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[dspencer]

Yngwie in the Cursed Woods

Help Yngwie the rat battle his way through an everchanging forest filled with monsters to find the magical cure hidden deep within it's grasp.

Play through the first area of the woods in our Demo, for PC/OSX.
Use WASD to move, J/K to attack or use your active item. 1/2/3 swap between available primary weapons.


Yngwie at his house, ready to depart.

Yngwie is roguelite in the tradition of the Binding of Isaac and zelda - explore a cursed, magical forest, fight enemies with your sword, and gain special items to power up. Each area will have a boss, a handful of special rooms, and lots of baddies to fight. We're hoping to give the player a mix of the awesome feeling of finding powerful items that you get in rogue-ish games, but combined with some of the skillful swordfighting of games like Hollow Knight but in ever-changing scenarios.

Buying some gear at Jackie's shop


A difficult fight with some acid spitting plants and territorial toucans.

So far, we've been focusing on the first area of the game - the outskirts of the woods, where Yngwie lives. To find the rare magical plant you seek, though, Yngwie will need to venture deep, deep within the forest. As you venture further into the woods, you'll find more weird and fantastic environments alongside even tougher, more vicious enemies.

The menagerie

What next?
Our current priority is making a public demo - and we're planning on having it ready real soon. Check back here for updates if you wanna try it out . Regardless, the game is inching forward every day, and we're real excited to be ready to share our progress with you fine folks here.

Dmitry Petyakin: Art direction, animation, music, and sound design.
Danny Spencer - Game design, level design, programming.

Yngwie is the followup game from our previous release, Graveyard Birds and we're excited to make an even bigger, even better game together. We're building Yngwie in Unity.

[El-Metallico]

Area cleared.

[dspencer]

December 18th

Updates
We've been chugging along nicely, and have a couple of updates. First off - amongst improvements we've been working on, I've been updating the map generator. Up to this point, it had just built a path and stuck the boss at the end of it, and attached a shop/treasure room randomly on the side. Now, it finds a path for the boss, and creates side branches off of that path to get to the special rooms... but additionally, it'll knock down a few more walls between rooms that are placed next to eachother, for some shortcuts and loops. Feels much more mazelike, and gives a little bit more variance - now you could find the boss really quick, if you're lucky (or unlucky) and happen to stumble in. Don't have any footage of map *generation*, but he's a view at an example of the maps we're generating:

as you can see, we've got more rooms, and some loops

Ok, but I wanna play
Never fear! We put "Demo coming soon" in the title and we don't intend to disappoint. We're planning on releasing our first demo here on December 21st. That's this friday! If you wanna try out our hack and slash roguelite, check back here soon :D

[El-Metallico]

New enemy - frog.

[dspencer]

Today's the day! Check out the demo here.

Use WASD to move, J/K to attack or use your active item. 1/2/3 swap between available primary weapons.

If you end up playing, please be a pal and give us some feedback!

Oh - and to make this more of a real devlog post, we made a bunch of QoL changes for this build. Updated the UI, replaced all standin sound effects and music.

[_jrb]

You've got an interesting color scheme going on here, I like it!

I'll check out the demo and let you know what I think.

[El-Metallico]

Now we have logo!
So, guys, have you played demo? Would be really cool to hear some opinions.

[QOG]

Didn't have super long to play, but I played it a little bit. Here were my thoughts:

• Really like the art style, a little reminiscent of the GBC Zeldas, but a unique spin.
• Some elements though, like the shadows for the flower(?) enemy projectiles and the slime trails seemed a bit jarring art-style wise.
  
• Shadows were hard to see in the middle of combat.
• A little hard to evaluate where it was safe to stand relative to slime trails.
• When the path from the starting house goes left it can be hard to see--I'm not sure I would have realized I could go left here on my first play:

• Also, it's a little odd that the grey tiles acted as a path for the first screen but were just kind of scattered at random for future ones.
• I got a couple items, but couldn't tell if they'd been equipped, as they were listed on the pause screen but there wasn't any visual feedback in game.
• Options to change the keys were really needed.
• Had something odd happen in one room where the slime wandered off into space:

• By the time I realized that I could shoot it with arrows, it had wandered offscreen entirely and I fired a few to no avail. Ended up having to restart the game since I was locked in the room.
• Enemies could probably use some better pathfinding. The tree enemies in particular couldn't navigate around terrain and so were pretty trivial for some room layouts.
• Didn't understand the wolf enemies. When/why do they speed up? I couldn't tell--I thought it was when they "saw" me, but this didn't seem to be consistent. Also, their hitboxes seemed a little short--I shot arrows that passed through their head or even upper torso from the side, to no effect. It's tricky to get that working due to perspective, but you might want to err on the side of generosity. If not, adding a shadow or some other visual indicator of where they could be hit would be helpful, especially given the limited range the player has with the sword.
• Found the bird enemies pretty frustrating. I also had trouble telling when they were going to attack and probably took more damage just trying to track them down than from any swooping.
• More subjective, but I really felt like the enemies, especially the ranged ones, had too much HP. I'd try to be clever and outmaneuver the melee enemies to take out a ranged one but it took so long to actually kill one of those that the tactic became pretty frustrating.
• Anyway, sorry I couldn't take longer. It seems like a fun game, but visual clarity and player feedback could be improved in future builds.

Best of luck!

[El-Metallico]

QOG
Thanks a lot for such detailed feeedback - was really helpful!

[dspencer]

Didn't have super long to play, but I played it a little bit. Here were my thoughts:... <snip>

Hey dude, thanks so much for the feedback. Been busy with the holidays, but our main issue I've been tackling was that thing with the slime. Shouldn't happen anymore, once the new build is up

Gonna address the other stuff too... In particular, arrow hitboxes need fixing.

Thanks!

[dspencer]

We're looking for someone to help out on the project in terms of design/direction. Specifically, we're focusing on building out powerups, and tweaking the procedural generation of levels w/ miniboss encounters and new enemy design. If you're interested, please send a message!

[El-Metallico]

New boss animation.