Stalked

Very atmospheric game, I thought the shadows and music added a lot to the experience. Gameplay was also fairly solid. I think some checkpoints would have been nice though.

The game will crash on start if you have a joystick connected, I was able to fix it by modifying player_controller.lua as follows: https://hatebin.com/sudroqpolk alternatively a walk button could be defined as well

Now checking out the actual game…

Great entry, very Another World-like including the insta death precise jumps

The visuals show a way around limited drawing skills or time to still achieve an interesting result, and surely the torch must be inspired by rxi who used such lighting effects in the good ol days
the sound design is very good as well

The tech is interesting, I can see Tiled and aseprite was used, I spent way too long thinkering with it, managed to make my modded version (smaller holes :P) after all by reexporting the map to .lua rather than modifying the game to load JSON, but I found a bug in coup/json.lua https://gist.github.com/kdrnic/f53878a93ed8d434f6066b201dcaeb0b which you may want to fix

(also annoying how apparently Love has no sort of interactive debugger?)

Thanks for the feedback! :)

@kdrnic the Lua export is required because, strangely, Tiled adds certain properties to objects there but omits them in the JSON. You might be able to get JSON loading working if you change how the shape of an object is obtained (in Lua Tiled adds a shape property; in JSON, you'll have to do things like check if ellipse is true, then check for a polygon property, etc. instead).

Believe me, I share your pain regarding the lack of interactive debugger ;__;

Also regarding the visuals: we did intend to add some foreground imagery, like silhouettes of rocks or grass, but sadly ran out of time.

I suspect the game has drawn some inspiration from @toasty's previous horror-themed Kajam entry? :D

After a certain amount of attempts (of which I'm not proud of) I finally managed to make some reasonable progress in the game. Still not finished but I hope to make some more attempts later :)

I like the overall looks & atmosphere of the game, with some good attention given to the main character and to make the game scary with both sounds and visuals despite the minimalism. The "line of sight" effect is cool and fitting! The death sequence is pretty effective too.

It took me quite a while to "understand" how the enemy AI works, having to experiment to make sure I did not misunderstand the gameplay. At first I was kind of thinking it was a "runner" game of sorts where we're racing against a monster, except with a twist to figure out, maybe having to be careful with the sound we make or something. But it seems like the enemy is really mostly scripted to alternate calm and skill-based escape moments ; it took a few tries before I rewired my brain to approach the game this way. I'm not sure yet exactly how walking and running makes a difference, seems like it has to do with restoring the light and avoiding guaranteed death at certain points.

So, so far it has played a bit in a trial and error manner, hopefully I can make it to the end!

Interesting to see that you thought this was a sophisticated "AI" at first. It's literally a monster on rails. The walking doesn't have much of a use, we had planned it for some additional features we didn't have the time to implement. But why waste a perfectly good walking animation, right? :-p

Awesome game! it is quite a challenge but still possible. Music is very fitting, graphics are just awesome. I would really love to play more levels!

Wow, this is eerie indeed. The eyes that follow you are very creepy; I very much did not want to find out what they belonged to (I never did). The fact that ground and unlit areas look exactly alike (black) contributes to the feeling of unease.

If there is a way to avoid the eye creatures though, I didn't find it. The fact that your light gets smaller as they approach doesn't help to evade them, either. Not sure why I would need walk mode.

The animation of the character is most excellent. In fact it's so good that I started to miss transitions between the various states. If it's done with skeletal animation, I suppose you could just add a brief tween.

Perfect atmosphere, nice atmosphere, good platforming. What an entry! Too bad you didn't make it in time for the ranked. It was really short but tbh, I died on the jumps so many times, I might have not made it much further :D
The use of the enemy to control the player's movements was cool. Good job!

@thomastc: Sadly it's all prerendered sprites, so adding a tween isn't really possible as it would be if we'd actually render the character from vector data in the actual game :-/