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Superhero Academy's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #62 | 4.022 | 4.022 |
| Game Design | #70 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Audio | #117 | 3.444 | 3.444 |
| Overall | #187 | 3.196 | 3.196 |
| Fun | #217 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Innovation | #516 | 2.422 | 2.422 |
| Theme | #551 | 2.489 | 2.489 |
Ranked from 45 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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The art is polished, songs are good(but repetitive) and sound effects are ok, loved the character creation, the game is well made overall.
So, there is a big flaw, for me the tutorial lasts way too long, it was getting tedious and tedious, to the point that i quit after ~15 minutes playing, the music contributed to this because it gets very repetitive. Instead of giving all the mechanics on the tutorial you should give them to the player as the narrative progresses, i know it is because it's a superhero academy, but it turns out as a big tutorial game.
I agree on most points on the feedback by in Principle Games, you should take these feedback as constructive, analise and use them to improve.
My game:
https://itch.io/jam/cgj/rate/475980
Thank you very much for your feedback.
I know that the tutorial takes very long, but you will understand why the tutorial is that long when you finish it. It ends after the second enemy stage. You could have reached it by the time of 15 minutes. So you should have been really close to finishing the tutorial and getting the payoff/punchline (don't knwo the right word).
For sure I will take the feedback as constructive, although his final rating was really harsh. It seems that people just expect short games with no story for a game jam. Sorry that we went for something bigger.
I think that jam games should be short experiences, because it is made in a small period of time, if a 1 week jam game has a large playtime there can be some reasons: the game require a large time to progress, like, large levels, hard puzzles, lots of text(this case is my game), not adding much new stuff during that time can make the player become bored quick, to have all that and still be a fun game that keeps players engaged you require lots of skill and experience.
There is too the case if the game is too easy, players get bored, if too hard, frustration. So much things to be aware when making a game, it all comes down to experience and knowing what to do.
People often have big game scopes for jams, i am trying to avoid that, creating a small experience that is more manageable for a jam short time, though i failed this time ,my game turned out as a visual novel, which are full of text and require large reading times, my friend did the writing and it is good, but doesn't know if it is enough to keep the player engaged until the end.
But yeah, some people won't like large playtime jam games because they want to review as many games as possible and so are expecting small experiences.
I think our game is not really too repetitive because you learn a new ability in each level and have to master it to overcome the level which increases in difficulty from checkpoint to checkpoint. I agree that it is a little bit on the harder side and people could lose interest. But hey, I can't make a game that everybody likes. If I make it easier, some might say it is too easy or too short.
We are very happy with our game. It turned out way better than we expected. For sure it has some bugs here and there and some missing particle effects and some might say there are too many dialogues. But I had fun writing them and nobody can take that away from me :D
I can't believe this was made in a week...I couldn't even make this in a year.. The Character Creation System was SO COOL!..I just had trouble playing with a keyboard..Buttt...That's my own fault xD.. The game is Really fun to play..You should turn this into a complete game.
I also played every day with the keyboard during the jam (I think I barely got to level 5 without finishing it haha) and only today I had the chance to try it with the gamepad ... it makes a big difference !! THANK YOU anyway for these beautiful words!!
Thank you very much, your comment means a lot to us. You should definitely try it out with a gamepad ;)
Maybe some day in the future we will make a full game out of it :D
But what I can assure you is, that I will make a tutorial on the character creation system ;)
Okay..I'm waiting for it then..I have a slight idea about how you did it..But still, It'd be nice to learn something new :)
The graphics in this looked fantastic! The platforming felt very nice, and the level design was fun! Nice work!
we thank you all: " thank youuuuuuuuu" (in chorus) :P
Awesome game! I love the polish that this game has! I am amazed in what you can accomplish in a week! well done fire totem games :]
Also it would be super cool if you checked out my game :]
Thank you very much. I have to extend your "well done" to my two colleagues who were responsible for the graphics and the music/sounds.
To be honest, the polish is not as high as I would have liked it to be, but we set our goals a little too high for the jam and had to cut things out.
I will check your game out later and give you valuable feedback. ;)
Hello! Your game is great! I love the character creation. How long did you need for that? Also music, graphics and animation are super cool!
