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Caissa's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Engagement/Fun | #1 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Originality/Creativity | #2 | 4.533 | 4.533 |
| Magical Girl Concept | #4 | 4.133 | 4.133 |
| Audio | #4 | 3.467 | 3.467 |
| Overall | #4 | 4.010 | 4.010 |
| Polish | #5 | 3.733 | 3.733 |
| Theme Interpretation | #5 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Aesthetics | #8 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 15 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?
All but one of the player characters transforms and have various powers like teleporting, shooting beams, summoning guns, and more (and are girls too yeah)
Which theme(s) do you pick?
Sister, w/ minor Sadistic and Service
How does your game fit those theme(s)?
The player has to protect the sister or lose the game, so she's the most important piece. There's also a piece that gets stronger after taking a piece for sadistic and a maid for service but that's just fluff
Were the assets for your game made during the jam? Elaborate as you see fit.
Music and sounds were from online, and I used a basic turn based strategy template, a lot of which was edited to fit the jam. All art and like 90% of the code were made during jam time.
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Comments
Clever game. I liked the varied magical girl designs and movement patterns. I think assigning star limits to different spaces is an inspired move. The AI seemed to be decently smart, they wouldn't just freely walk into squares I was threatening. Animations moved too slow for my liking and the game was a little too easy from what I played of it (only a few levels). Would definitely like to see this expanded on.
Thanks for playing! The balance was pretty tough, and I think I could have made each of the rounds a little more difficult, but I think I wanted to lean a bit more on the easier side so people could see everything, especially since I didn't end up checking if moves would put your King in check.
This is a really cool gameplay concept! I had a lot of fun with the chess style battles, and it was challenging without being frustrating. I managed to complete the game in one try, and had a blast doing it!
The audio all worked well. The art style is clean and looks good, though maybe a little more color or flourish to the game-board environment could improve it a bit. I did like the large variety of colorful ally sprites, those looked great!
I did find a UI bug during my game... I guess this comes from my own OCD testing of my games, but I went into QA mode for a second... after each stage, when you get to select a new ally, I suddenly thought to myself, what happens if I try to click more than one while they are sliding off the screen? Turns out I can keep clicking them over and over, getting all options and as many duplicates as I'd like. The character select screen isn't built to hold this many, so they start to go under other UI items and eventually fall off the screen.
Ultimately, this bug didn't break the game, nor did it give me any huge advantage. I basically just used the pieces I would have chosen without any bug exploiting.
Anyway, really nice work! One of the most fun games in the jam that I've played.
Thanks for playing! The UI bug is a bit embarrassing, I knew about it pretty early, but I guess I kept putting it off and completely forgot to address it. The character select screen definitely isn't built to hold that many characters, so hopefully it wasn't to difficult to still build your team like you wanted to.
Fantastic game. I like how it combines chess with rouge-lite in an Autochess-like fashion. The animation is very nice, though it is a bit long if you are replaying it over and over again, so I'd like to see an option for faster animation or even skip animation.
Maybe at some point you could prevent the user from putting themselves into check/checkmate.
Some points about balance: I managed to start a session of with two enemy queens vs my king and princess. Not sure if that is beatable. Also I feel like the original chess pieces just feel very valuable at their tier with the exception of the pawn. Because reaching the other end of the board gives you an essentially dead character.
Thanks for playing! Animations are a definite point that need some looking at. The original chess pieces are pretty strong for their level too, I was hoping that I could balance to similar strength levels, but I think the way I had combat set up makes it pretty hard for the other pieces to find value when compared to the originals.
It was pretty unfortunate I didn't add pawn promotion and only allowing legal moves, I think for the next time I should probably prioritize stuff that people might expect to see early on so I don't get caught out at the last minute.
Very nice game, really liked the custom piece rules and quite cute sprites and ran smoothly for me! As for suggestions, art-wise I think it would've been better if the other side uses pallete swaps of your pieces/characters, in particular since chess is supposed to be symmetric, also makes it easier to tell what the other side can do. Plus a bit more of story would've been nice, not asking anything too special but something like a few dialogue lines between the sisters between levels would've been cool, or maybe when you pick a new piece they say something to present themselves. Still enjoyed it quite a lot!
