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The Mass's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #43 | 3.240 | 3.240 |
Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
The primary theme incorporated is Cosmic Horror. The terrible events and in particular central antagonist came from space. The game is dark and features tentacles too.
If you manage to complete it, there's also a reference to Solitude
The location is perhaps not infinite, but described as very large and while I could have made the game require 1000 generated levels to complete, I thought it better to use a smaller number.
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I dug the intro narration with the spooky art. Deifnitely had a lovecraftian vibe to it with the even toned locatiousness. The sound in general was pretty interesting, though the balancing could use some work. Like the Health creature was way too loud.
Given how spooky the intro was, I did find it a bit weird how quirky the side character like the worm and spider were. The pitched up voices put me in mind of the Worms franchise.
Having the number of people you use as a difficulty slider was a cool idea.
Seems to me the early game is where most of the struggle is. Keeping your people alive long enough to up their stats and deck them out with equipment.
With it being auto-battling, obviously a lot of it's in the prep. Picking strong people, but trying to spread out the damage too. It was a little tricky to keep track of all my stats and equipment as the interface was, but I assume that's just a time thing.
Approrprate ending. All in all a solid entry!
Playthrough: The Mass Pt1 by Local Minimum
Thanks for the feedback and the recorded playthrough! Very interesting to see how hard the attempt was for you and how you put everything on attack even when the characters were running low on health. I guess it never really was explained that increasing the lower two stats would give a boost to health or sanity. But it was kind of scary to see you running around with the small healthbars and just getting by for quite a while.
An obvious point is that there should be one of the tardigrades that gives you the ability to visit the healing place in one of the closest rooms from where the player spawns as you didn’t even encounter any of them from what I could see.
Thanks for playing and thanks for posting a video
No problem.
The second playthrough was recorded too if you didn't catch it.
Should come after the first video.
I did eventually find the tardigrade, and I eventually started adding points into health and sanity a little later into the run. My rationale was, if I finish fights quickly, I wouldn't have to worry so much about maintaining health.
I also took all 10 on my second try just to ensure I could make it.
Didn't lose a single one. Until I lost them all.
For they were not durable toys.
After getting the portal, I clicked on the thingy in front of me a couple times, and couldn't hear what it was saying because it was garbled, so I clicked a couple more times to listen after that... and then someone died... Well, I guess I didn't need them anyway? >:D
Great entry! I liked the leveling up and finding loot, I wish there was a little more variety in the loot though. I couldn't tell if not meeting the apparent strength requirements was actually causing any problem, as it seemed I could equip them and my damage went up, not sure if that was a bug, or I was just missing more often because of it =).
The Crit-Tick was fantastic (both mechanically and atmospherically).
The minimum requirement should, probably did, lower attacks with the weapon by something like 50%. And probably made it harder to hit (except if you activate the crit-tick) so it is very possible that as a whole it still was beneficial to equip a higher tier weapon without meeting the requirements.
And I agree that I really should have provided subtitles especially given amount of effects I had put on some of the sounds.
Good stuff! I liked how you incorporated a story around the crawling. I also like the idea of assembling a party but I think the passive combat system takes away some of the strategy.
I started my first run with 6 people, with 4 specialized in a single stat at 6 and high con, and the remaining 2 were allrounders with 3-4 in each stat. After a few encounters I fought an enemy that dodged and blocked nearly anything and my whole party wiped. So I started my second run with 10 people and beat the game with it.
The combat itself is a bit dull and from the second floor onwards I didn't really enjoy encounters as I just wanted to finish the game. I didn't see a way to determine how strong enemies are so strategizing against them felt impossible, and with the way loot works (with 2nd floor weapons requiring 14 in a stat) it felt like leveling up was just blindly making numbers go up because the party members all felt like a stat sheet rather than an individual. It felt pointless to invest in defensive stats past 5, because there was no way to have tanky characters take the brunt of enemy attacks as their target selection felt random.
So all in all, I think the game could use a combat overhaul. Passive combat can be good but it just felt too random and aimless to me. Yes, I can bring less party members to make it more challenging, but the challenge still feels like pure RNG just being less in your favor as there's less combined HP to soak random hits.
Other than that, pretty solid entry! Loved the sound effects, it had some humor (but honestly got a bit old quite fast) and the dungeons were nicely generated. Could use some more variety if you plan to expand the game, of course. I liked the maw bringing you to the next level, was a really neat addition. And the portal to the wormpoop was also a nice touch. Solid game overall!
thanks for the great feedback! I agree completely that the combat is in dire need of overhaul and balancing. I’ll consider both the amount of information given about the enemies and the choice that the player needs for the semi-auto battle to feel more interesting.
