspecting some kind of string encoding, and was absolutely baffled to see the huge hero sprite in the shared map/sprite space.
Usually, when the number of used sprites is over 128 and below 256, shared space is filled with sprites from the bottom so the usable map space stays rectangular, but because you are dealing with 1 screen wide levels, you used a vertical split of the shared space with sprite data taking two separate screen columns... 1st time seeing this trick, but thanks to it, you have two levels that are 4 screens tall.
Maybe you can mess with map width and/or map address to have even taller levels if you make a sequel ?
I made a sandbox map to get a better understanding of what happens when you do :
Haha, yeah, it was this game that let me discover that the bottom half of the sprite/map space were shared, so I went experimenting around with how I could work with this, I've noticed that both sprites and the map could work together in my vertical levels as long as they don't overlap.
...However, because the spritesheet is in the map encrypted with your own sprites, this can cause some bizarre bugs as well:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=140427
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