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A jam submission

Uncharted WandersView game page

Journey across the perilous Divide between the Spiritual and Physical Realms. For profit, of course.
Submitted by Dashing Strike (@DashingStrike), Alex.Hamadey — 17 hours, 44 minutes before the deadline
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Uncharted Wanders's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game?#14.6254.625
Overall#44.1564.156
Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music?#74.2194.219
Gameplay - How fun is it to play?#94.0314.031
Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing?#144.3754.375
Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme?#373.5313.531

Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Viewing comments 25 to 6 of 25 · Next page · Last page

this game is awesome!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing, and glad you liked it!

Submitted

I LOVE the look of this game. Super cool and retro. I was really confused about the gameplay, but other people seem to have gotten it, so it's prolly some context I'm missing. Very impressive how much there clearly is going on here, custom engine, etc. Maybe a tutorial mode down the road would help folks like me? 

Developer

You're not the only one getting confused =).  I've (I think?) greatly improved the initial hints/tips/etc to help with people getting stuck, you can check out the latest version here, (I'll put it live on Itch as soon as the rating period is over ^_^), I'd be curious to hear if you're able to figure it out in that case =).  Maybe the only (seemingly obvious to me ^_^) thing not explained is that you'll want to buy a bunch of trade goods in one town and sell them in another to make some money if you want to progress =).

Submitted

ah I get it... I will check it out!

Submitted

I carried the high score for a little while, the first "not Anonymous" one. Now I'm only in the top 30. Don't worry, I'm going to play this game a *lot* more, it's absolutely one of the best in the jam.

I have to play it with a small window though, the CRT effect and acceleration / deceleration of the movement makes me queasy.

Developer(+1)

Ah interesting.  I remember someone else in the Discord noting that doing some easing on the movement caused some motion sickness for some people.

As a secret hack... if you press F12 to open the debugger, click the console tab, change the scope from the default "top" down to "index.html", and then run cmd('pixely 1') it'll effectively disable the CRT filter (or cmd('pixely 0') if you're a madman and want weird pixel textures in a high-res viewport...).  I'd be curious to know if that helps =).

Submitted

Good to know about that!

Submitted(+1)

Dungeon Crourier Simulator

The game is really fun and extremely polished but at some point, it will be just running back and forth to sell stuff over and over.

I will return to this after I have finished all the ratings.

Submitted

Congratulations for your team! Your game is insanely addictive. I had the most fun playing your title among the others in the jam. Finding money and expanding my group of mercenaries was very rewarding, visuals are perfect. Design of dungeon was also well made. Finding secret passages was quite intuitive. Definitely the best title for me, good job!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the kind words, and glad you enjoyed it!  It's great to hear finding secret passages was intuitive, I tried to place them (at least, the ones that were for bypassing encounters) in places where they'd not be too hard to find, but it's impossible to playtest when I already knew where they were ^_^.

Submitted

Cool ending sequence, it's always fun when you're not denied control during an ending sequence.

The game is fun. It's smooth, the presentation is good, combat is fast (which is important since it's automatic) and the game is well balanced, you've got some freedom on how you approach the game (where you explore, what type of merchant and what mercenaries you take with you) and going forward is always superior to grinding money. The dungeon is fun to explore, it's open, the monster placement is good and I like the good amount of illusionary walls. The scope of the game is also the right one.

Good one, thanks for sharing.

Developer

Thanks, and congrats for beating it!  I wasn't quite sure about the ending, it seemed cool in my head, but thought it might just be weird in-game, so I'm glad to hear you liked it!  Also glad to hear it was a "good amount" of illusionary walls instead of "way too many" ^_^.

Submitted

I really got into this! Very well made game. Definetly the complete experience!

Developer

Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Submitted

This is my favorite entry so far. Even if it's hard and you can kind of lose all your money (which is frustrating), it's still super fun to play.

Developer

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!  I tried a bunch of things to mitigate the possibility of losing all of your money, but there's a couple edge cases (like buying a new covenant and then not affording goods) still, though hopefully people just reload from their last save or autosave if they realize it and don't lose too much time ^_^.  Since you can get between any towns without fighting, it's usually possible to recover as long as you've got a few coins left, but would still be pretty frustrating.

Submitted

This entry is bananas. Looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, all the sprite work is magical. I can't get over the level of detail you've added like the sparkling ceiling in the spirit towns, the dithering in void above the divide and the town sky, the door transitions, the lighting/los, even the minimap is gorgeous. I'm really amazed what you've achieved in 7 days.

In terms of game-play, I find the concept interesting, hiring mercenaries, gaining knowledge of especially profitable trade runs, etc. Even unlock-able shortcuts to make the return trips easier. There is a lot of game here.