Also see some other people complaining about the AI, but considering the limited time and the use of custom chess rules and that the unit composition is always changing, I think you really did a great job with your AI. Many strategy games just make the AI blindly charge at you, but here sometimes the other pieces actually tried to maneuver around and aim at sniping the king sister, which is better than most others similar games I've tried.
Thanks for playing! I didn't think about the symmetry part of it too much, but maybe having them be palettes swaps would make it easier to tell which piece is which. I guess I thought it'd be weird if she was also fighting against magical girls story wise, but doppelganger monsters are fairly common too. I'll consider this some more. That's a good idea about the dialogue though, having little scenes in between levels or when you pick characters would be a good way to add a lot of personality.
AI was tough to balance, and there's still a lot of improvement I want to be made. I think it prioritizes the major pieces too much, so a lot of times the pawns will just be awkwardly sitting in their starting positions the whole game...
i like it! good concept, it was fun and engaging. The only downside is that my unit get taken down and the game get stuck
Thanks for playing! I've been really into chess recently so I'm glad that other people are liking the concept. If you don't mind, do you remember what piece was taken when the game froze?
No prob! the piece was the girl if im not mistaken
One of my pieces got taken and it froze the game. I played on browser.
I only played a game and a half, but damn it was pretty good. I like the idea of adding new pieces each time. Lots of fun. Very impressed at how much work you did too.
Thanks for playing! Was hoping that giving people different pieces each run would hopefully make for some interesting encounters. If you don't mind, do you remember which piece got taken when the game froze?
It's the original piece you get. Not the king but the other one. It has a huge range of movement
Thank you! I'll check around and see what was up.
I love this game.
Like for real you just made me remind when I as a smol kiddo used to make these new "characters" for chess.
Animations aren't slow, they are good for strategic game.
Anyways, graphics, animation and even AI (which was propably really hard) are all truly great and made me suprise.
I also love that you can choose your teammates. Mana system also is great cuz it makes you add even the pawns, jesters and other worse stuff.
The only problem is that game freezes easily, but I think it's understandable.
Thank you for this piece of art, Good job!
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it. It was very fun to make up the new pieces and movements, so I'm glad that connected with you. If you don't mind, do you remember what was happening when the game froze?
Sorry, should have mentioned it in the comment, anyways:
1. Your piece (any piece, it doesnt matters) gets taken down by enemy
2. After it got taken down you still see panels your now dead piece could go
3. Click at any of these panels
4. Game freezes :c
Don't know if it is only me through, but don't feel bad. It isn't that common I think.
That makes sense, thank you!
I liked the whole magical girl themed chess concept, and the character designs. I also like how you've got many different characters/pieces, which adds a bit of replay value to the game.
The animations may be a bit slow for some, but for what it's worth, I like how each of the pieces have their own unique animation.
Just one issue though. Clicking "Exit game" from the main menu causes the game to freeze. Tried with both the browser playable version and downloaded from the itch client. Perhaps the "exit game" can be removed if it's meant to be browser playable?
Overall a great game.
Thanks for playing! I had a really fun time coming up with the designs, so I'm glad you like them. I think that I could probably do well with speeding up the animations a bit so that they all still have their unique flair but speeding up the game.
Also, good point about the Exit Game button. Didn't think about how that would work with a browser game.
I love the concept of this game. It's magical girls and chess and turn based tactics, it's classic genres with new twists. Maybe it's been done before, but this is the first time I've run across it, and I had a ton of fun playing with the new pieces and mechanics.
I love the mechanics of unlocking and choosing pieces to build a team, too. The UI is pretty buggy and/or unintuitive, though, and it took me forever to figure out how to remove pieces or realize at all that you could have more than one of each piece. I wish the way mana worked was a bit better explained, too. And I'm still not sure if moving the starting pieces is even possible.
