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Nebularceny's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #1 | 4.680 | 4.680 |
Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
Planning and executing a heist, with a bit of genre fusion minigame while traveling to (a bit stretching it) treasure hunt along the way on a space ship that is... not sinking.
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Comments
What a nice game, it feels like a complete and a really polished game!
I’ve enjoyed the crawling, the combat, the art and the music! For combat I think the only thing I was missing is the description of how it works (ingame), but I guess I’ve figured it out during the play.
I don’t have anything to critique. Game was really good, I’ve defeated every enemy except the hidden one and it felt like all the features were adding to the game (I especially loved the pathfinder).
Here’s my play-through:
Pure class! The polish and execution throughout is super solid. I was initially a little sceptic to autobattle but that worked great actually. A lighthearted mystery/heist/adventure crawler with a fitting combat. Pacing was great too. Never a dull/filler moment. Great music also! lol at the cat :)
I didn't have time to leave a comment yesterday so I'm writing it now!
This was AMAZING, everything was so well done and polished I genuinely don't have any real complaints! I can honestly say of the 20 entries I've played so far, this is my favourite game of the jam.
I love the look of the artstyle, the Moebius influenced hand-drawn comicbook look is fantastic! The variety of enemies, locations, and the layouts of the dungeons are all well done.
The movement feels solid, the snapping that transitions into smooth motions felt good. And I loved how non-hostile NPC's would be pushed slightly off to the side smoothly.
The autobattling is juicy and fast, and I liked how the equipment upgrades gave a bit of choice in playstyle between attack/accuracy/defence/dodge. And the changing hats looked great!
Oh and I REALLY appreciated the move-by-clicking feature, it made backtracking and grinding money much less frustrating. It was so helpful, and yet I would not have even thought of it as a suggestion lol.
The music and sound effects were also very well put together. In some other entries that ran a bit long I ended up muting the music, but I didn't do that here.
And I really liked how you integrated the fast travel minigame, where the player can manually speed up and slow down. And if the player crashes they're teleported to destination and pay a fee, until they're out of money. But then the game doesn't hardlock the player, but just makes it so they have to build that money back up. This was a GREAT anti-frustration feature, made travelling go as fast and challenging as the player wants, AND doesn't end the game if they make mistakes.
On every front, this was a top tier entry, I would unironically play a full-length version of this. I'm so happy I got to see it through and for a little while actually held the #10 spot in the hall of fame!
Excellent work!
Thanks for playing and for the warm words =). The click to move is one of those features I encountered in another game (which had a lot of large procgen levels) and it was such a nice (and, frankly, easy) feature that I had to add it to my engine right away =). A lot can be forgiven (large, sometimes repetitive levels) if moving isn't a chore.
Excellent game!
Great atmosphere and very good visuals. I particularly like the main character.
Dialogue presentation is very good. Moving into the other person's square + a little shift for his sprite works well.
Movements are pleasant.
The map is really well implemented, and auto travel is very practical.
Frankly, it's pretty impressive for a jam game.
I enjoyed being 1st in the Hall of Fame.
Great Game !
I expected a lot from you and your team and was not disappointed.
Gorgeous graphics, nice sound, rock solid crawler implementation.
If I could wish for something it would be that the auto battle would automatically use a med kit if the health gets low.
Great entry!
Took bit of time getting used to but it was a good game, the art is very nice and I like the space station with the npc. Style was good and the minigame was nice to play. Exploring the world was good too, the combat was too basic i thought.
Overall a good fun game with a very nice style too.
Very unique character style! I included it in my compilation video series of all of the games from the Dungeon Crawler Jam.
I felt a little overwhelmed at first, but the fast travel option helped a lot, and after 10 minutes I was really into it. Not much else to say. Excellent entry!
I sold the red devastation! Hopefully that's not a bad thing. Amazing entry. Everything is super polished, from the stylistic handdrawn/comic like art, the movement, the pacing and balance. I liked the music and exploring the different planets and while the traveling was simple, it was a fun little minigame between planets.
I don't have any complaints except I may have missed how to find the ship without checking each docking bay, probably my fault.
Kudos, this is a top tier entry (like usual!) and you can see my gameplay here
Nice Entry!
The game looks very polished and the hand crafted graphics are great
Took me 70min to complete the game. I did spend some time at the guardian, but couldn't destroy him.
