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Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023

Hosted by zooperdan · #dcjam2023
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A jam submission

The Dark WorldView game page

Submitted by DaveLikesPasta — 59 minutes, 39 seconds before the deadline
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The Dark World's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing?#114.3824.382
Overall#143.9123.912
Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game?#164.1184.118
Gameplay - How fun is it to play?#173.8243.824
Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music?#283.7653.765
Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme?#443.4713.471

Ranked from 34 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Viewing comments 9 to 1 of 29 · Previous page · First page
vlzvlSubmitted2 years ago

Hey David, I checked your game :)

  • great title screen, I love it when people spend time making a nice retro title screen <3
  • nice graphics and sound effects
  • I so loved the in-game tooltips on actions, it really makes a difference. And great actions too :)
  • Great first event on that dead body and great graphics too. In fact, I would just show the dead body along with the event, either by rotating the camera or simply show the graphic of it above the event. The presentation is simply this good :)
  • I wandered on the settlement for a goodly amount of time and spoke to Shaman. Really, top graphics and feel for a Jam entry :)
  • I tried to "Quit to Title" but unfortunately, this feature wasn't implemented yet :)

Overall, this looks and feel like a legit and commercial cRPG crawler, you need to build around it :) It's so good!

Submitted
Worlds Apart
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago(+1)

Thank you for the review! You're very kind. 

I really, really shouldn't have put a "not implemented" dialog popup into the game because it tricked me into thinking the "quit to menu" was in. Honestly I thought it was until I read this review lol.

You're very right about showing the body with the event. I designed the dialog to fit underneath NPCs but then of course the first dialog-creating entity happened to be lying on the floor. Never even occurred to me that it was covered but yes, it would be much better to see the body.

I am tempted to make a commercial crawler but this won't be it. I did like working on it a lot, especially considering how fun the art was to make. I recently finished my fourth month in a professional illustration course where I was learning to do everything the "right" way and for this game jam it was dirty tricks all the way for the character art.

The title screen was not so hard, just a screenshot with some Photoshop text in the game font on it. But I agree with you it helps a lot. Having said that your game, by far, has the best title screen of them all. How did you create that, was it AI?

Reply
vlzvlSubmitted2 years ago(+1)

No worries at all, your game is pretty good :)

Thanks for your very kind words about my title screen! Yes it is AI, I generated it through Midjourney and filtered it a bit though the same processes that I do on The Darkness Below. Truth is, sometimes the generated image is so good, you rarely need to do things, but I did anyway as I crave for consistency :) Having said that, I wish that I had a little more time to be consistent content-wise but oh well, there's always a second version :p

Reply
TheGardinerSubmitted2 years ago

I am not sure if I completed the game 100%, but I found the sacred robe, relic shield and relic sword, killed both spiders and defeated the necromancer, there didn't seem to be any resolution to the story?


The monster artwork is profoundly hideous, I mean that in the best way possible, bravo!

The dimensional mirroring is fitting for the duality theme I think.

I found the combat to be a bit too easy overall, I didn't die at all, but maybe I was just lucky in finding all the items straight away.

Submitted
Spectral Synergy: Realms Entwined
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago

Wow you played that far through? Awesome! Thank you for the kind words. You are absolutely right the combat is too easy. That's the one thing I'm the most unhappy about, lack of play balance. As for winning the game, yes, you won by killing the Necromancer but sadly the "win game" title screen didn't make it in. 

Well done on finding the Sacred Robe, I wasn't sure if anybody was going to find that :)

Reply
FluburbioSubmitted2 years ago(+1)

Your game is visually superb! It's very cohesive and well polished. I wanted to play more, but the low depth of vision and absence of map made orientation really tricky for me. I couldn't even find the shaman and had to force quit the game. 

I absolutely loved what little I saw though, awesome job!

Submitted
Fantasy Quest
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago(+1)

Thank you! I'm very proud of the visuals. Yeah it would have benefited from a map but sadly that was cut. Honestly a "quit the game" button just totally slipped my mind.

Reply
ZackarottoSubmitted2 years ago
  • Absolutely nailed the classic tone/aesthetic! Very well made.
  • Perfectly incorporated the theme! Though I was definitely confused when I came out the Shaman cave – I initially thought I just took a second hall leading to the same exit and the same town got corrupted by monsters while I was away, so I was lost for a bit.
  • Should have custom mouse cursor art to go with it though, lol. It breaks the immersion a bit when I have to use the windows mouse cursor to close a dialogue and so on.
  • A map would be nice.
  • Could use a torch hotkey since I just swap it out for a shield every time an enemy is a tile away… or so I wrote, but I just found the “torch shield”, haha.
  • Guessing it’s not true that the Beast Sword claims to have a -15 attack roll. It feels like an accuracy upgrade over the +10.
  • The momentum system is interesting, though not as sophisticated as having other more varied moves besides accuracy modifiers, like status effects would be… Hard to cover that in a week, of course. I only really had to ramp up from careful to heavy attacks against the necromancer. On the whole it felt reliable enough just spamming heavy.
  • The 8-legged ones respawn when I load my save and I’m not sure that’s intentional, I get no new dialogue from the oracle after killing both. I went on to beat the necromancer anyway, but didn’t hit any new conversation triggers. I guess I beat the game?
Submitted
PRAXIS/PROVIDENCE -=- e g g w o r l d
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago(+1)

Thank you for the kind words and thorough write-up. I'm not sure about the cave being a clear transition to the Dark World. The idea was cool, go into a mystical cave for a long way and come out in what you thought was the same spot but actually in another world but a lot of people were confused by it.

