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Magical Sword Girl's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #7 | 3.656 | 3.818 |
| Polish | #12 | 2.611 | 2.727 |
| Engagement/Fun | #13 | 2.524 | 2.636 |
| Audio | #13 | 2.698 | 2.818 |
| Overall | #15 | 2.698 | 2.818 |
| Originality/Creativity | #16 | 2.872 | 3.000 |
| Theme Interpretation | #18 | 2.350 | 2.455 |
| Magical Girl Concept | #18 | 2.176 | 2.273 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?
There was a plan to give the character some magical powers, but I never made it that far. There was also a plot involving magical stones and magical girls, but that got cut too, sorry.
Which theme(s) did you pick?
Battle + Stone + Crusaders
How does your game fit the theme(s)?
the game is mostly focused on battle, there was some tie in for the other ones but didn't make it that far
Were the graphics/audio assets for your game made during the jam?
Most of the assets are store bought, however, there has been substantial effort to fix, mix and make them look good.
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Comments
I always love the idea of physics based combat. This already seems like solid progress. The hitboxes of sword clashes feels pretty accurate! It was cool to see the kobold's swing deflecting my sword when I swung too early from their sword arm side.The defensive stance feels pretty useless though. You've seen it mentioned but it makes things very difficult that walking into an idle enemy sword chunks the heck out of you. Hope you iron out the kinks as you work on your main project. I hope there's the ability to chain attacks together more quickly, a lock-on system, more engaging enemies, and a more fleshed out defensive system. I'm quite excited to see more! :)
As the lack of develop time, the game mechanic indeed is not very completed. So far, i feel it's much easier to walk away from enemy than really fighting them. the scene and main character, however, made quite good.
I wander around in the outside are and find several floor testing squares and a tree under holy light for no good reason XD
A you found the secret tree = } Yeah its mostly a prototype at this point that clearly needs iteration = ] !
Thanks for playing !
Though it's unfinished, it's clear a lot of work and time went into this! The world is large and looks good, and I like the little details (like the cart the I pushed in to the water for no good reason.) The combat is interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about the "1234" button swing select, but it works.
i did find the combat extremely difficult. I never felt like the enemy weapons would hit me, but instead their bodies/armor rubbing on me would rapidly drain my health.
Though I would have liked to see more (story, magical girl elements, etc) this is still an impressive prototype! Nice work.
Thanks for playing and the positive words !
Other people complained about phantom damage, surprise it was my theme "phantom blood" ... No just kidding! there must be a bug in there with the hit detection ( its supposed to only damage on a certain section of the swing) but maybe I messed that up somehow !
Of note, Q key cycles through the 1234 ... I thought about adding sword poses for each swing but ended up going with this, anyway I need to rework a lot of the fighting part and I will remember all this feedback when I get to it !
Another game that feels very ambitious, but doesn't offer much gameplay. The island is pretty and fun to explore for a few minutes. The combat is OK I guess. There is a short delay after most animations, and no input buffering, which makes it feel clunky. I feel like it could play really great with a good controller mapping, but the current one is complete nonsense and I didn't feel like setting it up myself. So keyboard and mouse it is. I didn't find a way to change it, so I was stuck with a really high mouse sensitivity. I don't really like using 1234 to cycle through different attacks, having it be contextual depending on the player movement and enemy position would be a huge improvement. Speaking about enemies, the battles feel a little dull; the enemies don't give much feedback and there aren't any sound/visual effects to make you feel like you're hitting something.
As a prototype the graphics look striking, but the gameplay leaves much to desire. I have to say I love the idea of a magical girl hack-n-slash action game, so it'll be interesting to see you take this concept further.
yeah Im not too happy with the end results for the combat, it needs a lot work still, I think there should not be a delay code wise, but maybe the animations are not "snappy" enough, I'll have to debug what the source is but yeah maybe input-buffering might be a part of the solution, good call out.
Sorry about the controller mapping lol, I only tested that it worked but never really played with it so maybe it was garbage sorry. I did provide the mapping stuff, but as you point out I totally spaced out on sensitivity sliders ! This is a great point and I will definitely add them in the future.
Hmm about the feedback, there should have been sounds and animations to provide SOME feedback... I know it was minimal, but I just really ran out of time on this, but let me know if you had no sounds or anims at all !
I'm working on a bigger project which will take a lot of this and has magical girl hack-n-slash action, so hopefully once its polished it will meet your expectations !
Thank you for playing and the feedback !
The sword gameplay is the focus here, so I'll start with that.
I really do like how attacks are physics/collision based. It looks good and feels great. The arcs showing where the sword will swing is super helpful (although one seems to be missing), and the way you may or may not hit depending on exactly where things are positioned keeps it interesting.