Thank you very much for your feedback. Really appreciate it.
The character creation was super easy. Only took like 1.5h to code. I think of creating a tutorial or maybe video on how I did it. So give me a follow here or on twitter and you should get an update ;)
The graphics were made by another guy. That took a little longer :D
Wow only 1/2 hours😮. Yes a tutorial would be awesome!
Character creator tutorial in the making ;)
https://twitter.com/FireTotemGames/status/1169363826887860232
Character Customizer Tutorial
https://firetotemgames.itch.io/superhero-academy/devlog/98803/2d-character-customizer-tutorial-unity
Wow Danke! (Gerade gesehen, dass du von Österreich kommst :)
Aha, da hat jemand meine Webseite angeschaut.
Hello! I played your Elf game in another jam! This is super cool! The character creation is super awesome, I want to learn how to do that! A tip I learned from another jam is to use a random sound array for things like jumping sounds (that way you don't hear the exact same sound every time, but a mix of however many you make) Please check out my entry if you can, any feedback or suggestions would be great~ Good day!
Hey. Yeah I also played your game for the ShenaniJam and I really liked it. The story was awesome. I will checkout your game later.
Everybody is just talking about the character creation. :D It seems I have to do some sort of how-to of that part, because many have requested it. It's actually super easy (barely an inconvenience). Don't know if you get the reference.
I know the sound trick, but haven't used arrays before. I also have to admit that I spent way too less time on tweaking the sounds... What I do instead is having a volume and pitch variation for my sounds, but I might have forgotten to add this to some of the sounds.
Character Customizer Tutorial
https://firetotemgames.itch.io/superhero-academy/devlog/98803/2d-character-customizer-tutorial-unity
Wow this is amazing! Great job~ I will try it for sure!
I thought having Controller support was really bad-ass!
Your sentence sounds like it is missing a ", but ..." at the end.
But I assume you liked the controller support ;)
Hi. Some criticism
yeah, the name has to be a minimum of 4 characters long. 16 Mac and the first name will not be available, here the game is lying to you because the name will never ever be used.
Regarding point 3, it seems you ran into the door bug or else I don't know what you are referring to. There are a lot of levels in the tutorial and you learn really nice abilities. Please give the windows version a try. It has less bugs, don't know why.
I really don't want to get a bad rating due to this stupid bug.
I don't know why your pause button did not work, it should.
Very polished gamed, both in graphics and audio!
It felt kinda difficult and way too long for a Jam, but it was fun and enjoyable playing it!
We got stuck into a couple of bugs when we needed to revive at some checkpoints in the tutorial and the other important thing that needs to be fixed is the invulnerability time because it's way too short, especially when meeting spikes!
Overall the game is very nice, the character editor is a fun part of the game itself!
tutorial is harder cuphead tutorial, frick
Ok. First of all thanks for playing.
But I don't know how I should feel after reading your comment. Did you like it or not? :D
i love it
Nice
I've give this game about 30 minutes or so, and I couldn't finish it.
I really liked the character creator. I'm generally a sucker for character customisation in games. This one obviously is simple, due to game jam constraints, however, it works and I was able to create Poopsickle, the pink and teal, baseball cap wearing tanned and blond nonce with an earring that looks slightly baffled. He was my character and that increases the relatability of the game, in my opinion. I tried calling him Smelly, by the way, but the game didn't like that!
The initial part of the game's narrative worked OK, with some 4th wall breaking. It did grow repetitive and long later, however. From my perspective, too much dialogue, too little playing.
I used an Xbox controller to play, as suggested by the game. The game also said I couldn't complain about the controls, but I'm going to. First the good bits: the game has modular jumping and grace jump as well, which is very rare in game jam entries. Pleasantly surprised to find it here. However, there is no predictable air control, so stopping going left or right in the air immediately stops you, and you can zig zag, which is very hard to control. The same goes for ground movement, it's either all in, or nothing, making precision platforming challenging. Lastly, I don't dig the fact that the jump doesn't really have an arc. When the apex is reached, you immediately start plummeting at max speed. Arguably predictable, but not for me.
The character's invulnerability time is too low, especially when hit by spikes from underneath. This leads to a lot of multiple damaging hits in a row, with little predictability.