I 100% agree about the map and mouse cursor. This is a painful one to play without a map but these things were cut.

I'm glad the "torch shield" is a hit, it's something that I figured would feel very rewarding considering the tradeoff between shield and torch. But I'm not surprised people are switching before every fight - I originally figured it would be outside vs inside but then I made the outside darker and ... you know how it goes!

I was hoping the momentum system would give you fights like the Necromancer fight through the whole game but I think the balance is out of whack. Heavy attacks are very OP for sure.

The "you beat the game" transition got cut, it was supposed to happen as soon as you kill the Necromancer.

I dunno if the beast sword is buggy or not, but I suspect the monsters are mostly just bad at dodging.

Reply
ZackarottoSubmitted2 years ago
  • Absolutely nailed the classic tone/aesthetic! Very well made.
  • Perfectly incorporated the theme! Though I was definitely confused when I came out the Shaman cave – I initially thought I just took a second hall leading to the same exit and the same town got corrupted by monsters while I was away, so I was lost for a bit.
  • Should have custom mouse cursor art to go with it though, lol. It breaks the immersion a bit when I have to use the windows mouse cursor to close a dialogue and so on.
  • A map would be nice.
  • Could use a torch hotkey since I just swap it out for a shield every time an enemy is a tile away… or so I wrote, but I just found the “torch shield”, haha.
  • Guessing it’s not true that the Beast Sword claims to have a -15 attack roll. It feels like an accuracy upgrade over the +10.
  • The momentum system is interesting, though not as sophisticated as having other more varied moves besides accuracy modifiers, like status effects would be… Hard to cover that in a week, of course. I only really had to ramp up from careful to heavy attacks against the necromancer. On the whole it felt reliable enough just spamming heavy.
  • The 8-legged ones respawn when I load my save and I’m not sure that’s intentional, I get no new dialogue from the oracle after killing both. I went on to beat the necromancer anyway, but didn’t hit any new conversation triggers. I guess I beat the game?
Submitted
PRAXIS/PROVIDENCE -=- e g g w o r l d
Reply
Kevin HutchinsSubmitted2 years ago(+1)

Great character art. I saw you talk about how you did it in the discord and it was a clever idea that paid off. It's the most traditional dungeon crawler of the ones I've played so far, which was a nice change of pace. The UI looked great, although I think the text box would have benefitted from being narrower on the screen.

I did encounter a few bugs:

  • The gear description gets stuck on screen if you close the gear menu with the keyboard while hovering over it with the mouse.
  • The game doesn't like it if you load a game when you don't have one saved.
  • I think I got softlocked by first talking to the oracle about the 8-legged beast after defeating it. When I went back to talk again, I just got prompts about asking where to find it, even after I defeated both it and the necromancer. It's also possible that I just skimmed past where I was supposed to go. (Looking at the save data, it seems like I had the event flags [5,9,6,7,12,13]).

The combat felt a bit on the easy side, except for the necromancer which I felt like I got lucky to beat, although looking at the preview screenshots I clearly didn't explore well enough, so maybe that was on me. I would've liked to see the damage/chance to hit impact of choosing the heavy attack/careful strike, as that might have changed how I fought in some battles.

All in all I had a fun time with it. I could see myself coming back around to it once I rate some of the other jam games.

Submitted
Sanctuary's Grasp
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago

Your feedback is absolutely heroic, thank you so much for taking the time to write all of this! Good find with the gear bug and the load game issues, I didn't know about either of those. As for the soft lock with the Oracle, that's really more a "game developer ran out of content so the Oracle always says that" kind of situation :)

You're right on the combat. I did a last minute playtest before submitting, saw it was way too hard, and then scrambled to drop all the monster stats. I never got to play the final version (big fail I know!) and I'm sad about how easy it is. One thing - did you find the spider caves on both the light and dark side? Dark spider is a bit tougher.

Reply
Kevin HutchinsSubmitted2 years ago

Ah, yeah, time constraints are definitely understandable. Just wanted to make sure that I didn't manage to find some weird bug.

As for the spider caves, I didn't find both of them! That's something to check out when I roam around again.

Reply
plexsoupSubmitted2 years ago(+1)

The character sprites are fantastic! Reminded me of Daggerfall.

I made it as far the village. Couldn't locate the Shaman. What I did see was pretty incredible though. Nice entry.

Submitted
Seraph in the Siann Den
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago

Thank you for playing! Yeah the shaman is west of the village center. There is an opening in the rock wall that leads to a path to the shaman.

Reply
archmSubmitted2 years ago(+1)

Don't make me use taskmanager to quit your game.

The artwork is great, especially the UI. The dungeon tiles are feel a bit flat in comparison, some bump mapping would go a long way.

Submitted
New Ways Home
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago

Oh yes, you are right, I have no quit. Alt+F4 or Cmd+Q isn't a good UI. Thank you for playing and the compliment about the art!

Reply
ScalphaMissionSubmitted2 years ago(+1)

Check out my live review at https://www.twitch.tv/scalphamission

Submitted
The Alchemist
Reply
DaveLikesPastaDeveloper2 years ago

It was a great review and a great stream. Thank you for taking the time to showcase it.

Reply
Viewing comments 9 to 1 of 29 · Previous page · First page
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