With regards to leveling up defensive stats, I think in part that was due to a balance breaking bug that made you more or less invincible which meant you didn’t need healing as much which in turn means that mental health didn’t go down too much. So with those things there was little need for investing in defensive stats. But it may also be that health should not scale so much with higher levels to keep the player needing to invest in it. That or the enemies needs to accelerate the damage they deal further in.
thanks for the great feedback!
Love your intro. Neat game. Pathways Into Darkness vibes. Catching bugs to make portals is cool. Everything is really weird, but part of the charm of participating in a jam is finding really weird stuff. (What the heck is a crit-tick…?)
I have no idea what makes a good build but I took ten with me, and all got easily killed except for one lady who inexplicably blocked nearly all damage and healed herself, which is an interesting natural-selection style of party building. Otherwise, it doesn’t actually seem like taking more people with you is helpful, as you’re spreading out XP/gear, no? Reached a point where I couldn’t lose unless I got critted twice in a row, so I did win thanks to that, but it was a bit of a grind.
Combat auto-resolves too slow – a one minute fight could literally be resolved in a second and it wouldn’t have altered my strategy. Could use added complexity, and probably less dramatic swings with the crit values. I also think the sound effects are too much. I want to squash that smug talking bug…
Would be good to have an option to flee, at least to swap party members. The monsters also move really fast, to the point that it rarely feels like you have a choice in engaging.
Thanks for the comments and for playing!
For party-size and difficulty. That got partially ruined by lack of balancing and that bug letting very tough characters heal during battle. It’s true that larger party spreads out gear, but non-participants also get partial XP from each battle. The second way it would have helped is to have more characters to cycle through battling in between visiting the healer-slugs.
You’re idea about swapping party members during fight is on my list of how to increase player agency during battle. I’ll also consider fleeing. Probably giving monsters an attack of opportunity each and then putting them in forced rest-mode for a second or two so that the player really has to run away from the room.
I’ll look into monster movement, my plan is to ease them between tiles too rather than teleporting and that in its own right probably will slow them down some.
This was pretty neat, the intro was simple but good, the party creation was fun, and the combat while a bit "meh" for my personal tastes I think it was well done for an auto-battle system.
Unfortunately this is yet another case of "I liked this game and it is very impressive, but I couldn't finish it" :(
When I reached the second level, I hit a point where I didn't find an exit to the next level, and eventually I couldn't find a way to new rooms. I placed enough portals to cover the 4 entrances around the healing slugs, as I thought that MIGHT influence it, but still nothing. So sadly I never got to see the ending.
Speaking of the portals, I really like the system and the talking tardigrades and creepy slugs which trade sanity for health. And the ominous voiceover after you're healed is very nice! Though I found I was able to place more portals than I had tardigrades, not sure if that's a bug or not. Even if it was, it didn't take away my enjoyment at all as I still had to trade sanity. The tardigrades constantly talking about how great it would be to teleport was a nice detail too.
The combat system as mentioned earlier wasn't really my favourite, though personally I've just never been much of a fan of auto-battle gameplay. I will say though it had a lot of extra flair to it. The little sound effects for everything was great, the combat log was super easy to read and organized with the various colours. And the assortment of items was cool. The crit-tick was a really neat twist, additional sarcastic narration with chance of bonus damage made the fights feel less samey. It did admittedly get a bit bland having the same enemy type, but at least the enemy count and stats seemed to vary a fair bit. Still definitely not my personal preference of combat style, but it is still well done.
I am curious though, is there a way to regain sanity aside from random chance in combat? I only found it ever recovered if a character blocked or occasionally when an enemy damaged one of my party members.
The environment is atmospheric, though I wish there was some more variety. Considering how heavily this game focused on the mechanics, I think the more basic visuals can be forgiven. I do agree with another comment on here though that an artstyle similar to the opening cutscene would've been neat.
The UI may have had a lot of placeholder art, but it functioned. I especially noticed that I can open the party menu while the map is open and it doesn't break the game lol. The fact there is an automap is impressive tbh.
Overall, liked this one, clearly a lot of time and polish spent on it and has equal amounts of existential dread and humour. Great work!
Thank you so so much for your thorough comment.
