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A jam submission

Kenneth's DescentView game page

Submitted by Arcadonauts — 12 hours, 51 minutes before the deadline
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Kenneth's Descent's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall polish#424.0004.000
Overall#543.8333.833
Engagement#573.9003.900
Creative use of art assets#1223.6003.600

Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

Very nice game, made it to the 24th floor :)

Developer(+1)

Holy cow! I'm pretty sure that's higher than my high score!

Submitted

:)

Submitted

Great game! I never would've thought of these concepts, they were really creative! I agree with the others that there should be checkpoints and maybe the player should move a little slower for better control. I'd also add that you should explain what each hand means - I know what a royal flush, but plenty of others might not!

Overall, loved the game - very polished, nice mechanics, and felt very fair because of how the enemies telegraph their moves.

Developer

Yes, this game presupposes you know poker hands and chess moves. I was never very happy with that as a prerequisite, but I wasn't sure how to add an explainer that wasn't just a boring text box.

As for the speed issue that everyone else also mentioned: This is the biggest weakness of game-jams: no time to play-test. I tuned the speed to what I was comfortable with, but that's stupid. I'm the dev and I know the game too well. It should be tuned a lot slower. Thanks for pointing this out!

Submitted (1 edit)

A lot of cool mechanics packed in here! Cards powerups and enemies that move like chess pieces in real time have a lot of potential, although sometimes it felt like a lot to keep track of. Maybe introduce them more gradually and have level design focus more on each mechanic?

Great use of the art assets, you chose ones that were not so obvious and combined them very well.

Also, you really aced the "game feel" aspect, the animations and sounds are great in this. Breaking blocks feels very tactile, and the telegraph on enemy chess piece movement is a great addition.

Developer

Thanks! I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the feel of the chess pieces the way I wanted. I'm really happy you liked it!

Submitted

I really loved the powerups and the card system, I only wish the levels were more designed around it. Perhaps making it more into a puzzly kind of game where you have to make the right decision to beat a level because right now it doesn't matter that much. Also checkpoints would be a nice idea so that 1 death is not instant restart, maybe every 5 levels.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted

Sadly it gets stuck on a black screen and I can only hear the music.

Developer

Oh man! I'm sorry!

What browser are you using? I'll see what I can do.

Submitted

No worries! I was using chrome

Submitted

Maaan I got randomly stuck in a wall :(

Besides that, this game is EPIC! FIGHT THE CHESS PIECES WITH THE POWER OF CARDS!!!

The only thing I didn't like was the speed of the player, it was hard to avoid some cards and grab others. The rest - awesome. The ending with character moving past the game title - wow.

Developer(+1)

Thanks!

I had some real issues with the physics engine. I'm not super surprised that you got stuck in a wall. Sorry for that.

In my mind, the difficulty of avoiding cards is a bug, not a feature. I like the idea of something that is very good or very bad depending on context (i.e., if you have a good hand, all the cards become essentially landmines). However, based on your comment, and some of the others, I may be alone in that assessment. 

And thank you for your enthusiasm! I'm really proud of the (somewhat secret) ending. I'm really happy you like it too.

Submitted

Wow, great game! The seemly different art assets worked well together to create interesting gameplay and all the juice/polish in the game makes it even better.

Developer

Thank you! I really wanted to juice it some more but I ran out of time.

Thanks for playing!

Submitted

Neat concept, interesting game play although the super rapid movement made control a bit difficult. It took a bit to understand the point of the cards but once I got that it definitely upped the enjoyment factor.

Developer

Yeah, I think the poker hand mechanic could have been explained better in the tutorial.

Thanks for playing!

Submitted

Very interesting idea to use poker hands as spell unlocks. Would like to have a little bit more health or maybe lives so you don't instantly game over on one hit.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing! I had plans for health packs that you could buy in the store, but some stupid design decisions I made early on made it difficult to implement within the time limit.

Thanks for the feedback!