Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
A jam submission

Harold Jam: Nature's ScratchView game page

Submitted by Shendoah — 6 hours, 45 minutes before the deadline
Add to collection

Play game

Harold Jam: Nature's Scratch's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Music#102.3082.308
Gameplay#111.8461.846
Comedy#111.9231.923
Overall#122.0002.000
Graphics#131.8461.846
Story#131.5381.538

Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Comments

Submitted (2 edits) (+1)

Overall: 2- An interesting premise stretched way too far. As Nate said, you'd want to compress this for a game jam. There is so much running around, finding dead ends, and fighting basic enemies that I got tired pretty quickly. A jam game should make a strong impression without too much extra fluff. Going forward, I'd suggest not only narrowing the game's scope (which you did fairly well in other Harold Jams IIRC) but finding ways to differentiate your gameplay and combat and make it more memorable.

Gameplay: 2- Really most of the gameplay is running through sprawling maps that should really be half the size at most and hitting dead ends. Battles felt stock and unmodified and I really couldn't tell what enemies were weak to or how much health they had. I also forgot to grab my party members like KV and got mopped for it. Animal spawn rates were way too low to really make the constant running feel justified. I like the idea of being able to return to the home map at any time to buy items, but armor and weapons require so much grinding to afford for even one party member.

Story: 2- Not exactly heavy on it.

Music: 2- RTP. Sound effects also needed some balancing. Ice-type moves are very very loud.

Graphics: 2- RTP.

Comedy: 2- Not a whole lot to be found, but also not in a way that detracts from the game.

Graphics: 2 - TREES. SO MANY TREES.

The random dungeon drove me nuts cause it was like staring into an abyss of green. I'm not sure if I can think of anything else to say, haha.

Sound: 2 - Nothing particularly of note, but the generic RTP field music is a perfect idle grindy game like this.

Story: 2 - There's no real story following the intro, and no one talks, either. I'm not gonna batter you on this point, though, since this clearly wasn't the focus, so I'll leave the score like this.

Comedy: 2 - There's a campy Bad Dudes reference, but the line is awkward. I'm not sure if there is anything else that would really qualify as comedy.

Gameplay: 1 - There's a lot I didn't like, but thankfully a lot of it is also easy to fix were you to expand this. Some of them were already said I'm sure, but the following is what I thought while playing:

The appearance rate of tokens was too low. For a grindy game like this, the option to speed up the animations or skip them is heavily advised, as the combat is pretty sluggish. The miss rate on physical attacks is frustratingly high, sometimes Kasey had to almost all of the DPS herself. To a degree it's expected that that random dungeons have dead ends, but there's an enormous amount of them, and none of them have loot so it mostly just feels bad. Speaking of loot, where is it!? I want loot in my vibes-based grindy dungeon game.

Overall: 2 - It's definitely unfinished and the gameplay is rough but I don't think it's a bad idea necessarily. For games like this it's best to generously provide the player with large quantities of dopamine. Loot, cool monsters, secrets, even bonus scenes or whatever if you decide to have a more character-driven focus. Working those kinds of things would help make this game enjoyable.

Jam HostSubmitted

Three things I liked about this game:

  1. Once you get into it, you can just vibe and grind.
  2. The portraits do a decent job of portraying emotion.
  3. The random elements are a nice touch

Three things I did not like:

  1. It's a bit too easy for a player to unwittingly shoot themself in the foot. I accidentally went to the main grinding area before collecting my teammates and got wrecked.
  2. The story is forgettable and wafer-thin.
  3. The overall design is lacking. I run through large expanses of nothing, eventually have a same-y battle or two, and repeat without much changing in a meaningful way.

There is way too  much padding in this game. I could not finish it in time. Try tightening things up next time: instead of relying on filler interactions to fill out the play time, strip things down to just what is meaningful and polish them to perfection.

Developer

It's actually almost impossible to beat the jam build.  I say almost because it can be done but you have to get specific.

Basically, I set token = 50 on the parallel event to update the variable for how many every time you returned to the "lobby."  I should have set it to greater than or equal.  So it's actually possible to get exactly 50 tokens by stopping interacting with the animals when you get close to 50, and have enough gold to buy the rest from the merchant in the maze.

