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A jam submission

Astro-Navigator Nebula!View game page

Action Game. Magical Girl Trapped in Show.
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Astro-Navigator Nebula!'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Magical Girl Concept#24.4104.714
Originality/Creativity#63.8754.143
Theme Interpretation#73.6083.857
Aesthetics#74.0094.286
Overall#73.4933.735
Audio#113.0743.286
Polish#152.8063.000
Engagement/Fun#192.6732.857

Ranked from 7 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?
Our lead character, Hayley, is an actress who plays a magical girl on TV named Astro-Navigator Nebula, but on her final day on set, finds that the set has been magically transformed and she now has all the powers of magical girl part she played on TV! Themed for the night sky, her powers are galaxy themed - star blast, meteors, gravity slams!

Which theme(s) do you pick?
Smile, Surprise, Sweet

How does your game fit those theme(s)?
A play on the phrase "Smile for the cameras..." - It's Hayley Nakamura's last day on set as the star of the magical girl anime Astro-Navigator Nebula, but SURPRISE! Hayley finds herself trapped INSIDE her own show! Puppeted by a mysterious villainess trying to force Hayley to act like her SWEET, positive counterpart Elara, Hayley is decidedly NOT feeling sweet OR positive about being trapped in this Truman Show-esque gauntlet! But hey - having actual magical powers is a little fun. ;) Although it's a short demo, the story follows Hayley as she comes to terms with leaving the show and this part that defined her behind, all while being taunted by a villain who wishes her to be sweet, smile, and has many surprises in store for her.

Were the assets for your game made during the jam? Elaborate as you see fit.
Yes, all assets were made by our team and the game has been built in Unreal Engine 5. We're excited to share it!

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Comments

Submitted

So I couldn't get it to run at more than a frame a second so I'm rating it of XCVG's recording. Using a laptop with a low end gpu. 

The production looks great and looking at the size of your team it's impressive you could coordinate in such a short amount of time. The voice acting makes it a step above the other entries in my opinion. 

That being said, I have to agree with the others when they say that it is not clear where to go and what the objective is. 

I would like to see more of your game and if you can manage to get a version out with lower requirements that would be great. 

Submitted (1 edit)

I really wanted to like this game. The production values are very high, and there was a large team behind the game that clearly put a lot of love and work into it. I'm totally on board with the narrative and gameplay concept, too. Unfortunately, there are few major issues that really brought down the experience for me.

The biggest issue is the performance. It ran like cold molassess on a winter's day on my laptop, which is not a weak machine by any means. It's a gaming laptop from 2021, with a mobile RTX 3060. I got between 15-20 frames per second when trying to record and a few more frames without, which is completely unacceptable and borderline unplayable. Honestly, I wish this game didn't have all the fancy lighting, motion blur, reflections, and other fancy effects. Some of it is cool at first, but the novelty wears off fast especially when the game is chugging along at an unplayably low framerate.

I should note I have a 4K display. I have no idea if the game was rendering at 4K, and there didn't seem to be a way to check or change it.

Paradoxically, this is both an extremely polished game and an extremely rough one. There's voice acting, which is always impressive to see. But the voice acting is highly variable in quality, and there are some serious issues with the synchronization between the text and the voice lines. There's a very nice main menu that makes musical notes when you hover over the different buttons, but there's also no options, not even volume. There's an NPC that guides you through the game, but the signposting is inadequate and inaccurate, with them referring to a stack of boxes that is mostly composed of chairs, and telling you all your attacks without telling you how to use them. There are scripted cutscenes, but they are very rough with enemies appearing out of thin air, no camera control, and sudden transitions between cutscene and gameplay. Controls are clunky and sometimes effects don't appear.

To be fair, I think I'm coming down harder on some of those flaws because the initial impression of the game was such a strong one- it felt like something almost professional with a lot of talent and a lot of work behind it. Because of that, it was both all the more surprising and all the more disappointing to see it fall down in fairly basic ways.

Once I figured out the game mechanics, I did have some fun with them. The double jump with the little butterfly effect is very nice. You have a lot of mobility in this game, and jumping around environments is pretty fun. I found the magic hard to understand, but all three abilities had impressive effects. I wasn't expecting to see a shooter in this jam, and this one is pretty solid.

I managed to clear all the enemies in the first area and made it to the storage room with the key. And then... nothing happened. No cutscene triggered, I couldn't pick up the key, and there didn't seem to be anywhere else to go. Normally I'd assume I'd just missed something... but every Unreal engine game I've come across in a jam has been buggy for some reason, so who knows. If it weren't for the severe performance issues, I might be inclined to search more, but the game was really starting to give me a headache by that point.

