Holy Smokes - DEMO
A downloadable game for Windows
How low can you go?
In the innermost reaches of the Earth's core lies the land of the Underworld, the province of the damned. Since the dawn of humanity, souls deemed not worthy of Paradise have been sent to that dark place to suffer, each becoming a part of the Lord of the Underworld's ever-expanding army with the goal of one day seizing the riches of the heavenly world above.
Holy Smokes is an arcade rogue-like adventure to the Underworld where you use bombs to blast your way downwards, obliterate enemies, and collect precious gems. You play as Faith, a newly recruited angel tasked with a very special assignment to destroy the Lord of the Underworld before they are able to begin their conquest of your homeworld, Paradise. Will you be able to defeat the Demon Lord? How low can you go before you meet your end?
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Milkbar Lads
Jack programs the game and does the environmental art
Major makes the music for the game
Ace designs and draws all the characters
Gel does all the miscellaneous art for the game
and Loud designs enemies and draws them!
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Links
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Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Holy Smokes DEMO v1.0.1 -- Changes and bug fixesDec 16, 2019
- The demo for Holy Smokes is here!Dec 13, 2019
- Demo trailer!Dec 07, 2019
- The demo is now available early on Patreon!Dec 06, 2019
- Demo coming soon!Nov 30, 2019
Comments
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Could there ever be a way to fire up the devs passion to continue this project?
Seems like it could be great. Shame it's clearly never gonna be finished.
I agree
This was very fun, when it gunna get updated?
demo is oddly satisfying
I`m so excited to play the full game. I hope next update to add something big. I love this game. The art style, the mechanics, THE DESTRUCTION😍
Holy Smokes, this was fun! Finally got to work a game title into a sentence, gonna just tick that one off the achievements list.
A simple concept that leads to quite an addictive gaming experience, this one. Basically you're an angel tasked with blowing hell to... where would blow hell to if it was already in hell? Sub-hell? Anyway, you're tasked with blowing it even further down than it already is, essentially.
So you can litter the landscape with bombs to create a deeper and deeper pit, all the while avoiding / exploding enemies that try to hinder your progress with little minigame / store checkpoints on the way down.
It. Is. So. Fun. Honestly, despite the random generation killing me off so many times I never felt aggrieved enough to stop playing, and I did eventually make it to the end of the demo and stage 1... at least I think I did. If I didn't I don't want to know, I want to retain this feeling of accomplishment.
I'm super excited to see where this game goes from here, and I am 100% on board! Keep up the awesome work lads! =)
Loving the demo, that palette is super pretty.
If you have the controller plugged in it wont read keyboard inputs. Also a sound glitch happened in a midway room where it started spawning a bunch of coins and my xp bar to glitched out and it kept playing a loud coin sound that nearly blew out my ears. other than that its fun.
this looks fun
So right off the bat I want to say that this is a very fun game. It has an aggressive rhytm, you never know when one of those yellow things is gonna pop up and take 3 HP of you at once. That's what gave earlier video games purpose, they were unforgiving both with enemies and game overs (you start all over, here) and what is ultimately responsible for the success of Binding of Isaac. The collectables feel rewarding and push you deeper into the game.
The soundtrack, though so far in my playthrough composed only of 2 tracks, hasn't really grown stale. It is very enthusiatic and vibrant, and couples well with the art style that the game is composed in. Story is very straightforward, but effective in making you feel like you have something to lose by losing. The fact that if you rocket jump in Heaven outside of the initial area you can see some interesting stuff and that you can blow off signs shows polish to minor details.
Your own bombs don't hurt you, and this is well thought-out, as in some parts of the experience you won't have a lot of space to run away from your bomb while attacking something. Not a lot to say about that, but it is absolutely essential. There's a diversity of environments, from deserts to forests, but that doesn't really impact the enemies in any way and if it did it would very much booster replayability. It still is refreshing, because it gives you new objects to blow up, such as flowers.
The only quarrels I have with this game is first and foremost that it needs to be visually more consistent. The pixel art in the actual gameplay conflicts with the more cartoonish HP meter, scoreboard and etc. Second, the game throws you into it without really explaining how the controls work and how do you plant a bomb, forcing you to go into the options menu to see that. I get that Z and X to interact with the environment is standard in itch.io games but it affects the acessibility and potential popularity.
But perhaps the most detrimental aspect in gameplay is the camera disobeying you if you want to go up. A lot of the time you will want to get some collectables you lost or protect yourself from a sudden attack, but that will be impossible. Going up is more relevant than I think devs have realized. But I can also see complete freedom with the camera making the game less forceful and challenging, so a middle ground is needed here.
