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Monastic Inversion's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #256 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Presentation | #325 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Overall | #331 | 3.271 | 3.271 |
| Gameplay | #428 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Original idea, had a few bugs unfortunately, got caught in a fight as I approached the door and couldnt target the enemy. Really liked the depth in the systems though, presentation and navigation were fun, good job!
What do you like about your game?
Eithe skeumorphic interfaces or writing a combat system.
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Comments
I LOVED this. I love dungeon crawlers, and I love RPGs. I especially loved the experimental nature of trying out each rune and figuring out what it does. And the game's look and feel are right up my alley.
Awesome game!
This was a very unique game! I liked the interfaces and animations. I do think the combat could use something else to spruce it up a little, like an extra mechanic or two, but other than that, it was quite a fun experience :)
oh wow, i really like this pseudo-deck builder rpg system you have here! the contextualization of the orbs representing an element that can be used to cast its respective spell is very neat, with the orbs kinda reminding me of magic's the gatherings 5 mana types! also the way you just cast spells is really fun and engaging, rather than a simple button to click to cast a spell, i like how you actively have to drag the orb into the slot and then cast the spell after choosing a target, very nice! though due to both my orb rng and enemy encounters, i found myself to be using flare (the red orb) the most and either didn't get the others as often or wasn't put in a good position to use them or discover what they did (because of the 3 enemy encounter). still a very nice system with a good foundation, saw the pic down below the comments talking about combining orbs, and yeah that would be awesome to have if you continue this! also i do like the myst style movement (or maybe since this is a turn based rpg, etrian odyssey is a better comparison?) but i also do agree with some people that it is a tad too slow. if you still decide to stick with this movement system, yeah making faster would definitely help!
i also really like the vibes of the aesthetic! the mixture of 2d and 3d elements provide a neat contrast with each other, with the 3d elements being more of these desaturated darker colors making the brighter saturated colors of the 2d enemy sprites pop out more! also like how the enemies show up in the same world you're moving in instead of just loading a battle scene, very nice. the enemy designs all look pretty cool and the ui is also laid out really nicely! the animation and the presentation of the battles are also surprisingly polished and look really nice! also gotta compliment the audio design here while im at it, because the sounds while interfacing with the menus are really fun to listen to and left a pretty strong impression, very nice stuff! lastly the cutscenes were fun to go through, they provided a lot of nice context to tie the mood and atmosphere together, really cool stuff!
as a fan of rpgs, this was very pleasant to go through and seems to have a lot potential! hope you continue to work on it, great work!
i really like the ideas and potential behind ur game! im a sucker for turn based combat and thought the way u want to go about it is rly cool! would like to see more done with it if you plan to!
Wow, that must have been a lot of work! You made that system for cutscenes/dialogues, a unique movement system with random, a turn based battle system with 5 very different working spells and logs and a pause menu? I can see why the game is short! But for what it's worth it, I think you've done a great job! I also got that "monster behind the wall" bug a couple of people reported, but in my case the wall was more like an arch, so they weren't fully covered. Only critique I would have is that the game pacing is very slow. Maybe it's just me or it's just how this genre is, but I feel like you could have let the character move around a bit faster.
Thanks! The cheat I had with the cutscene is that I build the dialog with a
dialog_finishedcallback, so anything can create a dialog and wait on it while itās rolling. I copied the trick over from how the battle animations work where theyāre mostly tweens that can be waited on.this game absolutely oozes style, and as someone who's been following the massive development documents during the development period i quite liked this one and had been looking forward to it. i think keeping it kind of small scale for a jam release (i know that a complex combat system was in the works) makes sense, but i would've loved a bit more nuance to the game, flare was always good, stand atop all was a way cool mechanic though, as was garbage's vengeance. perhaps some way to combine orbs would be awesome, and i really liked this old school 2d assets but 3d and grid based dungeon crawly aesthetic (idk how to really put it in words, but it hooked me). really fun time though short.
as for this:
soonā¢ļø
I am The Spiked's #1 Fan.
As a long time enjoyer of the Megaten franchise, especially the oldest of the bunch, Monastic Inversion was right up my alley. I've been following your excellent posts in the Acerola Discord since the beginning of the jam and it has been rather insightful to see the complete thought process of another dev so clearly laid out. Truthfully I wish that I were to have created such design documents before jumping headlong into my game, I imagine the experience would be a little more focused as yours.
