Great game, great music, it just feels smooth to play this game. Congrats!
Play game
Retromancer's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #2 | 4.179 | 4.350 |
| Gameplay | #2 | 3.923 | 4.083 |
| Audio | #2 | 4.323 | 4.500 |
| Graphics | #2 | 4.323 | 4.500 |
| Innovation | #3 | 3.923 | 4.083 |
| Theme interpretation | #3 | 4.404 | 4.583 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Source code repository URL
https://github.com/kettek/ebijam23
Comments
Woah, I really enjoyed it!
I'm impressed by the bits of lore, seeing the effect it has here makes me want to focus on this side of gamedev more for my future games haha
In terms of mechanics and balancing, I found this really fair, I loved the boss fights, they were challenging and dynamic.
There's usually a strategy that emerges to beat a bullet pattern or another, that's enjoyable to figure out!
I think my only death is about the part (spoiler alert, I'll try to avoid) where you need the non-reverse mechanic (the last one you learn, I think?).
I read too fast, went to the next room, knew I was needing it because the level design made it obvious, but I must have skipped the part where it was mentioning the key to press haha.
I tried to bruteforce with the other abilites once, then I figured by pressing random buttons!
The art is great and consistent, visuals and audio mix really well, good job @kettek @liqMix!
Submitted
SidenAh! Yes, I think one of the things we missed adding was a pause menu during the game where you could exit or view the controls. I'll go ahead and update the game page with the mouse + keyboard controls.
We had initially made the Lich much tougher (because your abilities can a bit overpowered when used in certain ways) but we decided to tone him down and it sounds like he's in the right place now.
Thank you for the feedback and playing our game!
Thoroughly glad you enjoyed it! Tidbits of lore, I think, do a lot for the end-user/player to fill in the blanks of experience. I know whenever I've played a game that has some tiny aspect of something weird/unique/different, I immediately begin to formulate more about what that universe has to offer. Honestly, having even a tiny bit of lore presented can cause a lot of imagination to occur.
Glad you found it fair! I think so as well, but I do want to add hints if you die at a boss one or more times to improve the player experience.
Also, that the level after you get the shield was one of the few levels I worked on directly, haha. I should've put more direct hinting, including the keys/buttons necessary. However, with the aforementioned hint system, I would like to have it so that if you die 1-3x in a map, it presents hints in an increasingly obvious fashion.
Thank you very much for playing!
Absolutely amazing! I love the music and the mood it sets, art is awesome and gameplay... I mean what else can I say? Great game!
Submitted
The PassageYooou dieeee daaamned liiich \ò_ó/
Not much to say, honestly. Everything is at least great... but then audio and content in general are exceptional. And on top of that, the co-op, GPT integration, multiple endings, japanese translation, gamepad support, quality of life features and details like hats, muting sfx and audio, interaction highlight hints, going back on menus, etc. Just awesome.
Don't want to sound like everything isn't also awesome, but the music is really something else. Congrats to liqMix, really good understanding of not just how to make great music, but how to make the music serve the context.
Submitted
TransitionYou flatter too much! I probably shouldn't say so, but I really missed having a complete game from you this jam, though I am glad for the effort presented. I hope for and look forward to next year to see more of your talent. :>
p.s., hope you saw the moof -- it was mostly because of reading up on Susan Kare, but that was ultimately due to seeing a certain icon in Discord.
Actually, I missed moof! Thanks for pointing it out, nice detail, haha.
One of the things I like most from this being a relatively small community is that we get to see something beyond other people's games; we get to learn about their identity when it comes to game design, their subjective preferences, the ideas that they gravitate around and get them excited and drive them to create. You can expect heartfelt fables from Daigo, otherworldly spaces and mind-bending experiences from Zyko, equation-solving-like challenges from Quasylite, resource management and upgrade focused games from Elamre, Loïg's minimalism and his gift to create deep puzzle-like mechanics from small and elegant rulesets.
And I say all this for two reasons: first, highlight the beauty of it; second, to bring the point home that expecting complete games from me on a game jam is... misguided? I like creating worlds. Typically moody, somewhat ethereal worlds, something that will capture my own imagination. Worlds that make you ask yourself what's beyond what's presented in the game, where the game story is only a small series of events within a broader universe. In Retromancer, for example, you also managed to create a small, cohesive and unique world, but gameplay and content are always at the center, with other parts acting as a supporting elements. You make a world to add color to the game and anchor it to a theme. Being very ambitious and never neglecting any of those elements that can help make a game more colorful or fun may be an important part of your identity as game designers, but you always keep gameplay and content that you can interact with at the center, as the first focus, trying to create a complete experience around it. And it totally works.
All these styles are absolutely fine, and it's great that we all do different things, but I feel like my approach is among the most incompatible with game jams, and creating a complete experience will almost never be my main goal. At the same time, when compared to most other jam participants, all this might make me more prone to keep working on a project even after the jam ends. I've worked on ideas and content for 10 miles of the project, even if I only ended up showing 1, because creating foundations that I'm pleased about takes a disproportionate amount of time for my style. And that's why I'm great at text walls and tutorials, because I always go much further than what may be considered healthy in terms of pondering, trying to examine things from multiple perspectives, being impractically contemplative. But that's my way of doing things.
(That was a very long way to tell you to adjust your expectations, hahaha.)
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