Its a bit strange when you back into a stair/teleporter you are turned around when you exit. Got me confused a few times.
The movement is kinda smooth, but there is a delay when holding buttons which makes you not wana use it, so you are down to tapping only.
The Combat with auto battling and deterministic outcome is a great choice imo.
The itch page has instructions on it, but once you start the game you cant reach them, ESC only opens the in-game menu.
I don't think there is a way to gain gold on the ship, but the tickets cost 100gold, so potentially you could end up spending it all and not afford the ticket out, softlocking yourself I guess.
I would like to have had an option to exit out of the final NPC interaction menu to go finish stuff. Maybe having a % completion could be an additional fun thing.
Very nice entry!
Thanks for playing! You can't get soft-locked because if you're out of money, you get a free pity ticket =). Similar for crashing if you have no money, it's not game over. For viewing instructions, yeah, Itch's "fullscreen" is a bit weird on the setup, but the back button on your browser will get you there (just make sure you save, I'm not 100% certain itch won't unload the game... or actually the back button will first navigate to my main menu which probably isn't desired here).
For the final NPC, it auto-saves before the choice, so you can simply click "load game" after making a choice to get back if needed.
% completion would have been a good idea, that probably would have made a better leaderboard secondary factor than the nebulous/grindable "wealth"...
Yeah, I ended up ALT tabbing and opening the game page in a separate window to read it again.
Nice with the free option there. I never ended up in that situation but I also started the return to the ship by buying the ticket to prevent it. I should have skipped that and just bought med kits until broke I guess. :P
EDIT: I went back to check the out of funds thing, it's great!
I can confidently say this is my favorite game of all the games I've played so far. Honestly, I just didn't want it to end! Everything is perfect from the look of the walls to the UI, the movement, the balance of difficulty, the writing... I played for about an hour and a half and ended up second on the leaderboard.
I can't think of anything that could have been better. It says episode 1 on your page, do you plan on expanding your game?
Congrats for a stellar game!
Thanks for playing and the kind words! No plans for an "episode 2", it was just fitting for the comic book theming =). Maybe should have started with "issue #7" or something instead to be clear :D.
Well, well - you never know, maybe one day in the far future ... :-D Something like "Ep. 2 - Escape from the Henitentiary" - mhm?
Wow. Every year you all raise the bar.
I have a special place in my heart for hand painted textures ;) and these were gorgeous. I loved the humor and writing as well.
Movement was perfect, everything felt very smooth and responsive. The auto-battles were very well presented and I think they fit the whole vibe of the game. Also, the music kicked ass, and was another highlight for me.
When I got the second chicken hat (the Chicken Eyes, I think) and saw it basically melt on my head, I thought that was going to slowly be turned into a chicken :D
I really don’t have any constructive feedback, I’m sad to say.
Hmm... I really expected something valuable to be hidden here. I laughed when I read that. Kali4nia joke was brilliant, dunno how many people will get that one but it was brilliant. I really love how many secrets there are and how clear everything is - enemy stats, equipping items, map, everything is very clean and polished as usual. I really liked the patient sentry in the early area - running into giant enemies and strategizing dealing with them or coming back later is something I really like. Showing which doors are unlocked on the map is such a nice QoL feature! Thank you for that. Did you mean to spell "Civillian Deck" incorrectly? Feels like maybe a joke and maybe a typo.
Honestly this is an amazingly beautiful game, it look SO GOOD! OMG it really does. I hope you two work together a lot more. I did notice the lack of tactical combat - but I don't think that would make the game better anyway. Absolutely beautiful game.
My one criticism is that I really had no idea what I was doing or why I was in the game until after I had been playing for quite a while.
Glad you liked it! I hoped at least one person would get the Kali4nia joke =). In practice I think most people only read a few of the item descriptions though, judging from watching streams, and some were better than others, so that's fair. "Civillian" was a typo, which I blame primarily on Chrome not doing spell-check if the text is in all upper case :D (and secondarily on the comic book tradition of using only upper case). As for knowing what you're doing, we wanted to make the game feel open, so I mostly intentionally let you go around and do whatever you wanted, although if you followed the exclamation marks on the map and only flew to new areas when someone had given you a reason to do so, it should give you reasons for things... but ended up pretty easy to just stumble through things in any order and maybe it should have actually gated people from going to the various locations until they had a reason to do so...
