Cave of the Crown
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 | Z |
| slash | X |
| heal | hold ⬇️ |
| ability | tap Z+X at same time |
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 off enemies 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
lexaloffle page: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=150629#p
Download
Comments
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Woohoo! I was very excited by the very challenging battle system! And I managed to clear the game, but I was already having a lot of fun with it!
The battle against small foes is easy when it's one-on-one, but when there are multiple foes, it's difficult to avoid their attacks and predict their moves, but it was great when I could get through it successfully.
The HP recovery system makes battles very interesting because you have to attack enemies to accumulate energy, and you can only use it when it is safe to do so.
What bothered me a little was that since all the energy was used for recovery, there wasn't enough left over to put into other actions. If I get better and can go without recovery, I can fight stylishly!
Thank you for playing! It's cool to see a video of someone playing.
Yeah it takes time and practice to get the most out of energy, I guess a it's a high skill ceiling (or just a hard game lol).
Good luck for if you decide to fight stylishly with your special moves!
Great game! Very challenging I got to depth 12 on like my 5th run.
Nice that's really good! You're almost there :)
Excellent game!