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A jam submission

AscentowerView game page

Endless roguelite dungeon crawler rpg thingy.
Submitted by Apho (@AphoDev) — 16 hours, 54 minutes before the deadline
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Ascentower's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Gameplay#122.8873.333
Comedy#172.4832.867
Overall#202.7143.133
Story#222.2522.600
Music#232.3672.733
Graphics#242.4252.800

Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

So I replayed this today and finally reached the end of the game, and wanted to fix where I said the humor didn't land after the beginning. Turns out more humor stuff landed for me ^^ Also, thanks for polishing the game up more :D

Submitted(+1)

Overall a fun dungeon crawler which needs some improvement in item balancing. I also like how irrelevant Harold is.

Submitted(+1)

Played up to floor 13 so far. May continue but I think I got a good enough feel for the game. 

Overall: A super enjoyable and multi-layered rougelite which got me thinking about my own battle systems and the little things I could do to take them far. That doesn't happen a lot so that alone deserves special notice.

Gameplay: Surprisingly in-depth! Class changing was a nice surprise, and I also appreciated how each character had a unique playstyle on top of it. (Class changing mid-battle would have been next level.) Mid-battle equipping was a lifesaver when I realized I gave Marsha Soulsweep Staff right before a boss. I just feel like there should have been a required number of enemies to fight each floor (coughcoughtake3fight3coughcough) because most of the time I skipped enemies. I also couldn't keep track of how each element affected the others, ironically enough.

Music: Those RM 2003 remixes go hard.

Comedy: They do not shut up. They do not shut up. THEY DO NOT SHUT UP THEY DO NOT SHUT UP THEY DO NOT SH

Graphics: Mostly RTP and Aekashic, but I admire the effort put into the window layouts and aesthetics. Little things like that can make a world of difference.

Story: Go up the tower. Definitely a more gameplay-focused game which obviously isn't a flaw. There was some awkwardness with the exposition which I have a hankering doesn't get resolved since the game is endless.

(+1)

Hi, I will be going live with your game :D

HostSubmitted(+1)

Lots of cool things about this game! Clearly a lot of time doing some customization of things like icons, enemies, status effects, etc. The more Harold heads, the better imo. Some cool randomization going on with the stages, though it still was repetitive after a few floors. Combat was alright, but status effects remaining after battle wasn't fun (especially blindness). There was also almost no incentive to battle after gearing everyone up. I kept on fighting in hopes of some extra badass weapon, but they all felt super par to me. Customizing defensive items was just a roll of the dice, so I just picked a random shield. 

One weird glitch was the ability to use the stat items infinitely. This worked for a little bit, but then a little later the items did legitimately disappear, so not sure why that would happen.

I found a lot of parts humorous. I laughed out loud at the staff description. The dialog felt like it was all in the same voice - and didn't distinguish themselves in their personalities. And out of personal taste, I found they were all just really mean to each other in an off-putting way. 

The game had a lot of interesting things going for it! Could act as a solid base for more development.

Submitted(+1)

This is a very decent entry. While not amazing, it’s not bad, either.

Battles are not overly long, there are some (albeit basic) action sequences, and some real effort went into making a variety of skills to spread across the classes. I also really liked the class change system, it’s a neat idea that lets players adjust the party to fit their approach to combat. Flavor text is constantly humorous, which I appreciated.

The way combat was implemented is where my feelings are most mixed. Since the party does not gain experience from engaging in battle and items are already abundant thanks to the various chests and such dotting each room, there’s not much reason to fight other than to test the party’s skills and see how different combinations work. I decided to avoid a majority of the fights after about the third or fourth floor. I do like that there is an “end” to the game if you decide you don’t want to endlessly scale the tower. Boss battles were fine overall, though having repeat bosses felt kinda disappointing and there wasn’t much tension due my large stockpile of items and the bosses dying well before my team was anywhere near critical. That said, if you had to slant the difficulty in one direction, easier is generally better, which you did!

Having the same tune going in both the map view and battle is fine and kept the energy of the atmosphere consistent, but no battle back (aside from some faint speed lines) and keeping the same tune across multiple floors did get a little boring.

Even if this entry isn’t the most innovative or mind-blowing, I still had a good time with it and respect the work that went into it. I didn’t encounter any bugs and liked the little touches, like the Harold heads falling on the title screen and the Harold head cursor. Well done!

Submitted(+1)

I actually didn't really enjoy this T_T The humor landed in the beginning for me that I liked, but the ones after the intro didn't really. I also had this issue with the characters being so speedy and even the menu selection quite slippery and I'm not sure if this is just me, but the speediness even in menu selection affected things negatively for me. The battles didn't grab my attention much and I find myself kind of randomly pressing whatever, and then at times making sure I attack and heal when HP is low. Though I do gotta say I appreciated the class change idea a bit; that was the interesting part for me. But there's kind of not really any revival item, and I started to get frustrated when I'm left with one character and around floor 10, and started to realize perhaps this could be endless and maybe I'll never beat the game. Don't have much fuel to retry or battle when there's only one character left in the party. Maybe if I skipped encounters and only fought the bosses it might have been easier. Maybe this is a rogue-like game, but I think without at least some revive items here and there, it didn't feel balanced at all. It feels like I have so many skills and characters at once, and even healing items, but no revive items (only ever revived a character once at the beginning and never since then was there a revive item for me).

The idea itself is interesting, but perhaps the frustrating parts above could be tweaked a bit.

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I could definitely tweak stuff in the next updates.

About the speediness issue, are you perhaps using a display that runs above 60fps? If so, there should be a setting in the options to synch the fps which should hopefully fix the issue?

Submitted(+1)

Hey, thanks for replying and so glad maybe I wasn't harsh or anything. That's a relief hearing back from you and I really appreciate that. About the speediness, so I just did a quick test and matched the monitor FPS option, went into battle, ran away, switch back to the default setting, and went into battle, and then closed the game... and turns out the speed is okay after I set the adjust monitor FPS to "ON." Not sure why it doesn't happen in other people's MV games but only(?) yours so far, but yes, from my quick test, it seems the setting in the options does fix that issue. ^^

Submitted(+1)

not a bad game I like the setup for everything but found myself running past encounters to just get to the bosses

Submitted

I'm not quite sure what the goal here was. There's a ***ton of items just thrown at the player, but not a single revive item. (Guess that's what makes it roguelite for some reason)

The class change also seemed kinda overkill and unnecessary. 

Overall it plays and feels like someone just copy/pasted their big project into a jam project, made some dialogue to fit the requirements, mashed together some bland maps and called it a day.

Balancing seemed fine for the most part. Not sure why status effects just never disappeared (At one point my therese just had all these effects of burning, bleeding and that hilariously big thorny roots animation on her)

Combat in general felt default to me. Deal as much dmg as you can, heal when getting low.

Humor did not land at all in my case.