Blaming the tools and comic book tradition, I love it!
I just sold the red devastation to the highest bidder. It didn't seem like greater evil than killing these poor smiling aliens on Calliope. I also got the references, got cocky and tried to test my might and rigthfully got put into to shame.
The presentation is stellar, I love the arstyle including the UI elements, it's super consistent and they're quite some details in the context. These alien worlds feel alien and are all the more exciting to explore because of that. They're some quite nice tunes too. Then the game is incredibly pleasant to control, everything feels so smooth and you can walk as fast as you want to. Combat is super well presented and doesn't waste your time, equipment progression is satisfying and the enemies you need to come back later on to defeat enhance this.
If anything there could be more than one way to spend your money, which could be either different upgrades and/or consumables to choose from.
You created a fantastic entry once again, congratulations to the team.
Incredible. Such a polished game. The art is great - I love the pencil drawing look. UI is clean and intuitive. Combat is very simple, but kinetic. The music is excellent and has variety. Your teams always produce such great quality games.
Yet another excellent entry from you! A few QoL things would have been nice (e.g. quick save) but it certainly did not detract from the game. For longer jam games, I often feel they overstay their welcome and I’m ready to be done before I get to the end. This game did not do that, it was the perfect length!
You saw my playthrough so not much else to say except, thanks!
If you would like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://youtu.be/hHr9D2aedfs?si=cRtLvOJImS79hNsR&t=4965
it took me around 3 hours to finish) and I join to compliments to this game. I still didn't open last door on first planet. Where is noone home. One thing that I've noticed, sound loop of an engine during flight sequence has a gap at the end. it's possible if you are using mp3 file, just switch it to ogg if this is the reason. Thank you for the great game.
Thanks for playing and your feedback! What browser were you using? Any chance you were playing on Mac OS or iOS Safari (they don't support OGGs so we fall back to MP3 there, which isn't ideal, but better than no sound or crashing downloading a gigabyte of .WAVs :). The last door on the first planet is for the quest to locate The Ascending Sword, but I'm guessing you must have found the ship manually by going through every docking bay on the station instead of talking to people, which is totally okay =).
I played on PC. I didn't know that ogg isn't supported by Safari that's weird. And yes I have search through all docking bays))) forgot to tell you that I love your fast travel system.
This is one stunning creation in basically all respects, music, art, writing and smooth experience playing it over all. Those battle start transitions. Wow.
I played on controller since it was available and there were a few things missing a bit. It was a bit too easy to do two moves when you just wanted one. And a few interactions didn’t have a controller solution like map travel. The equip/unequip with left right on d-pad or left stick was a bit problematic using the stick. You’ll see that in the video.
I also accidentally missed some of the story bit because disappeared from screen a bit quickly, especially when it coincided with me getting loot. It could also have been solved by me being able to re-trigger them by stepping on the same tile again.
Overall an extremely polished experience.
The playthrough with more comments in there (when youtube is through processing it): https://youtu.be/feZf859Kr1M
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! I've started watching your playthrough and have been taking notes of lots of little things to potentially fix =). Yeah, the controller support is a little finicky (and didn't get around to adding on-screen icons for them, mostly because I figured not many people would use it anyway). Thanks for sharing the video!
It plays great, it looks great, it sounds great. This is basically a commercial-level game. I particularly enjoyed the hats and the unexpected asteroid avoidance mini-game. My only nitpick is that I wish passing by characters when they can't move out of the way felt smoother. Currently the camera seems to just clip through their sprite - maybe they could fade out when the camera is very close to them or something. It's literally the only thing I noticed that didn't feel super polished. Oh, and civilian only has one 'L'.
Thanks for playing and for your feedback! Good catch on the typo, that'll be fixed after the jam for sure. I blame that on having to use all caps to be "comic-book-y" and Chrome for some reason not doing spellcheck when things are capitalized :D. The walking past people artifact bugs me too, it was on my polish to-do list, but I didn't get to it, definitely something I hope to fix in the engine before next year. It's actually worse than just clipping through it, it's part of some complicated logic that moves them over and to the side when you're in the same cell with them, but then as you're interpolating away it goes a little haywire and snaps them back to the center of the cell and then you clip through it ^_^.