The flame is the only light that remains in this world. Protect it at all costs from the creatures that want to destroy it. Do whatever it takes to survive. You can become a powerful mage, a mighty warrior, or recruit an army.

Status	On hold
Platforms	HTML5
Author	Thinking Of Z
Genre	Strategy, Survival
Made with	Godot
Tags	2D, Roguelike

Download

First Flame - Windows 72 MB

Install instructions

Download and run the first_flame.exe file to play.

Development log

Shipping My First Game
Oct 27, 2023

Comments

ShoTro174 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hey! Love what you did with the course! I was looking for my own twist to make the concepts my own and I loved your outcome!

Here are a few notes/ideas/bug fixes:

When you purchase a weapon after having purchased all the weapons, you get stuck in an empty menu. A back button, would be nice to back out of the choice, but also, if encountering this bug, players can get out of it.
Items collected in areas where you cannot see... maybe negate any damage to enemies until they reach a specific point on the board? Make the modulate on the sprites black then white signaling the change?
Increasing the number of projectiles was the key to making this game very easy. Maybe you only need a single upgrade? 3 seemed to be overkill.
Once you get all the weapons unlocked then you are pretty much unstoppable. To promote replay, maybe allow only a certain number of them to be unlocked, like 5.
The lag might be caused by instancing all the resources for an attack for the first time and maybe the enemies. Maybe preload those scenes so it only effects the start of the level.
Buying a knight at the beginning of the game causes them to kill everything in the darkness. As to my previous point, maybe restrict the knight's movement to only half the scene length.
The magic/flame wave upgrade description was vague compared to what it actually did IMO.
Maybe enemy health needs to scale or something. There needs to be more balancing or the game needs to end with a score card after a set point of time.

Over all I really enjoyed this game!

Thinking Of Z174 days ago

ShoTro, I'm glad you enjoyed the game and even played all the way through.

- I really need to fix this asap!

- Hmm, I hadnt considered this.

- Also good feedback, as fun as this is, it scales your power WAY too fast. Maybe you can choose to buy a weapon OR increase projectile count. They both fill the same slot. And then limit to 5-6 weapons / projectile increases.

- I made all of the nodes exist in the scene even when unused, however they are marked as "visible = false". For some reason the first time I turn an instance of a node from "visible = false" to "visible = true" it causes the game to stutter. I still havent figured this out, and it is causing issues on other games I am working on...

- I'll see if I can add a leash to bring them back if they get too far away.

- Strong yes. It does actually have a victory screen at 30 minutes, but I think the game becomes AFK at 10-15 minutes with the scaling being so broken.... so you never get there.

I found that with each item that I added ( weapon or new unit ) the game became harder to balance, and rather the learning about the game engine I was spending a ton of time tuning numbers and enemy HP etc, so I decided to take a break and publish it. But comments like this give me a lot of motivation to revisit it and see what I can improve.

Thanks again!

ShoTro150 days ago(+1)

For the visibility true/false stutter... modulate alpha from 0 to 255 and maybe disable the collision. I found out that visible goes through the whole tree to check stuff... for some reason.

As for the balance thing... yeah, that is always the hardest thing to figure out. Especially if something you really wanted is what is unbalancing the game.

billybop180 days ago(+1)

Loved it! Took a few tries but once I got going it snowballed.

Glitched at 18 minutes. The option to buy another weapon popped up after I finished buying all of the other upgrades and it greyed out the screen.

Thinking Of Z180 days ago

Thanks Billybop! Looks like you are better at the game than I am :O

RogueAbyss182 days ago(+1)

game is kinda laggy sometimes, but fun!

Thinking Of Z181 days ago(+1)

Glad you liked it, and thanks for the feedback :D

DreamWaker183 days ago(+1)

Any chance of a good bit more time before the boss arrives?

Thinking Of Z182 days ago

I can do that, how long did you have in mind?

DreamWaker179 days ago

Maybe have it spawn when the player hits a certain point (like X levels gained, or stuff bought)

Koalamode184 days ago(+1)

This was really fun and a great challenge! Thanks for creating!

Thinking Of Z184 days ago

Thanks! Glad you liked it <3

XkaliaX185 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

honestly a fun game! if released as a mobile game im sure it would do well if the bugs were worked on. bug no 1: cant scroll on upgrade menu occasionally, bug 2 game freezes up after you lose, bug 3 generally just lag (i have a beefy computer, bug 4 wont let me download because of error file

edit: i only got bored after it froze too much

Deleted post185 days ago

Deleted 184 days ago

Thinking Of Z184 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks for playing the game and thank you for the feedback!

I fixed the menus, and I think the performance has improved a bit.