Fight off waves of enemies and gain an upgrade after each wave.
I made this in about a month and was very inspired by the combat of Hollow Knight (this is essentially my version of the Colosseum of Fools from it).
Controls + Instructions
Controller works too, O and X are just some of the main 4 buttons.
move---⬅️/➡️
jump---🅾️
slash---❎
heal---hold ⬇️
ability---tap 🅾️+❎ at same time (+ ⬆️/⬇️ for some abilities)
You can hold the up/down arrow keys while slashing to direct it up or down, this can be done in mid air and you can bounce of enemies head if you slash down on their heads (aka, pogoing).
Slashing at a projectile will reflect them (use this to damage the flying shooters).
Each time you hit an enemy you get energy, which appears in the orb on the bottom left. You can use this to heal or use an ability. Healing and some abilities take 1/3 of your energy orb, some abilities take half of that amount, 1/6.
Development
This is the first time I really pushed the limits of Pico-8, I exceeded sprite sheet capacity and stored it as strings in the code. I also ran against the token limit quite a bit. Both the token limit and compressed capacity warnings were blinking quite a bit at the end 🫠
I used up all the sfx tracks, mostly for music which I had a lotta fun making, I actually got carried away and made most of it before half the game was done :)
I would've liked to make the final boss a more interesting fight, to have a proper tutorial instead of text on the menu and the description, include another enemy, etc, but alas, tokens were sparse.
The Very Little Bit of Lore
You see, they say the crown has great power. So using that power the queen has possessed/controlled the enemies from her domain at the bottom of the cave, that's why they have green eyes. Or was it really the queen..?
The boss fight characters are (in order): The Lost Monarch, The Royal Knight, and The Crowned Queen
Have fun! Its pretty tough, so good luck!
game by @Munchkin
playtesting from @DianteClark
itch.io version: https://void-gamesplay.itch.io/cave-of-the-crown
1st death in the instructions screen, hahaha, this is going to be tough...
2nd death at L5, hit the boss once with his magic ball for a tiny amount of damage before being completely destroyed, I probably should have taken the double jump when offered... Except it wouldn't have helped as I had spent all my mama on healing anyway.
This promises to be very tough unless I find some broken combo in the upgrade system.
Thrilled to try again...
@RealShadowCaster lol the title screen being able to deal damage (and death) was a workaround that makes a fun Easter egg as well.
Glad you seem to be enjoying it! I don't think there's anything too broken with the upgrades but some are certainly more useful than others.
Just beat it; was there a balance update or something just recently? It feels like the Royal Knight was less dangerous and had less health this time around.
The enemy variety was very good and made for a surprising variety of ways to mix up the combat and make the player improvise. I managed to totally cheese the final boss, though, by taking 2 jump force upgrades and 3 range upgrades (no double jump) with high damage and thus defeated the Crowned Queen very quickly on my first try.
Ultimately, I would say the most dangerous wave of the game was Wave 2, with how all the little guys would tend to fall on your head and attack from the side very quickly, and the hardest boss was definitely the Royal Knight. I haven't played Hollow Knight before (though I've seen plenty of it), and I found this to be very fun!
@Rascal Congrats!
There were some balance updates but they should have made the knight harder, I'll have to double check that in case I messed something up...
Yeah the final boss cheesing was something I knew about and left in lol, I was going to make her way cooler with lightning attacks (on time to the music if I could get that working) and stuff but I kinda ran out of tokens (and time/energy with the game)
Ah I guess wave 2 might be pretty tough that early on, the rollers originally had less health but I increased it so they stayed relevant later on and didn't change that, I'll tweak that in an update if I make enough changes (like if I messed up the knight difficulty).
Anyway, happy to hear you had fun, thanks for playing!
Finally I dethroned the queen!
Nice challenging game but it was fun.
I have to agree that the queen is less hard than the knight. If you want to rebalance things, I suggest nerfing the knight while buffing the queen.
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