Really fantastic entry, well done.

Developer

Thanks, I love bananas!  To be fair, a lot of the sprites were from one asset pack, although the animated spirit town environment was all original - that was made when the artists abandoned the team, and I was left sitting here thinking "trading between the spiritual and physical worlds sounds great on paper, but how the heck do you draw that?"  =).  Kind of ended up feeling like a disco parlor, but I guess that's close enough, glad you liked it =).

Fun fact with the line of sight on the minimap, that's just a biproduct of the rendering algorithm showing which tiles are drawn on the given frame ;).

Submitted

Unfortunately, on the Windows download, I get this strange error on Windows when the game first starts and it doesn’t go away:

It doesn’t seem to affect game play but is just a bit annoying to have on the screen. Seems to be related to the audio? Switched to the WebGL build and was fine!

Gorgeous retro graphics on a lovely scanlined CRT.

Controls are snappy and the game is FULL of tons of content.

I played this game for over an hour and will likely come back to it in the future. Lovely game! Great job!

Developer

Hmm, what do you mean by "Windows download"?  There is no Windows download, only a web-based version...

Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed it though!

Host

Super solid crawler engine with all the stuff you'd expect from a dungeon crawler. Great mechanics all around, with excellent graphics and sound. The presentation with CRT lines and curved display really sells it well.

Interesting concept with being a defenseless trader and having to enlist henchmen to protect yourself. I totally can see this as a full game and it doesn't seem very far from being that.

I found the difficulty being a bit on the hard side. I kept dying a lot but that's probably because I didn't play it very well :)

The transition when you walk through a door is brilliant.

The controls works well and you nailed the perspective view.

Best implemented automapper I've seen in a while.

  • +1 for lots of illusionary walls!
  • +1 for dying when my henchman lost the fight to a chest, lol!
Developer (1 edit)
+1 for dying when my henchman lost the fight to a chest, lol!

Oh no!  The "chests" were just a super quick hack to have an enemy with 1 hp, 0 def, 0 atk and dropped loot, without having to actually add chests/containers/looting ^_^.  I actually at the last minute put in something so that if you had no mercs you'd auto-win against a chest, but I guess there's a bug that if you have all dead mercs, that doesn't get triggered, LOL!  Oh, or possibly there's the rather unlikely chance that the enemy attacks first, can could kill a 1-hp merc as well, maybe you got really unlucky...

Thanks for playing!

Submitted

Wow, your game looks absolutely gorgeous! I really love how smooth everything is, from the transitions to dialogue to the player rotation... and that CRT effect gives it even more charm. It's a bit hard on the first try but I'll definitely go back to this.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and glad you liked it!  Yeah, the beginning difficulty is a bit rough, I added some hints to the Itch project page that might help get started, and will push a version with slightly decreased initial difficulty post-jam =).

Submitted

This was an excellently made entry, in my opinion. The graphics were simple and had a very cool retro esthetic and shader! I loved the idea that you don’t fight directly, but, rather, hire mercs! I thought that was a very original idea! While trading is not exactly my style of gameplay, I appreciated the thought that went into setting up the Covenant, trade, merc mechanics and felt they were executed very well!

I think my only real sticking point in this game was being a little confused in the beginning. It really is told to you in the beginning, but missing that one bit of dialog regarding already having a tradable item on my person, I completely missed how to get started for an embarrassingly longer time than I would have liked. Still, though, that’s me. Others most likely caught on just fine.

Over all, wonderful game and great entry into the jam! Here’s the link to me playing the game on my stream :D

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing, and thanks again for streaming!  And, no, it's probably not just you who got confused by that =).  What I thought was a fun bootstrapping/introduction to commerce, as well as fitting into a vague theme of being in the afterlife or something along those lines, turned out to be just another bit of information overload.

Submitted

Finally found some time to finish this! I had a great time with it. The visuals, while ostensibly simple, established a great atmosphere, and the gameplay had a great draw that hooked me all the way through. Excellent job!

Developer

Great, glad you enjoyed it, and finished it!  I'm constantly surprised by how many people actually played it all the way through =).  A lot of the visual work is thanks to finding some good asset packs to use after the artists abandoned the project mid-jam... but I'm happy with how they turned out in the end too, glad it sets the atmosphere well for ya!

Submitted

Looks really nice, but i don't want to sell the photo of my beloved so i'll propably never play this game lol




PS: I'm propably going too but selling the photo of my beloved hurts. 

Developer

Don't worry, you can buy it back!

Submitted

Loved your game. Great art, style and nice music. Merchant part of the gameplay really reminds me of some old and unknown RPG from early 2000s.

