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A jam submission

Crab Raid TacticsView game page

A Tactical Action Roguelike - Command a squad of Crabs in real-time battles with hordes of enemies and tricky bosses!
Submitted by Servelat (@srvelat) — 2 minutes, 6 seconds before the deadline
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Crab Raid Tactics's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Art / Graphics#34.8754.875
Overall Fun#44.6254.625
Controls / UI#184.2504.250
Sound/Music#443.3753.375

Ranked from 8 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)

Hello Servelat !!

Nice improvements you've made there !!
Game is harder than it was at the previous Feedback quest, which is a good thing I think !
You have to play your crabs more carefully.

The design of the ennemies is a lot better now too !
It's good to see several landscapes for the arenas, the one underwater is gorgeous.

For an odd reason selecting crabs with 1 2 and 3 still did not work for me ? Could it be because I use a french Azerty keyboard and not Qwerty ?


Now is the time for a music in the background that gives you energy to blast those blobs !
Also I found that difficulty stays about the same for a bit too long, and then steps up big time when the big fellows are popping amongst blobs. Maybe adding them one by one to learn from them before sending waves of them ?

Keep up the good work !!

I am going through all submissions to make all developers aware of an important Google form I've made.

I'm joining the IQ folks to help organize smaller events in between the main FQ event in order to help prevent us from getting too many games in main events. Right now, I have a planned structure for these events but I would like to hear from everyone who was in this event in order to tune things better. The survey is a bit long, but it covers as much as I could think of. If you can take the time to do the survey by June 1st, I would immensely appreciate it!

You can find the form here: https://forms.gle/P9LPYwERhJtpZzteA

(+1)

Great to see you back!

I did notice a few additions that weren't there last time, such as making players click on the first reward so they know to do so. The gameplay is just as fun, too.

I think with where things are now, I'd say what you really need is music for the fights, to prevent the player from choosing the next stage until they've taken the reward, and to add sound effects when you click on certain things or when pop-ups come up. This way, there's an audio notification that something is on screen.

Developer

Thanks for checking the game out again!

I agree those are the biggest pain points the game currently has. All of them (blocking portals before reward is collected, sounds for rewards and UI) are in my backlog, and I'll be sure to look into them in the coming weeks.

As for the music - this is one of my biggest concerns. I am working with a composer right now, and iterations are taking too long. There's definitely room for improvement.

Submitted(+1)

I enjoyed this quite a bit! Didn't think I would, either haha

FEEDBACK:

1. It would be nice if, when selecting crab upgrades, a picture of the crab you're upgrading appeared on/near the box. This got a bit confusing at first.

2. Is there a place we can see what certain icons mean? The portals would populate, and I'm guessing certain icons led to different zones: treasure? more exp? I wasn't 100% sure, though. Maybe a small tutorial for this?

OVERALL FUN: I had a blast! Really enjoyed how simple and small the levels were, but they gave just the right amount of challenge. Also... the battles leading up to the boss (giant crab) were relatively easy, but that boss is tough... which is a good thing. Overall... great game!

ART/GRAPHICS: Crabs and enemies are cute. Levels are bright and vibrant. Animations look fluid and amazing. I have no complaints here.

CONTROLS/UI: At first I hate the controls, because I thought we had to click on each crab and drag to move. It wasn't until my second playthrough I saw you can select crabs with 1, 2, and 3 and then just move them. It got a LOT better once I realized that. So, controls were great and easy to understand.

SOUND/MUSIC: I do feel there could be a bit more intense music playing during battles... especially the boss battle. However, the rest of the sound effects were great. The healing totem, the explosions and hits. All sounded great.

Developer

Thanks for playing! I'm glad I was able to leave a good impression :) If you don't mind sharing - I would be happy to know what gave you an initial idea you wouldn't enjoy it! That could help a lot.

To your questions:

  1. This is something I thought about, haven't found a proper place for it in UI. There is a selection in the bottom menu, and there is a picture in the right panel with all the details, but I do understand it's not necessarily when the player is looking at that moment. I'll try to make that screen more obvious
  2. There's nothing in the game that explains it right now. Tutorials/Tooltips are one of the things I'm going to focus on next. Those icons indicate rewards - Extra Loot (Exp), Morale (Extra lives) or Elemental Rewards ("Attuning" an ability or upgrading trinkets). This one is mentioned a lot - I'll look into making reward choices more clear.

Also, I am working with a composer on the music, but the stuff is taking a lot of time. I will definitely introduce something there - it does feel empty without proper soundtrack. 

Again, thank you very much! Your feedback was very helpful!

Submitted(+1)

Hey there, Crab Raid Tactics are getting better and better!

