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Gravity's End's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Metroidvania | #16 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Enjoyment | #17 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Design | #19 | 3.350 | 3.350 |
| Overall | #22 | 3.413 | 3.413 |
| Presentation | #59 | 3.050 | 3.050 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Unity
Team/Developer
adroitconceptions & wayfarergames
External assets
audio & some UI images - see game page for details
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Comments
This is easily one of the better games in the jam! Definitely a lot of metroidvania elements, and it's a fun map to explore!
I would add another enemy type, since those wasps start to get annoying after a while, and rockets feel a bit slow.
Thank you for the feedback.
We definitely had a few more enemies on the planning table, but life hit and we didn’t manage to get all of the stuff we wanted in.
Good sound and animation made it fun to shoot. Cool puzzle boxy little level too, I liked how the rooms interlocked. A good amount of extras too! Maybe another enemy for the end could have helped, but solid overall!
Nice!
thank you for the feedback.
Cool and fun game!
The 3D art is simple but it's pretty nice. Some music would make it better.
The metroidvania theme is well applied, didn't get bored at all. The enemies respawning everytime I go to another room was kinda frustrating.
thank you for the feedback.
Ohh, flashy menus and an options screen? How much time did you have left over?
Enjoyed this entry. Nice touch on locking the player near the beginning with the long drop to help restrict access. It end up feeling a little linear as a whole but I managed to get first end screen on these metroidvania games so congrats!
Nice idea, like the 3d metroid feel/vibe and the jump dash powerup was fun to use. Would have been really useful to show us a prompt of what we got or a little hint/space to try it would. I was a little scared to jump after getting the dash, although in hindsight i probably would have just spawned back to exactly the spot i left off. And it also would have been nice if it auto switched my weapon after getting the water gun.
Anyways, loved type of 'locked item' instead of lock room which worked well too!
Kudos, good game
we actually had less time then we expected and didn’t get as much done as we had hopped. My co-jammer focused on menus and UI as he didn’t have a whole lot of time and that was something he is really good at.
That is a really nice one, I love how fluid it is! It's kinda rare to see shooters on game jams, let alone one that feels so good to play. The lowpoly graphics are also really charming too despite the simplicity, and honestly that UI looks stylish as hell, extremelly cool.
I also really appreciate how you took your time to make an actual options menu. That is also something really uncommon on game jams, but it is certainly a pleasent surprise, specially since my laptop struggled a little bit to run the game at the highest quality, so it felt nice to change it to "balanced" and not having to worry about that.
I also really like the bee-bots Ninja-ish AI, and since they are pretty much the only enemy for most of the game it really made them way more fun to fight repeatedly.
I only really have some very minor nitpicks as critiques here tbh.
For example, the shoots doesn't actually come out in the direction of your crosshair, it actually has a little offset to the bottom right of it, wich made aiming a little weird at first, but I could get used to it.
There's also the fact you tutorialized the fire extinguinshing mechanic with red particles coming from the floor, wich are very different from the actual fire walls I actually had to extinguish, so I took a little while to figure that out.
A reaaallly tiny nitpick, that is actually very personal to my own approach of how I usually play shooters, is that I wish I could swap weapons with the mouse wheel instead of having to go throught them all every time, since I was using the ice wind blower as an improvised melee attack, and having the bazooka right after it kinda added an extra step to get back to the default gun quickly lol (this one is really not an actual issue at all tho)
Overall this one was pretty fun tho, I like it
thanks for the feedback.
on the crosshair vs weapon, I played with the camera/weapon placement to get them as close as possible, but you are correct the weapon is very slightly down/right from the crosshair. I tried a few things to make it visually come from the weapon, but move to the crosshair “path” but everything I tried looked really bad. Something for me to do some research on.
the red fire walls vs the red fire barriers… that is a good observation and something to look into making more similar if I do something like this again (and why it is really good to get play testers that aren’t part of the dev team… I had my kids play it, but they did see me working on it and running my own play test runs… so they might have picked it up from my plays)
on the weapon cycling, I didn’t want to rely on a scroll wheel (we had originally planned on controller support also, but that got dropped - which wouldn’t have had a scroll wheel) - I think scroll wheels are basically ubiquitous now, so that probably shouldn’t have been a concern. but I do agree putting it on the scroll wheel would have been nice. you probably wouldn’t be surprised how many rockets I shot when trying to switch from the ice spray to the blaster after I picked up the rocket in play testing for that very reason.
Great entry! I like the look and feel of the game.
