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Cutest Dungeon's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity / Innovation | #11 | 3.767 | 3.767 |
| Visuals | #16 | 3.867 | 3.867 |
| Audio | #32 | 2.833 | 2.833 |
| Overall (Fun and Playability) | #32 | 2.967 | 2.967 |
Ranked from 30 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How was the theme(s) implemented?
- Cleaning up the hero's mess The hero's leave "mess" in the form of triggered traps, monsters needing refreshments or revival, gold coins, doors left open - Dragons One of your monsters is a legit DWAGON! - Retrofuturism Set sometime in the early 20th century, the eccentric Earl of Grey had invested in all manner of futuristic dungeon furniture and accessories, such as the teaomatic 3000. You've inherited his eclectic dungeon. congrats. - Elemental Rock Paper Scissors The adventurers do "elemental" damage to your monster which must be countered by the correct "elemental" tea.
Where did the assets come from?
Most Graphics were created by the team during the jam
Some audio assets were downloaded or made prior to the jam
Do you have a diffrent Discord nickname?
Phil
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Comments
Whoa, this might be the most unique fun mechanic I've seen yet in this jam! Great way to clean up after the heroes - I loved walking through walls, locking gates, seeing heroes and the vanquished monsters and then bringing the monsters back. It's really good. The art really works for me, very charming and fun. Also the rock paper scissors mechanic works here. "Does anybody want red tea? Anybody?" lol. I look forward to playing more of your games.
The first run was somewhat confusing, but not in a negative way. After dying the first time and realizing I'm in a wave defense game, it all became so exciting!
Managing refreshment production and running around to resupply the dungeon minions was great. I loved the walk-through-walls mechanic.
On the third run I actually noticed you can rearm traps so that added a new cool element. I feel like this is an untapped idea and that it has potential to become more than a jam game. Very nice execution.
(I will say though, the adventurers get overwhelming very quickly, but that's fine, quick runs)
And yes, it is the cutest dungeon
tysm for your kinda words - so glad that you enjoyed playing!
Wait, I WROTE THE COMMENT IN THE WRONG WINDOW ahahaa and swapped them around. Damn. ONE MOMENT for actual review
lmao! ok that does make more sense now :)
I'm glad to hear you had fun. If you're willing to go for a 4th (or more) run, you could eve, try to find the golden brick to go through walls with tea. And in case you didn't find it yet, you can summon the monsters to your current position in the summon tab next to movements :)
Enjoy ;)
I absolutely adored the art in this game! It felt a little bit like a tower defense game which I really enjoyed. I’m looking forward to coming back to this one.
Thank you so much for submitting this to the jam!
You can watch my playthrough here: https://youtu.be/sPyAPn3r1fI
Thank you so much for your review. I'm glad to hear you liked the game and we WILL make it even better after the jam :)
You can maybe do even better runs on this current version by using the monster "summon" function (just above the movement UI there is a tab for summon) or even go through walls using the secret passage (you need an eye for shiny rocks ;) )
That was awesome Captain Coder, tysm.
For those getting stuck around wave 4 - try not to think of this as "tower defense". It's a logic problem or math equation that you need to solve. The heroes come into your dungeon and make mess. The damage, healing and steps between everything are known quantities - you clean up their mess by optimizing the dungeon - and use the "summon" tab to move the monsters to the best place to achieve this.
The tut was gonna explain all this more clearly ofc, but we ran out of time and had to cut it ;(
Oh, the colored border around your monsters shows the elemental damage they suffered, so you can optimize your tea making :)
"You survived 10 rounds of adventurers and kept the dungeon cozy. The monsters are very grateful"
That was The Earl of Grey's Dungeon in Easy mode, then on Normal difficulty too.
I really like that the game is turn-based, it controls well, offers a fun gameplay loop and the difficulty is appropriate for a jam (after one's aware of the summoning feature).
Thanks for sharing!
omg, it's the legendary cryptrat!! tysm for playing and even beating it :) means a ton to us all!
Even though I didn't know what I was doing at first, I was having fun! I agree with others that this type of game is mayybee not the best experience in first person grid movement. But you tried something different! The visuals are also really nice! Thank you for sharing! :)
glad to hear you liked it! :) we had lots of fun making it too
Did you write the game with react?
I'll hafta let Phil answer that one but I think so?
We're not using Unity or Godot or anything - it's a custom engine, if that's what you were asking?
Yeah, kinda. From the page react was my best guess. I'm making a note on all games about the Engine used, I got an Other category which these go in.
Yes this was written with React, 3d parts with react-three-fiber and the poimandres Drei helpers/utilities.
I use React every day in my day job so it was a natural fit and since it's web-first it's perfect for gamejams. 🙂
Its interesting to see how fast it loads compared to most games made by engines.
Very Cute! And the game tries to implement all of the themes, which is impressive. The graphics are very nice, escpecially that you made them all yourself. The sfx fit the game well. The movement is fast an precise. But I think, that the game you wanted to make, does not totally fit with the genre. I mean, a cute form of Dungeon Keeper, with tower defense gameplaye etc. is a very cool idea, but you play Dungeon Keeper mostly from an overhead perspective, because you need the information. But anyway, you tried something and many things about the game work very well.
Appreciate your feedback, we plan to use everyone's great suggestions to improve it after the jam.
Thanks for playing!
Really loved the visuals in this game, and the mechanic around tea was great!
Super impressive to make a rougelike too!
tysm for your kind words!
Cute game for sure!
I mostly picked up ingredients and healed monsters, apparently I should be able to place monsters and fix spikes as well. Yeah, very hard to get an overview of what was happening and what tasks were needed, but still very nice concept and gameplay!
