A jam submission

Echo RiftView game page

Fight your own shadow with each their own unique spellbook

Submitted by Steelkenny — 14 hours, 27 minutes before the deadline

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Echo Rift's itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Theme	#653	3.000	3.000
Cleverness	#755	3.000	3.000
Artistic Style	#970	3.000	3.000
Playability	#1486	2.000	2.000

Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

I didn't realize I was fighting a sprite of myself. So, that was confusing at start. The music and sound effects were awesome. I liked the animations and environment. I think it would have been much better if you could jump, because I found myself really wanting to do that to avoid the enemy projectiles. Keep at it. Good job on your game. It was fun!

Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes

Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
Yes

Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes

Tell us about your game!
~ Controls ~
Move with WASD.
LEFT CLICK to shoot, SHIFT to dash, RIGHT CLICK to cast spell.

~ Goal ~
You will fight against your own shadow that copies you. However, you and the shadow have a unique spellbook. Each spell has an element and 4 levels. Collect orbs to switch elements or to level up a spell. Kill your shadow as often as you can to increase your score.

~ Extra information ~
This game is a prototype, made in only a little bit more than weekend. It is not balanced or polished, but we're very proud of what we achieved in such limited time.

We were out of time to clearly show what spell you currently have equipped. Refer to the first page of the GDD to see all spells.

Extra Notes
It's our first game jam ever! We had a blast :)!

Comments

FearganSubmitted122 days ago(+1)

Congratulations on your first gam jam entry! Really cool concept and quite an accomplishment for such a short amount of time; very creative. Once I started to pay closer attention to the mimicking mechanics, I managed to get a high score of 20. I felt like the low jump height was holding the gameplay back, but that’s something easily balanced and I bet this wouldn’t have been an issue with a little more time. I really enjoyed the spell variety and the artwork for the main characters is awesome. Great entry; I’m looking forward to seeing more of what you create!

Submitted

Grimoire of the Gunslingers

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SteelkennyDeveloper121 days ago

Hey, very cool! Level 20 is quite a feat.

> I felt like the low jump height was holding the gameplay back

Initially I thought spells like (Air+0) high jump would be way more intuitive in a way that you'd be like "Oh I need to jump high, let me grab air quick" but that was hard to put into practice. Movement spells are mostly useless in their current state. I get where you're coming from because I agree, but higher jumps would've made the flight/jump spell useless. It certainly needs balancing there if we were to continue the project.

> the artwork for the main characters is awesome

Haha when I contacted my friend I gave him full creative freedom for the art. I requested 24x32px sprites of hooded mages without legs which seemed doable in a weekend (you can see them in the design document) but he was like "Hell naw". But it came out really great yeah.

I'm sad that we couldn't fully complete everything because the person who did the voice lines actually recorded a lot more, but I didn't manage to put everything in.

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E-pi-cSubmitted127 days ago(+1)

High score of 7! Really fun concept, I am so curious how you programmed the AI! Took me a minute to realize what exactly was going on (had to read one of your responses), but there is a surprising amount of depth in the combinations you can make! Very nice game.

Submitted

Shadow Boxer

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SteelkennyDeveloper126 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Every frame the inputs of the player are saved in a list, and 60 frames (*) later the Shadow copies that input, mirrored. They actually both use the same object/class, and the code for player or the code for shadow seperately are very small. The only difference is the spells they cast and the way the input happens (from key reads for the player, from the list reads for the shadow).

When shooting the bullet remembers who cast it so you can't self-damage, but that also is just one unique object. There's no shadow-bullet or player-bullet. I'm pretty proud of how few code I had to reuse.

(*) If the Shadow uses level 3 time this amount gets lower, making the Shadow copy the player faster

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E-pi-cSubmitted126 days ago(+1)

So cool. I love that thank you for sharing!

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EcksSubmitted133 days ago(+1)

First of all the character art is fantastic, 10/10 for that. But this game absolutely kicks my ***. The AI snipes so well and even after like 10+ attempts when I managed to beat her her health just refilled and she didn't die?

I'm not sure if it was a spell being cast on me but sometimes my controls would just randomly invert? Super confusing if it's intentional or not!

I like the voice acting and it's very ambitious to add to a gamejam game so great job on that and the music.

I'd really like to dive further into the game and some of the spells in the screenshots look awesome but It's just waay too hard for me.

Submitted

Blood X Thirsty

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SteelkennyDeveloper133 days ago

Hey, thanks for the review!

> The AI

It's not an AI that's kicking your ass, it's YOU! If you move, the shadow moves. If you jump, the shadow jumps. If you shoot wildly and dash everywhere that means the shadow will shoot wildly and dash everywhere, which will be a difficult opponent because indeed, the shadow snipes well.

Instead of playing it like you would play Super Smash Brothers, you can take your sweet time. The shadow does a random attack every ~10 seconds, but that's it. During that time you can build the spells you want.

Some notable spells are Fire+2, which is the beam. Water+1 is a self-heal. If the enemy has void and you cast a +3 spell, you can see the black hole featured in the screenshots!

> her health just refilled and she didn't die

I tried to keep the wall of text small, but that's how you score. Every time you kill the shadow, you score a point. If you die you see your final score at the end screen. I know it isn't very clear but we were getting out of time :(

> Super confusing if it's intentional or not!

It's intentional, it's the Manipulation+0 enemy spell - but I agree that there might've been an indication for it.

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symbol24Submitted134 days ago(+1)

Congrats on your first Game Jam! Congrats on submitting!

Submitted

The Stone

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SteelkennyDeveloper133 days ago

Thanks!

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