As for the unreachable end on level two, I’m just guessing here but it might be that the procedural generation failed to connect all rooms on your seed and then placed the exit in a place you couldn’t get to. That would be very unfortunate. I’ll have to review all 3600 seeds and see what I can come up with and add some handling of that scenario. Very unfortunate.
More portals than collected tardigrades is for sure a bug. I’m guessing you at least could not place before you collected your first tardigrade? But that you had collected several, and when you placed them the little tardigrade icon never disappeared? Or that after you collected one, you could place even after that icon was gone… Up onto my bug-list!
There should be no way other than leveling up to increase one’s sanity. And that during combat health sometimes restores is another bug.
Opening map while having party open… I hadn’t thought of that. Pure luck nothing fell apart doing so :)
I’m planning to redo the fighting quite a bit, giving a bit more agency to the player while keeping the core auto-battle. It’d be interesting what an auto-battle skeptic would feel about it after those changes.
Again, thank you so much for the extremely useful feedback. Several new issues opened!
Well I always like to provide as much feedback as I can!
Regarding the tardigrade I could only place portals after picking up the first tardigrade, and I was still able to place portals after the tardigrade icon disappeared.
The auto-battle changes would certainly be interesting to see, good luck with the post-jam patch!
Loved the voiceover and the crit-tick and the teleport tardigrade! The combat and party system were quite cool too, if a bit overwhelming during character creation haha. The maps were nicely generated, but could've been shorter for jam purposes as I didn't have the time to get through to the end of the game. Well done overall, an above average entry!
The intro and backstory are phenomenal. There is a lot to say about providing an interesting backdrop for a game. I rather liked the monochrome approach of the intro and key art, and felt the game itself could have benefited from this idea.
I enjoyed this game! Really liked the atmosphere created through the music and the narration. I also quite liked the auto-battle system, which was quite a unique choice. I had a nice time playing. Great job!
I played it through and enjoyed the whole experience quite a lot. I love the auto battle system and the constant improvement of your party through the generous loot and XP, that made the game quite addictive to me! 🙂 I agree that the levels are a bit too big and repetitive, I had some trouble finding the portal that lead to the next level and lost some time backtracking.
It would have been nice of each level could have had its own wall and floor textures, or at least a different color scheme, to give the impression that your are progressing, and also I wish there was subtitles because English not being my first language, I'm sure I missed some of the lore/hints.
Loved the sound design too, especially the sound of an enemy approaching. This kind of minimalistic experience is right up my alley. Very solid entry!
Glad you liked my recording of deforming an empty can of beer for the monster movement sound. I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
As for finding the exit, I noticed the same when Captain Coder streamed the game, that an unlucky placement where the exit is on same wall as the entry to the room that the player took makes it very invisible. Since the levels are so so austere at the moment too, there’s no reason for the player to look about. Rooms are just places to be attacked. I have plans to add area effects and style the exit room in general as distinct from the others. And just actually dress up the levels.
Subtitles are high up on my TODO list.
Hey,
a solid entry and I had fun playing it. It felt a bit long at the end, as no new equipment popped up and the leveling got quite slow. I liked the intro and ending with the nice voiceover, the sounds were also quite funny and nice. The UI was, I dont want to say terrible, but it was. Needed to put the screen 5 cm from my face to read the possible party members. :D The walls and environment was to bland for the repetivness of the dungeon. There were nice elements with the portals and the mouth, but for the most part it were the same not so good looking walls. The movement was fluid, but something was off and I cant really put my finger on it. Maybe it always stopped for a frame or so between steps? The leveling felt cool and the choices had impact. The same with the equipment. The auto battling is a good choice too, but the presentation was not for me. I would have liked some small hit animation and numbers flyling of the encounter and party members. That way you can put the encouter large in the middle and also increase the size of the partymembers, get rid of the text and its super clear whats going on. Maybe some small shake or zoom animation on the party members, so you know who was attacking.
But as I said super solid entry. And also gameplaywise very polsihed. Did not had any bug and it played smooth.
Everyone agrees, me included. The UI… suck. And the walls and floor. It should really give reflect what the intro described. However I’ll manage to do that.
Really interesting reflection about the potential frame stop. It could be a consequence of how I implemented the movement controller… Was it in particular while changing direction or also when keeping forward pressed down? If you remember…
The presentation on the autobattle came from a more involved idea about the Crit-Tick interaction. That pressing it would freeze time and you being able to reroll any of the rolls visible and thus voiding what came after it. But while I think that’s a cool mechanic, I don’t know anymore if it suits the game. So focusing on the participants with damage numbers flying about is much better. Making issue for it right away.