I especially enjoyed the boss fight, it was fair and fun, just maybe a little too long for a first boss in my opinion. I had a healer, a tank and only one solid damage dealer, probably teams more resolving around attacking abilities would defeat him a lot quicker, I will test it later!

Here's what I caught:

I had to play Crab Raid on low graphics settings, initial settings caused my PC to overheat in the menu (it's not-high end, but I played Elden Ring on it with low graphics). It was set to EPIC on all, but maybe it shouldn't be the default choice if it requires a very good computer? :)

I found that when I set a higher resolution than my monitor could handle (I set to 1920x1080, my max screen res is 1680x1050, which sadly wasn't selectable in game) crabs were moving to wrong places (offset to left and upwards), even though movement arrows pointed to the correct place on map. There was no issue when I set resolution to be lower than 1680x1050.

In terms of gameplay, I don't think I have much new feedback.
There's only one thing that comes to my mind, something that GameGushGamer mentioned on the stream - when one of crabs leaves the raid, the keys we use to select specific crabs may change. If we got used to them during the raid it might be difficult to control the party right away, especially in the heat of battle.

Overall it was fun as always! :)
Developer(+1)

Hey, glad you like it!

  • Settings are supposed to be auto-detected, will investigate
  • Curious find regarding resolution, I'll have to try and reproduce it on my end. Also, the list of resolutions should be adaptive and offer options suitable for your machine. Will look into that as well
  • Yup, competely agree with morals behaving weird. I am thinking about reworking the system completely, right now it barely serves its purpose. The initial idea was to have crabs joining/leaving the squad all the time, but I see many issues with that approach, and the current system does not help.

Thanks a lot for playing and providing great feedback!

Submitted(+1)

I love this game! This is the second time I've played it, and I really enjoyed it :)

I went to and kill the crab boss.. I forgot his name.. the boss fight was pretty long and there was one part where he got stuck around the corner and I could attack him without getting attacked, at least until an AOE thing caused me to move my crabs around.

I don't remember if the AOE thing was around in the previous version, but I like that it's here, and it causes me to have to move my crabs around a lot.

The variety of enemies was decent. I liked that there were melee and ranged enemies. Maybe having a healer enemy would be nice too!

For the boss fight, after everything died, I took quite a while to mop up the rest of the barrels. Maybe have those disappear/explode after the boss and minions are dead?

Other suggestions:

  • having a way to command all the crabs at once would be great, maybe ~ or something?
  • at the end of the first stage, I accidentally clicked on one of the caves before picking up the level-up loot thing. Maybe make the loot thing be picked up before the cave options appear?
  • I'm still not sure what the icons of the caves mean. Maybe having a tooltip or some such would be great!

Overall, a ton of fun, and I look forward to the playing this again in the future!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing! A lot of great feedback!

  • Glad you could beat the boss! I was trying to balance him to be hard to just zerg rush, but fairly easy if you pay attention to his mechanics - in the same way most MMO bosses work
  • AoE was there the last time, but much less visible, and there was another random even I removed, that was turning the game into a slog
  • I have more enemies planned (some are even inspired by what I saw in your game =P)! Healers are there, the green ones. They were quite annoying the last time around, so I tried to make them less fast and twitcy this time
  • Thanks for reporting Extra spawns are supposed to be destroyed when the boss dies, right now it seems broken. 
  • Group controls: Still considering in! I have my reservations about it, but I hear you! One idea I had was to implement an extra on-cooldown command that would tell everyone to gather around one place
  • Reward pick-up: I implemented a quick fix with the notification to pick up the reward, but I agree blocking doors until it's collected would be better
  • Icons: I would say, I intentionally left some ofbuscation there, so it can be observed and learned. They mostly corespond to "Elements" that give you reward, each offers Sttunements (Abilities) and Trinkets of that element. In the meantime, I intend to rework the rewards themselves, to be more logical and obvious

Thanks for your kind words! I'd be happy to improve the game further!

(+1)

Super cute art style! How do you not love the looks of these crabs? Would benefit from popup tutorial on how to play after starting new game and tooltips describing what each icon means when selecting another map. Controlling the crabs separately plays into the game's strength of using strategy, but on the other hand, not being able to control them all as a singular group plays into a weakness. This is even more apparent during the boss fights. Overall, it's an addicting and fun game with great art and cute UI elements :)

Developer

Hey, thanks for playing!

The game is in the early state, so I haven't built a proper tutorial yet, focusing on core gameplay. I do have plans for it, though!

As for the "group control" - you're not the first one to mention it, I am considering it. Right now, it is as you said - strategic positioning is the big part of the game, and I would not want to take away from it. I do hear you, and I would like to address the situation from the different angle - by introducing more mechanics that utilize individual controls and help to maintain formation.

I am happy that you find this game fun! Makes me want to work harder to improve it!