Menu system looks really nice.
Thank you!
thank you for playing! we'll defs be adding a proper tutorial in future :)
I found this game quite fun to play even if at first I didn't understand what I was doing, but being a little tea serving ghost in a dungeon to help out your fellow monsters and protect the tea machine was fun.
The design for all the NPC's were cute and the creativity for this game was cool!
Thanks for playing! Yes, we hope to expand in future with a proper tutorial to help with this! :)
I really liked the tea concept! Walking and not walking through walls. That was the strongest part of the game by far for me.
My problem though is that I suck at tower defense and in all honestly never found one that worked for me.
So my critique should probably be taken with that in mind, but I feel like there are two main problems: available information while playing and player on-boarding. The latter is really hard, extremely hard to manage during the jam, but I also (?) didn’t understand or promptly forgot I could summon monsters and playing without it seems quite impossible even on easy setting. Might be easy still is way too hard for a jam-difficulty even with summons.
The second part, from my understanding of tower defense games, they generally have a zoomed out overview type of perspective for the player. Or fast ways to scroll over the map and get to places. Otherwise it becomes very hard, and starts to feel unfair. I would suggest, as a start making the side-bar much larger allowing the player to see the entire map at all times. Probably with a static north in the map (no rotation) and rotating player direction instead. Clear signage of what are heroes and monsters (and their state). I understand the map showed what you needed to know (mostly) but only if you know and remember what was a monster and a monster in need. And heroes and spike traps looked identical to me.
The heroes and monsters were cute though, and I like the work on the intro sequence!
Play-through:
Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, you're absolutely right the summon mechanic is critical and we didn't do enough to make it clear to the player how it works and how to summon them. We had a tutorial planned but as jams go we ran out of time. :P
I really like your idea of having an overall map, we'll be sure to address this in patches after the voting period.
It's great to see such details feedback, thank you! There are definitely a lot to improve and some good points I didn't think about yet.
As mentioned by Phil we will work a bit more on it after the jam to polish this little baby gem :)
This game overall is really fun and has great art style. I like how you need to serve the correct tea to certain creatures, and the fact that the tea will be served after you take around 10 steps.
The game is too difficult as I often times have to bring tea to people and then the enemies come in where I'm basically screwed. I don't really know what to do besides making tea and protecting the dungeon.
There is a summon mechanic to help the player place the monsters startegically as well as some hidden shortcuts and the possibility to go through walls to help accelerate the player's movement across the map.
You can also replay the same seed mutliple time to build up a startegy ;)
I'm glad you still enjoyed the game and I'm sure our artist is happy to hear you like their art :D
Interesting concept for a game. I always like when people do dungeon themed games from the perspective of the creatures living in the dungeon.
Yeah once the idea was suggested I couldn't get it out of my head! I really enjoyed your submission also, thanks for playing.
The spiny map messed with my head a bit. I did like being able to explore the dungeon safely from the outside of it. Reminds me of some dungeon core books
we were gonna have an option to select north as up (doesn't spin), or forward as up, and I think we totally ran out of time! We'll try and add this once the voting is over :)
thanks for playing, glad it was fun :)
Great visuals for a cute game, also I love the game idea the player being the one who needs to take care of the dungeon, its a clever implementation of the jams theme. Excellent job on this game :p
Thanks! We appreciate your feedback. Imaya did a great job on the sprites and tileset.
I love the play on Darkest Dungeon with the title! The game does a good job of telling you where the adventurers are when they show up and where the tea machine is so that you can find it again quickly. I had to play it a few times before I noticed the summon option to get monsters to go to a specific location. The game also really lives up to the advertised cuteness, everything is adorable.
I loved yours too, we're "play on titles" og fr here :)
tysm for playing, hope we can extend things more after the voting ends
Fun and cute lil game, great job for 1 week you guys :D
tysm claeys! hopefully just the beginning!
Super cute! The Cat Bat was adorable xD The game was functionally done well and looked cute but something felt a bit lacking... Like it was more chore than fun taking the tea to them. Really good job though :)
It was quite the challenge to take a unique mechanic like this and figure out how to make it fun within the allotted time, a lot of good ideas that had to be cut due to time.
Thanks for playing and for your feedback, we have lots of ideas for improving it after the voting period ends. 🙂
Look to an old game called Dungeon Keeper for some inspiration :) It's a little similar to your idea!
Played for a bit. I'm disoriented by the map, I think giving the player time to explore layout of the dungeon and the locations of doors and monsters before the adventurers barge in would be great. The walk-through-walls mechanic is great, and the sprites are cute!
One thing we implemented to try to cover for that was to allow the player to select the seed to generate the dungeon. So if you did not have a satisfactory result on the first playthrough you can try again with the same dungeon and try to get a better result ;)
And some hidden mechanics are also there to help you move through walls even with tea in hand if you can find it :)
This is indeed the cutest entry I played. Visuals are top, though sometimes the map feels a bit empty. The sounds are fine, nothing special, but it fits the game well. The gameplay itself feels a bit like work for me. The dialogues are nice to have, but they quickly become repetitive and then there is not a lot left to keep me engaged. Bringing the correct tea to the correct monster is just not satisfying enough on its own, and I don't feel like I have a real impact on the rest of the game, even if somehow I do, that I couldn't really figure out. I played a few rounds, beaten a few waves, but couldn't win it.
Overall it's a solid entry, it has everything that it needs.
Here is my gameplay video:
Thanks for the solid review :)
We obviously and unfortunately had to let go of a lot of the intended content because of time and theme restrictions but I'm glad you liked it 😁