I gotta say that this amount of illusionary walls would definitely call for a name change for "Shortcuts explorer" or a "Wall basher" :) Once you get the idea where they usually are you start to discover those shorter paths, or less dangerous ones. Loved your level design for that part. Underground seemed too chaotic though.

Would love to see continuation of this game with probably a harder travel routes, more covenants, mercenaries and maybe some tactical choices for combat, so you can have a certain combat builds.

Developer

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!  Yeah, I shoulda made the secret passages even more visible - they've got an animation on the wall texture to try to call them out, but apparently it's too subtle ^_^.  I did try to mostly just put them in consistent spots, but unfortunately they were probably just varied enough that everyone feels they gotta bump all the walls -_-.  Merchant part was inspired a bit by Uncharted Waters (SNES one came out in 1993, but there's been a ton of them), and more recently Horizon's Gate which is like that crossed with Final Fantasy Tactics ^_^.

Underground was mostly just an excuse to have some variety and big open spaces, and started from a randomly generated dungeon that I hacked up to make the topology I needed.  Great that you made it far enough to see that though, and congrats on beating the game!

Submitted

Hey, I played your game :)

  • nice title screen, loved this CRT lines / tv effect.
  • remarkable that you managed to add that highscore list, loved it, superb idea :)
  • from the very start, a commercial-level retro look and feel, loved the colors and UI style!
  • the game is packed with content around every corner, this is a great approach!
  • liked a lot the idea of trading/hiring mercenaries, so simple but keeps you doing it!
  • great music in town and dungeons and also great movement.
  • challenging! I thought my first brutish mercenary would take care that red monster, but he died and then I died :) Which makes the player to think more over it, which I loved!

Overall, a great game with lots of replayability! Definitely going to return to this, it has all the nice ideas and great execution.

Developer(+1)

Hey vlzvl, thanks for playing, I've got your game on my short list to check out soon ^_^.  Glad that you liked the CRT effect, I always worry things like that might be a bit much, but it really helps soften the chunky pixels =).  Great feedback!   I didn't intend for the first merc to be unable to survive one fight with a patrolling monster, but I added those just near the end, and depending on the rolls apparently you can die in the first combat (though, if it taught you to avoid patrolling monsters, perhaps it served its purpose ^_^), glad you enjoyed the challenge!

Submitted (1 edit)

I always wanted to be rank 1 in something, and now I am it in this dungeon crawler jam game. :P

I had quite a lot of fun with this game. Trading goods is quite relaxing.

The beginning was a bit rough. I started two times over, because I went to the left at the start, at the other "normal" town. Then I tried to "trade", only to find out, that goods cost the same in both towns. Then I had no money left to go anywhere because the mercenary was dead too. I felt a bit like an idiot after my 2nd restart. :D However, after finding out how this game actually works, everything went very smooth. I traded back and forth, got an overpowered party, and then cleared the rest of the game. Becoming  a mighty merchant felt very rewarding. I never found a "dingleberry" for the last quest though.

Soundtrack was relaxing and nice, visuals worked well too, lots of nice sprites. Nice game, i had fun (obviously :D).

Developer

Great score, and congrats on being first (at least for now ;)!  For the Dinglehopper quest, that was an 80s reference that not everyone would have got, I guess, see here, and you can probably guess what item she actually wanted ;).

Sorry about the rough start, I really wish I had gated that path upon getting to Spiriton first (though Mags tells you a bunch of times to go that way, I guess no one reads ^_^).  And I'm one of those "hug the right wall" kind of people, anyone who's a "hug the left wall" kind of person I guess just starts down the wrong path -_-.

Submitted (3 edits) (+1)

Haha, well i know that movie, but its probably a different word in the translated version for my language. xD

People *never* read the instructions, I guess. :D Besides, I generally think if there is a right/left path as alternative to a "straight path", quite some people will always try to go to the left/right alternative first. Even if told otherwise. Simply because "what if there is a secret?". Its a bit of video game conditioning I guess. Because in plenty of games its actually indeed better to go right/left first. :P

Submitted

Such a fantastic and imaginative entry. The best so far for me. I am utterly impressed!

Developer

Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed it!

Submitted

A bit grindy; but everything looks, feels, and sounds smooth and consistent. Combat is so difficult to give depth and balance to in a week it's a big relief having mercs auto attack for me.

Developer

Thanks!  I do like my games on the grindy side =).  I'm really happy with how the combat turned out - the original plan was a basically non-combat dungeon crawler, but thought there should be a bit more risk (and a different track to spend resources on), so the auto-combat was the simplest thing there, and I really liked it.

Viewing comments 25 to 6 of 25 · Next page · Last page