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A jam submission

Side Alley SqueaksView game page

Explore an underground sewer as a cool rat in a new Metroidvania!
Submitted by MunchiMango
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Side Alley Squeaks's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation#143.6893.889
Overall#222.9253.083
Design#252.8463.000
Metroidvania#262.6352.778
Enjoyment#282.5302.667

Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Engine
Godot

Team/Developer
MunchiMango

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Comments

Submitted

Very sick looking game and it plays well too! The weapon is so OP that the enemies really weren't a match lol. The sole exception is the final boss, he shot so fast that the best strat was just to keep jumping and hoping he wouldn't hit. He also still needed some beating after having a full red health bar, cheating bastard. Not a long game but it still took some time to beat it because I'm apparently shit at reading instructions and finding things.

No idea how I'm supposed to get over this gap btw, didn't get there from the other side either. I suppose I didn't miss anything important though.

Submitted

Really Enjoyed Playing it

Saddly was not able to defeat the boss. as the loading time was too much after I get killed by boss

One Suggestion: Make Player and enemy sprite tone a little lighter as it was not really visible well that gave the game very odd look. like what's in focus 

Other than that, everything was good

Best of luck for future dev!

Submitted

This is one of the better entries I've played so far. Good work! The design is cohesive and the animations are well done and there are a lot of nice added details. 

A few suggestions:

I think the level design could be improved, especially the lower section with the giant insta-death pit. That part wasn't particularly enjoyable, as I couldn't always tell whether I could make a jump or not and ended up dead and having to restart. 

The camera could be tweaked: it seems like it moves exactly with the jump, which is very fast and kind of jarring.

It also took me a while to figure out the ctrl-dash thing. Using it with jump was not intuitive for me.

I ran into a couple weird things when fighting the boss. After dying, it took a really long time to reload the save. Windows thought the program had gone unresponsive. Also, in one attempt, my controls locked up and the player drifted to the left side of the room. 

Criticisms aside, however, this is a great entry and I'm glad I tested it. Well done. 

Submitted

Yooooooo this game is really cool! The art was really well done, the backgrounds and characters/enemies, UI sfx, it all looks really clean! Funny and charming game.
The mechanics felt really good too, the yoyo is very unique and the groundpound is very satisfying.

While I did like the simple way the controls were written in the environment, it did lead to some confusion; when I got the run button I mistook it for a dash and couldn't figure out how to use it properly. At the very least the signpost needed a "hold" or "run" to be written on it.
I ended up falling down the pit with no way back up, frozen there by the checkpoint, no way to make any jumps, and I almost quit in frustration. The run speed and animation are also pretty subtle, especially compared to the initial burst animation. I do think something extra to the run could give it that oomph to make it undeniably clear, maybe a dust particle that comes continuously out of the feet or a scampering sound effect or something? Just a suggestion.

Once I DID figure out running though, it was very satisfying to flow between platforms. The character that felt oppressively heavy before started to click and it was very fun!

There's one part where you unlock a fork with a key, I didn't really understand why a key removes a fork, I had kinda assumed the fork would be indicative of another move to get through but alas.

Some kind of bug happened during the boss fight my second try, I ground pounded him at the start and then ended up floating backwards into a wall, not able to move and not taking any damage, softlocking me :(

I did beat him though! He was uh.... exceptionally easy. He basically gets stunlocked simply because you can hit him no risk as soon as he gets out of stun. My recommendation would be to not have a stun state at all, but instead to disable his hurtbox for a bit when he's hit (but still flashes or something to indicate he's taken the hit) and have him continue attacking. That or switching back and forth between vulnerable and invulnerable states that can't be interrupted. The art of him getting hit was pretty funny though.

I think as a metroidvania it was a little barebones, largely because you give the player running and yoyo right at the start. The only item/obstacle combo really was the ground pound; when I booted up the game after crashing at the boss and losing all my progress I managed to get right back where I was in about a minute, since all I really had to do was run straight to the one key and the one ground pound. If you take the path of least resistance (the tower of cats is easier to fight than jumping up the platforms before knowing the run button), you also never even encounter the breakable blocks until you already have the powerup, so there's no real feeling of an area being gated or any moment of 'ah, I remember where I can try this'

I'd love to see more mechanics, I think you've definitely got some good ideas and I'd love to see more!

Developer(+1)

YOOOO Thank you so much! We've been at work at making the tutorials much more clear to understand, when we made those small little scribbles we were practically at the end of the late submission time 馃槄. Most of these are noted and actually fixed which I've already uploaded to the other platforms this game is on. Thank you so much for the feedback!

Submitted(+1)

What I liked

  • Really dug the art
  • Yo-yo's as weapons have always been cool to me since I played Star Tropics as a kid.
  • I liked how you included the "how-to"'s as art.
  • GamePad support is always appreciated and, fortunately for Godot users, is easy to implement
  • I enjoyed the music

Feedback/Suggestions

  • What sticks out to me the most is that the player movement could use some adjusting. I noticed the gravity made it hard to jump to platforms that were clearly accessible. If you don't want to change the gravity, adding a coyote jump would be easier on the player so that they're not having to be so precise in the timing of their jump


Overall, I definitely liked how it looks and sounds and would love to see this improved upon after the jam, should you decided to do that. Congrats!

Developer

Thank you! I'm writing down the stuff for the movement, the game actually does have a coyote time but it might be a little unforgiving so maybe I'll increase it!