This boss fight is too hard. You'll need some practice.

Master each attack pattern, one-by-one. Practice makes you tough!

Controls (explained in-game)

Red attacks cannot be deflected!

You can use space to jump too (see the alternate controls below)

Control	Keyboard	XBOX	PS4
Move	WASD / Arrow keys	D Pad / Left Stick	D Pad / Left Stick
Attack	Z or J	X	Square
Deflect	X or K	B	Circle
Jump	Up/W/Space/C	A	X

Practice each attack pattern!

Your teacher will show you each attack pattern 3 times. Watch carefully, you'll need every bit of practice you can get.

You can find the soundtrack on my soundcloud (warning: autoplay), or in the embed below.

Abhi Sundu · Clash Mastery OST

I hope you enjoy it!

Color palette used NA16 by Nauris: https://lospec.com/palette-list/na16

More information

Status	Released
Platforms	HTML5, Windows
Rating	Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (9 total ratings)
Author	abhimonk
Genre	Action
Made with	LÖVE
Tags	2D, Boss battle, LOWREZJAM, Pixel Art, Side Scroller, Swords

Download

Clash Mastery - Windows 7 MB

Comments

Wistpotion39 days ago(+1)

Oh this exist? Hell yes.

I really like the concept of this, this feels like the interactive tutorial taken to its extreme. And it's really good as well, I like how story is baked into it. That theming combined with the scenery (wind blowing the capes, a knight training you) does make for a really intriguing setting. Kind of makes me wonder what could come after this...

I'm not entirely convinced about grading the tutorial phase. It makes me feel anxious rather than challanged. It feels like the opposite of having a safe playground to learn in, here I'm immediately being tested. Might just be me who is student-damaged. I enjoy the "get up" system much more than the grades in the tutorial.

I adore the attacks, and the combination of parrying and attacking is way too much fun! I feel there was a lot of variation here, and all the attacks were interesting on both their own and in combination. The switchup phase was really cool as well! It was a good balance between having to improvise while not being overwhelming.

The music was really good too! I do feel like you are starting to get a bit too comfortable with the style that you have though? You have changed up the instrumentation a bit between, but it's the same slightly melancholy mood in pretty much all tracks. I've been using chiptune.app to get midi files to learn from. Might be worth checking out.

Also, the animations are so so smooth! Especially the black circle, then red circle combo. It looks really powerful. And I love the squash and stretch in the jump, it just looks fun! Makes just jumping around feel good. The animation work really feels like all of your best tricks coming together.

All that said, fantastic work! This was a good way to spend an evening.

abhimonk38 days ago(+1)

Thanks! Glad you liked it. Really happy you found the attack patterns fun. I don’t usually spend so much time on a single boss fight, but since this game was just 1 fight, I had a lot of fun making the attack patterns more intricate.

I totally hear you on the grading system. When I watched my friends play it on discord pre-launch, I could hear the anxiety ramping up in their voices when they’d be close to no-damaging an attack, only to get hit at the end. The grades here were kind of an ‘engagement stop-gap’ to give players something to strive for during the practice phase, but if I ever return to this concept, I think I’ll have a more free-form practice mode (a ‘playground’ like you describe). Or maybe I’d do something like the player has to demonstrate a certain level of mastery before proceeding, but they get as many tries as they want.

Music is something that’s been on my ‘list of things to improve’ for a bit. I’ve been doing “seasonal themes” this year, so my fall season theme was “drawing”. I might do “winter of music” or something to give myself a reason to do some music exploration. I’m still happy with the OST, but I do feel like I’ve fallen into a bit of a formula. I’ll check out chiptune.app, I’m definitely in the market for new musical inspirations. I’ve been listening to a ton of jazz fusion recently, so I might try experimenting with that a little.

Thanks a ton for playing and for the comment. I think I always say this but I’m always really happy to get a notification from you.

Silver_Guillotine74 days ago(+1)

Good stuff!

CROSSANS104 days ago

Wow, that was epic.

