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Tower of Merrix's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Most Appealing Art / Visuals | #3 | 3.733 | 3.733 |
| Most Appealing Sound Design / Music | #6 | 3.133 | 3.133 |
| The "I Want to Play This as a Full Game" Award | #6 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Best Use of the Theme for Story/World/Character | #22 | 2.400 | 2.400 |
| Best Use of the Theme for Gameplay | #23 | 1.867 | 1.867 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
i can't really rate it because after waiting minutes for it to load, it hangs on entering the second room
edit 1: ok just took a couple minutes to load the second room
edit 2: yeah every time i kinda sorta load a new room i'm waiting a couple minutes. i think i'm giving up on it, sorry.
Everything is fantastic: the music, the art, the gameplay...I don't have much negative to say.
Playing as a cat that ends up slaying the villain-turned-rat is hilarious. The "pounce" feels like a natural fit for the character. Strangely, although there were many dead ends, the castle was fun to explore. Trying to find the right path felt like a fun little puzzle.
I fell through the floor of one of the bookshelves once, and the music sadly did not loop after it finished, but other than that I didn't come across any bugs.
One thing I have to point out (and yes this is a WEIRD rant but I feel this is important)---I think the self deprecating humor, like "this is supposed to be a bed" and "imagine this is a spring with magic in it or something", does not belong here. Devs put so much work into their craft, and even though your team may not have had time to finish all the assets, you all did an incredible job and it makes me sad to see stuff like that which cheapens a great experience.
You did an especially good job on the fairy lights. Yes, the game chugged a bit in the fairy room, but I think the effort paid off.
Thank you!
I mean luckily it kinda was humerous to have the bed and stuff in the game. It was not originally meant like that, those are actually just our internal communications we didn’t have time to remove lmao. Just an artifact of it being a jam game.
I did not have time to investigate why the fairy room was laggy, though I suspect it has to do with each wisp/fairy thingy being light source since something weird is going on there and they also turn on and off for some reason. Or it could be something to do with poor instancing on my end and I ended up duplicating assets a bunch … It didn’t break the game on my own potato laptop so it stayed xD
Oh if you fell through the floor of one of the bookshelf that was intentional but probably poorly communicated. The idea is that you get pushed off the shelf by the book that is going out. The bottom floor does a check and will never push out a book where the cat is to prevent falling out of the map ^^
It took me a few tries to realize I had to click the mouse to jump, but I was able to beat it! The long falls felt punishing but it only took a few tries to get past the hardest parts so I didn’t really mind. I liked the art and how the cat felt to control, I especially liked how the tail moved! Some slow motion would’ve helped when aiming, I think a preview line would trivialize the platforming too much.
My favorite part was the bookcase where you had to ride the self-sorting books. It was interesting and alive, felt right out of something like Limbo. Nice work on this in the little time you had!
I like where the game is going, its difficult yet not TOO punishing for falling, since you broke the level up into “checkpoints” in a way. Besides the flying book room, took me some time to realize I shouldn’t be in that room, but enjoyed seeing the books flying around haha.
A couple times a ledge tripped me up jumping from a moving book, then I had to redo a whole section. (The side ways book at the top of the room with the sine wave books, that final jump, I fell like 4 times trying to get up there hah)
The jumping is a little weird to get a handle on. I wonder if adding just a faint “beginning of the jump trajectory” might help the player know a little better where they are going. Like when you need to jump onto the moving books in the BIG shelf. Or how you used the lanterns on the final stretch of jumps, I knew to put my cursor above each lantern to aim correctly.
The ambiance is nice and the environment that feels magical yet not too over the top. I really wanted to see the particle explosion out of the cauldron, it crashed my game, but went to see it again anyway haha.
Great job, even with everything the team went through during the month!
The game is visually very appealing! And the music is good too! This is one of the few games in this jam I actually wouldn’t mind playing a full version of.
However, I don’t get how the theme fits into this. It seems very much that the cat is the main character and hero of the game. Normally I wouldn’t complain about that, though.
On top of this, there’s something I would complain about: the lack of controls for the left-handed. The way things are, this game is hard to play and so it is hard to enjoy what is there. And with this being Godot, it’s super easy to just setup additional inputs for actions.
Please check out our game and let us know how we did! Though we are pretty proud of it, I’m sure you’ll be able to point out things that we hadn’t thought of and can do better next time. Thanks!
hey, thanks for trying our game and giving us your thoughts! ^^
I'd like to ask what you mean by "controls for the left-handed"? I'm left-handed myself and didn't really feel like that impacted the gameplay, so if you have some insights on how other left-handed people engage with M&K controls, it would be great if you could share them. This seems like something I've been completely unaware of.
Also, in case you are curious about the theme: The original idea was for the wizard and hero to fight things out in the background while the cat chases after the rat. You'd essentially be going after your own goals while the "main story" keeps trying to interfere with it, for example by having random fire balls fly in from off-screen. Due to time constraints and some issues during development we weren't able to actually do this, sadly, and so in the end the wizard just ended up being turned into the rat.
To move left/right you’re game only allows A/D. But I use the arrows keys for movement. And my left hand is my mouse hand.
A bit of googling around I see that some lefties just adapted to the righty setup. I guess that’s what you did. I never did because I grew up playing FPS’s and could always use arrows keys for movement and look/aim with the mouse.
interesting, I actually had no idea. Thanks a lot!
I'm a big fan of the level design both aesthetically and functionally. Its impressive how many on theme platforming challenges you could make. I'm especially fond of the shuffling bookshelves. This feels like a game from the golden era of flash games in the best way possible. Gratz!
Firstly, good visual style.
Then, interacting with the cat using both keyboard and mouse is really fun. Kudos on the controller implementation!
As have been mentioned in the description, there are some area that soft-locked me from progressing further. One between the shelf, and another one I got stuck on the floor (cannot jump) on the where there is a moving platform.
Personally, I think the intro text is a bit slow. But maybe this was deliberate.
For lighting, I wish the immediate area around the cat is a little brighter to illuminate the cat's line of sight.
Overall, it's a nice little platforming game. Good job!
You can click to advance the text at the beginning. It was a last minute change I upped the duration because you could not read it in time and I did not know it would affect every sentence change lmao since I did not implement it. Oops xD
No worries, it is just a minor issue.
I wasn't even thinking about pressing anything while the intro is playing! Probably I got used to just watching any cutscenes when playing games.
I think anything that allows you to be a cat an knock things off a shelve is inherently 10/10. The cat was great. I never quite felt totally confident in how I was using my jump, sometimes it felt like I was either overshooting or undershooting my shots despite thinking that I should have landed it. Maybe the player just has to learn to get used to it, idk. I also got the soft lock you mention in the description. Maybe a small restart button that reset whatever room you where in could have help. Congrats on finishing.