Skelliwags have taken over the graveyard and its up to Willo to kick them out!
Help little Willo sneak around, go 'woo', blow out candles and get up to all sorts of spooky stealthy fun in this short stealth'n'spook-em-up
Featuring
- 8 action packed graveyards to spook about in
- MGS style ranking system, can you get all 8 platinum medals?
- Skelliwags, floating eyeballs, tombstones and occult pentagrams
- One adorable little ghost, Willo
Game by @danhowardgames
Music and SFX by the outrageously talented @gruber_music
14805! Great game, not too hard to drop it, and not too simple to become bored. I loved the music and sound effects :)
One thing to maybe improve is to clear the alerted status of skeletons when you hide in a tombstone.
Excellent! Great atmosphere, great attention to details (effects, feedback...)
@chowyunbrent I forgot to even look at the scores, hahaha! I was just having fun figuring out how to clear the levels. I'll have to play through again and pay attention this time.
EDIT: 13215, silver! I did not go for every candle though and I definitely got caught many times on a couple of levels :)
@Zverik thank you! Glad you enjoyed it. I thought about clearing the skeletons alert status when you hide in a tomb stone, but I enjoyed the confused look on their faces too much to change it!
@freds72 thanks! Glad you liked it. I think it's the details where these kind of game shine!
@Athas thank you! Game feel was a big focus throughout!
@2bitchuck silver! Pretty good! So far I've only seen one person get all platinums, which definitely takes some replaying. You need to get all candles and never be seen for a platinum.
This was pretty fun. After getting a silver on my first playthrough, I went back and did the full platinum run. Wish there was a timer in each level to give a better idea how you're doing for the speed score, or at least some sort of indication what score you need for each medal. In a couple of levels I was off by just 5-10 points without knowing it and was almost ready to give up.
@hahhah42 wow! Well done! That's an amazing score!
I understand what you mean about wanting a timer. I didn't put a timer in in the end as I was concerned that it would make players who aren't interested in scores rush and get frustrated. But I think having the medal thresholds clearer at the score screen might work? Also the platinum medal scores are pretty high (as you need to be pretty quick as well) so they are no mean feat.
Congratulations!
@chowyunbrent To be fair, I pretty much always like there to be a timer in the games I play, so that complaint isn't as meaningful as it might be from another player. Indicating the score thresholds would be plenty.
Went back and did a third playthrough to show how to get all the platinums, in case anyone trying to get them all would like help figuring some of the levels out:
@hahhah42 wow this is amazing! I don't think you used a single tombstone either. There should be an extra bonus for that. I love the video. Do you mind if I share this?
@chowyunbrent Go right ahead! To me, the tombstones make more sense for any% speedruns. For example:
If you'd like to reward the player for achievements like that, you could upload your games to Newgrounds and try the medal system there. Though I've heard it's rather tricky for pico-8 games.
@hahhah42 wow that is so fast! Love how you use the tombstones as fast travel. Particularly in mission 7. I'll look into Newgrounds as well, thank you!
This game should be featured, nothing better that a good halloween game in halloween month of a spooky year.
@chowyunbrent If you like watching speedruns of your games, check out KADZ64's recent run in Swordfish. He did it in 4:32 with no glitches! https://www.speedrun.com/swordfish/run/zq41qv8m
Some comments on Newgrounds:
I really enjoyed this. This kept popping up on my Twitter timeline and the graphics and animation drew me in. I don't usually enjoy stealth games, but this is just fantastic, the animations of the skeletons when they've lost you just cracks me up. The medals/rating system makes for some great replay value. Here's my video review:
@hahhah42 wow that was quick! I love your creative use of the tombstones and the way you attract skeletons to get hit quicker in the final mission. Very cool. Thanks for sharing your thoughts in Newgrounds as well. I'll check it out..
I hadn't seen that swordfish run either! Very nice. Makes me want to make games exclusively for speedrunners, although I am bad and it myself!
@extar, thank you so much for your in depth video! I'm really glad you enjoyed the game. I've put some additional comments on YouTube, and subscribed! I love the skellies too, i love how dumb they look when you lose them. Hahaha.
I enjoyed this game. It was fun, the graphics were lovely, the sound effects were wonderful, and overall an enjoyable game. It's whimsy and spoopy in such enjoyable ways. Good controls as well. Simple fun to clear, but whooo boy the platinum medals added a surprising amount of difficulty to the game. Stage 7 was easily the hardest to plat. Former score 21,795, removed for updated score below.
