Mausoleum Quest is a small action adventure game where you explore an old and ruined place, inhabited by dangerous drones. It looks peaceful, but the quest will be difficult.
The controls are simple: an attack key, and a dash key to escape your opponents attacks and jump from a platform to anther.
Credits:
pathfinding from picozine 4 by richy486
collision script inspired from this cart by Zep
animation function by Scathe
Really good ! The level design is remarkable. It took me very long time to understand that the hero is tall and has a long spear. Is there anything after the tombstone ? I'm stuck here with 8 coins.
Also can't get past 8. I see two areas with the blue blocks that I can't seem to find the buttons for. Is there something I'm missing? Otherwise a really strong game, challenging but rewarding.
@~firefly~ @jacobBB
Thank you for playing! I'm going to guess you are both missing the 2 "hidden" coins. One of them is actually visible on the map. Walk around this room and you'll find an hidden way to reach it... it's a little tricky ;)
For the last one... well there might be a last screen you didn't visite :D
That was pretty cool overall. Definitely neat how you had to think carefully about the map to find how to reach certain areas. You also made very effective re-use of assets without things feeling too samey. And personally I didn't have any issue finding all 10 coins and reaching the boss (although I did find the double turret room pretty much by intuition).
I definitely got a bit of a Hyper Light Drifter vibe from it (and I love that game), though this admittedly didn't feel as good to play thanks to the clunkier controls (but that's partly due to the nature of PICO-8 itself).
A few notes:
- The hitbox for the player isn't quite centered. This is mostly noticeable on 1-tile tall ledges, where you appear to be standing at the lowermost edge of a tile when you're as close to the wall above you as you can be.
- Why can't you attack diagonally in any way? You can dash diagonally, but you can only attack directly in the cardinal directions. This makes some parts more annoying than they need to be since you only hit stuff you're directly adjacent to (ex. when you land diagonally adjacent to a projectile turret and don't have time to reposition and attack before it fires). Maybe have a sweep attack if you hold the button down? That could also add a bit more risk/reward to combat.
- This game could really use some sort of music. With the exception of sound effects, the game is completely dead-silent. What would be really cool would be to have an ambient track that plays throughout but has more layers added on in combat scenarios, and unique ones for the boss and maybe larger enemies (You already have a feature to detect if a room is cleared of enemies, so I think this shouldn't be too hard to implement).
- Enemies don't telegraph attacks well. This is kinda frustrating with the humanoid drones and the boss, as you can never quite tell what they're about to do. The boss is less problematic because they tend to attack in the direction they're facing, but it's still kind of erratic. (Note: This doesn't apply to the lasers, I have no mechanical complaints about those.)
- You have NO invincibility frames during your dash. It's not unplayable as it is, but given how clunky the dash and attack are this makes it makes it a little frustrating to deal with projectile turrets. (Alternatively, you could make it so you can deflect/destroy projectiles by attacking them.)
- (Minor) Large laser turrets fire their beam from an off-center position. This is pretty much purely visual, but it just seems off when it looks like they should be shooting from the center of their body instead of the upper left.
@Jusiv: Thank you so much for your feedbacks! I also really liked HLD, it probably inspired me a lot for my game :p
I never really consider invicibility during dash but that might be a good idea indeed.
I actually try to teach myself how to make music, but I start from zero so I kinda gave up on adding music for this game. It's a skill I need to work on.
About the gameplay... I agree with you, the drones attack are not great...
I think I'll try to prototype a less-clunky action battle system on a separate cart, and maybe I'll make Mausoleum quest 2 based on it :D
This is awesome. I only got 8 gems and then I had to go do something else. But what I did play was really good. As others have said, major HLD vibes, great level design, kind of clunky combat. Would have been cool to have some ambient music akin to HLD. Otherwise, it was really cool. Looking forward to the sequel.
P.S. As with a lot of games on Pico-8, a save system would be nice. There's probably several variables to keep track of with this one (gems, checkpoint, rooms cleared, switches pressed), but it would have been cool to start back where I left off.
wow that was tough but i beat it! got 9 coins before i gave in and referenced the map. that last room really needed more of a hint as to where the entrance was. also looked up how many hits it would take to beat the boss. collision is the weakest part of the gameplay especially bc it affects a lot of the platforming as well as the combat, but over all it was great. excellent visuals and solid room design.
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