The biggest gameplay flaw is the inconsistent AI. Sometimes it plays perfectly, sometimes it runs headfirst into a brick wall. Neither of those things are great in the first place, and together they create an experience with really inconsistent difficulty. It's not a deal breaker, but this area could definitely be improved.
The difficulty ramp in terms of opponent pieces and placement was kind of all over the place. I had a very easy level after a challenging one, and I also had the same enemies twice in a row. I've heard it might be randomized, but I only played the game once. Maybe the weighting could be better.
I was having a lot of fun, almost had made it, and then...
I made a stupid mistake and my king got eaten. I hit restart... and the game kicked me into a level with six high-level enemies and only my starting magical girls. I wasn't sure if that was a glitch or deliberate; it felt grossly unfair to the point where I kinda lost all enthusiasm for the game and called it a day at that point. I had no idea the game was permadeath. I'm not a fan of that in general, and I really think that if this game has to have it, it should definitely have a check mechanic like chess normally does.
I think some people will complain about the slow pacing, but to be honest, for a game like this it works. The pixel art is great and the unique animations for each piece just give it that much more panache.
If there's one nitpick it's that I wish the info panel showed the enemy piece instead of the magical girl version of the piece when showing where each one can move.
The theme implementation is solid enough, although it's kinda the obvious one to go with in retrospect.
All in all I liked this entry a lot, and I feel it's one of the strongest of the ones I've looked at so far. I just really was bummed out by being unexpectedly kicked back to zero, and there are a few minor aspects that could be improved upon.
Thanks for playing! I was on a bit of a chess kick at the start of the jam, so when my first idea didn't pan out how I was wanting it I thought this could be a fun idea.
You make a good point about the UI, I'll consider some ways to better telegraph that you can use multiples of the same piece or remove them from their positions. It's intended that you can't move the two sisters starting positions (although you can take two of the big sister and have her on any tiles with enough stars). Showing how the mana worked in general was an issue as well, really just tutorials on how to play were kind of relegated to the end and then proper ones were cut for time unfortunately. There's an explanation in the controls section in the bottom right of the start screen but even there it could have been explained much better.
AI is another big one. It was tough trying to have it make moves that are at least understandable, but there's a lot of work that can still be done on it. On the bright side, I do have some ideas of stuff I want to do with the AI that might be fun.
The opponent placements also need some work. You're right that they're randomized, but they're separated into four difficulty sections that I thought would be of a similar difficulty, so you won't be fighting a queen on the first couple of fight for example. The main problem was that they were all basically eyeballed for difficulty level, so its definitely possible (and likely) that there's some inconsistent difficulty progression.
Not including check I don't really have a good excuse for... In the next version I'll probably add some kind of warning system for when you're leaving your king in check. The restart thing was an unfortunate bug, it was supposed to take you back to the beginning.
Thanks for all your feedback, I think there's a lot of improvements that I'll be able to make.
I like that the chess mechanic makes it easy to pick up. And then the randomness and customization gives the game more depth and unpredictability. It's a game that I feel it's joyful to play more than one run. the graphic is cute and "indie".
i feel it will be more exciting if the animation is much faster. but probably it's because i like playing fast game.
Good job anyway
Thanks for playing! I was hoping that the randomness made people have to think of some different solutions each time, so hopefully that came through a little bit at least. Faster animations, or a mode with no animations (or minimal animations) is something I definitely think I need to add as well, the animations were just such an important part of idea I had that it was a low priority when I started having to cut things for time.
I like the concept I'm a big fan of rogue-lites and chess so this was really cool to see! I thought the art and character designs were cool and I liked the star limit mechanic. The only thing is we got stuck in a stalemate in one level and there wasn't a way to restart the game so we had to refresh the page. Overall, very fun :D
Thanks for playing! Glad to hear you liked the combination. Yeah unfortunately I didn't think of a good way to handle stalemates until a little too late to try to get implemented for the jam so it is kind of just a problem I let happen. Sorry! A better way to restart is definitely something I should have done as well.