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Gloom: The Pyromancer

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Medals

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Pyromantic Prodigy 100 Points

Collect all 5 runes and encounter every monster in the same run

Cryptid Collector 100 Points

Complete the Omnibus

Runestone I 5 Points

Collect the first runestone

Runestone II 10 Points

Collect the second runestone

Runestone III 25 Points

Collect the third runestone

Runestone IV 50 Points

Collect the fourth runestone

Runestone V 100 Points

Collect the fifth runestone

Global Rankings | More Games With Medals

Author Comments

CONTROLS

Movement - WASD

Camera movement - QE, JK, or mouse

Quick turn - H and L to turn 90 degrees, R to turn 180 degrees

Camera lock - Hold shift while moving the mouse

Shooting - Spacebar or clicking

T - Teleport to safety once you have all 5 runes


4/29/24 UPDATE

To keep from having to use the dead zone or shift key, run this script with AutoHotkey. Note that this ONLY works when playing in full-screen


As a note, the enemies you encounter are random every game, so even if you're bad, playing enough times will eventually get you the Cryptid Collector medal.


Play the original Gloom, released in 2021, here:

Log in / sign up to vote & review!

I felt this was one of the most compelling and addicting entries of Flash Forward this year tbqh.

In the beginning it felt sometimes like a confused mess, especially how every direction looks kinda samey, but the more you play the more it becomes instinctive. The first few playthroughs left me feeling quite confused, especially as some enemies felt quite difficult to understand. Sometimes the RNG wasn't kind with different enemy combos, but, again, the more you play the more you know on what to focus. Kinda felt like there was a certain skill-ceiling you can only reach by getting really familiar with the different enemy-spawns and the map.

At first I felt like mouse controls were way harder, but then I felt the opposite. Mouse + often using shift to calibrate the mouse felt the easiest to play. Overall it's great fun.

Kwing responds:

So first of all, HUGE congratulations on being the first person to beat the game AND acquire the absurdly hard Pyromantic Prodigy medal. This game can be a real bastard, doubly so if you don't understand the enemy types ahead of time.

The intent behind the enemies being difficult to understand was to drive home the atmosphere of the unknown. I liked the idea that players would encounter a new challenge with no preparation of how to deal with it and panic trying to understand an enemy, maybe defeating it but probably dying and having to check the omnibus. This game is very much a "grower" and rewards you the more time you spend understanding it, something that doesn't tend to go over so well in a game jam setting.

Thanks again for sticking with the game long enough to get over that initial hurdle!

Btw, if you're wondering how to get a *really* high score, try waiting at the campfire until it's nearly dead before delivering the logs to max out your kill count and survival time. You should be able to start getting 40k+ with that method.

Certainly a bit of a technical marvel with the way you got the psuedo-3D to play out (though it is a bit goofy looking), and the gameplay is a decent arcade experience with a nice sense of tension and good escalation from a lot of interesting enemies showing up one-by-one such as the Mario Boo-esque ghost that tries to sneak up when your back is turned and the camouflaged tree monsters. It's a bit bland, but not too shabby!

Unfortunately, as much as I tried to treat the unwieldly controls as part of the challenge and master them, like how some people say Resident Evil works best with fixed camera and tank controls despite being a bit awkward, I just couldn't get past it and would feel really frustrated when I get killed due to not being able to rotate that extra few degrees because I'm on the edge of the screen! I'm guessing there is no way to force a cursor lock in Flash like you can in other engines like Unity? I appreciate the creativity in trying to find a solution through the use of the deadlock bottom bar in a sort of Apollo 13 way, if you get the reference, but it's just not good enough, haha.

Pretty cool concept! Especially impressed by the 3D, I haven't seen that before. It really feels like it needs more work though, to do justice to the concept.

- It says find firewood. I found firewood. I can't do anything with it though? Edit: I found something that looks like firewood but is actually the bonfire. My bad. Apparently I spent so long looking for the first piece of wood that the bonfire went out, which caused it to look like a pile of sticks. So I was trying to interact with the pile of sticks, thinking it was firewood, wondering why I can't pick it up XD

That's probably a derp on my part but I thought it was worth mentioning. (User testing is valuable, especially when the users are boneheads!)

