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Healer: LFG's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #1 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Overall | #6 | 3.663 | 3.663 |
| Overall | #7 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Art/Graphics | #7 | 3.438 | 3.438 |
| Audio/Music | #7 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Fun/Engagement | #7 | 3.313 | 3.313 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- Well it's certainly the most direct route of approaching the theme. That being said, it was also a fun dynamic for me. In other group games I am NEVER the healer. I am a tank. Dual axe wielding, blood curdling screaming, barbarian tank. SO, this was specifically fun for me to try something new to me and it gave me a good outlook on the traditional healer position. So good job on nailing it as a properly done introduction for healers. While the character design was really, really nice you obviously fell short on background. This is a jam so time constraints usually end up biting most people on the behind so no worries. With more time the background can be hashed out to look as awesome as the characters. I didn't find any bugs to note so bravo on that in a jam. There was a good tutorial which I always appreciate and is a bonus in a jam. The character speech was a nice touch and very natural which is sometime hard for writing in a game. I will caution that sometimes the speech bubbles/words themselves seemed to get in the way visually of the combat. The button based targeting system for healing as opposed to using a mouse was nice. I found there was a good progression in the levels, and there seemed to be good balance in the healing abilities. Your SFX were good, and hopefully with more production time you'll add music as well. Overall, a great framework for a much larger game and I think you should be proud to get it done in a time crunch.
- I loved this games concept! It's the first thing I thought someone was going to make as a game when we came up with the idea. So I'm glad someone went that route. The largest issue this game had was the fact that the only ability that seemed to heal for any noticeable amount was #4. Which meant I was basically playing the waiting game to time my 4th ability just right to keep everyone alive. The character AI was spot on, retreating to the healer when they were low health actually gives the player a lot of control because they can physically drag team mates away from danger. I wish the enemies used projectiles instead of hitscan for ranged attacks, that would have added an extra element for the player to think about when moving. Overall: Cute game that was competently executed, but with some better balancing and design tweaks would have been given a much better score.
- Congratulations on your completed entry into the Fireside's first ever Game Jam!
Did you work alone, or as part of a group? (If in a group, list their names)
Group. KrazyKain, Ben Mallinson, Alen Blazekovic
Disclose if you used any public domain assets or not.
Font Used: Hardsign by Blankids
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Comments
Oh, I really liked this one. The character design is very good, although I wish it was more visible in-game, and the concept is very clever, especially with the team members talking to each other like they're playing an MMO. The tutorial was a helpful little touch, but I feel not starting with all three allies would further help guide players throughout the game. I hope the idea gets expanded upon after the jam is over! Great job!
Thank you very much!
I actually originally planned on doing just that with the characters. Have you start with just one ally, and then recruit the rest of the team. I was going to have separate levels rather than a bunch of waves and a boss, so I'd have more control of who was in each level. But I decided to descope all that before I even began implementing it because I already had wave management and spawning code from my main game, so I could save time and be more likely to finish in time. I'd love to go back to the game and improve the chat system and expand the story. I think there's potential here to tell a heartwarming story about the players who log in every night to play the game. But I do need to get back on the aforementioned main game I'm working on, so post jam updates will be later down the line.
Thanks again :) I appreciate the comment and feedback!
Descoping was the right decision. You've shown a promising idea, and that's more than enough for a game jam. Good luck with your main project, btw!
This game reminded me why I suck at mmos lol. I think the concept was really clever and the art was wonderful. My biggest problem with this one is the UX and UI design are extremely confusing. There are too many identical bars on the screen to keep track of your friends' health and I found myself dying out of nowhere constantly because I was too busy trying to figure out where everyone's health was. The targeting system was very hard to wrap my head around so I found myself staring in the bottom right corner of the screen most of the time, but at one point two of the characters ended up behind that UI and I literally had zero clue what was happening. Something that might have been nice was a way to reset the position of your friends. like a button to command them to come towards you instead of the enemies as another thing I found frustrating was when the fox character would charge straight into a pile of three enemies and die almost instantly over and over. So overall, I think this is a really clever idea, but I think it could use just a bit more time tweaking and playtesting to iron out those issues that make it frustrating. Great work to everyone involved overall and if you update it post-jam I would love to give it another go!
