Claw Knight
A small endless arcade game where rather than moving your character you move the enemies! Use the left mouse button to drag enemies and objects around to protect the knight.
Made for GMTK 2023
Code/art by Thoof (Twitter) (Instagram)
SFX by rubberduck on opengameart
Music is The Bard's Tale by RandomMind
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Nice to see a new game from you!
Simple but fun concept that starts easy, but really ramps up as it goes on. Lovely pixel art, as usual. I wish there was a fullscreen mode... I played the web version, didn't see the option.
Great work!
Edit: After looking at your screenshots again, is the Web version supposed to look like this? (The grey box) It looks this way for me on Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. (All PC) Enemies and objects all appear within this grey area, so it's part of the playfield.
Ooh, that's strange. Doesn't look like that on my end at all.
Ah! I solved the mystery... I was playing it on my 4K monitor, which is set to the windows default 150% scaling. If I play it on my 1080p monitor, it looks correct.
Thanks for figuring that one out! If I scale the page it does the same thing for me too. Hopefully it'll be an easy fix!
Lovely game. Loads of fun for the whole family.
Hey Thoof, nice to see your latest work!
I like this one, it seemed like a interesting deconstruction and combination of some of the ideas of both Idle clickers and Tower defense style games, with the hoard and single position. I also like the simple but clear pixel art, and thinks it's quite charming.
So easy quality of life thoughts, that might clash with your design simplicity, but might still be interesting would be,
1. have a ring around the night showing the safe blast zone for bombs. I found my self doing the knight a lot of harm with the bombs, so some marking to visual reference would help. It could be things as simple a a circle, or a circle of stone like the knight stands on, several blast circles at irregular places around the knight to give a sense of where would be safe while still being a bit unclear. The idea I liked most was a circle of grass/flowers that sets the safe distance, but gets destroyed by bombs, so you lose more of it the longer you play.
2. A place where it's suggested to stash spare potions, like as a resource management guide, thought again possibly to hand holding.
Some augmentation ideas
Grass or some sort of fog of war that type thign that is cleared by boms or fires.
Some sort of tower defense esque walls that pop up as you play or your buy from a side list for kill bounties.
Freeze slimes that freeze skelletons and the night until explosion or flame slime
General thought
I almost feel like this is a game that would be alot of fun on mobile with a touch screen, as it would give a nice tactility to helping the knight.
Overall I really like the concept, and how solid the execution was.
Thank you for making this.
Ooh, thanks for all the ideas (and for playing) putney!
Easier solution could be to have a visual indicator on the bombs themselves to show the blast radius, I should have thought of that!
I found myself putting the spare potions in the same spot myself!
I love the tall grass idea, though in the current game it would get cleared out *very* quickly unless it also grew back
Placeable walls that the enemies attack would be good, right now the enemies are a little too dumb for that! The skeleton's bodies serve a similar purpose.
I actually have a sprite for an ice slime that I ended up not using, it would have left a trail that slows down the enemies.
nice art
Currently your game does not run on the web! Looks cool tho!
Huh, runs fine on my end. What browser and OS are you running?