One major issue with combat is one that's been pointed out already: it's kinda hard to hit enemies, and way too easy to get too close to actually hit them with your sword. There seems to be a very narrow sweet spot in which your sword actually hits. It might be worth exaggerating the size of the colliders even if it's less physically correct*.
*fun fact: the sword in A Dream Of Valhalla has a reach of something like three metres
I also found dodging to be pretty awkward, and I'm not sure why. The movement controls aren't unconventional, enemy movement isn't unusual, yet dodging feels a lot worse in this game than it does in most of the others I've played.
There isn't really a counter to the arrow enemies at this point. Maybe if you had a shield that could block arrows, that would help.
A few other minor nitpicks: Damage text/callouts need to be bigger and bolder, because I can't tell who is being damaged or how badly. Movement speed should probably be slower when you have your sword out. A few times I took damage for no discernible reasons, maybe from the weapons of enemies that had already died.
With some minor tweaking it could be really good. Even as it stands, it's good enough to underpin a bigger game. It wouldn't be amazing, but it would be decent enough, especially if there was story or exploration or something else to carry that game.
It might be worth trying lock-on. I can't say if it would be better or not- it's enough of a departure that it would require another round of testing to see if it works.
It'd also be nice if selecting an attack unsheathed the sword automatically, but that's a pretty minor nitpick.
The visual style is somewhat inconsistent, but the little 3D island full of trees and rocks has a surprising amount of charm. For a mechanics demo, it's more than fine. If the full game had graphics at the same level and style, it would be pretty decent. Once again, not stand-out amazing, but decent enough. The only major issue that really needs to be fixed is the excessive pop-in. Sometimes objects would change LOD dramatically only a few feet away, which was extremely distracting.
The audio is functional. The mixing is a bit weird and some effects are oddly chosen.
It has remappable controls, which is really nice, and a few other options as well. The menus and HUD are pretty minimalist, but already have some style to them, and once again are surprisingly impressive for a mechanics demo and would be just fine in a full game.
I think that sums up this game in general. As it stands, most of the elements would work fine as-is, and if expanded and/or refined a little, they would be pretty damn good.
At the same time, though, it is still just a mechanics demo. There's a target to hit, a little bit of physics to play with, a few enemies to kill, and that's it. There are no healing items so any damage you take is unrecoverable, and no real game-over, you just die and have to restart. And while you can explore the island, there's nothing there to find, so there's not much point in doing so. Finally, without magic implemented, it's not really a magical girl game.
That's kinda the difficulty with all the incomplete games in this jam, though. If you try to take them as more than they are, they don't measure up, but they shouldn't be expected to.
In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with next!
Thank you so much for the great feedback ! Sorry about the wall of text that follows!
I really wanted this to work physics based to some degree and I'm glad you found some of the positive to it, I need to work on this a lot more and polish it up, I think it will work but I'm less certain after the jam, I'll keep trying though. By the way, I think one is NOT missing but its just really small ( the stab) so its hard to see maybe ?
Yeah there are a few things that are really working against this prototype here , some of them interestingly might be either way too much physics, or too little in others!
1) An example, the colliders, I just didn't have time to make full body colliders, so its just using a big cylinder in the center as the hit zone... For the Kobolds, this is pretty bad given that they have a sword and shield, so it makes them hard to hit with out hitting either.
2) the sword strikes are driven by animation only and I made them only use upper body (masked) and there is also terrain that changes your bodies rotation... so sword strikes are way off ... I think I need to add some IK to the body to make up for this as in point the spine towards the terrain to some degree and maybe some ik to the arms so that they apply some weight towards the enemy itself, a good example is the stab attack it just goes up like way over their heads ( it only hits because the before mentioned cylinder is usually higher than their heads.
3) there is some physics bugs I'm pretty sure, but not sure exactly what, I haven't looked into it.
On the other hand, hitting the archer goblins is super easy lol
Hmm... well the dodging is interesting, because I made it relative to character and maybe I made it too small, I had it set to a larger value and changed it towards the end of the jam cause you could dodge yourself away too easily. I think some of this is because I chose to not do "locking" onto enemies, dodge would be easier in that case, but I sorta wanted to go away from a locking style control... Another issue is that the enemies are too simple still and they just charge forward relentlessly. I wanted to add a lot more nuance to the AI, like hesitation time, blocking, feinting , but I just ran out of time. I did however spend plenty of time making sure they could find the player, loose the player and attempt to search the spot you were and be able to path + dynamically steer away from dynamic objects... sadly I think all of that is lost with out proper level design and more polish/details that would have made it cool. (it worked better in my test level with a bunch of boxes, lol)
Yeah the crossbow / bolts enemy (goblin) is literally the last thing I added to the prototype, so I had no steam left to give the player something to counter it. Technically though its fairly easy to dodge, since the AI is pretty lame. I'll have to think a bit about what could be added for countering... on the other hand its supposed to be somewhat realistic and I feel arrows/bolts are just like that in real life, dangerous and come out of nowhere. Side note: Here is another example where I spent time on thigs that are probably not noticeable, if you pay attention to the animation, you can see the goblin reach back into its quiver and actually take a bolt out and load it onto the crossbow =] .
