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This one's really cool. I love the art (and color choice), and doing isometric with GB Studio is very impressive. The environments seem full despite GB(C?) limitations. I also love the presentation of the battles. The health bars, along with the camera panning down into the arena, and the arena itself resembling the overworld placement/environment is super cool. I love that different battles have the characters in different positions. The final boss was super cool, I was surprised to see something so intricate for a game jam game.

Unfortunately, I didn't gel with the gameplay as much. I'd say it's the only weak point in this project. The overworld isometric controls are a struggle. In particular, if you hold a diagonal direction, your character stops entirely, which causes some grief in combination with the isometric view. I've seen how GB Studio handles input, so I'm sure they're not making it easy. Sometimes the collision pokes out in unexpected ways as well, like around doors. I noticed the game chugs a bit on my SP compared to the web player, which is unfortunate since the game looks so good on it.

The battles were alright, but a bit simple. The gameplay does feel a little bit railroaded; I think I would've preferred more monsters appearing at a time, so that I could whittle them down while searching for weaknesses.

None of that ultimately takes away from what works so well for this. This seems like it was a really tough project to make, and the final result is super impressive. I think it's splendid.

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Wow, thanks so much for all the thoughtful feedback! I truly appreciate you taking the time to go in detail like that. 

Unfortunately, like you mentioned, isometric movement in GBStudio is a bit wild. It actually makes it so triggers don’t activate sometimes, but I didn’t find that out until the last day of the jam so I couldn’t go back and fix it. However, we’re looking into making it work. I did try to make the movement better (specifically the diagonals) but a play tester told me they felt like it took away from the character of the isometric movement. I’ll see if I can find a middle ground for that. 

The game also probably chugs because I have the RTC being checked every frame. I’ll see if I can mitigate that. Thanks for giving me the feedback on how it runs on your device. I have no way to test it on real hardware myself. 


Again, thank you so much. This REALLY helped me understand what my game can do better after the jam. 

Glad to help!

Yeah, I've had a lot of trouble with triggers in the past as well, they're very unpredictable.

For me, the issue with the movement wasn't specifically having to use up/left/right/down, but rather that the in-betweens make the player stop. Might just be a way that I use D-pads, but it's common for me to keep the D-pad pressed down and simply sliding my thumb to change directions, rather than un-pressing or re-pressing, so as a result, the player would often stop while I changed directions.

Yeah, GB isn't the best when it comes to frame checks. If you haven't already, a handy trick is to put a 3-4 frame wait at the start of update checks so that it only runs update every few frames. I've never used the RTC before, so it's possible it's an especially demanding task.