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BOSS RUSH JAM 2024 ($2,500 Prize Pool!!)

Hosted by FartFish, 🕹️swagshaw · #BossRushJam2024

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A jam submission

Arms Sacrifice: Aku no MoriView game page

A demon gave you your arms back. Use them to hunt her disciples.

Submitted by bonejackal (@TELECO20XX), Double45 (@Double45_), Gabriel — 1 hour, 2 minutes before the deadline

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Arms Sacrifice: Aku no Mori's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
ART / VISUALS	#3	4.636	4.636
Overall	#23	3.712	3.712
SOUNDS / MUSIC	#29	3.727	3.727
USE OF THEME	#37	3.636	3.636
BOSS DESIGN	#54	3.455	3.455
FUN	#56	3.455	3.455
CONTROLS	#64	3.364	3.364

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Game's take on the theme
The character exchanges their weapon for a new one every boss cycle. The story is about what they are doing in exchange for getting back the use of their arm.

Did your team create the vast majority of art and music during the game jam?
Yes

Did your game use PlusMusic?
No

Did your game use Playroom?
No

Did your game use generative AI art?
No

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Comments

masawhoSubmitted84 days ago(+1)

I really loved the game! It presented a very cohesive idea and I loved that the atmosphere, art, sounds, and gameplay made the idea more pronounced. The breaking trees and death animations really help out a ton for the feel of the game. The fast pacing makes the fights feel more impactful, and the thought behind the overall scene and setting is what really strikes it home for me.

Gameplay wise it felt great, but not quite amazing. I agree with some of the other comments mentioning that it would be nice if the vfx and sfx made the hits more noticeable. I think the fights with bosses felt weird sometimes because the visuals and sound didn't line up with what I was expecting from my character or from the boss.

Submitted

AruSubmitted84 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Well presented and original, with a degree of attention to detail that I'm already coming to expect out of Boneyard Productions™

Aesthetically - the game is designed well. Starting with a blood rain that gives an eerie intro befitting the plot, and the environment gives off a special atmosphere as well. It feels like you're lost somewhere dangerous. Even death animation has you "return to the soil" (I wonder if the forest was alive?). The boss track is short and loops quickly, but turned out oddly addictive.

Gameplay-wise - it didn't resonate with me so strongly. For the first boss in particular - limited camera angles and slower than the boss speed for the player (even with dash) made it really awkward to anticipate the boar's moves. It felt like you either had to facetank to deal damage at a swift pace (trying not to get yeeted in the process), or chip away very slowly and keep running/jumping around to avoid taking hits. Lack of immediate defensive/movement abilities encouraged running away from bosses rather than proactively seeking opportunities to attack.

For both bosses, I couldn't utilize some of the weapons fully - the crossbow was really awkward to aim, and the sweeping attack of the Bone™ couldn't hit the second boss while grounded. The long wind-ups of some weapons also made it impossible to deal hits while being able to dodge the quick fly demons. All in all, both bosses turned into battles of attrition for me, so I didn't enjoy the combat aspect much.

It's a shame that you've had to spend so much time dealing with IRL stuff. I think the game could turn a lot more fun with more development time, more player responsiveness, and perhaps some extra abilties beyond walk, run, attack and jump. With how the player can climb and jump off of trees I assume there were thoughts to incorporate it into combat somehow? Or maybe there's already some kind of mechanic/game changing strategy I didn't discover?

Overall - solid foundation for an atmospheric deforestation and de-demonization sim. I'd totally hire Mortilla to chop some trees and demon limbs. Combat system may need more attention. Oh, and a crouch button please, so I can feel a sense of accomplishment after beating a difficult boss.

Submitted

bonejackalDeveloper84 days ago(+1)

ty aru, i appreciate the effort from one of my esteemed colleagues 😤

the aesthetics were kinda what i was hoping would carry the lack of polish we were able to bring with this one, it all runs and everything but as you've gathered, it needs some improvements LOL. the story is very likely that a war was fought there a long time ago, and countless people died on the battlefield, their blood and rage contaminating the soil, which caused creatures in the forest to become demons. like a boar that found a slain king's cape and became consumed by its ambition, and (even though cello didn't actually consult me when sneaking in the flies boss) the flies that consumed the corpses of soldiers learning bloodthirst. when slain, their blood again floods the forest, and their souls are laid to rest, or at least so the arms demon tells you. she actually lives in the blood of rage, bathes in and drinks of it, and lives to provide arms that keep battles going. but mortilla was born of that lingering hope that those arms would forever be lain to rest, the hearts that sank into the earth that yearned for a better future, and so secretly pursues slaying her. "mortilla," evoking a "small death," acknowledging the minimum amount of violence for peace. ripping off the arm that feeds if it causes you to bleed. that was the initial plan.