Damage text, yeah I had them in there and calculating some numbers but I ran out of time and just went with a simple 4 hits of anything is a kill. So literally I just ignored the little red damage text... I probably should have hidden them.
Movement speed, I believe it is slower ? I'd need to check, but you definitely cant run in that mode since it uses the dodge instead. I'll keep in mind to check it or nerf it further.
The phantom damage ... yeah probably a bug or is it a jam theme? I need to look into it. Probably add polish like vfx for sword swings and blood when you get hit, etc.
Ah thanks ! I hope to make it much better, in my head this is really a first pass ... ;) you know which game this is for right ?
yeah, my first instinct is to not use lock-on as I already mentioned, but if I can't get it to work as well as I imagine it in my head, I will probably try it or maybe a more actiony type of combat instead of this "physics" based thing...
Good idea, that's an easy one to add = ]
Hopefully the bigger game will look better, its a different style, less cartoony ...
Ugh yeah, I need to go in and tweak the LOD's they are very visible, I was so worried about performance before I switched to URP that I over did it with the LOD settings. At least for me its running at 60fps pretty solid after the switch, but I never went back to fix it.
I totally agree and I'm fine if it gets disqualified by Ran if he ever plays it, although again I still think I'm in the running for the lowest score of the jam, which puts me in the running for your prize! I do have the magic UI hidden in the prototype, its cool I should have thrown a screenshot of it as proof lol.
Would love to get a little more expanded feedback on this. Although of course I agree, I only had time to put what I considered the most essential sounds.
Anyway, yeah its a complete work in progress and so far 3/3 MGGJ's that I have failed to make it to a complete game, but at least this one I submitted, so yeah that's something ? Nonetheless, this is all work towards the bigger game and hopefully with out the jam time constraint it will all end up sweet.
Again thanks for all the feedback, I really appreciate it!
This might just be my own old school sensibilities speaking but I think I'll always be impressed even with a bare-bones 3D sandbox. Anyway, this is an incomplete entry by all accounts and it's sort of apparent. I don't really know anything about making a good 3d controller but I can't say this is it. Seeing the path of action that your sword strike will take is actually sort of nice, but the delay on the attack is a strange feeling; you definitely don't feel very nimble. The first kobold somehow dealt a bunch of damage to me and I couldn't even really tell if they were swinging their sword or not. There was an interesting sense of, like, parrying/dueling almost like Skyward Sword in a weird sort of way that is probably worth exploring, but yeah, hitting an enemy didn't really feel very crunchy. The navigation in general was also a bit weird, you stop all momentum if you land from a big jump'tall vert height which is strange. And yeah... not much in the way of magical girl-ness or themes here, so...
Thanks for playing and review.!
A good 3d controller... there is a lot to it. In a quick summary there are like 2 parts here: one is really just the basic movement and camera and the second part is the fighting ... I think I spent a lot of time making sure the camera worked nicely and that you could jump around in the level geometry and not get stuck and be able to ride physics objects. I also spent a good while on the fighting part, but not nearly as much and it shows.
This is one of those projects where I have so many ideas in my head that I imagine would be cool, but getting them done correctly in practice is a lot of time that I clearly run out of or I spend doing silly things that probably nobody cares for like hair shaders and cloth physics.
About the jumping, yeah I wanted there to be some penalty for jumping and I clearly made it super harsh, I somewhat hate games where people are jumping around constantly because there is no penalty... anyway I need to revisit that too !
I had a tough time with this one. I think the biggest thing that this is missing is some sort of lock-on/strafe, as I couldn't consistently hit a monster. Swapping between swings is a pain too, possible making them a bit more accessible would be something to look at.
Maybe instead of having RClick unsheath, it would focus on the enemy, and then the different swings would be holding LClick and moving the mouse left for the swipe, or down for the downwards swing, or a quick forward nudge for a jab.
I think this could be pretty fun given some time.
Thanks for giving it a spin = ] ! ... yeah I've got some work to do on the whole sword fighting I'm not too happy with the end results.