Great game! Controls are intuitive, you mention playing on controller, so it'd be good to have the controller instructions in game when using controller rather than keyboard; but it was easy enough to figure out. Would be good if you couldn't die in the tutorial (I enlarged the box on me several times :P ), also be good to have a spawn point so you don't get sent all the way back to the start. It does need some music in the tutorial stage as well (music in the rest of the game is super fun), and you can use AI now to generate some cool voice-overs for the on screen text at the start of the game. Love the 8-bit graphics!
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Merlin: Scale of the Magic's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Overall | #6 | 4.145 | 4.145 |
Graphics | #11 | 4.418 | 4.418 |
Audio | #12 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Gameplay | #17 | 3.945 | 3.945 |
Theme interpretation | #104 | 3.618 | 3.618 |
Innovation | #153 | 3.127 | 3.127 |
Ranked from 55 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/nicolasbize/Scalazard
Comments
Amazing game! Gameplay and level design is really well thought-out.
The music really hits hard when it first starts. I was really digging it. The only negative is that it kept going at the same pace and it started to get old.
I love the pixel art and animation, it's superb. Much better than I could do in my game.
Theme interpretation is solid.
I'm tired so I'll probably come back to this game tomorrow but it's really good.
Initial impression after the tutorial:
It feels very polished from the start. I liked that you had a loading bar in the intro and that you added a gameoff splashscreen. I am currently playing on the web build with a controller(because you said that, that is the way to play)
During the tutorial there were no binds for the controller. It said press "space" instead of "x/a" and so on. This might be because I connected the controller later on or because of the web build or maybe you didn't have time to include text for different controllers. Managed to figure out the controls still.
The first room after the tutorial I killed my self multiple times with the expanding of the crate. It felt a bit frustrating in the beginning but now when I have finished the game I don't mind it. It felt really awesome the first time I killled a bat with the box accidentally. Managed to get a couple of double kills with the box later on :)
Water physics was a surprise, small details like that give a lot to a game.
Some bugs/improvement area.
You probably already know this but wrote some stuff down when I played.
Gate animation could be changed a bit. It feels like there are two animations, one opening and one closing. If the gate is currently opening but something happens (like I step off a button) and it needs to close then it will start the close animation from the closed state.
When you hover and attack the animation will go back to idle instead of hover.
The blue enemy that jumps can see you when you are under it and sometimes through walls.
The first area in the hover route or whatever(the door that leads to shadow boss) was a bit tricky for me to figure out. I had to watch the gameplay but I felt really stupid when I saw what you was supposed to do. I managed once to fly over with the box in my hand and quickly throw the box and slash so both the box and my character got through. I though this was the way but never managed to do it again. Not sure if any rework is needed here but I got stuck there a long time.
The fight with the minotaur was the hardest for me by far. It did not feel fair. When the minotaur is about to attack and you slide under and attack him, he will almost immediatey look at you and attack again. There was also a place wher you could stand without taking any damage in that fight which was nice for me but not sure if you intended it to be like that. Adding picture.
I think that if you take damage and then enter an enemys hitbox you wont take damage again and it will just stand on top of you. It happened twice for me with zombies.
One zombie once stood completely still even though I was close and in his range. Hard to see on the image but he stands still I promise
It felt like the shadowboss couldn't hurt me when I stood on the platforms above. Like he never used the electricity then.
Overall a really nice game. Think I spent an hour on and I had a great time with some minor frustrating parts (like when I got stuck or when I killed my self over and over with the box). I liked that you used the boxes for the bosses a lot and I enjoyed the level design. However, sometimes it took a bit too long to backtrack to the hub. Great work!
Thank you so much for the in-depth review and the constructive comments! Outside of the improvement on the gate (which is really insightful, thanks!) we unfortunately were aware of the other issues when we submitted, but unfortunately ran out of time to fix them. In fact, the main reason the player gets killed by its own box is because I didn't have time to fix the subtle collision issues that can happen if there's not enough room to expand various colliders (things could fall out of the map without a way to respawn etc) so that was an easy cope-out lol
The minotaur was also completely reworked at the last min (used to be a skeleton a few hours before deadline and is still called SkeletonKing in the code :) but we didn't have time to make it fair and pleasant. Once you know you can slide under his legs (I tried to get the player to use the latest ability gained to kill the boss from the next level), the fight actually becomes completely trivial and is just as non-balanced. This is something we'll rework in the postjam version. There's also no help for the player to understand how to beat the boss as well.