I appreciated the frequent checkpoints, however, I found some of them not to work, which forced me to repeat large sections.
The worst part of the player interactions by far is combat. All attacks, both melee and ranged, have substantial delay to them. It makes it difficult to predict and needlessly annoying to deal with enemies. Down and up attacks are finicky, because humans are terrible with analogue sticks. Rogue Legacy is an example of a game that struggles in this area too. I suspect this is why the dev suggested to use the Down direction on a D-Pad instead in a tutorial.
Let's tackle the premise of the game. The game is a large tutorial. From my perspective, this is a poor choice, because tutorials are the least fun part in a game. I really started feeling despondent toward the game over time due to the premise. As for the theme, it's used in dialogue every now and then, but clearly an afterthought.
The art is strange. The character looks and animates great, but by comparison, the enemies are simplistic and seem cobbled together last minute. The biggest issue, however, is with the colour palette. Everything (and I mean everything, even the UI) is 1 colour + Shades of grey: teal. That makes the BG and FG not stand out very well, and the levels look really samey really quickly. So, the art has care in it, but I don't support the artistic vision is a way of putting it, I suppose. Lastly, I think the Particle Systems and the Trail on jumps don't look very good AND don't really fit the toony art style.
Music is alright, but because the game is so long, the loop gets boring quick. The sound effects are fine until you encounter enemies. You hitting them has one of the least empowering SFX I've ever heard. It sounds like me dropping an empty can of tuna onto a wooden floor.
Strange entry for a game jam. Very large game, with little in it unfortunately.
Ok , first of all, your comment got posted twice somehow. So I deleted one of them.
It's sad that you wasn't able to finish it. I now that it's a long tutorial, but you will get the point after you finish it. You were already quite close. There are only two enemy levels before the tutorial is over. Sad that you stopped there.
Now to your feedback.
This was the first game I really used a system that talks to the player. I agree that I might overdid it with some of the dialogues, but it was somehow fun to write them.
The game only told you not to complain about the controls if you are using the keyboard, so your feedback is ok. We (or mostly I because I was the programmer) took inspiration from Hollow Knight and that game also has this all or nothing control type, which i personally like a lot. For me it makes controlling the character perfect. I hate games where the player has a weird or long acceleration or deceleration phase, because it makes the controls feel floaty or like pulling your character with a spring. But yeah, controls in such type of games are always a point of discussion and you can't make it fit for everybody. Especially not in a game jam :D
I agree with the invulnerability time. Unfortunately the web and windows build have the problem that the flashing of the player is not shown correctly. The white flash is shown as invisible, which I couldn't fix in time... But yeah, increasing the invulnerability time would help, but this could also lead to the player exploiting it. Tricky stuff to tweak.
You have to run through the door to activate the checkpoint. I wanted to add a sound effect, but forgot it due to all the other stuff having priority.
For the combat, I had an instant attack response before, but changed it after tweaking the attacks. I can agree that it's a little tricky to perform the right attack, but there was again not enough time to design the enemy levels. The movement levels before are all carefully designed.
Regarding the theme. I agree that we will not get full points on that, but we had this nice 2D platformer in mind and the story which unravels itself after the tutorial (which you didn't reach). So we went with a game that we enjoyed making instead of some weird game. Similar to your game :D
For the graphics, this should answer our graphics designer. But the particle system and trail were made by me and yeah... Time issue. I had really nice particle systems in mind. The jump effect was done very quick before the submission and I'm not happy too.
I just watched the stream from you playing our game. You literally stopped playing 2 min before the end of the tutorial. Btw, you will not get much more gameplay than the tutorial. That's the reason it is so long.
Ok, I might sound like I'm defending our game a little too much, but I think your rating was a little to harsh on the game design and fun part. For the greater part of your stream you enjoyed the game. You even found all secret checkpoints/traffic lights.
And for the game design, you praised us for having grace jumping. We have variable jump height and all the nice stuff a good platformer needs. The gravity might be a bit to high which I will check for sure.
Sorry, but your feedback really hit me hard. Did not expect to get destroyed so hard by you. Next time I will just make a character creation screen :D
That's silly. I told you what I think is true. I played your game and enjoyed the first bit of the experience. However, as I progressed, I became weary of it and by the end I was happy to quit and didn't want to go back to it.