It was during all movement, if I remember correctly. So also while pressing forward down.
I stared at The Entity (with 7 characters ... in the beginning, 4 at the end).
The game feels quite ambitious and complete and I had a lot of fun playing it. The introduction and conclusion are cool. I like the choice of a number of characters which will make the (beginning of the) game less or harder. You really managed to create an alien world, between the creatures and their voices, the portals. The traps in the wall to advance to the next level are particularly great. The difficulty is right on point. I like the multiple armor slots and the progressive gain in power via equipment and levels is satisfying, I took my time and by the end my characters were war machines. I like the silly parts with the voices and creatures, they actually fit the alien world of the game perfectly and adds to the pacing and fun.
Neither the wall textures nor the UI presentation are the game best strengths, and I don't specially like the movement but at least advancing by keeping the key pressed still makes it alright in the end.
That's a very cool entry overall, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the great feedback! Yeah I really don’t like how the walls turned out and the UI. I’ll revisit the textures and models for the world and make them more like they are described in the intro. And the UI… I’m a bit ashamed of it honestly. It’ll be reworked 100%
A solid entry! I think there is a lot of potential here. I would have loved to see more interesting decisions in combat and a bit shorter (or more interesting levels). As I stated on stream, the last half of the dungeon felt like a chore rather than a game.
Thanks for making it!
VoD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2111781401?t=00h18m30s
I’ll take that into account when making updates to the game and also I really really love your idea of tag out fighters so I’m going to at least try that out and see how it feels.
Looking forward to re-watching your stream and taking notes. I’m gonna have so many notes.
For me, this was a bit cryptic, but I also had problems reading some of the text, because the font does not scale well on a 4k screen. The customizeable party size was a nice touch and I loved the humor (Crit-tick *g*). The graphics are hand drawn, which is nice, but the could use some touchups. The movement was fine, but the level needs some landmarks or something, it is just hallway, bigger room with enemy, hallway, room and so on. It got a bit samey after a while. But you got a nice map screen, that is a plus.
I agree with you!
Yeah I do need to learn how to make better UI in unity and one that scales well. I had to cut some serious corners there and they are basically more or less placeholders as they are now.
There needs to be more variation in the world, there needs to be more explanation of how the game works and if you knew how late in the jam and how fast I had to do some of the graphics… but also I’m not the most talented in that department but I for sure can and will make them better.
It took me a few tries to get it without losing, but after I realized the slugs are the key to recovery it wasn't too bad after that. The graphics were good, I liked the hand drawn enemies etc. The music added to the creepy atmosphere and the story seemed like it was pretty good.
I feel like there's not enough agency in combat, so I would liked to see skills and such but also understand managing/balancing up to 10 person party can be alot! The movemen responsiveness t could be improved a bit as well, I got messed up a few times trying to run from the enemies! Otherwise, this is a solid entry.
I guess you visited them before you understood how central they were? So perhaps my idea of having a UI prompt when facing them that says:
Press [Space] to Interactthe first time and
Press [Space] to Healonce the party knows what it does… might be helpful in trying them out?
With the combat I agree there’s something missing. When you say skills, do you mean something that you as a player can activate during the actual combat except for the Tick?
I had the idea that every something level up the player would get to choose from two negative perks that the character would get. But I’m guessing this is not exactly what you have in mind.
And the player controller… I really need to work on that one.
Thanks for the great feedback!
I didn't even know you could activate the tick! lol. Yeah I was thinking with the characters just something to change it up (unless that was the tick that I missed) outside of the auto battling.
no you can pop the tick to gain a guaranteed critical hit on the next attack (building on the Crit-Tick word pun). I had initially planned for the player to be able to rewrite battle history when popping it by selecting a roll of their own to re-roll and voiding everything that happened after it.
I had also planned to tutorialize it a little more, but now I was basically hoping that the voice lines and the spinner below it would be enough.
I loved it! Gameplay loop was quite catchy, though I figured out that you need a good protection to survive and prioritized that, probably leading to an easier game overall. Nice touches with Crit-tick, teleport thingy, slugs (died from them the first time, lol) and the whole humorous way of presenting a cosmic horror :)
Movement, imho, can be improved, it wasn’t as responsive as some other entries, and the ability to look at the currently equipped loot would be nice too.
