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A jam submission

Little trouble in the big OakView game page

Find the missing fairies using spells and cunning in this lowpoly metroidvania adventure!
Submitted by WigHz, FreakClub — 1 day, 10 hours before the deadline
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Little trouble in the big Oak's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Enjoyment#103.6923.692
Design#113.6923.692
Presentation#154.0774.077
Overall#163.6353.635
Metroidvania#443.0773.077

Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Engine
Godot 4 RC2

Team/Developer
FreakClub and WigHz

External assets
Font: AmaticSC

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Comments

Submitted

I really liked the look and feel of this one! A very unique approach, and well executed overall!

Also I feel super dumb, somehow it took me until I was level 4 to find the frost fairy... I searched the whole map it felt like 3 times before I finally found the bridge staring me in the face at the start, lol

Developer

Haha, man it's hard to guide the player. We did actually put some effort into it, like having the player spawn with the bridge visible in the background and stuff. And I think it is an important thing in jams too, because people don't have that much patience with running around not knowing what to do. Glad you found it eventually :⁠-⁠D

Thanks for the kind words!

Submitted

Cool to see something so different in the jam. Not exactly my style of game, but fighting was surprisingly satisfying. Nice job!

Very MMO-ish, I like that! It's really unusual seeing top-down metroidvanias at all, let alone one that controls like that, so this was really a pleasant surprise.
The game has some pretty nice gwaphics too, it looks really good, but unfortunatelly it is way too next gen for my laptop, so I did play it very laggy, and due to that I wasn't even able to defeat the first fire boss wich is a shame, specially considering the gifs on the game page looks hella cool, so I really wanted to play that.
Altought thanks to the low fps while fighting the fire boss I could notice his hitbox was a little bigger than himself, and that he already deals damage on the very beggining of the rolling animation (before he actually starts rolling).  Idk if those happened exclusively due to my low performance, but if that's not the case then you should be carefull with those since those are the things that usually leads to damage that feels cheap. (Really wasn't the case of this one tho, the only cheap thing here really is my hardware xD)

Credits where credits is due tho, I'll actually just say how good the path-finding of the character is. I really could click anywhere on the map, be it down a hill or up a cliff, and the character would flawlessly find his way to there witouth issue (as long as there weren't a barrier of course) and that just felt sweet. I actually got a little bug where everytime I died to the fire guy the character would still try going to the last point a clicked, and that was actually a very nice bug to have, since it spared me the work to actually go there myself!

Aside from that I can't really play the game, so I'll just say that the very beggining of it was certainly pretty fun, really wish I could've seen more of it.

Submitted (1 edit)

Pretty neat setting and clean graphics. Wished there were more reason to explore other than to find dead ends, and was hoping for some shortcuts after I got the earth fairy to get me back to the next area. 

It also seems like I was able to activate wind magic early to make combo magic even without getting the wind fairy, then again, that didn't progress the story. Just made the damage a little bit more bearable. 

My critic would be to use the screen flash and shakes less frequently or to have an accessibility option. I have really photosensitive eyes and dark into flashes while casting spells actually hurts my eyes. Not going to hold that against you guys in the game's rating, but something for you to think about in the future.

Developer

Interesting with the shake thing. I'll remember that for coming jams. I recently participated in juice jam II, which was all about that stuff, and wanted to bring some of that into this game for some good feeling and feedback. 

What could be a good alternative way to provide feedback on taking damage for instance?

Submitted(+1)

Getting strong Magicka vibes here, very fun concept and good execution! I'm not too good at action rpg control scheme, so maybe it's on me, but i had a really hard time in area before white gate, I felt like my character wasn't going where i was clicking, islands were getting very small and jam packed with enemies that were respawning really quickly and i couldn't progress much further past that point. But i still had fun combining spells and destroying enemies with it. I feel like casting wild fire before room with enemies and just rushing in combined with melee is OP :D

Developer(+1)

Very much Magicka inspired it became :D
I know exactly what you mean with the controls. I think it is the navigation agent that flips out and makes the char run in another direction. It would have been better if it just ran in the direction of the mouse there. And it is terribly hard up there in the wind zone. Even with wildfire and melee I think :D
We had fun trying to figure out what different sort of applications the spells should have, and wildfire turned out nice I think =)

Glad to hear you had fun, and good thing you never saw the last boss, lol!

