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A jam submission

nano_ruinsView game page

A Dungeon Crawler Jam 2022 Enty
Submitted by DamienDe — 11 hours, 5 minutes before the deadline
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nano_ruins's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay - How fun is it to play?#43.7503.750
Overall#73.6253.625
Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game?#83.8133.813
Originality - Does the game innovate or try something new?#93.5003.500
Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing?#103.8133.813
Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music?#103.2503.250

Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

That was fun. I ended up just power levelling attack, and brute forcing through to the end.  I liked the alien look of the environment, and that there was alot of variation (Following the same palette), especially through the teleporters. 

Really good entry!

Submitted

This was a cool concept! I liked the frequency mechanic it, it give an extra dimension (or two ;) to the combat. I also really like the art. Great job!

Submitted

Hey! Props for the most funny ending so far ;)

What I liked:

  • The visual style! It really reminded me of some of the old games in 1997 like Hexen or one of the first Tomb Raiders from the 3D + Sprite part. I also liked that the enemies were remarkably different and yet shared the same style.
  • The background music because it was very moody and fit the theme very good since it had some echo or hall in it which resembles the level structure quite well
  • The EXP / level system. One enemy down, one upgrade more. That is a rewarding mechanic and adds a second meaning to killing the enemies besides staying alive. I did not expect to find even different weapon types! 
  • Key - Lock puzzles where you see the Lock before the key. Very well done. Metroid and Zelda are doing this for example and it always feels nice to finally find the key to that door :). Speaking of: Not only where there keys there were levers too. The fact, that you used levers just once, made them special and that felt great too. Also the combination of a room with levers (something new) and then opening a door in that room to find a new weapon (something new) was a nice double surprise.
  • Leveldesign: This is a huge dungeon, yet every room feels different so that I can easily create a mind map of the dungeon. This is a good mechanic if you do not want a dedicated map to obstruct the screen. The dungeon gave me enough visual points to remember where to go and even if it was not huge it felt quite big. This is supported by the different height levels. Good job.
  • The ending and the explanation ;)

What I noticed:

  • I didn't used the special attacks, given by the additional weapons once. I just skilled attacking to LVL 9 which was sufficient.
  • I was completely amazed by the look of the game itself after the Intro text that looked a bit flat on that background. The intro made me expect something completely different. If that was intentional: That's a good trick to keep expectations low and then: surprise!

What can be improved:

  • At some points I could shoot enemies from below them when they were placed two steps above me. They however could not fight me then. If this is intentional, then it's okay. I liked the advantage.
  • The keys gave me a hard time ;). I accidentally closed the game 2 times because I wanted to close the inventory with escape and then realized it should be enter. But by hitting enter I just said "yes" to the: Do you want to quit? I would have preferred using enter and space as the action key and escape to close the menus. After all: If I want to quit the game I can just press alt+F4 or hit the X on the window.
  • On one point I walked into an enemy that walked into me the same time and it could attack me but I couldn't attack it. I had to restart there.


All in all a very good entry!

Keep it up!

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thank you very much for the profound feedback. I noticed your cool comments on the other entries and wished, that you do one for me. And here we are ... you made my day. And then I noticed, that I am a bad person and have not commented on your project, yet. Well, actually it was one of the first entries I tried and rated, I just forgot to comment. I hope you can forgive me, as I repented for my sins a moment ago ... even if I am not a man of as many words as you are :)

Submitted

Thank you :D

There's nothing to forgive here :). I always hope that people are not saying: Too long did not read! I like to support other developers where I can and I hope I can do that a bit by pointing out the best things and the things that - imho - could be improved. 

And of course: Thanks for your reply on our game and rating it :)

Submitted

I also get the shader error trying to open the game :(

i7-10750H

GTX 1650Ti

Developer

You could go into the data/shader folder and delete the volume.vs and volume.ps shader files. They are not uses at all and seem to have something in them, Intel does not like. On that note, I am pretty sure the game defaults to your Intel GPU, maybe you can force the game to run on you nvidia GPU. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for trying the game at all.

Submitted (1 edit)

Thanks for that. Managed to get it working and I'm glad I did. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The controls were a bit arcane but once I got the hang of it, it was smooth sailing. Finished the game, learned the mystery behind the nano-machines ...erm...distractions and got the core. 

Awesome job!

Developer

Oh, that is so nice to hear. Thank you for jumping through all those hoops.

How about you game The Spell(ing) Dungeon, I could not move around in the game. Do you have an update on that problem?

Submitted

I don't know what happened really :(. In the buggy version I published for the jam, the onscreen arrows indeed don't work, but the numpad keys should. The only one other thing that could prevent you from moving is opening up the debug console by pressing "~" (you can hide it again through the same key or escape and regain control). Haven't had the chance to test on other devices just yet, but I'll see about that and get back to you if I find something. Thank you for trying though.

Submitted
Deleted 2 years ago
Submitted

A very fun game to play, great frequency mechanic, good SFX. Visual style is not my cup of tea, but it deserves praise, it's consistent and unique. Strafing for QE, not AD surprised me a bit, but it wasn't a big problem. Overall, had a good time with the game!

Submitted

That was a great game. We had to change the game to use the NVidia GPU instead of Intel on our laptops using the NVidia Control Panel but when we did things went well. The gameplay was very smooth and we really had a sense we were progressing with the levelling up of the stats. The art style was very self-consistent and the variety in textures for the different walls was really nice to see. We could work out where we were on the map from the look and feel of room we were in. The enemy were all interesting to look at, very simple but effective sprites with a nice wibble shader. The variety of mechanics for upgrading your weapon with different attacks was nice. Levels, access codes, teleportation, all good stuff. The title matched the art style very well too - Nano Ruins. Well done, a great entry to the jam, this is a real gem. Now about the keyboard bindings...