It was a deliberate decision that you wouldn't be able to control or order around the rest of the party, because you weren't meant to be anything but a healer, not a party leader or anything like that. But I appreciate that in order to make that work I should have improved the AI (at least make them move back to the center between waves for example) And the UI/UX, well I played around a lot with the placement, but after a bit of playtesting I received a lot of feedback about having to dart your eyes around too much to see the party status and abilities, so they were put next to each other. Given more time I'll have to figure out what to do with the UI, and what other controls might work, I've had mouse targeting suggested a few times so definitely something I'll look into.
oh... but I will say.. idiot fighters rushing to their death expecting you to heal them? that's a feature not a bug.... MMO healer's know that pain :P
Thanks a lot for the feedback, much appreciated :)
I didn't really figure out the play style even with the tutorial. I did like the characters and the game style in general, I just couldn't figure out my powers very well.
Solid on theme and characters.
That's fair, I suppose I could have explained a bit more what purpose each spell does and when to best use them rather than just what they are.
really an interesting game, the healer :D
but honestly it hurt my eyes a bit <.> i wish there was a full screen button
so i can see more clearly because the characters are too small on my screen (1920x1080)
but the game concept is soo dam good ! and fun to play !
i played it till the big skull came and finished all my teammates xd
Good Game ! <3
fair point about the games size. It just seemed easier to lock down the size of the game then mess with anchoring UI elements... Not going to lie, it's laziness 😅
But I'm very glad your enjoyed it 😁 thanks for the kind words. If you happen to try again... Focus all your heals on the platypus when fighting the boss and he's a piece of cake because he won't change target while the platypus is healthy
Wow you guys drew all those characters yourselves? That is really cool. I'm super impressed with all the neat little characters and their fun personalities! It's interesting to basically take on the role as a healer which turns the game more into something like a tower defense game it feels like and it works really well with the theme. All the different healing moves felt cool and useful in their own ways, though I will say it's really tough to keep track of which moves you have, where your character is, and where the character is that you need to heal. Most of the time I just stare at the bottom right corner and use long distance spells, but that doesn't work well all the time and sometimes you just need to get in with close quarters healing which is where I get all scrambled up (in a way, that's a great addition to the gameplay for that very reason.)
Music and sound effects were great, and like I mentioned the characters talking was a really nice touch. I'm always a sucker for a well designed tutorial in a jam game so well done! Far too often people spend all this time making a game and then don't bother to teach anyone how to play it, so you score a lot of design points from me. As far as feedback goes, a couple things I noticed were that the super well done art for the characters clashes a bit on the retro style background and healthbars. Also the game is brutally difficult...I didn't even get close to beating the boss lol. But overall, excellent work!
oh my god, such kind words, I'm tearing up here!
seriously though, I really appreciate the feedback. All the characters were drawn by Alen, he's an amazing artist. And the reason the great art clashes with the health bars and low res grass tiles are because I made those bits, and I'm a terrible artist, but he was too busy with the characters, end screen and menu art.
Anyway seriously, thank you so much, you've made my day
I really liked the story elements of the game where each of the characters was talking on screen, it made the characters feel alive. The controls were quite hard to master. I just wound up mashing the 12345 buttons the whole time hoping it would keep my party alive. Maybe give the player the ability to click on the character they want to cast the spell on with the mouse instead of selecting with the keyboard. The background didn't change at all so you can't really tell they are on a "journey" and walking through the world until one of the characters said they have moved onto the graveyard. I think its a cool idea, just needed some more graphics for the setting and some SFX.
To be totally fair though... some healers in MMOs get by with just spamming their skills so.... :P
joking aside, thanks for the comment :) I would have liked to add a lot more, including different backgrounds to make it feel more like a journey but I had to focus on my strengths... Art not being one of them. I recruited an artist much later in the jam so they had to focus on replacing what I'd already put in, rather than adding to it. I'd also have loved to explore the story telling potential of the chatting and might revist the game post jam.
Oh, and yeah, mouse targetting would have been a good idea... another thing I might add post jam.
Thank you very much for the feedback :)
Yeah the chatting between characters was really fun! Definitely something I would want to add to a future gamejam game I participate in the future!
Very cute game! Difficulty was easy enough that I could fumble through without knowing what I was doing and just started to feel challenging at the end. Controls were a little tricky to wrap my head around but since I don't a working mouse atm I liked that it worked with just a keyboard
Thanks! I struggled to find a good difficulty curve but I'm happy with how it turned out. I appreciate the controls are confusing, they have been changed a few times as I experimented with different schemes but ultimately arrow keys for targetting made sense because the UI placement can make it easier for your brain to parse UP means this character DOWN means this one ect... and number keys for spells is basically how MMOs do it and I'm pretending you're playing an MMO as the healer.
Thanks for the feedback!