A very minor problem, because the controls are pretty great and fluid, I never had problems with that and it adds to the fast-paced experience. However, changing binding controls should be more effective. It is pretty time wasteful if you want to change a single key to sit confirming that you don't want to change all the other ones.
tl; dr Very enjoyable and well-executed game, definitely not perfect but not far from that.
Thank you, I finally have some time to get around to replying to most of these comments so I'll try to address most of your criticisms. I am probably going to add some visual adjustments to each enemy in the first level depending on the environment. I'm also gonna add some small season-unique details, like pumpkins appearing in the Autumn alt of the first level, snowmen appearing in the Winter alt, etc.
As for the contrast between the UI elements and the actual game, I wanted to keep the UI a higher resolution mostly for legibility's sake, but I'll try to think of something to make the appearance of the UI elements mesh better with the gameplay.
I'm considering changing the default controls to something like left/right/space/Z or something like that because it seems like a lot less people are familiar with using Z and X as default controls than I thought. I'll definitely add in a proper tutorial for the full release, though.
The camera is an issue I'm not too certain about how to fix yet. I think being able to move upwards would definitely add a lot to the game, but at the same time I wanted to allow downward movement exclusively in order to make the player consider whether to continue moving onwards or stick around in the current area to pick up any remaining collectibles, but ultimately I think the freedom of moving upwards is more important than that. I'll probably allow moving back upwards in the full release, but I want to add some force to the game to encourage the player to keep moving down and not stick around in their current location for too long. Maybe a timer or something, I dunno. I'll have to think about it more.
Finally, changing the key rebinding method should be pretty easy and it's something I'll make sure to fix. Thanks for all of your critiques, I agree with pretty much all of them looking back on this demo and I'll start working on fixing them for the final release ASAP.
Fun game, with a beautifull art !
Thank you!
Made a video
I love watching people play our games, thanks for the vid :)
Gorgeus pixel art, addicting gameplay, cute characters and great upgrade, definetly a labor of love! I'm looking foward for the final game.
There's gonna be much more where that came from in the full release. Thanks for your support.
the guy that makes you upgrade items when u upgrade the item and go to another item the bar of the item upgraded dosen't show
Working on patching it, thanks for pointing it out.
cute game
Thanks for sharing your gameplay with us!
I want to love this but I'm confused by this game. T__T
When I think of a downwards bomberman where you shape your environment in order to fight mobs, it sounds super cool.
But when playing it I just feel confused. It took me some time to understand where the enemies came from, and when I did I wasn't really sure what to do about it (they randomly spawn from destroyed blocks right?). Sometimes I'm trying to fight a serpent and they just randomly spawn under me. ÒwÒ
I feel like if the basic enemies had a special looking block that spawned them, you could at least plan ahead more and approach it with a clearer intention.
I don't know, essentially, it's like, I feel like I'm not doing well but I don't have any clue on how to improve. And when I die it takes foreeeeeever to get back to where I was, esp considering the first level is basically empty.
I wondered if I was just too bad at the game, but quickly looking through let's plays on youtube people seem to struggle in the same way.
I think the core idea is super dope, the bombs are satisfying the sounds are nice the graphics are great, which is why I want to write all this to try and see if I'm not playing the game correctly to enjoy it.
Cheers!
Nice idea (Bomberman reincarnation) :)
when i run the game i cant seem to do anything. arrow keys do nothing, mouse doesnt show up, wasd don't work. i've tried everything. help?
If you have a controller plugged into your PC, try unplugging it before starting the game.
disconnected a controller and it works now, thanks!
NP brother, that's something I'll have to patch out in a future build.
click the game with invisible mouse then keys will work
It's crazy to me that people on the other side of our globe are enjoying our game, thank you so much for playing.
Pretty neat game! I really liked the sound design, the art style, and the overall gameplay. I didn't complete the demo, but I'm looking forward to seeing what the full game shapes into! I made a video with my thoughts and experiences. Keep up the great work!
actually pretty good and not cringe
nice game,il make a gameplay of it soon,good job
Got 2 runs. Died on the first one because 2 worms spawned right next to the entrance, in fact i dropped right onto them and then died. Won the second run. Constant explosions are only fun for a bit. Wish there was a quick fall ability. The player feels very floaty. Ok....
Thanks for your critiques, I'll try to fix some of them in a small update I'll probably be releasing soon.
Looks cool! It's like if Mario or Zelda had only bombs to work with...