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A jam submission

VallaView game page

Game entry for the Touch the stars game jam.
Submitted by DamyanNov — 1 day, 7 hours before the deadline
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Valla's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Fan Favorite#543.0623.750

Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

I liked how easy it was to swap between the animals and how you had to use the different forms to overcome puzzles. I would have liked some more depth to the puzzles themselves, but it was still a nice game with really good custom art assets.

Suggestion: Allow the player to swap from animal to animal, instead of having to go back to a human again.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing ^^ I’ll definitely look at switching from animal to animal. Puzzles are admittedly basic due to time constraints. I’ll look into giving them more depth and perhaps combining mechanics from different animals to complete puzzles in the future.

Submitted

This wasn't a bad game! You may benefit from a bit more signposting to objectives, as it wasn't always clear where to go next. The exploration map is possibly a bit too big, as Drifty mentioned.

Does the inscription in the pyramid do anything? I wasn't able to determine whether there was a way to get through that bit with the footsteps next to it.

The animal shifting mechanic is pretty cool, and a neat approach to on-map abilities. There weren't many places here to use each one, but it speaks to an interesting set of abilities that I could see being well-used or combined in cool puzzles in an expanded version.

Battles were fairly well-balanced IMO. Blind wasn't debilitating, Rend provided decent healing, and scaled up with more enemies, and the Brave mechanic provided a decent opportunity to finish enemies off quickly after they got to a certain level of health. Levelling up a couple of times made the enemies pretty easy, but I always prefer erring on the side of being a bit easier than harder.

Not a lot to say about the story as there wasn't much there to comment on, but the theme was definitely incorporated.

Overall, good effort. Keep it up. :)

Submitted

Heeeeey! this was a pleasant surprise! game looks good but mostly your shifting animal mechanic make it reaaaally interesting.

The game definitively needs polish (understandable given the limited time) But you should keep expanding it, I really like it!

Question, what plug in you used for the brave mechanic? im looking for a skill that doesn't consume the players turn and that might help me.


thanks!

Developer

I’m using  the Visustella BTB system and the battle core from them as well

(1 edit)

Good starting impression with the music selections and opening map. I like the use of lighting and the character walking sprites are great. The font has been changed into a nice, big and easy to read font, which I appreciate. The busts are good and detailed. 

The maps are pretty and seem decent but maybe a little too spacious in some areas, and definitely too spacious in others. I find the lack of dashing quite annoying and I wish that we were able to dash around. What's the reasoning for not allowing it? It seems sadistic to me to have these huge maps, yet disallow dashing. Are you a sadist? ;)

Jumping into battle! I'm a wolf-rat-squirrel creature?

The dragonbones battlers look great and the animations are fantastic but the brave battle system is not my favorite. When you use your brave points up, if you don't kill off the creatures they will get several turns back to back, so I end up not using it very much.

The Rend ability seems overpowered, but maybe it's necessary when you're fighting larger groups.

I suggest making the enemies in the first area a single enemy to face. Fight a single bird instead of a pair of birds, and grant the player a few more starting items.

The guards that block a path to the north should be able to run from. They are extremely hard and you get locked in combat. My dumb butt didn't save and now I'm locked into a losing battle. This makes me sad. The Golem boss fight was fun, good job.

The battle backgrounds look really good. I like them.

I can open chests from angles that I should not be able to. (I grabbed the iron claw from a chest near the golem fight on a mountain from the bottom area.)

Once you get an enemy's attention they follow you forever, but I think they should eventually turn around and go back to their home zone after awhile. 

This game really needs a mini map, like bad. The nature of running around looking for the braziers to light and every time you find one you go back to see if the statue responds differently becomes super boring given the fact you cannot dash and have no idea where the next brazier you're missing is. It boils down into running walking around around aimlessly, with the occasional battle. The story is pretty weak, but that's probably because it's taking too long to get to it. 

40 minutes in I realize that you can shift forms by pressing the number keys... OMG you need to make this sooo much more evident! I was giving up on this game and couldn't figure out what to do!

