| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #5 | 3.644 | 3.644 |
| Creativity | #5 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Visuals | #6 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Audio | #6 | 3.889 | 3.889 |
| Game Design | #6 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Theme (Max 4 if Flavor isn't used) | #7 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Who all was involved in the creation of your submission?
TrickyTriangles
How does your game fit into the Theme?
I interpreted "down to the wire" to mean down on your last legs. In this game you are afflicted with a poison that quickly drains your HP to 1. It won't kill you, but it will leave you at the brink of death. This status effect elevates the tension of the game and forces the player to make strategic choices with how to approach enemies and how to manage their limited healing resource, which can enable them to get out of a tough situation.
Does your game contain sound effects?
Does your game contain music?
the game is fun but the character animations are a little off, though I’m not very good so a little bit more grace would nice with an “easy” mode or something, you don’t have to drink the potion at the beginning which doesn’t make very since. that’s all the advice I have, the game plays well with control, and the music is okay too.
Edit: Would like to see it expanded with more difficulties.
I really love the concept of this game! This game very much reminds me of The Binding of Isaac, which is a game that I've put far too many hours into :P My biggest piece of feedback is that the poison taking away your HP every second or so makes progressing very difficult. A great thing that I've read before is "if you give a player 8 hp, but every enemy does 2 damage, you've effectively given that player 4 hp." This is very true here; you've effectively given your player 1hp with how quickly health depletes from the poison. Giving the player a longer time before health depletes, or maybe even basing it off of a similar mechanic to Pokemon when a member of your party is poisoned (ie every 10 steps that party member loses HP to the poison) would be a really good quality of life improvement for this game.
Thank you for playing the game! I watched your playthrough on stream, and I agree with the criticisms you made. The HP mechanic was a tough balance. I struggled with coming up with ways to make the game feel fair while maintaining the atmosphere and style of play I wanted. I wanted the game to be challenging and suspenseful, and require a degree of caution and patience from the player, but in the end I think it just came out punishing. I've watched / listened to about a half a dozen people try my game out so far, and the main character's fragility has been the first and foremost complaint of every one who played. In my head I suppose I saw this game a bit like a shoot-em-up. You've got the fragile main character who dies in a single hit, and a bomb (the potion) that you can use as a panic button to get you out of a tough situation. But I guess I forgot that in those games you typically get multiple lives.
On the stream you brought up that it would've been a good idea to add a quit / retry menu instead of having to completely restart the game, and that's actually a really great idea. Where to put the player on reset was a tough decision as well, but the full restart was mainly a product of time constraints. By the end of the jam I was just rushing to wrap everything up to be in a playable state. The game does need some more QOL features, I agree, but I simply didn't have the time to add them before the initial due date.
The UI graphical bug you experienced was caused by putting the game into fullscreen. Unity's UI system is a bit strange in that each element can be given an anchor point + an offset position that allows it to render relative to that anchor point, and by expanding the screen size those anchors were moved around as well. So the Z and X button icons, for example, were anchored to the lower right of the screen and given a small offset. The game was only meant to be played at a 900x600 resolution, so when the screen got bigger the bottom right shifted to being in the black void and the icons went with it. The hearts in the health bar were also a casualty of this problem.
I noticed you also had a glitch where the main character went invisible after getting hit, and I believe this was a case of me doing some bad code. I think it's caused by the player getting hit while still invincible somehow, and the routine that handles the blinking animation ends up running twice and blinking the player's sprite out of existence for a bit. I had run into this a couple times while playtesting and it would've been a very quick and easy fix, but I just forgot about it. Whoops! :S
I'm sorry for the longwinded response. I appreciate the feedback, and I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the game (at least a little)!
Fantasitc! Had a lot of fun playing through this one. The combat feels really well implemented for a jam game, and the poison mechanic put a really cool spin on dungeon crawling, and really adds to the intensity! The ending is really nice and feels super satisfying too. Amazing job on the sound design also, and I think you mentioned the spritework was used from elsewhere, but it's still really well implemented and the dungeon is laid out nicely and in a very aesthetically pleasing way.
Feedback for improvement: This was already discussed on stream, but the difficulty is far to unforgiving. But it's so very close to ideal in case you want to take this game further! I'd recommend making the health deplete slower still, so the potions are a little more tactical (currently they serve more like short invulnerability timers to run through enemies, as getting hit doesn't matter, your health is gone within seconds anyway).
Another thing would be to have enemies signal in some way before attacking. Particularly the guys that shoot spikes, there is no warning at all (that I could see), so no chance to anticipate/dodge.
I also took damage in a transition coming back down from the north-most key. Luckily my potion hadn't worn off yet, but that would have felt like a cheap death, so maybe tweak the bat positions away from the edge slightly and bear that in mind for any future additions :)
Seriously good job though! Another amazing game, and especially impressive given it's a solo effort.
Thank you for playing, and congratulations on making it to the end! I've shown this game off to quite a few people, and to my knowledge you're the first one that's gotten all the way through. I completely agree that the difficulty is too high. It was a tough balancing act between making the game accessible and creating the type of gameplay I wanted to create, and I think I leaned a little too hard on the challenge. I've had a lot of people suggest reducing the poison damage tick rate even further, and that's something I had toyed with during development, but I was worried that reducing it too much would've impacted the identity of the game. A major factor of what inspired me to make this was the idea of the player being in constant peril with limited resources, and the strategic decisions players would make when put in that situation. I was worried that if the poison ticked down too slowly it would allow the player the maintain their health above 1, which from my perspective would remove the "down to the wire" tension that I was going for. It's a tough call. A part of me wonders if the Zelda-esque format of the game is partially at fault here, and that the way I handled the HP mechanic and the health meter created a false expectation in players. You mentioned that the potions act as little more than short invulnerability timers, and in truth that's actually how I wanted them to work! I know that typically in games of this genre people are used to taking multiple hits and having full access to their health bar, but here it's a bit of an illusion. You have to approach it from a different perspective, but unfortunately that perspective is a little disorientating.
The spikeball enemy could've used a little more visual cues for its attack, yes. Knowing how fragile the main character is, I had tried to give all the enemies deliberate attack patterns that the player could figure out and predict, but on that one I dropped the ball a little. The strategy for the spikeballs is to keep your position in a safe zone until it fires, since when they fire they remain stationary for a couple seconds. As for the room transition damage, that was also an oversight on my part. I knew that with the enemies resetting their positions on room transition that it could lead to the possibility of unavoidable damage. I had tried to leave the entryways clear to prevent this, but it looks like I didn't test that room properly. That's negligence on my part.
Updated to game to incorporate some of the fixes we talked about on stream. The game should now be a much more manageable experience. The game should now be framerate-independent, but if you come across any additional issues feel free to let me know in the comments.
Changelist:
- Bats and slimes no longer catapult backwards when hit.
- Bat movement speed and projectile speed is far more reasonable.
- Poison damage tick rate has been slowed by 50%, giving potions more of a benefit.
- Textboxes have been fixed to prevent immediately skipping to the end.
Wow this game is so well polished and stylized! Really love the zelda-esque style and gameplay. I'm gonna have fun with this one for a while I can tell...
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.