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Scaling The Last Mountain - GameOff 2023's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #12 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Overall | #13 | 4.067 | 4.067 |
| Graphics | #36 | 4.112 | 4.112 |
| Audio | #39 | 3.685 | 3.685 |
| Innovation | #188 | 2.966 | 2.966 |
| Theme interpretation | #191 | 3.112 | 3.112 |
Ranked from 89 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/NjitRam83/GitGameJam
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Comments
This is so good! I played all the way through and really enjoyed it. I have played a few other games that are done in this style and this is the first one that has used the direction of the mouse to aim the spells so I thought that was a really cool feature. Everything worked well, the UI was very nice and fluid and I liked the mechanics of setting up your own bag and choosing your items. I think that high level of customizability is difficult to create and you did it well. Great job!
Thanks for the review.
Be sure to be on the lookout on Steam in 2024 when the full version will (hopefully) be released ;P
Very cool! This plays really smoothly, feels like a properly sellable title. I played through to the end, solidly built from start to finish. I could have taken a little bit more difficulty, once I had enough resources it was pretty much just a matter of moving enough and letting the weapons do the work, but that's also the nature of this style of game I suppose. It seems like your team can work very quick and smoothly, on any future projects it would be cool to see some more work with original sound and/or visual artists taken in as well to give the game a more unique aire to it, but regardless this was a solidly built game
Thanks for the review!
The game is indeed too easy in the later levels but worry not, we are already working on a new version of the game with many more ideas.
The art and sound is a valid point, we both are not skilled in those department, so for now it will just be bought or free assets.
PS: Did you perhaps forget to save your rating?
I see we are still on the same number as a couple of days ago and would hate not to get a rating from someone as positive of the game as you :D
Good catch! I though the comment saved my rating but I guess not, mistake corrected
Wowo! This game was seriously well-crafted and a blast to play. Kudos to the entire team! Just out of curiosity: were there any features you had to ditch due to time constraints or other limitations? I've got this topic on community section called "the Features Cemetery," and since your game seems to be one of the standouts in this Game Jam, I'd love to have your input! :)
Thanks for the kind words!
Overall I'm pretty happy with what we got into the game. Of course there is always stuff that ends up on the board as "nice to have", but you know a lot of those are just never even gonna get picked up unless you finish what you really want in the game.
In a way the Daily Challenges were something that was on our Nice to have list. The game would have worked fine without it, but since we had some time left at the end of the project we managed to get Daily Challenges in the game as well. So we view it more as an extra to the game, whereas you could also see it as leaderboards that did not get implemented, since we do have the analytics for them (we know who finishes a daily challenge). We just didn't have time to implement the UI of the leaderboards.
Wow, felt like a real game! It made me want to play vampire survivor again. Did not really understand the backpack thingy at first, restarted the game after the first wave because I thought it bugged. Even after I read the how to I did not completely understand. But managed eventually. But other than that it was a cool idea for the inventory and made the game unique.
Did not play the entire game but it was nice and started to get addicting. Want to try to play as many games as possible today though so I try to not spend too much time. The thing that bothered me the most was the animation the character did when attacking, it did not feel like it synced well with the projectiles I was throwing. I think the game could be without the animation.
Nice music, cool art, good game :D
Can you explain what was unclear about the backpack?
Was it the interaction between bags and items (aka did you try to place items on spaces where you did not yet have a bag?) or was it something else? Would love to hear the issue because that is something we would want to fix going forward :)
Glad you had fun at least and thanks for the review ! :)
I'lll try to explain. Usually when I play games I don't read the "How to" so and if I do I do not read it thoroughly, keep that in mind :)
So the first thing that happened when you start a level is that you get presented a shop and the first thought is to buy something. It looked like I was suppose to click on stuff. I hovered over a weapon, chose the one that I thought was fitting and that was cheap enough to buy and then I clicked it. Nothing happened! Then I double clicked it, nothing happened. And then I clicked on the lock thingy and thought, no that might be for something later. And then I clicked play.
So I started the game without buying a weapon, it made the game a bit slower but I wouldn't know because I hadn't played it before. So that is the first possible improvement, you could force the player to buy something in the start. Or present a dialogue "Are you sure you want to start the game, you haven't purcase a weapon yet?" if you want to have it as an option to not buy anything.