Put a few small images on the screen that shows a visual representation of the form you character is in and grant the player an item that toggles that visual representation on and off. So by default it shows the number 0 and a tiny Man icon, then a 1 with a wolf icon, then a 2 with a bear icon. That will be a new player reminder that they may press the number buttons to switch forms. Once the player learns that that is how it works, if they want the game screen real estate back, they can use the item that toggles the icons off as they so desire.

Overall, I'm really pleased with this project and it came as a breath of fresh air out of so many mediocre and bad games. Great job, I look forward to seeing where this one goes in the future.

P.S. Allow dashing on almost all your maps. Especially in the huge zones, you sadist! ;)

Developer(+1)

Haha I normally do allow dashing but I omitted it because the wolf moves at 2x speed.  Combat is very unbalanced for sure. The guards are in escapable because you could cheese it by just running from all of them to remove them from the map otherwise. Eventually you get a cat form that stealths past them as well as the random encounters. Overall, I wish I’d spent more time on the game but I’m glad you played it! I learned some things to put towards my main project so win win. Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted

Looks like this game uses the bravely default brave system, though it wasn't really clear at first.

This game was pretty easy using the healing attack (rend) and the buffing special (alpha stance). That combination seems really powerful.

Seemed a bit odd that you are always a wolf during combat no matter what form you take.

The quest system and enemy detection system were interesting. I didn't test the stealth on the roaming enemies, unfortunately, since I had killed them all before I thought to check.

I suppose that the limited number of encounters made testing easy.

One of the jumps is glitched I think and jumps to the wrong spot since it jumps you directly onto another spot, which means you have to move off then on.

Movement speed being based on form was kind of interesting, but I would've expected the stealth form to be a little faster. I guess balance reasons.

Sound can be a bit weird near the waterfall, especially if you are just passing.

One of the paths leading east doesn't actually take you anywhere, so might be worth changing the tiles there or adding an event there so the player knows it is later content. That way it is an obvious dead end instead of leaving the player to guess if it is a bug or not.

I didn't realize until after that the clue was for the temple and not the path to the temple, but even if I had known, it wasn't clear where to go. Might have been better to have used a more directional effect to help the player better identify the path if they took is slow.

The tiles near the crystal are weird and look very off/out of place.

For the ice boss, it wasn't entirely clear when you were supposed to guard.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! This was my first foray into proximity sound so I expected it to be a bit wonky XD The jump does take you to the wrong spot, I should have made the warning for the ice boss closer to the actual attack right now it warns on turn 10 and attacks on turn 13.  I originally wanted to make it where Rory could fight but I didn't have a non chibi sprite for him and no time to make one so I stuck with he can only fight in wolf form. Overall, it was a bit rushed but thanks for playing ^^ (Yes Rend/Alpha is op)

Pretty unique experience, I did not expect playing as a trap. Visually this game is really nice and I appreciate how it doesn't waste time with introductions. Unfortunately, it's a tad too difficult in my opinion. The fights (or rather enemy moves) are not balanced at all. You can get permanently blinded by bats, and you can suffer three "double attacks" from the Guardian in a row. This means that to win you have to be lucky. I didn't discover any healing, so I was a bit stuck. After about 10 deaths I called it quits. The "Brave" mechanic is a little strange, but welcome. It seems like it lets you use up to 4 actions in a row. Some actions don't seem to mix and sometimes they are skipped entirely. Then the enemy gets 4 actions as well. I'm not sure about the logic behind it, but it's interesting. The fact that enemies need to detect you first and then they chase you around the map is also very welcome. I wish more games did that so well. The only problem is that if your character gets stuck having a monologue, they can easily catch up to you and start a fight. Even though I died a bunch of times, I had a fun time with this game. I only hope that you make it a bit more approachable for dummies like me. 

Developer(+1)

I honestly should have put in a detailed tutorial on the brave system. You can use up to 4 actions but you pay them back later. Giarding builds brave points to let you use multiple actions without the penalty. Rend is Rory’s only source of healing as well as some potions I have hidden near the beginning. Overall it was a good learning experience and I’m glad you had fun with it. Thanks for being the first to leave feedback!