Interesting gameplay, even if at times you don't understand what you have to do. I enjoyed playing it,
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The Villain's Lair's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Relevance to the Theme | #55 | 3.556 | 3.556 |
| Concept | #62 | 3.278 | 3.278 |
| Overall | #81 | 2.922 | 2.922 |
| Gameplay | #82 | 2.556 | 2.556 |
| Immersion | #83 | 2.611 | 2.611 |
| Presentation | #99 | 2.611 | 2.611 |
Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Credits
Textures and music were made by Alternative.Paper and Rudydzik
https://alternativepaper.itch.io/
https://rudydzik.itch.io/
External Credits
N/A
How did you/your team interpret the theme?
You play as a villain and fight off heroes. We also thought that in every story villain is ultimately destined to lose sooner or later, so we decided to make it a arcade style game where you don't win, you only fight for highscores.
How was your/your team's experience in this jam?
We were having great fun working together and learned many new things!
Content Warnings
N/A
Comments
Nice and interesting game. I like the concept and the mechanics, but there is a complaint: Controls are unclear in game, i had to look twice on the page to attack, after that it was just matter of time to die, i've read your intentions was to make this an arcade style where the main goal is to get the bigger score so it works like that, but i think there should be some walls to help you react to the enemies. Graphics don't work well togheter, same style could give this game a great boost. Also the UI is glitched for me.
Keep on the good work!
Submitted
A bride for the princeThanks for playing and feedback!
Controls being unclear is a sideeffect of game having many mechanisc (moving, attacking, spells and upgrade system). I am planing on improving this by adding a pause button which in addition of letting you plause the game will display all the controlls.
Where it comes to helping players react to enemies, I figured that since they always come from the same spots, are easly distinguishable and have predictable attack patterns it won't really be a problem. I might try to fix this by adding them a half second down time after spawning, but I think it might make the game too easy. I don't want to add more walls to the map, since it may broke some of the spells as they currently work.
The UI and map were made by Rudydzik and characters were made by Alternative.Paper. They clearly had different visions of how the game should look like and weren't communicating that much. On top of that it was their first experience with pixel are so they wanted to experiment and I didn't wanted to discourage it.
The UI works only under 1920x1080. I didn't knew how to scale it properly, so I made it work under what I thought to be the most popular resolution. I do plan to return to it, but I clearly need to educate myself on how Unity scales UI.
I'm pretty sure your team can find a particular style that suits for both of them, the game is easy on the first stages but then enemies start comming from everyplace and it turns a pandemonium LOL. I hope you find a way to reorder the UI accordly to screen size.
I don't use Unity, but i think there should be a way to implement something like relative coordinates calculating screen size and tile the UI anchoring the elements relative to those calculations. These calculations are not so hard to set i hope you find a way to do this. Also i think you can set a small letter related to it's actions in the UI, i.e. setting 1 for the first skill and so on.
Good luck!
The game kept me on my toes, nice. For the games pace I would have liked some easier controls. For example reducing the number of spells to two and putting them on ‘q’ and ‘e’ would leave 1-4 for leveling up skills. Maybe that would make it a bit easier. At least I barely used my spells because the controls are further away from WASD. Appart from that the already mentioned effects for getting damage or attacking would really go a long way. But like this it is already a nice acomplishment and fun to play!
Submitted
Wicked PotionsI think the hecticness of this game made it more fun. It surprised me how the swordsman follows me in advance when moving around him, which was fun.
The balancing for adding more enemies to the map was also neatly transitioned altho difficulty it removed the thought of how simple attacking was.
Overall, the game is good, add some feedback to the battle system like damage values and stuff, and this game will be even better.
For the art, a lot can be improved, of course. But, the art was neat, and it was on point for the functionality and helpful for how players understand what's happening in the game.
Submitted
Please Sire!!!As always, thanks for leaving a comment!
We made a huge deal of making our game as balanced as it can while retaning the hecticness, so I am happy it worked for you. We needed to cut many ideas, like, for example, that enemies were able to level up at one point of development, but no matter how we balamced it either the mages or swordsmen ended up too strong at some point.
I am right now working on update that will add suggestions from this comment section, so let me add damage feedback to the list.
And for the art, I am also happy it turned out readable for you. Our artists are open to suggestions and critique and would be glad if you could elaborate on how they can improve!
Love the quick upgrade system , using a mouse in game like this is very weird for me , so the keyboard input is perfect . One problem I found is the UI is broken under different resolution ..
Submitted
Quest MasterI like the concept! Movement + arrow keys to attack is neat, and managing upgrades while under attack is always fun.
I think binding keys to level up stats is useful, but not very intuitive for new players. I found myself lifting my hand off the keyboard to use the mouse to click the buttons instead, which meant I couldn't attack. And then because I didn't want to memorize all the button inputs, I just spammed E a bunch.
Overall, the sprites are pretty clear in their intent, but there is a missing cohesiveness to the art overall. I think restricting yourself to a palette and sticking to it would help! That, and maybe consider drawing all the characters on the same sheet - it seems like the characters have very different proportions.
Well done! Great game!
Submitted
Goblin JanitorThanks for sharing your opinion!
I am aware that stat system might be unintuitive for new players, but at the same time understanding it was designed to be a big part of learning how to play, so I don't really know how I could improve it.
I am also pretty sure that our artists will appreciate your advice! It was first experience with pixel art for both of them, so it was expected that not everything will look the best it could.
For a first experience with pixel art, that's really impressive! WAY better than some of my beginning stuff
As always, I gotta drop the link to the best pixel art guide I've every seen: https://blog.studiominiboss.com/pixelart
This website has helped me SO MUCH and is crazy useful. I cannot recommend it enough for people learning pixel art + animation
This is really hectic game! I wish there was even a couple second break between levels. There isn't time to pay attention to your levels and upgrades. I guess this is a game you would just have to play more and git gud. But overall it still was fun!
Submitted
A Spoonful Of DollarsThe game was supposed to be fast-paced and challenging. Of course making game like this also feel fair isn't an easy task. We tried to achieve that by making hud kinda big and gave every important variable a icon with distinct shape and colour and also by binding upgrading stats to keys near your left hand. It was expected that a couple of first attempts will end early, but in the next ones player will start noticing some nuances, like the fact that you can use upgrading vitality and magic as a way to restore your hp and mp at the cost of score. There is more to the stat system, but I want players to discover that themselves :)
This is a pretty nice game. It is playable and once I figured out how to upgrade, it was pretty fun. Endless enemies is really nice and it gets quite challenging as time goes on. Nice work!
A few critiques:
* A start menu would be nice. Starting right in the thick of battle makes it really hard to get going.
* It was awkward initially was not knowing when I was taking damage. It could be nice to have a knockback / audio / flashing to indicate you were hit.
Very nit picky here but I had fun.
Really great work for 1 week :)
Submitted
Pocket Hero
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