In any case, thank you so much for going through the game in its entirety, it means a lot, especially knowing those areas of frustration :)
Cheers!
Hello! I played your game live on stream today and thought you might like to see the live playthrough. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1996736252?t=0h9m44s
I really like the game, but you'll see if you watch that I made a lot of recommendations along the way while I was playing.
Keep up the beaufitul work!
Thank you so much for the stream! It's always a blast to see other people go through the game in its entirety, and see what needs to improve as they play test them! We unfortunately ran out of time to playtest and fine-tune the last 30% of the levels / bosses (from minotaur onward), and there was a lot of additional polish /bugfixing TODOs from other levels playtesting we just didn't have time to fix, most of them happened to be exactly the frustrating stuff you ran into... The level design has too many unfair spots that punish the player for no reason, and very few rewarding moments that can help the player feel great about what they have accomplished. In retrospect I think it would have been good to have a person dedicated to level design given the scope we wanted to tackle.
Really appreciate your time and analysis!
Cheers
That’s a super great game, very harmonious with the music and graphics, cool implementation of the theme. My only point of criticism is the key mapping. Keep it up, congratulations on the cool game!
This felt very polished and was a great throwback. I wish the movement was a bit more tight; it'd probably be best to remove acceleration/deceleration altogether so the movement is more snappy. Good take on the theme!
Amazing game! Grand graphics and intelligent gameplay! Exquisite audio! Interesting box-scaling!
Awesome game! Congratulations! I really enjoyed it, sadly I don't have a controller to play it as you recommend but it's still really enjoyable with the keyboard.
This is truly amazing! Controls feels very well done and the theme is perfectly centered. One of the best enters I've seen so far :)
This game was a perfect example of the theme mechanically. I loved it and would want to play a full polished version. The scaling mechanic was really cool and if you did a game with more spells and physics puzzles it would be rad as hell. Where it might need polish is I could throw crates through walls.
Game is absolutely gorgeous. The polish and care here is simply incredible, looking forward to being able to buy this one Steam! Fantastic work!
This was fantastic! I really enjoyed playing through it. The pixel art and the portrait work was so good and the music really fit the game very well. I did enjoy the scaling ability that merlin had but I do agree with some of the other commenters who said the movement was a little slippery feeling. You did a great job of giving a progression to the game by gradually unlocking abilities and I didn't find myself struggling to figure out where I should go next. I did encounter an issue where when dying and pressing the respawn button quickly the sound effects from the laser attack launched by the boss would continue playing after I had respawned. I played through on normal difficulty using a windows system and it took around 25-30 minutes and did not encounter any issues! Great job!
I loved the game, it's incredible what you can do with godot nowadays, didn't finished tought i will watch the gameplay, i had some trouble with the movementation, but overall it is a very nice game, as Lanyard has said, give merlin some spells, and put the game on Steam.
Just put it on Steam already you animals.
Incredible pixel art all around but particularly for Merlin, wonderful chiptune remix score, good level design with signposting for the player, excellent intro cinematic to set the stakes, I could probably go on.
You're likely all-too-aware of the little graphical glitches here and there so I won't harp on that. I would say though that I think you should err more on being too generous with your player. Difficulty is pretty high here and rooms can be huge, making death really hurt. If boxes could "checkpoint" and stay put if they were more-or-less in the right area, this would be an incredible boon and take a lot of the sting out of dying. And I think the box scaling killing Merlin instantly should be reworked, it's just too frustrating and common and doesn't really add anything to the experience. Scaling boxes could hurt enemies though, that'd be fine.
Give Merlin a whole set of spells, flesh out the castle with lore and a deeper aesthetic and I think you're well on your way to something players on Steam would pay money for. Great work.
Thanks so much for the kind words!! :)
Will definitely rework the scaling ability, this was a last minute cope-out to bypass some collision issues I was seeing, but hopefully we make it only punishing for the enemies. Great advice on being generous with the end-user, and making more incremental save points. We'll bring this into the post jam version alongside other abilities
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