Then if you started to play and won the first wave you have to choose a backpack and here is where I got stuck. I chose a backpack and then what? I think I tried to place the weapons inside the backpack but inside the "chest area". Maybe something like this?
Is there a reason that you can drag around the items in this area however you want?
I can even drag them to the reward area:
When I drag an item that is too big to my backpack, I get no indication. This could maybe be shown with like red tiles or something :
However, it is not that much of an issue if you learn how it works you can use the lines around the backpack and easily see if it will fit or not.
After you choose a backpack, you currently have to place it before you can continue playing. You might want to force the player to make that collection (force the player to always hold the backpack and let the player sort weapons after the backpack has been placed next to another).
This might help you a bit. But don't overhthink it, a big part was me just being a bit stupid :P
Btw I messed around a bit in the shop and noticed some other stuff. You can sell your starting knife and then play. The game does not really work without a weapon :) I switched out my sword with a shield. Did not really work with only a shield either.
I wonder if you might want to start with a weapon, the character has a sword in the sprite so you could use that. A default weapon that you cannot change and is not affected by the backpack logic. Then when you win the first wave, you choose your first backpack and continue from there. Would solve some issues but might not be what you want.
Hope this helps in some way!
This helps amazingly and should win the award for best response/review in the entire game jam !
We should for sure explain some more in game because I bet you are not alone in not reading out of game explanations.
For the game jam we didn;t have time to implement this all (which is also why you got stuck with the backpack placement, that part was just not thought out enough). Selling your weapon or starting with only a shield will "brick" your game since you cannot beat the level so that is a very valid concern too.
Again, thanks so much for this in depth review !
I liked the tetris inventory :D
Cool game, and the music was good too!
Thanks for the kind words!
We can't take credit for the music besides choosing music that fits well. Unfortunately we are not gifted composers but at least we chose music that worked well in the game (and the awesome fade in and out of course ;P)
Glad you enjoyed it !
Very good entry! At firts I was expecting another "survivors" game but it turned out to be something different.
Only complaint might be that it felt too short and too easy :)
Might add more locations and hard mode.
More people mentioned it being too easy, but some of our testers actually died to the boss so maybe you guys are just all too good ;P
We already started work on a longer and more difficult version so keep your eyes open in 2024!
Thanks for your review !
This could be in Steam and I’d be glad to pay for it. Really fun game, with more content and some tweaks it would be a really nice game. Congratulations!!
That's great to hear because we may have started brainstorming on the full game already!
(Coming to Steam in 2024 (hopefully ;p))
Thanks for the review!
This is honestly a really fun roguelike and the storage and weapons system is really cool and unique! Great Job.
Thanks so much for the kind words.
Glad you enjoyed it!
A really good game, and one of the best of the jam. I played all the way through and had a great time. I loved the upgrade mechanics. My only complaint is that I think the scaling theme could have been a bit stronger.
Did your team make all the pixel art yourself? I was curious.
We didn't have an artist on our team so no, all art you see is from assets.
Glad you had fun!
Thanks for the praise! I agree with the scaling theme - we actually found it quite difficult to include it more in the game while not having it feel being 'dragged by the ears'. We choose to focus on a full game-loop instead. Glad you enjoyed it!
Regard the pixel art - sadly we cannot take credit for most of it. Our team exists of only 2 developers that have still yet to become professional pixel artist ;) The combat pixel assets are mostly from RafaelMatos - a really good pixel artist (and cool guy) with great art. His assets have been used in quite a few steam games, and I was glad I was able to use some of his art to make ours as nice looking as we could in the month. ;)
Fun and addictive mash-up between two fun and addictive games. Once I started, I had to finish it. There's some pixel size inconsistency that needs to be dealt with, and a few other graphical oddities, but they weren't enough to blemish my time with your game. Thanks, this one was great fun.
The pixel consistency issue was mentioned during development since I am just scaling up the enemies to make them more menacing (and to have more Scaling in the game!) But as we have no artist on the team it does cause the inconsistency.
Love that you finished it and thanks for the review!
As a huge fan of both backpack battles and vampire survivors concept seems like a great idea and implementation is very nice for 1 month of work! Hope to see a completed release after the jam!
Thanks for the review!