Sword that required 24 str was probably too much, I barely had 14-16 str on that character by the end of the game :)
Glad you liked it!
I wanted to include some equipment icons and tooltips with their descriptions, but I also wanted to reskin the entire UI but time… oh time. I’ll for sure do that in the post-jam version.
And great to know that you got that many “loot points” in my internal system that it allowed a 24 str sword… I guess I should have included something that limits offered loot to what might be relevant or almost relevant to the party… because it’s not fun to get loot you can’t use or don’t want. But it can be a bit fun imo to get something just a bit out of your current range. So you can hold on to it, longing for when it can be used properly. Onto my TODO.
And a bunch of you agree I have to work on the controls so I gotta figure out somehow what’s not entirely right there… I wanted to have the ability to execute movement and turn simultaneously and I’m guessing that’s where I did something wrong.
Really interesting game. I was sucked in super hard by the intro cutscene.
Amazed by how much you got done! Loved the gameplay and artstyle
Nice game. I liked the ticks and management of the characters. At first it was a bit intimidating, cause it looked complicated, but it worked out well.
The map was good, but having to stop to look at it made it a bit harder to use.
When using the portals thingy I pressed a lot of times before realizing what it did and brought my sanity down significantly, spamming it also made several instances of sound play.
When swapping the same type of item you get the notice that it will replace, but you don't get this for different types of weapons, even though they do replace.
Movement is very nice. I liked that the combat was auto. Nice general vibe.
I don't know if the floors are infinite, but I gave up at the third one.
Good job!
Thanks for the really great feedback!
I’d be very interested in knowing what made it look intimidating. Was it the party selection? Or the Pre-fight? Or something else. And if you have any idea of what might make it less so.
I was planning to not need mouse interactions while exploring at all and have an “Press [Space] to Heal” or similar show up inside the portal room when facing the slugs. I guess that would have helped. It should probably be made clearer that it comes at a cost. At least after first time.
And third level was the last! I really should have done some narration after each level started to hint towards this. My initial idea was of course that each level should be and feel different too…
Again thanks for great feedback. It has added a lot to my post-jam refinement list.
The intimidating part I meant was just that the gigantic list of characters you got to choose from and the list of them in your party tab has so much info in it. So not intimidating in any other sense.
Yeah I guess three is the charm for level count. I guess it has a bit of the same issue as my game, it is slightly to large scoped as a jam entry. With 170 games to play jammers might lose interest before reaching the end, missing that great content... I kinda expected it to end after reaching the end of the first level and maybe after a small bossfight at that point, but I kept going thinking it was two levels. And yeah the levels looked so similar I couldnt tell them apart and therefor assumed it could be infinite.
Keep on the good work!
I checked the timestamps for me downloading and rating your game. It took me exactly an hour until I abandoned the game. Hope this helps.
Thanks again for all the useful feedback! I’ll consider it all when planning the post jam version.
Allowing players to set their own difficulty level by selecting the party size was great. The VO in the cutscenes were good, and I really enjoyed the Crit-Tick and Slugs :D
Movement felt a little sluggish (pun intended), and I wish the auto combat was a little faster, but overall I had a great time with it.
Josefa kicked some ass :)
Thanks for the feedback!
My initial thought for the combat was that the tick would allow to pause time and redo an action, but since I ran out of time I opted for clicking the swollen tick resulting in next attack being a critical. Still with that interaction mattering less to the player except to evaluate the sanity cost of activating it, it felt problematic to speed up the fight too much…
… but I also don’t feel like I nailed it and got it working that great with the limited player interaction… so I’m a bit at a loss how to combine the two perfectly. Perhaps fights shouldn’t be faster (more actions per second), but shorter?
Paul Brown survived his solo adventure!
Super cool how much you got done doing all of the art, design and sounds yourself. Also having it be procedural too, really impressive. Skymandr's heckling was a nice touch.
The party size system was awesome for scalable difficulty, I had to give the first floor a couple of tries to decide what sort of setup was right. The itemisation and character specialisation was also great.
I don't think any constructive feedback I can offer will be new to you or of any surprise as it's all mainly due to the time limitations of the jam. Of course a balancing pass and some more monster variety would have been nice, but with the amount of art and sound work you've done it's very understandable.
Overall it was really fun once I got a handle on how to build a party and I got nearly a good hour out of the game, well done!
I’m so glad Paul Brown made it to the end and that you liked the game.
I’ll hopefully do a post-jam version with more balancing and variety in enemies and levels too.