It's my own fault, I didn't playtest enough.

Honestly, it's gonna be a challenge to figure out how to make the randomized maps not look like trash.  I've been experimenting.

Submitted

While the concept and idea of the game are interesting, the low spawn rate of the animal make the game too repetitive. However, it seems like the dungeon is generated. If that the case, I like it. 

Anyway, this is a good submission. Good job!

(1 edit)

Overall: 2 (It hurts to be this harsh)

Gameplay: 2 (Dungeon Crawling Collectathon is an interesting idea. This implementation just doesn’t work for a jam)

Music: 3 (RTP, but that particular field theme is a bleeping bop)

Story: 1 (There’s a story beyond the intro cutscene?)

Graphics: 3 (Mostly RTP, although that fence tile is new)

Comedy: 2 (Didn’t feel like it was trying to be funny outside a shoehorned Bad Dudes reference)

(+1)

The game loop idea is interesting, you just stretched it out way too far for the jam 😅i'd have balanced it to get to the gates in 10-20 mins personally. Shame about the gate bug, too.
Hey, I also sent incomplete games before, that's how we learn haha 🩵

Submitted

I quite liked this one, lol! Maybe a little too long especially with how you have to figure out that you (I'm pretty sure) HAVE to use the return scroll to reset the dungeon, but eh.

I'd really have liked a more understandable dungeon map layout. For a short and sweet dungeon crawler it felt really spread-out and confusing (and greeeeeen).

I loved Kasey's facesets lol. Some funny shit.

At one point I found a golden statue but couldn't interact with it?

FTR, I did play the fixed-up version.

Submitted(+1)

Ooops just saw Sawyer didn't want people voting on the fixed version. Is the only change seeing the final boss fight? Cuz that did not affect my rating at all since it felt pretty minor overall.

Host(+1)

To my knowledge the only change was that it increased the spawn rate of animal tokens, so I think it's okay if you played that version. I just don't wanna make a precedent of people updating their games a ton and fixing major flaws left and right (makes it hard to keep track of stuff and not fair to voters).

Submitted

Not too bad, but I played for like 25 minutes and didn't seem to go anywhere. Also couldn't buy anything in the lobby which sucked. I like the direction the game was going, but unfortunately I didn't get see anything outside the first set of dungeons.

Submitted

Cool concept of delving into randomised dungeons to collect enough currency to progress. Things do get grindy fast to gather enough tokens. I think there is a bug that even after collecting 50 tokens, the guard still won't let me pass.

Developer(+1)

Yeah that's the real game breaking bug in the jam build.  basic math error, had it equal to 50 and not greater than or equal to.

But, I stand by this loss.  I'm just providing an actually playable build for entertainment.

Host(+1)

Heyo! You watched this live, but I'll be typing up my ratings here for preservation and all that!

Overall: 2 - The concept was cool, having a little randomized dungeon, but the execution with animal tokens being so rare made the gameplay lose its luster really fast, and the other elements did not compensate.

Music: 3 -I just found the overworld theme to be a real jam. It's a normal RTP song, but I like it quite a bit.

Story: 2 - There's effectively no dialogue after the initial cutscene

Comedy: 2 -There may have been a joke here and there, but not a ton

Graphics: 2 - It utilizes RTP which isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't use the assets in a super thoughtful or creative way.

Gameplay: 2 - This one is close to being fun, I was enjoying the first couple minutes, but the shallow combat and endless scroll looking for animals made me lose interest swiftly. After about 35 minutes with only 22 tokens I decided to call it quits.

Developer(+1)

Yeah I'm gonna figure out where I screwed up.  I stand by this L, but any objections if I upload a fixed/enhanced version for people to enjoy?

Host(+1)

I believe Itch doesn't allow you to update an entry during the voting period, but I think it'd be fine if you were to upload it as a separate project. Unfortunately in the name of fairness, I have to ask that the fixed version not be used for voting, since being able to update mid-jam would lead to all sorts of issues, but I'd love to give the fixed version another run to give you more of my thoughts.

Developer

Yeah I'll make it clear I stand by the L, and I've found out that the jam build truly is broken (basic math error lol).