Submitted

great game! a bit 'slow' on my steam deck, but still had fun playing. Using fire spell is awesome, I felt like a powerful magician :D

Developer

Hey, thanks for playing the game! Glad you had fun! And cool to hear that it is possible (even though slow) to play on a steam deck. I had no idea :)

Submitted

A very nice entry. The combat feels fun. I like the tension of not being able to move while casting.

The level design is nice, but the gates feel like a bit of a cop out. I would have preferred something more thematic, like freezing a path across water, or burning an obstacle with the fire spell. Being told to get fairy X to open the door loses some of the sense of wonder.

I really like the zoom in and blur when your character dies. That's a nice effect. Overall, very nice effects and animations.

Developer

thank you so much for the feedback and kind words! 

Yeah, our art director should probably have told me to lose the gate in the first place, hehe. Some cool ideas you have about substituting them!

One of my experiences from jams is that being transparent to the player and helping out so they don't get stuck is very important. Balancing that with a sense of wonder and exploration is hard. I guess some would get frustrated and just stop playing.

Glad to hear you liked the animations. I spammed animation players thus jam :⁠-⁠D

Submitted

Really nice, I like the spell combination system (was kind of disappointed when the wind fairy didn't give me a wind spell), the environment was nice but kind of repetitive.

The enemies, except for the spiky dinosaur who killed me too many times, were fun, I especially enjoyed the boss fight against the rocket throwing bat.

I had fun, thanks a lot.

Developer

Aah, you made inDesert last jam, cool. That also looked so good! 

Oh thanks for those kind words. Yes, it would have been 8 additional spells which we didn't have time to implement, so it was a bit lame to get wind fairy. And yes, spikey is kind of a tempo disturbing a-hole to be fair. And the boss was also sort of last minute. We didn't really think people would play that far, so nice to hear that you actually did!

Submitted

Hey! I really liked your game especially the music and the spell system which reminded me a lot of "Magicka" if you know the game series.

The last boss fight felt a bit annoying because you couldn't do anything but kiting him and that took a while because I didn't have time to charge the spells. what might have helped is a dash or knockback spell.

However, I had a lot of fun :)

Developer

Magicka was a big inspiration for the idea of combining stuff into spells. Had some good times accidentally blowing my friends to bits with the thunder spell, haha. Imagine having that one in the last part of this game!

Yes, the last boss was terrible design, sorry about that. We assumed not many would get that far, but maybe we were wrong about that. I'd love to get better at designing enemies. There is probably lots to learn there! We realized also that frost nova slowing enemies would have been awesome in that fight. Freeze with nova, run and charge some meteors with Q+E. That would have been something to tell the grandchildren...

Thanks for playing, it really warms to hear that it brought some joy :D

Submitted

Looks and sounds good! The spellcasting system is quite original, and the different spells feel satisfyingly distinct from one another.

Given the size of the level, some kind of map would have been very helpful. Also, it would have been nice to have more variety of enemies.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the kind words! I agree that a map or more Savepoints would have been good. And yeah I would also have liked more enemy types. I guess we had a fairly inefficient way of implementing the enemies, so we could not find time to implement more :)

Submitted(+2)

Things I Like:

  • level graphics/models
  • mixing power ups to get even more abilities
  • music track

Things I Would Change:

  • more respawn checkpoint
  • condense the level [lots of ‘walking’ for a game jam]
  • add controller support
  • allow moving while charging spells

Broken Stuff:

  • game tries to take you to last clicked location on death
Developer

Thanks for the feedback!

Developer

Thank you so much for the feedback!
More respawn points are especially true towards the end, in the "wind world".

We had a thought about making the ascent to the "wind world" a bit majestic, but it did result in some walking. Also some of the areas in the start world were maybe a bit empty. 

Controller support was something I thought about after hearing about Hogwarts Legacy, but it was forgotten. Could probably have been awesome with controller!

At first it was possible to move freely while charging, but then we turned it off and said "we should probably let the player move at half speed while charging". Didn't happen though :)

Submitted

yah, 1/2 speed would have been a viable trade off