the game started out with a bunch of soulsborne players designing it, including myself, but none of us wanted it to just be a soulslike. so i emphasized verticality and aggression by a lot, but there are still similar elements that don't seem obvious. like for instance, you can sprint and not outrun the boar, of course, but to avoid its attacks you must jump a lot. the character is crouched and low to the ground to imply that springiness, and is very roughly frog-themed if you squint. so the equivalent to the grounded dodge roll is to sprint and then jump, which does give you a boost that is enough to avoid attacks if you travel laterally to the boar's charge, and unlike in souls, you can attack out of it as well while being close enough to follow up. when the boar charges you, you are supposed to charge a jump in anticipation, so the boar will slip under you and you can counterattack. i made it very jump-oriented, but i couldn't really communicate its design ethos haha. people seem to have wildly varying times with it contingent on whether they're spamming jump attacks and constantly moving very fast or not, so i tried to make the game more conducive to frantically running and sprinting at and around the boss so you're not wasting time getting back to it. if you're knocked away, there's a built-in slingshot if you immediately charge a jump slide to re-engage.

there was an initial design process where i wanted to communicate that some weapons are simply worse at engaging bosses than others, and initially i wanted it to be that the weapons distributed on the battlefield corresponded to the weapons that were worse against the boss. like "these were the weapons that fail to kill them." until the last ten minutes, the Burning Splinter (the long-ass sword) could not be used against the flies grounded either, and it was horrible to fight them with that weapon. but i relented and increased its vertical grounded hitbox and it trivialized the fight a lot, i feel like i should've kept it LOL.

i actually wanted the dragonbreath moves on the bone to be highly effective on the flies by making the flies disperse based on how many times they're hit rather than how much damage they take, which a constant flaming hitbox would be naturally better at doing. but the strong grounded tail attack can actually hit the fly, which also trivializes the fight 😩 and i believe the bone's strong tail attacks also heal you significantly on a hit. i was going to make tree-specific moves as well as dash-jump specific light and heavy attacks, but the mechanic was a little too specific to tweak with the time we had, so i made it so you can easily jump off them or attack while on the trees. the projectile weapons tended to be really powerful grounded and let you engage from a distance if you say, tree jumped really far away, so the long windup was intentional. what wasn't intentional though is that the projectiles heal you based on a hit, and you heal when you hit trees, so the gun and crossbow heal you massively just by shooting randomly into the forest. >:'3 all the bosses i had planned involved heavy use of trees, including the boar's ability to break them. can't say i could add a crouch button though, since mortilla crouches by default anyway 😞 a taunt move is a great idea though since i wanted the character to feel feral.

AruSubmitted84 days ago(+1)

Okay, you sold me - I'm definitely hiring Mortilla to chop trees, slay demons, and bring world peace with minimum violence. Do you think they've got a spot in their schedule for me?

I tried playing again, this time managed to beat 2 loops (not cheesing the boar with the bug) before dying. I've been meaning to write how the jump doesn't feel like a true alternative to dodge rolling, because of how long you spend in the air and how little player control you have while airborne. Then I rolled the axe which turned out to be a gun? and you can spam it in the air to stay airborne forever?? and it turned out to be the most fun thing ever???? ...I guess my gripe now is "why did other weapons feel inferior to the point that beating a boss - without being a facetanking jackass - takes forever?"

I suppose it's a matter of being used to one type of gameplay or the other. 3d Souls-likes never resonated with me, but similar action games like Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Metal Gear Rising and Furi I enjoyed a lot. All of them give you either a dodge ability with invulnerability frames, a type of parry, or both, along with other special attacks and moves. Rather than limit the player's abilities (I tried dark souls once and it felt like the player was a lead balloon), they keep the degree of freedom high while making enemies and bosses harder and less predictable to compensate. With Aku no Mori, it felt like you had to know always when you can be around the boss and when you cannot. The jumps' timing and required force (for the boar fight) are precise. Jump too soon or too low and the boar will hit you before you can charge another jump. Jump too late and too high - you'll miss the opportunity to strike efficiently, so you'll either have to deal less damage and run away asap, or stay and endure one of its instant attacks. For the fly, it depends on your weapon (and gets really awkward with a melee one), but as you'll either have to use an accurate mid-air attack or a ground attack with wind-up that has enough reach, it really comes down to knowledge once again. There weren't many times when there was an attack coming at me which I didn't expect, and I had enough time to use my abilities to evade while still being able to damage the boss. Again, I assume it's the default for souls games where you have to know what the boss does firsthand and make precise inputs based on specific telegraphs, rather than be able to experiment and trust your gut.

