Okay, so first the art is amazing, it's so damn good, it's incredible.
I think the two great things about this game are the story and the art, both are good, and the story is funny.
Now for the downsides, you play as a janitor but the gameplay doesn't reflect it, you are just playing a classic platformer. It's not bad but for exemple the cleaning mechanic is totaly useless, or maybe i'm missing something. It would have been nice if this mechanic had a purpose.
Attacking is also hard, sometimes you want to attack, but your character start to clean, so I ended spamming the jump button while attacking, it's even more frustrating because cleaning has no real purpose. Maybe putting the cleaning and the attack on two different buttons would be better.
I was also not a big fan of the level design, probably because of the high number of enemies that were a bit frustrating to fight because the attack system was a bit strange.
Other than that the game is really cool and I would love a more polished version with better controls, more enemies types etc...
Amazing work !
Play janitor-experience
Goblin Janitor's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #5 | 4.385 | 4.385 |
| Immersion | #6 | 3.962 | 3.962 |
| Overall | #8 | 4.092 | 4.092 |
| Relevance to the Theme | #9 | 4.346 | 4.346 |
| Gameplay | #13 | 3.654 | 3.654 |
| Concept | #18 | 4.115 | 4.115 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Credits
DrDrub - Programming, Writing, Pixel Art
zdiasio99 - Music, Level Design
gluten male - Music, Level Design
Ash and Livie - Brainstorming
Kafka - Goblin noises
External Credits
We used Dialogic, a really cool plugin for Godot!
https://github.com/coppolaemilio/dialogic
How did you/your team interpret the theme?
We interpreted the theme immediately in a fantasy setting, and then decided the most mundane thing you could be (compared to the hero) would be a janitor. And then the rest fell into place.
How was your/your team's experience in this jam?
Stressful but fun! For sound, both gluten male and zdiasio99 were basically learning on the deadline, and they learned how to make music in a week! (Previous jams relied heavily on samples. This time we focused on more original song creation)
I (the programmer) lost two full days of the week because I went to the zoo. (no regrets)
Super fun! :)
Content Warnings
There is very cartoonish blood throughout the game, and a sad scene :(
Comments
You mop if you stand still and press J, and you swing if you move and press J. I hoped that most people would be able to figure it out, but it's not as intuitive as I hoped it would be! I was going for a smash-bros style control system, but it didn't really work super well.
Yeah we didn't have a story scene for a... certain moment in the end game. You're right, it got cut for time. :( We also worried that we were making the story too long, so that's why we focused on making more levels, instead of finishing that middle story-beat. But yeah, def would have wanted that to be in there!
Yeah, the mop system certainly has its flaws. I wanted to try a smash-bros style system, but I think having a neutral move that can't attack makes it less intuitive. Had I had more time to code, I would've coded more different attacks for the different directions. It's also tough thematically, because the game is sort of about how violence is bad, and it's a combat platformer...
Yeah I absolutely overused the text effects. It was just too much fun to use. Will definitely be more intentional with its usage in future games.
As for the theme - the ending sort of does walk back the theme, but I felt like it still worked. We sort of interpreted the theme as: "you are not recognized as the hero", which is definitely a less direct interpretation of it.
Thank you for the review!
Thank you so much for your kind words!
I've thought about making youtube devlogs, but I've been kinda busy recently. And when school starts back up, I probably won't be able to make very consistent "content", so.
This comment made my day!
Fair point!
We really wanted to focus on the story for this game, but I do feel we neglected the gameplay a bit too much. My personal goal for this game jam was to learn how to implement dialogue in a game (I’ve previously used shortcuts, like ren’py or animation players) and I feel happy that I’ve accomplished that!
I personally love dialogue heavy games - but I understand they’re not for everyone! And you’re right, development time was spent more on dialogue than on gameplay.
Thank you! The text was done using Dialogic, a plugin for godot. The text effects are a built in part of godot's Rich Text node, and they're called bbcode. It's super easy to implement, and adds a lot of flair.
Glad you liked our game!
Yup! I absolutely agree with your point.
We wanted a bunch of features originally, but we really overscoped and had to cut back on the features. When the jam time was approaching closer we thought a lot about investing more time into the story versus the gameplay, and we decided the story was the most unique part of our game, so we focused more on that. But yeah! Our combat is very bare-bones in this state.
Thank you for playing!
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