I should reiterate that this is a very visually impressive game. I'm not sold on the heavy post-processing, but the game does have a distinctive visual style and some very nice looking models. Though... Hayley/Elara is a bit uncanny valley. Everything else looks super nice, though. The magic effects are a step above basically anything else I've seen in any MGGJ. The environments are detailed, compelling, and they even have physics!

I think there's a ton of potential here. A lot of the work has been done; the assets are there, the mechanics are there. It just needs tweaking to address some of the weaker points... and some serious optimization.

EDIT: After editing the config file, I was able to get a playable framerate, at the cost of losing most of the lighting. I noticed that there were prompts for some of the controls, which did not show up before. I was still not able to get past the key area.

Submitted(+2)

Very impressive game! I was also impressed that it actually ran alright on my dinosaur of a "gaming" PC. I did get the driver has known issues message, but nothing really seemed to come of it.

The overall aesthetic of the game is pretty cool! I like the bloom and gloom, and the characters and enemies almost look like toys or clay. The whole thing really shines. The audio presentation, with full VO is also quite nice. The story was pretty interesting, for as far as I got anyhow (more on that later)

The environments look great, and are fun to interact with and knock things around. 

I didn't have a great grasp of the different powers... trial and error got me there, more or less. But a little tutorial might help. The combat in general was solid. Although, I ran into an issue toward the start after the pile of boxes, where my regular attack seemed unable to hit the enemies. That's where I did experiment with the big attack, which saved me.

Another small bug/nitpick is that I seemed to trigger multiple dialogues at once heading into the lighting switch puzzle. Not a huge deal, but I was confused for a sec.

Unfortunately, I did get stuck after fighting the large moth creature. I wasn't really sure what to do, and I eventually noticed an area to climb up. I got up into the section with the bars and it seemed like I needed to platform up to a door... I found that part very frustrating. The movement controls felt too slippery for the precision jumping and platforming here. I tried again and again and almost made it twice, but eventually had to give up. Maybe I was doing something wrong...  I would say that overall, control felt a little off whenever I needed to jump over things.

Anyway, despite the problems I ran into with the platforming, this is an excellent submission. It seems like it was quite an undertaking, and it paid off! Awesome work!

Submitted (1 edit) (+4)

"The installed version of the NVIDIA graphics driver has known issues in D3D12"
ah man, seems like i need to update driver. will try again later
it seems i can still play the game without updateing driver

the graphic is amazing. both the modeling and lighting. the character is cute. and i like that there voiceover for the whole story. lots of effort has been put on this project. beautiful.

However i got stuck in the the main hall trying to find crystals. so far i can only find one in the basement. i guess there is some upstair but i can't find a way to go up. i do find a ladder but not like i can use it

Developer

Thanks for the comment! You will have to use you E ability to create a platform that you can use to jump up to get to the area above the ladder :)

Submitted(+5)

Hey, I had a good time playing this, even though I'm not sure I met the minimum requirements suggested. Really liked Elara's design, and really liked the effect of the double jump - I was double jumping around the whole map just to see it more often. There were a couple times I think I interrupted some dialogue by moving too far forward a couple times, which was a little unfortunate. There were also a couple times when the text would scroll all the way past the text box and I wouldn't be able to read it anymore. 

I think my only gripe with this was the section with the crystals. The rest of the game was pretty linear and platforming light, so it took me a while to figure out where I was supposed to go to find the crystals, and the way I took to get to each of them made me feel like I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing. I also don't know if I was doing something wrong during the fight with King Alfred. He was taking very little damage overall, and he eventually starting moving way too fast for me to catch up with him. I ended up having to hide in the tunnel where the Water Crystal was to avoid him and the monsters he was summoning. 

After that I got stuck in a white void after going in a portal, but Hayley said it was one of the lighting rooms, so I figured that's where my hardware limitations fully caught up to me. I don't know how much of this was the lack of the missing requirements, so feel free to take most of this with a grain of salt.

All in all very nice work!

Developer (1 edit)

Hey ! Thanks for your feedback, we are glad to ear that you enjoyed our game !

Just to answer some of your interrogations, the crystal puzzle was meant to be a kind of sandbox puzzle, there is obviously an intended way but we haven’t restricted other ways so that the player can find it’s own way if he wish ! We are aware of some issues with the boss and the final room and these issues are actively being worked on, most of them are not hardware related but only stuff that did not work as intended.

Developer

Glad you enjoyed! Which version did you play? V7 has almost all the bugs worked out. The dialogue still can have issues if you move faster through the level than the dialogue. But King Alfred's fight should be working properly now as well. The white room will make more sense with the Dialogue, and V7 should be working on all graphics cards now. Thanks for the feedback!

(+4)

Amazing work for such a short amount of time!!! I LOVE Elara's design!

Developer

Thanks!