Oh, and you've mentioned the bone's flame attack so I tried it against the fly. It worked, despite me losing most of hp in the process. Crossbow - I've managed to beat Boar with it without cheese, aiming still awkward but it's not terrible (and I never noticed the heal off of trees mechanic lol, idk if it matters since you stay away from the boar and never take damage anyhow). Didn't use it against the second boss, but if neither shooting it on the ground nor the sweeping attack hit the fly then it's going to be way too painful to fight. So yeah, it's not skill issue that led me to all the feedback so far, I hope!

(really sleepy so dunno how readable or objective this WoT is, but I couldn't stand to delete it all either. Anyway, as with other such texts, take what feedback you need and discard the rest)

bonejackalDeveloper57 days ago(+1)

somehow didn't see this a month ago 😭😭😭 thank you for your feedback aru, and i'm glad you gave it another spin. i'm pumped though!! we got third in aesthetics

NoirFerroSubmitted86 days ago(+1)

the game is overall interesting and amazing at building atmosphere and boss fights. art is very cool, exchanging weapon is always a neat thing. controls is fine. music is quite neat

some bosses is rather a bit annoying to be understood, and i was confused when i played it the first time.

Submitted

AX3L (ULTRAKILL/DOOM alike)

bonejackalDeveloper85 days ago

yea, the playstyle of the game is kind of out of the ordinary, so the ambition of trying to get it across was hurt by that we lost a lot of time up front - w -;; if we had the time we thought we had we could've made all the mechanics feel more cohesive.

the original concept was actually that your weapon breaks permanently and you have to select a different one, but later i wanted it to be that your weapon gets stuck in the boss you're fighting before it sinks into the blood again. but either way i'm glad that what we made got the idea across!

Zye_3Submitted87 days ago(+1)

amazing game! love all the concepts of the different weapons, some of them were way better than others, and it was sometimes hard to tell whether youre damaging the bosses, especially with the ranged weapons, but other than that, i really like the different weapons! (especially the axe gun thing)

i dont think i understood the climbing tree thing, but the game feels super good to play! i love how you managed to capture the feeling of being in an endless forest, the game looks amazing in general!

sad that there were only 2 bosses, but the concepts for the bosses that are there were really cool, i really enjoyed fighting them, great game!

Submitted

Weapon Exchange Box

bonejackalDeveloper85 days ago

yea the axe gun is a reference to Princess Mononoke, actually! well, in name at least. i called it "Eboshi's Cunning," after the antagonist in it that kills a forest god using a gun. it's my favorite in terms of design, i had a lot of fun putting it together. i also wanted to limit the amount you can shoot it in the air to two times but that slipped through the cracks :'3

the forest is all Cello, he threw together a procedural forest super quick, it's insane. and then he and Double collaborated on making the trees break, since i wanted that to be a major part of the game. the tree jumping was supposed to be much more important in fighting the bosses, since i wanted an emphasis on verticality and advantages from the air, but charging a normal jump and sliding around while charging jumps made it easy enough without the tree mechanic. still think it was really cool at least.

thanks though dude! Cello crammed in the flies boss using the main character's model and a fly model he made like two days before the jam ended and he did that really clever thing where the fly makes up the eyes. i had drafted 4 bosses you fight, and two of them were modeled (one textured and rigged completely) and those simply got cut LOL.

MagnaRemoraSubmitted87 days ago(+1)

First of I'd like to say that I loved the style of this game, it has this grim mood going for it where textures seem to be slightly desaturated making it feel atmospheric. The soundtrack is cool, somewhat resembles something I would hear in Samurai Jack of all things, not sure if that's an inspiration but it is a nice vibe.

Now as for gameplay, I found the gameplay to be on the easy side, things functioned as they should, though I think the feedback on damage seemed a bit hard to tell, especially with the boar boss whenever he rams into you. A working strategy was to circle the bosses with staff. On the second time the boar appeared, I equipped a rune-looking sword that let me spin to win, however, this weapon was so powerful that it broke the boar's A.I. so it just stood there and accepted defeat.

Overall I had a very good experience with this game, the fox character looks awesome, so I'm just going to leave you with this image and say congratulations, you've done an awesome game :)

Submitted

bonejackalDeveloper85 days ago(+1)

thank u dude!!! yea, Double came up with the idea of a blood rain in a forest, so i wanted to use red/green complementary colors for the setting, and make it so that your weapon selection was cleanly delineated from when you go back to the forest. Cello also threw something together really quick because our original composer didn't feel well, so the music that got in still ended up being really good. can't speak to his inspirations though, maybe he could chime in on that.

i wanted to tune the difficulty more, especially since i designed the character combat such that hits don't waste your time or punish you too badly with your jumping ability, but that was really really late in development. :'3 same with the boar AI, that it stands still and lets you destroy it if you're close enough was an oversight we just ran out of time on. the "staff" you mentioned is actually just a really long fucking sword with a constant hitbox at the end, the hit registration sounds were something that also slipped through the cracks. Cello had the foresight to give them damage sounds when we were really struggling at the end. i was looking into it near the end, but i wanted to make the sword, the "Burning Splinter," make a sizzling sound when in contact with an enemy to make it clear that it's a damage zone. but i counted on it being a favorite considering it just looks really cool. and then yea, "Carnot's Claw," the hook sword, was meant to have you spinning to win, but more with an emphasis on bouncing on the top of the boar. that the forest king's AI is busted kinda messed up some of those design decisions LOL.

thank you for playing, i'm glad you enjoyed it. :]

Ryan KSubmitted91 days ago(+2)

Atmosphere was super cool, and visuals felt like they really fit with the theme you were going for. Some of the abilities were a bit hard to use, but it was definitely fun.