- It seems to be an open world but isn't. I spent like 5 minutes walking into the darkness, before I realized the ground moves even though you're stuck against an invisible wall. lmao

- One hit kill? :(

- One hit kills might make sense, if enemies didn't sneak up on you, and if the controls weren't so clunky.

- The controls: the cursor getting stuck on screen edge and not letting you turn around, while a floaty zombie is about to murder you... does not make for fun gameplay! (Also, asking a player to install AHK scripts to play your Flash game... I mean at that point you may as well make the whole thing a download.)

- EDIT: Apparently there's a way to lock the cursor (and still get mouse delta) in HTML5 (requestPointerLock). To use it with Flash (Ruffle) you'd have to make a HTML5 wrapper and use the external code API. I noticed that's how Skeleton Day did its controller support. Maybe the Ruffle team can integrate this into Ruffle?

- End screen stats are broken: When I die it says "Time Alive: 0" ? Also "Firewood Gathered: 0" but I got several. Also "Kill Count: 0" and "Enemies Seen: 0" but that's also not right.

- I got ate by a tree? wat XD

- Some enemies fly away from me (while staring at me?) and are invulnerable to my attacks

- The 3D effect is pretty cool, though the way the ground moves is a bit strange. I guess Flash doesn't have perspective transform? The collision is also a bit odd, like I'm a few meters from a tree but I'm bouncing against it.

Hope this helps, and I hope you keep working on it. I'd love to play an updated version.

Kwing responds:

Thanks for the lengthy review!

So to start, the 3D engine I made for this lags if too many objects are rendered on-screen at once. One of my workarounds was to have the world be fairly small and barren, but to incentivize the player to stay in one area. This is actually the reason the premise of the game is collecting firewood and bringing it back to a central point, as it keeps the player from wandering too far and realizing how small the world actually is.

Having everything (except the Dark Wizard) die in one hit was an intentional decision to maintain tension, especially since none of the enemies use ranged attacks. I like that the player never has to look at a HUD to see how much health they have left, and they can't get complacent just because they have a lot of health. Even though the game isn't especially scary I felt this design maintained a level of suspense that fit the tone.

The cursor getting stuck is something I've done just about everything I can for, but unfortunately Flash doesn't have any features for locking the mouse in place or even detecting movement (it can only detect position.) The first game uses shift lock and keyboard controls, this one added in a dead zone as well as buttons to instantly turn 90 and 180 degrees, as well as providing an AHK script. You may notice that other 3D Flash games (like ports of Quake and even Doom Triple Pack) have the exact same issue. requestPointerLock is an interesting idea, I'll see what the folks on Ruffle Discord have to say about it.

The end stats briefly display numbers for each category (time alive, kill count) but then tick down as the final score ticks up. I did this to make it look cool but I'll admit it is kind of annoying if you want to look at each number individually, and if you look away you might not even see that there was a number there to begin with.

Once you encounter an enemy, it's added to the Omnibus where you can see tips on how to defeat them. I did this intentionally (encounter enemy first, see explanation later) because I wanted fear of the unknown to be a big part of the game's atmosphere. As you discovered, this includes the Mimic which takes the shape of a tree, and the Stalker which is invulnerable to damage until it tries to attack you.

Regarding the ground movement, I believe perspective transform is only available for AS3 and this game was made in AS2. The animation is baked, though, so I probably could have exported a perspective transform animation as a different filetype and re-imported it into an AS2 project.

fun game, but the camera is pretty weird (like you can only move the camera 180 degrees than 360 degrees)

Kwing responds:

I'm going to see if I can create a macro for auto centering it.

insanely hard, and I keep getting disoriented and lost
but still, its pretty neat

Credits & Info

Kwing

Programming

ShinsukeIto

Artist
Views
1,175
Faves:
14
Votes
100
Score
3.47 / 5.00
Uploaded
Apr 20, 2024
12:00 AM EDT
Software
  • Flash
Wall Art by
Magibauble

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