CROSSANS104 days ago

lovve the music

Achie117 days ago

Super smooth combat and interesting combos! I had a blast playing through the game, with this amazing looks and soundtrack!

Combat felt great and mixed up, the only thing I wish for is a way to restart the current phase from 0 instead of continuing what I have, so I can try and actually master things and not win by sheer brute force of attempts. My blocking skill is seriously lacking x)

Stood up 9 times and had a blast! Amazing entry!

Fletch118 days ago

This is SO FRICKIN COOL!! Great tutorial and fun combos to dodge with plenty of grace period to get your own hits in. Felt really good to play through this!! Incredible work!! (also the screenshake and hitstop are perfectly tuned, nice work)

abhimonk116 days ago(+1)

Thanks a ton for playing and for the kind words! Pre-launch the grace period in between attacks was a little too short so I upped it by about 50% right before I released the game, glad it felt good.

Psychic Chicken119 days ago

Really fun game! I think this is the first entry I've tried where I have no criticism, well done! I think a hard mode would be really fun if you ever update the game :)

greeenphroggo117 days ago (1 edit)

is that rivulet as your PFP?

Psychic Chicken117 days ago

Yes

greeenphroggo116 days ago

rain world fan spotted! riv is hecking adorable, definitely my favorite scug

abhimonk116 days ago(+1)

Thank you! A hard mode would be fun to make for sure, I might consider it haha

RodOfD1scord119 days ago

fun game

abhimonk116 days ago

thanks!

greeenphroggo120 days ago

amazing game, though I wish there was a way to navigate the phases easier without playing throughout the entire game again

abhimonk120 days ago

thanks for playing! I’ll try to add a ‘phase select’ screen in a post-jam update, a couple people have asked for this so far so it seems like a good idea.

evilentity120 days ago(+1)

Woah great idea and execution! Didnt expect a souls game :D

yellowloon120 days ago(+1)

Masterpiece

AzertyMoiloi121 days ago(+1)

Good game, had a good time playing it !

CacaCaden121 days ago(+1)

Super fun concept and applied well in this game!!

LazerLars121 days ago(+1)

nice made ma dude!! I see you it's a love2d compiled to a web edition. i never got it to work converting any of my love2d project to web so far with https://github.com/Davidobot/love.js. do you have any tutorial or tricks or can share how you do it, would be much appreciated ma dude.

abhimonk120 days ago (1 edit)

Hey! Cool to see another love2d user. If you have any specific questions, I’d be happy to try to answer. Outside of that, I can paste my web build script below and you can ask me questions on it if you like, I don’t have any specific tips though.

Here’s the script: let me know if it’s helpful or not. You can tweak it as you see fit, hopefully the comments help: (It’s not the full script, I had to remove some stuff that doesn’t make sense to share, like I copy a bunch of custom JavaScript files into the final directory for stuff I didn’t use this game, so I removed that from the script.

Rem this line makes it so each line of code doesn't echo into the command window
@echo off
Rem This is the folder that contains all different build versions
Rem The builds folder is defined as "Builds". If it doesn't exist, this will create it.
set buildFolder=Builds
Rem This is the actual folder that you'd zip and distribute
echo Enter the name of this build :
set /p buildName=
echo %buildFolder%
echo %buildName%


if not exist %buildFolder% (
    echo adding build folder %buildFolder%
    mkdir %buildFolder%
)
if exist %buildFolder%\%buildName% (
    echo old build folder already exists
    echo removing old folder
    rmdir /s /q %buildFolder%\%buildName%
)
mkdir %buildFolder%\%buildName%

echo zipping up all files into %buildName%.zip
"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a %buildFolder%/%buildName%/%buildName%.zip "Engine" "Fonts" "Music" "Sounds" "src" "Textures" "ThirdParty" "conf.lua" "main.lua"

echo renaming zip file to love file
rename %buildFolder%\%buildName%\%buildName%.zip %buildName%.love