If I had any critique, it would be changing the wording on the "Super Ghost Bonus" at the end. I spent too long looking for power-ups to make me super. Maybe change it to "Never Seen/Caught/Found Bonus" or something along those lines.
Overall, an excellent game!
@Jawbone Thanks for playing! Really glad you enjoyed the game, and what a great score! All platinums is tough so well done.
Yes 'super ghost bonus' is not very clear. It was a joke on the classic MGS ghost bonus' you get for never being seen. Alas you are not alone in finding it confusing! Thank you for the feedback.
@chowyunbrent Dang! I was wondering if it had any hidden meaning. I get it now, but that's the problem with old references. As someone who has used old references, I know that feel. I took a look through some of the other comments, and I agree with you about the timer. Sure, it would be great for high score grabbing, but just starting out fresh with a timer would've made me feel rushed. I'll poke around and see if you have any other games, as Willo was fun!
@hahhah42 Thank you! I've been battleforged since the days of Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania on the NES, so it's good to see that my reflexes aren't failing me yet. I took a look through the other comments and it seems my score is currently the highest at the time of this writing. There was a guy who posted a platinum run, so I skipped to the end of the video to take a look at that. Not about to feel cocky when the wiggle room on that is so tiny, so I'm pretty confident someone will beat my score eventually.
@Jawbone Yeah, that was me. Although that run is outdated now—I did a no reset all plat run on Halloween that happens to have a higher score than the previous video, even though the focus was getting them all in one shot. Still a little lower than yours:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjTpUS4HwM
When you get all platinums, the only difference in the score comes from the speed score, and I doubt there's too much room for improvement on your score. It's 5 points for every second saved, so your sum of times saved ~14 seconds on my better run (possibly more or less by a bit due to rounding errors). Have you tried speedrunning at all? I expect you'd be good at it!
@hahhah42: I'm going to have to say that I'm legit impressed on your no death/retry platinum run score. I'm not about to try and take that one from you. As for speed runs, I like short burst speed runs like with short games/1 level at a time/race track/boss rush mode kind of guy. I prefer grueling/handicapped/crippled runs. I thank you for the compliment, and seeing you do better made me want to do better.
@chowyunbrent Congrats! It's possible to score above 22k in your game!
(Level 7 is still the bane of my existence)
@Jawbone I'm having trouble parsing your response. Are you saying those are your preferences in terms of what you run? (And do you record/post your runs somewhere?) Or is that what you like to watch?
And congrats on the 22k, that's amazing!
@hahhah42 What I run. I sadly don't record/post my runs. Not much of a watcher unless I'm doing battle runs with a friend. And thank you!
@Jawbone I see. But if you like to speedrun, you really should consider recording your runs. I put it off for a couple of years myself (I only started recording them in July), but I've found it makes it a lot more enjoyable.
You could even start fresh with chowyunbrent's other game, Swordfish. I've been running it off and on for about a month :)
@Doodel @HeavyBladeVideo Thank you! So glad you enjoyed the game
@PicoLate Thank you! I love Nitrome's style so that is a huge compliment.
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Hey, this game got added to speedrun.com recently:
https://www.speedrun.com/willo
I might come back to it and try to improve my times. ...After I'm finished with Grippy.
@hahhah42 amazing! 3:32 ?! incredible stuff. I watched the video and yeah I reckon you can shave a few seconds off! Well done though. You can sneak directly under the skelly guarding the corner on level 7 too I think?
@chowyunbrent That was from back in October. Actually, the thing that jumped out at me on rewatch is that you can sneak above the skelly in level 1, which saves ~5 seconds. For level 7 I'm not sure, but I doubt it would be as helpful.
By the by, any chance you could share the points required for each medal? I didn't set up that leaderboard, but given how it's set up, it'd be nice to have those established. Particularly for the all silvers & golds categories.
On second thought, I came back to willo before finishing with Grippy. Serendipitously found another new strat while I was at it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsIiA4fjoUU
I think it's probably possible to get it down below 2:50 without any new discoveries. (Level 8 can be done at least 5-6 seconds faster.) You can also slip past the eye in level 5 to save a little time there, but that's quite tricky for such a small amount saved.
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