The combat system is interesting in that I desire to see how you might develop it from here on, ultimately it's a card game, something I don't think I've seen in this specific context so to me it's a novel idea. I rather enjoy the potential concept of modifying your 'deck' of spell sigils as you traverse the game, stumbling upon new and interesting things to incant behind hidden walls or through other interesting interactions.
Ultimately as it stands in its current form, I found myself near exclusively using flare and not considering any particular strategic implications of the other sigils I had, though I very much imagine that with greater enemy variety, new spells, and other mechanics you might implement into what I see as the potential of a 'Deckbuilding RPG' of sorts, this could be alleviated.
I do have to echo your own thoughts from Discord, the movement is a small bit on the sluggish side, I do rather enjoy grid movement in first-person dungeon crawlers so to speak so I'd hope you stick with it, though I realize I have some niche tastes haha.
All in all, I like Monastic Inversion, more for what I am certain you can (and will) make it into than anything else. It's promising conceptually, and I think your solid structuring of thoughts in your design documents will really pay off. Thanks for the experience!
Spiked was the winner in the enemy design department. šHappy to make a fellow Megaten fan happy!
Definitely an issue. I had to refactor the encounter system late because of an oversight and a last minute rebalance killed some ideas. Originally the big candle man would hit hard and have a lot of health, so you just hitting him with the red sigil would kill you and you had to stun him for two turns with yellow so you can buy time to heal with green, wait till your garbage was full and hit him with the blue sigil, or get him alone and use the orange sigil, which kills single enemies outright.
The trick to that was I made a card game in the past which was pretty janky, so I knew about a lot of the pitfalls going in and I didnāt try to plan everything out all at once, but did it in steps, so I was reasoning less about a grand design and more about individual āchangesā to the current system. Also, good whiteboarding takes experimentation so itās all about stacking projects I think.
Enemy designs are clever, and the theming is cohesive! The concept of queing up spells via, what I like to call, Magic Marbles, is a Unique take on deck building RPGs.
The grid based movement, while I see the goal, feels restrictive and slow in first person. Very stop-and-go. Perhaps a different perspective can turn that stop-go movement natural, a la top down dungeon crawlers.
Thanks!
Thereās definitely either a different form factor I need to switch to(free look, top-down, etc.) or improvements that need to be made to the movement. Iām thinking about making the grid square smaller so the player feels less constrained(also would open level design possibilities) and adding diagonal movement for faster traversal(or perhaps let the player face in eight directions instead), itās a running thing with me that I despise the difference games draw between orthogonal movement and diagonal movements since the squares are still āadjacentā, so Iām suprised this slipped my notice.
Million dollar idea for ya
Great minds think alike, cause I actually gave hexes a shot for Ludum Dare awhile ago: https://soulreviews.net/blog/Cave-Game-Dev-Log-1
Itās always amazing for isometric games, although in the first-person perspective Iām not sure itāll work since people are kind of married to cardinal directions?š¤ Gonna have to try this out at some point, I feel like thereās a 5D Chess-like idea hereā¦
fun short game/demo, I enjoyed the loop and combat system once I figured out how it works. The art style is pretty cool, definitely the biggest draw of the game to me.
One glitch I encountered though is that enemies can spawn behind walls and then are no longer interactable to attack (loading game kinda fixes it).
Congrats on the game!
I liked the narrative and the explanations of the sigils, once they were used. However, the gameplay is a bit too simple for my taste, although it seems that you still got some plans to improve on this aspect. I have a few notes that I hope may help you:
In any case, great job and I wish you the best š¤
Thanks for the feedback! I have to spend some time scripting exports in the future so the
.pckadvisory is well-appreciated! Many of the animations are unfortunately placeholder(meaning: absolutely permeant and shipping in the final game!) Usually I have this rule of āno placeholdersā, but I need to be more strict in this regard. Proof-reading is also not my strong suite š¤£. I plan on writing a.csvdocument or the like thatās change tracked/grammar checked/linted to catch these issues in the future.As for behind the wall bug, Iād thought I had fixed that issue, but need to return to it. I use the same raycasts as for movement collisions for checking if enemy encounters are triggered, but there appears to still be an edge case. Iām betting itās because I buffer move inputs so the encounter is triggered, but you still do an extra move and the enemies are relative to the player transform so they appear behind the wall.
This has a great art style and feel to it. Great work and an awesome accomplishment for the length of the jam! ššš