@REM https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=81736&start=160
@REM Need to pick a much bigger size for the game than what is reported by the zip file size
@REM for example, if the file size was 55426989 bytes, you should pick something like 70000000
@REM Otherwise you get a cryptic 'out of bounds' console error in JS
Rem compute the file size first
for %%I in ("%buildFolder%/%buildName%/%buildName%.love") do set numBytes=%%~zI
echo zip file size is %numBytes%

echo Using a value of 70000000 (7 with 7 zeros) for the bytes required to preload game on the web.
echo If you get cryptic failures, try changing this value in webbuild.bat to be much higher than the zip file size.
@REM If you get cryptic errors and it gets stuck at 1/2 when loading the game, try picking a much bigger value.
set numBytes=70000000

echo building with love.js
call npx love.js.cmd -c -m %numBytes% %buildFolder%/%buildName%/%buildName%.love %buildFolder%/%buildName%/%buildName%

echo removing stale love file
del /q %buildFolder%\%buildName%\%buildName%.love

echo creating a zip file for itch.io right under the build folder
cd %buildFolder%
cd %buildName%
"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a %buildName%.zip "%buildName%\*"
cd ..
cd ..

echo finished build

LazerLars120 days ago

i just tried out the script, modified it to my project structure. boi oh boi this is what i needed. this is the first time succeeding having a web edition of any of my projects working. Don't know how to thank you, this is so freaking great :)

Now I just have some errors when compiling it to web compared to standalone i need to have fixed. Etc one of the things in with generating a random numbers the arguments are switched from the web, but works on standalone, but thats managable :). Do you sometime face that some of your code works when its standalone and then needs modification to work when compiled as web?

Just really happy to have this working finally, since i believe the size of games im making don't really make sense that you need to download to play.. Again thanks ma dude ! You should share your script on a open github repo. I belive many could benefit from this !

LazerLars120 days ago(+1)

i added the script to my github repo as well https://github.com/LazerLars/doveBlaster4000_love2d/blob/main/love_web_build.bat , i credited you in the script hope this is ok buddy, else let me know? "

@REM all credits goes to abhimonk

@REM script provided by https://itch.io/profile/abhimonk via comment @ https://itch.io/post/10552214 itch page: https://abhimonk.itch.io/ x page: https://x.com/abhisundu"

abhimonk120 days ago

Thanks for the credit haha, looks great! totally ok with me

abhimonk120 days ago

Glad to hear it worked out!

As for standalone vs web code: The main change I make is all my audio is loaded in “static” mode (including music) for the web, whereas in the downloadable version, the music is loaded in “stream” mode. Outside of that, I don’t think I have many other web-only changes.

I’ll definitely try to post some of this stuff to github, that’s a good idea!

Bad Piggy121 days ago (3 edits) (+1)

As usual, you have some of the best boss design on this site lol

I've always wondered how to really teach a player to parry, and I think you made a pretty accessible way for most people to definitely get into this system outside of hardcore fans. The block was forgiving enough and always felt great to use and get that perfect parry

The boss attacks felt varied enough and the indicators were basically perfect. I need to start ripping off how you indicate attacks lol

Presentation as a whole was also great and stylish with the pallette changes

That said, I have two main issues :

- There seems to be a little too much of a delay between when you can attack and you can parry. I'm not saying you should be able to cancel attacks by blocking, I just think the delay should be reduced somewhat with how fast paced the game is

- Like I mentioned, the parry always felt good to pull off, but the player's main attack didn't really have enough oomf behind it. Maybe just a minor amount more screenshake or some sort of effect would help there

But otherwise, another banger from you

abhimonk120 days ago(+1)

Thanks for stopping by and for the comment. Hahaha you’re too kind, I love making boss battles and I always appreciate the kind words you have for my boss designs.

I’m really happy with how the deflect came out, glad you liked it. The post-attack delay is definitely a little on the stiff side. If I’d had some more time, I think I would tried to add a tiny bit of input buffering so you could buffer a deflect out of an attack, that might have alleviated the delayed feeling a little. The attack’s also a little dry, could definitely add a bit more juice to it.

Thanks a ton for playing, I always appreciate your comments. Glad you enjoyed the game!