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The Holy Arrow's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Adherence to the Theme | #888 | 3.705 | 4.429 |
| Design | #1386 | 2.630 | 3.143 |
| Overall | #1616 | 2.630 | 3.143 |
| Originality | #2344 | 1.554 | 1.857 |
Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Nice game, I liked to play. Thank for this
Please try our toohttps://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/461656
There was some really good ideas at play here, but it unfortunately needed a lot more polish. A lot of little things somewhat ruin the gameplay experience, such as the enemy seemingly camping your arrow drop when you get hit.
I don't want to seem unfair, because I do see potential here and it definitely adheres to the theme, however it is difficult to comment on too much because it is clearly unfinished
Thank you for your feedback my friend! Yeah, we definitely would have added more and polished if we could find more time.
There are a lot of "collect your shot after you fire it" games in this jam, but this one has stood out for me and I'd really like to see you build on it. Between the arrows in the walls, the towering enemy with a glowing red eye and the dramatic music, you really sold the idea of facing down against something bigger than yourself.
Choosing between standing your ground for an easier shot and letting the enemy close in added some nice tension, as did having to scrabble around for the arrow.
A minor change I'd recommend would be to add some sort of death cam showing how you died (though this would probably require a player model, so I guess it's not that minor) - the first few times I died it was jarring to be teleported back to the middle and I didn't really understand how I was dying (or that I was dying, for that matter), which might put a lot of new players off.
More importantly, you should probably not count the tutorial arrow in "your shots fired" count at the end - I want to do it with "only one" arrow!
Overall, though, I thought this was great (I had to trawl through a day's history of downloading jam games to leave this comment, since searching "the holy arrow" doesn't bring the game up on itch for whatever reason). Good job!
Yeah, if this game gets featured then it getting a “sequel” is a big possibility.
Do you think having the boss give off a growling sound whenever it’s close and having a short “you died” thingy would solve the problem you experienced?
Also: you’re totally right about the tutorial arrow not counting! We totally should have done that. Thanks for all your feedback.
Do you remember the name of the other games about retrieving the bullet? I figured we wouldn’t be the only ones since Mark Brown literally pointed it out in his video.
I think the growling and death screen are clean, effective fixes, but I'm a sucker for feature creep (especially in other people's projects).
I like the idea of some sound when the boss is close (getting louder/changing pitch as it gets even closer), but for me, a growl would ground it in reality too much. Its general silence and unnatural, methodical turning and acceleration had me imagining something otherworldly, so maybe look at what sounds other games and movies use for beasties like that.
Alternatively, you could have it corrupt your vision more and more as it got closer. Something a bit like this, but all black:
which could transition in to an all-black death screen quite nicely*. Though I think the problem with a "you died" message like that is that it only tells you that you died and doesn't show you how you died.
Maybe you could fix that by leaving the camera in place where the player died, letting the bow fall under gravity, and letting the boss run a bit past where the player was, so they can see which direction it was coming from and think "oh yeah, I hadn't looked that way for a while."
I know ideas are a lot easier than implementation, and I also know that I've never finished a project, largely due to feature creep, so probably don't pay too much attention to everything I say. I am still occasionally coming back to the game to have a round or two, so you definitely have something engaging here, whether or not you end up getting featured (which it might not - I think the ratings are going to favour either highly original or highly artistically polished games).
I can't remember many of the other bullet retrieval games, but here are some names from looking at the first 100 or so titles as they're listed for me, that sound like they'll have a similar mechanic:
One Arrow Colosseum, One Arrow, Only One Arrow
* I'm no unity expert, but I think this could be done by having an animation in the UI layer and stepping the frames forwards/back depending on the boss' distance to the player. It might even be possible with a single grayscale image and building a black mask with a steadily decreasing darkness threshold.
I was playing about with shaders (in a vain attempt to finish off my own game jam game), and they might be an elegant way to do the overlay I was thinking about:
i.imgur.com/a9jKBI0.mp4
which just uses this image
to multiply the rgb value of each screen pixel.