We share your hope in seeing a complete release after the jam so we better get working on it soon ;p
This feels like a full blown completed project.
Thank you!
But it's not complete enough, so we will continue to work on it after the jam :)
I love Vampire Survivors and this scratched the itch quite well. Also, the addition of inventory management was a neat twist! I feel like items in the shop actually could have costed more as I had 1000 unspent gold at the end of the game. Maybe even the extra pouches and backpacks could have costed gold. Still the threat of losing progress and going back to the next level kept from taking it too easy.
Thanks so much!
The items in the shop are quite cheap, but for the jam we didn't want people to be limited so if you really want you can change your entire build mid run.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Really cool game ! It has a lot of interesting mechanics and lack just a bit of polish (which is totally understandable given the time constraint)
Thanks for the review !
We will be sure to take more time for the polish when we continue work on this after the jam ;)
Cool game!
Combat was fun and polished, and even though I'm not a big fan of this vampire survivors genre, it kept me entertained for a while!
I'm not gonna judge the art because it wasn't made by you, but it was assembled nicely and fits the theme for the most part. On my monitor the UI got cut off on fullscreen, but that was pretty much the only bug I found.
Thanks for the kind words!
Fair point on the art, we are no artists so the best we can do is use what is out there and make it look accepable.
As for the UI: We had a lot of issues with it as I chose the wrong aspect ratio at the start and we never got the grid located correctly on 16:9 monitors, so that's totally my bad ;P
Rate no. 14
I'm not gonna go through the good stuff because there is just way too many. I do have some things I can see the game improved in tho:
- Pixel inconsistency just doesn't look good. The sprites look really great by themselves, but individually scaling them afterwards makes their pixel sizes different compared to eachother, which in my opinion doesn't look nice; it sort of creates a low effort feeling.
- UI is a bit big, it's mostly personal preference, but on larger monitors it would probably be even worse. I recommend constantly checking your work in fullscreen instead of the small viewport when working with UI.
- I think the difficulty was too easy, I was rarely getting hit by enemies, so I just never bought any armor and focused on dealing as much damage as possible. Pierce is also a bit OP, giving 3 of it in a 1x1 item should not be a thing.
I'd say the best game I've played so far, took me around 30 mins to beat the game and I love deck building stuff.
Those are all valid criticisms. Short reasons for all of them:
Pixel inconsistency: No artist on the team ;p
UI too big: Was brought up by our testers but there were more important things to fix first.
Game too easy: For a jam I prefer a game that most people can finish. Maybe we could have made the boss more difficult but with a not so great build he is very hard to beat.
Loved your review because it's good to know where we can improve and of course we are happy you enjoyed it! :)
Dang, that's a great game. 5*. The core survivors-style game loop is so satisfying, then managing inventory shapes adds a nice touch. Upgrades feel earned. There's also some nice quality of life additions and great carefully thought out game-feel and polish. Very well done.
Side by side with Vampire Survivors, I'd probably choose to play this game first. It's less mindless, but more satisfying.
If you offered local executables, I'd install it and keep it installed. (Which is about the highest compliment I can pay a jam game).
Hope you're moving on to Steam soon.
That sure is some high praise, and I hope we are moving to Steam soon too. We haven't decided yet whether to put the current version on Steam as a Windows build as I would not be comfortable having to support the current codebase. But maybe we will put it up as a demo as-is in the meantime.
Most likely we will add a Windows build on Itch after the game jam (for now we like the analytics of seeing how often our game gets played in the WebGL version). So be sure to check back then.
If I remember to I will try and ping you once it is up :)
Don't forget your Mac audience!
Being able to customize upgrades is fun, and I like the variety of items you can purchase. Nice job!
Thanks so much for your review.
The game was a blast to work on and I so glad so many people are enjoying it!
It's amazing how much content/mechanics you all managed to have in the game!!! I had a great time! Well done.
It's a delight reading so many reviews of people enjoying the game!
And to be honest we wanted to have even more content in the game. But that will now all go into the expansion/remake we plan to start on after the jam.
Really fun game. I love the backpack mechanic and the stats modifier. It's fun to experiment with different weapons and boosts.
Glad you had fun!
We had so much more planned for weapons and items, but I guess that has to wait until after the jam :)