You have three options as to what to do with the feedback:
1. Be all depressed
2. Ignore it
3. Take notes on what you think can be improved and keep the learnings for future projects or to improve this one, should you want to
I strongly recommend 3. Best of luck :)
Yeah, my answers where written in a bad mood. I'm already over it now and I chose option 3.
Really good game especially for a game jam! I loved the character creator and the animations. You should make this into a full game :D
Thank you very much for your feedback. We put a lot of work into it this week.
Making it into a full games is easy to say, but there is so much other stuff to do and other projects to work on :D But nice that you liked it.
Working on a tutorial for the character creator https://twitter.com/FireTotemGames/status/1169363826887860232
Give me a follow on itch and/or twitter so that you won't miss it ;)
Character Customizer Tutorial
https://firetotemgames.itch.io/superhero-academy/devlog/98803/2d-character-customizer-tutorial-unity
Wow, for a 1-week game jam, this game is solid. Love the superhero theme, and the quality is very good. Although long messages bored me a little, the rest of the game was superb.
This game was SOLID. The physics and tight controls make it great to move around, and each mechanic is properly tutorialized in such a way that there's a satisfying climb in difficulty as the game progresses!
Thank you very much. I was really putting a lot of effort into creating proper tutorial levels. But it seems it was worth it ;)
Love how you can customize the character. Very good art and animation. The music is amazing too.
I enjoyed it!
thank you so much for these nice words! we will certainly try your game :)
Character design and intro look very good! The game is very challenging for me because of it's speed, but I still enjoyed it. Good job!
thank you very much.
It's sad that the game was too fast for you. This is one point I totally hate about making a game for a game jam. If it is too slow it's too easy or the controls feel weird/floaty. If you make it too fast it's challenging but too hard for some people...
Can you tell me how far you made it?
At first attempt I was stuck at spikes part. But when I tried for the second time, I got to enemies part, but the game just got stuck at loading.
I really liked your attention to details (loading screens, gate animations, character entering/exiting gate animations).
And yes, I agree that it's so difficult to perfectly balance game to be challenging, but still fun. I had to playtest my game with some random people and it helped to tweak it :p
Ok, it's sad to hear that you run into the door-bug. That's only happening on the Web version. The windows version is fine.
You almost finished the tutorial, but I guess you won't give the game another try to see what comes after the tutorial.
Wow this game take me a while to play and for a game jam that is really surprising. First i played in browser than i died two times and the game bugged two times. So i downloaded the windows version i received the jump ability and i couldn't jump so i restart and then the games was normal. The controls was really good, the audio is just enough for the game, and the graphics is really good. The story looks like is just a reason to fit in the theme but it's not bad.
Also when i tryed to create a character with the same name of my previous one it said "This name is not available" i was thinking that this would be useful for some story thing, but i am still not sure why this happen.
Overall is a really good entry!
wow thanks for your detailed feedback. Really appreciate it.
Yeah, the door bug in the web version showed up on the last day and we couldn't fix it. I have no idea why your jump did not work on the windows version. But the game is so complex now that there could be a lot of reasons for that.
Yeah, we did not want to follow the theme 100% because that would just not be fun. The player would get rid of all the lies too fast so we only lie from time to time. Btw. Your name not being available is one of those lies. The game is only singleplayer and your name is never used again. I think people will not really get this joke tho.
One question. Did you make it all the way to the end? Because that's quite an achievement ;)
Of course i played all the game. My experience playing 60 hours of Hollow Knight needed to be useful for something :)
Oh and i forget to mention the camera sometimes felt a little strange because i couldn't see the next platform, but almost unnoticeable.
Yeah, Hollow Knight was the main reference for this game. I played it a lot during the jam to get my controls somehow similar. Did our game felt like hollow knight?
Yeah, the camera is always a trade off. Zoom out and you see everything, but you lose on details. Zoom in and you see the beautiful detailed graphics, but you lose and environment awarness...
Btw. Due to my playing of Hollow Knight I lost all my "coins". From 30.000 to 0 because I did not pick up my ghost at some point