Submitted

Luminimpetus Prime

bonejackalDeveloper91 days ago

thank you!! yea i am really pumped at how the aesthetics turned out, obviously there could always be more but i was really fighting the deadline with everything i had, haha. i'm glad you enjoyed what you got. :]

Lion YawnSubmitted91 days ago(+2)

First of all, you had to jump through so many hoops this month, so props to you for even having a complete game. Visuals are great, and I love the vision you had with the movement. Controls were difficult for me, especially when trying to hop from tree to tree, which I was really excited to do after seeing it on stream. Bouncing back after getting launched across the forest was also really cool. I hope you'll eventually make a fleshed out version of this!

Submitted

bonejackalDeveloper91 days ago

tysm dude, yea you've seen me on the journey LOL. but oh nice, you figured out the rebound slide move!!! yea that was honestly a really cool compromise for getting knocked back dramatically while still letting you get back to the action quickly, i was stoked because it was so easy. literally just had to not tell the engine to slow you down when you go in for the slide jump. unfortunately some weird-ass bug crept in where sometimes your tree jumps will happen in slow motion and it's weird as hell and makes it hard, but when it's working it's really fun to zip from tree to tree. and if a tree breaks in the middle of the lunge then you can get tilted and your character won't be able to select a weapon 😭 but i'm glad you found some enjoyment in it, i can't wait to get to your game >:3

ardie01Submitted92 days ago (1 edit) (+2)

I really like the art direction of this game. The movement is also almost really good, but there’s just a bit of clunk in there that kind of ruins it for me. I’ve only played a bit, but from what I can tell, it just loops. If that’s correct, it would be nice if there was a counter to keep track of how many bosses you’ve defeated. Also the forest king has a pretty bad glitch where if you stand right up next to his face, he just stands there and doesn’t attack you.

Submitted

bonejackalDeveloper92 days ago (1 edit)

yea, we didn't have enough time to take it to feature completion :'3 a bunch of terrible stuff was happening over that month that really killed our ability to stay on top of it. i was literally about to add a timer to the boar that makes its behavior randomized if it stays still too long but i was working on it down to the wire. i also wanted to add boss defeat tracking but we hardly were able to get UI in. i spent most of my t ime trying to make satisfying movement and weapon mechanics, there wasn't a single sound until the last week of development LOL. but thank you! i really feel in my element polishing up the aesthetic side of things.

ThePlatypusSubmitted92 days ago(+2)

Really enjoyed the game, its was so fun I played it a couple of times to try out all of the weapons. Also the concept of an axe that doubles as a gun is really cool. Good job :D

Submitted

bonejackalDeveloper92 days ago

YEA >:3 that gun is actually my favorite weapon, i really like long matchlock rifles like the tanegashima. if you're familiar with the Honest Woodcutter, i used that as inspiration for the silver axe head, because there's also a golden pickaxe. glad you tried out all the weapons. i should've left it in but originally it used to be really hard to kill the flies with the Burning Splinter, because your ground move couldn't connect, but i literally extended the hitbox on it in the last ten minutes because i'm a coward. should've left it hard. :'3c

EldyrdSubmitted92 days ago(+2)

First of all, I really loved the aesthetic, the music and the creepy vibe with the rain feels increadible. And I love how fast paced the movement is, it feels great to jump and use the air attacks, great job!

Submitted

bonejackalDeveloper92 days ago

yea, the first thing i did was try to make smooth and satisfying movement. i thought i was onto something with how often i would get distracted just running around spamming moves LOL

i'm glad you liked the atmosphere, our music situation was looking a little dire so i'm glad we managed to get something in :]

ObifangSubmitted92 days ago(+2)

It's got a great atmosphere and great variety of weapons. But I found the lack of lock-on camera made the whole experience feel chaotic and overwhelming. Otherwise great work!

Submitted

bonejackalDeveloper92 days ago

aw, dang! i thought it would've been disorienting since it's not a closed arena and the gameplay is so fast. because you can travel arbitrarily far, the enemies needed teleports to keep up and they'd constantly make your lock on drop😭 but i'm glad you enjoyed it! thanks for playing :]