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the very nice comment and again for the help with finding the Intel chipset problem.

Submitted

the frequency mechanic is a great idea. QE/AD feels a bit backwards. i think a 'rest' option to quickly recharge while out of combat would improve the feel as well. balance is a little off, as damage seems to basically be the better version of stamina; but we all struggled with balancing it seems and this system errs on the side of fun over frustration.

Developer

Yeah, balancing is hard and needs time...which I did not really have, so it was more of an afterthought ;)
But nice idea with the resting, which actually is something RPGs quite often have.

Submitted

Sorry to tell you but we couldn't run the game either. It came up with this error. If you have any suggestions we're up for trying them to help track it down. Well done for submitting your game.

PS C:\Users\adam\Desktop\Drawer\Dungeon Crawler 2022 Entries\nano_ruins> .\nano_ruins.exe
Unhandled exception. System.Exception: ERROR: 0:4: 'RGBA32F' : syntax error syntax error
   at OpenGL.Shader..ctor(String source, ShaderType type)
   at OpenGL.ShaderProgram..ctor(String vertexShaderSource, String fragmentShaderSource)
   at Poison.Engine.LoadShader(String fileName)
   at Poison.Game.OnInitialize()
   at Poison.Engine.Initialize()
   at Poison.Program.Main(String[] args)
Developer

Hm, what graphics card do you use? There seems to be some incompatibility with a shader on your system. I wish I had the time to test the game on other PCs, as I only have access to nvidia chips right now. Well, I tried it on an older i3 notebook with an Intel gpu  and I think I got some similar error, but ignored it, as I could not support gpus not capable of OpenGL 4.5 shaders.
I hope I can fix this after the jam and avoid these problems next year ;)

Submitted

We tested on two laptops, one with a GeForce RTX  2080 and another with a GeForce RTX 3060. They are laptops which means they may be trying to use the Intel GPU first. Yep that was it. We forced it to use the NVIDIA GPU and now it works!

Developer(+1)

Okay, then it is a problem with OPEN GL on Intel chipsets. I am really grateful, that you helped me on this. I think I have access to a gen 11 Intel notebook, there I can debug, what really is the problem.

Submitted

had the same issue, still no fix?

Submitted

This video shows you how to force an application to use NVidia if that helps (which is how we got it to run on our laptops). If you only have an Intel GPU then you're out of luck I think:

Submitted (2 edits)

The game looks and sounds nice. The idea of finding the enemy’s weak spot is an interesting innovation.

The controls could be improved by making them a little more standard - QE to turn and AD to strafe is more common in other dungeon crawlers I believe. And escape to exit a menu instead of backspace. I would also like to use the mouse to target a spot on the enemies.

I did encounter a bug - I moved simultaneously as an enemy, and we ended up in the same space. I couldn’t move away or attack at that point, and even after I died and respawned, I still couldn’t move.

Submitted

controls felt a little clunky, but that's just me being used to a different control scheme.

mostly i wasnt thinking to use Backspace for going back. yes, it makes sense, but all my years of playing video games wants to use the Esc key

Submitted

https://twitter.com/Gr4uk3n/status/1515230250002751488

Submitted

The movement feels fluently even though the controls feels a bit hard for me. The gameplay seems very bug free.

I liked the fact that you move in elevation and that the movement feels generally smooth.

I Like the upgrade system it works well.

The information page in the beginning has alot of text to read and maybe a bit to long, but it does give alot of information that is needed to play the game.

The menu system felt a bit strange to work with, and maybe the keycards should end up on the bottom of the inventory (or somewhere else) since you seem to be used passively.

I ended up using only wasd and spacebar and backspace. Skipping strafe option entirely.

I did die one time in last room. The only time using the 3way shot made sense, but instead I got hit from 3 enemies at the same time and died. Nice death solution and that I didn't need to do it all over from the beginning.

The game would benefit from sounds. The scenery and graphics (not enemies) worked great.

It took me about 35min to complete the game.

HostSubmitted

There are many things I like here. The interesting level design with verticality, the unique art style especially the enemies, the fitting ambient atmosphere and the interesting experience system. At first I found the interface a bit awkward to use but once I get used to it then it worked well. Fun game! Well done :)

Submitted

Pretty cool. Get's a bit repetitive after the "first large area" and the whole "open menu -> select action" loop is a bit cumbersome but otherwise I really liked it! I really dig the aesthetics.

Submitted

Hello;

The game does not start at all on my system... I wasn't able to run it.

Submitted

For me Avast first saw it as suspicious file and did a search through it, but ended up calling it safe.

Submitted (1 edit)

The game seems excellent otherwise but I always end up stuck on the same tile as an enemy, unable to do anything. The only time I waited it to kill me it seems that after dying I still could not move.

Developer

Thanks for the nice comment, but what a strange bug. It can happen, that you are able to walk through an enemy or land on top of it, but movement should still be possible. Well, I guess that is something to find after the jam result phase.

Submitted

This happened to me as well, moved into an enemy and couldn't do anything nor move anymore

Developer

Well, I will check this one out, after the rating phase, thanks for playing and the link to the twitter post.

Submitted

By the way I simply avoided to walk in the same time as an enemy and completed the game, it's pretty well exectued, I like that you're using stamina instead of long cooldowns, the context, art and advanced layout of rooms are immersive and the choice of how to spend your experience is always a plus.

Developer

I just can´t trigger this bug, that is kinda frustrating. I thought, that maybe it is VSYNC issue, that people with the bug have the game run without VSYNC, but that does not seem to be it. I have not checked the game with and AMD graphics card, maybe there ist something wrong?!