To improve:
- Would have been really nice to have some music (either doom-like or metroid-like)
- The enemy respawns were a little annoying and odd. I often found my myself backing up in rooms in order to make space, only to walk out of the zone and de-spawn the enemies. The buzzing hum they make helps that somewhat, but it was also strange at times to hear the buzzing before seeing an enemy.
thanks for the feedback.
music - neither of us had time to dig though stuff we had access to, to find something that fit well, nor are musicians, so I left it with no music vs something that didn’t fit well. Myself, I think I would have leaned towards some sort of environmental sound set over music, but I can see how the lack of music feels ‘lacking’
respawning - yah, I had some improvements in mind, but that would have taken a fair amount of updating. It would have made it so they didn’t spawn/depawn quite the same as they are now, which I think would have helped with most of what you experienced. (basically zoning the whole map, and adjacent zones wouldn’t despawn them and you would need to go beyond an adjacent zone before a room would respawn)
I love how clean and simple this is, in visuals and design. You weren't kidding about your programmer being a UI wizard! Love how the charge metre is on both the HUD and the gun itself.
I wasn't quite able to put my finger on it, but the enemies felt weird. Like they were maybe glitching through walls or floors sometimes? Not a big deal, but it felt a bit disconcerting. Also they respawned a bit too often for my taste. It was annoying to clear a room, take a wrong turn, then immediately have to do the exact same combat again.
I like how open this felt. Straight from the beginning of the game, it seemed like there were loads of places to explore, even though it was actually a linear progression (as far as I could tell). Getting that Metroidvania feeling of "I'm excited to be able to go over there" early on was really nice.
Both of us do programming, but my teammate only had time to doe menus and UI and yes he is a wizard at it.
they shouldn’t have been glitching through any walls or anything, bu there was one or two spots were they would spawn in a room you were not in, because the spawn triggers were slightly larger then their rooms, so they would trigger before you walked through the doorway.
As I got playing testing, I wanted to go back and make a bunch of spawn zones, then have them track adjacent zones and only respawn if you went beyond the adjacent zone… so you had to go two rooms away before a room would respawn. I think that would have killed most of the ‘wrong turn - have to refight’ issue while still having respawning happening as you moved around.
Our goal was to move the charge meter fully to the weapons - and instead of a bar, some sort of animation showing how much was left, but that fell on the cutting room floor fairly early when we both had life happen and significantly reduce the amount of time we had.
Thank you for the feedback, the points that felt of are definitely places were this could be improved.
This is a really cool submission. Love the different weapon types, their usefulness for combat and progression made for fun exploration. Really slick UI and presentation as well.
One issue I had was that the controls aren't listed on the pause screen or anywhere past the main menu, so they can't be checked without quitting. That had me lost initially when getting the dash power up. Overall though this was a fun time!
thanks for the feedback.
yah, the controls display/etc stuff wasn’t quite as good as we wanted it. unfortunately we were hoping to get in rebinding and needed to have stuff react to that, but didn’t get that far, so some text in the menu was what we got in… adding it to the pause menu in this case would have been a good idea, thanks for the idea. I will try to remember it for the next game I make - to have the controls documented there, so they can be referenced as needed.
Pretty enjoyable game, I like the different guns using them to find passages to next areas. Not a huge fan of minimalistic 3d aesthethic, but you made it work, especially with those particle effects. As others mentioned before me, the constant respawns were pretty annoying, but I understand where that comes from. Great job!
Thank you
Really enjoyed your game. Would for sure continue to work on it great job.
thank you
I very enjoyed this game! Love that those guns have additional functions except for shooting :D It could be much better if there was some plot behind this game, because this game has potential!
thank you.
The “plot” was on the game page… which roughly translated to “go get the macguffin”
The upgrades were cool, and I thought it lasted a good length relative to the amount of content. The bees became a little stale to fight by the end, but otherwise I thought the experience was quite good. I also didn't miss having a map all that much since the level was compact and it was usually easy to remember which areas could be reached with new upgrades. Overall, I was impressed by what you managed to get done in a month while working in 3D, nice work!
thank you.
We had hopped to have at least one more enemy type and to have them in mixed groups/etc. to make it varied, but life happened to both of us, so we made do with what we had.
we had planned an actual boss fight, but that didn’t happen, so I used the wave code to put something there instead of nothing.
I liked the feeling in the plasma gun, nice particles on the bullets!
It was a little annoying that the wasps respawned every time i reentered a room, they were really fast and good at dodging bullets (which was a cool feature). Some of the models were really nice!
A resume button in the menu could have been... Good if you wanted to change volume while playing :D
Some uptempo techno style music or something could have been nice!
Thank you
This was fun!
Looks really good, with a pleasant and distinctive color scheme. Controls smoothly. I like the various abilities (ice, rockets, health upgrade, etc.) and the way they gradually allow access to new areas.
The enemies are nice and aggressive. It would be more satisfying if there was more feedback when they died--e.g., an explosion (I think they're robots?).
Also, I did get a bit disoriented at times. A minimap would have been great.
check the trailer at about 4 seconds, you can see one explode/die: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNH8BDiiunw if you weren’t getting that, then something is up with the build you played.
I just tested the windows build via wine and none of the VFX graph stuff was showing up :(
Messed with some build settings and the windows version now correctly shows the explosions under wine.