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(+2)

I have to say, the graphics and sound design are outstanding! You really captured that gameboy feel, and the little touches like the screen transitions only add to that feel. And you did this without using a game engine? Damn, that's masochistic! But impressive.

That being said, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. Movement is clunky (I guess you recreated that aspect of GB well huh), because the player collision shape is a CHONK. Barely fits in doorways. Like, lose some weight, miss witch. That wouldn't be so bad if not for the pushing puzzles. It's still not clear to me how exactly it is supposed to work. I thought it was something like sokoban, but it's not. You can push blocks halfway, but only sometimes, other times the blocks don't move at all no matter what you do. There is no tutorial to teach you the rules of the block-pushing, so we're left in the dark.

The combat is really flat. Light attack has no reason to be used ever, since it only deals 1 damage for 1 mana, while heavy attack deals 2 damage for 2 mana, not wasting an additional turn. Defend completely negates damage for 2 turns, so if you just spam defend->heavy attack over and over, you can win any fight without taking damage. This is really boring however, because you have to wait for your mana to slowly regenerate every 3 attacks, and enemies have 10+ HP. So it's a slog. You can cheese the mana regen phases by just using reveal at the enterance doorway of the room with the ghosts, so the door that spawns to block your escape keeps the ghosts away from you.

Potions don't help either. Mana potions are actually harmful, because gameplay-wise you want your mana to run out, because if you cast a heavy attack at 2 mana, the enemies don't get to retaliate.

Overall, the gameplay loop and especially the combat could use a heavy rework.

As a piece of art however, this truly could have been one of the GB games back in the day. It's gorgeous. <3

I wonder what you could have made if you had used a game engine?

(+1)

We appreciate your feedback. It was indeed a challenge to make it without a game engine with the little time we have during the week. We are aware of the issues you mentioned.

In fact, the combat was supposed to be more complex, but we had to simplify it. We noticed it would require more work as we did the tests, but for the Jam’s time, we decided to leave it for later. In the GDD, we have described a more advanced evolution of combat with new abilities, skills, and actions more or less effective against certain types of ghosts. I hope we can improve this later.

The block problem, believe me, it irritates us too, lol. They were supposed to work like the movable blocks in Link’s Awakening for GB. Basically, some blocks are pushable and others are not (visual difference between the blocks, the ones that look less old are the ones you can push), but there is a lot of inconsistency between the pixels of the colliders. This is one of the reasons why the blocks sometimes get stuck on the way.

About the art, thank you very much for the compliment, I never did so much pixel art in such a short time haha.

(+1)

I'd be really interested to see where you take the game post-jam. Given that it was made without an engine, it's quite the achievement already. You really got a taste of what gamedev was back then, since I don't think there were any commercial engines around GB's time :D

You could go for a more puzzle-y route for combat - to defeat enemies with limited resources by exploiting their weaknesses and such. Something like Desktop Dungeons' puzzle levels if you know that game.

Good luck with your project! <3