itch.io

Foiled by the name entry screen. Bit tough for my liking, but plenty to recommend it.

Thanks. This was the game I needed. It may be dumb luck, or I may be good, but I was just 274 short the first run. I feel once I learn what triggers refills (I think clearing a whole column) it could become easier, but I’m lazy and planning that far ahead is for chess players. I’m sure I’ll beat it next time, I learned a lot, it made me feel special.

Interesting take on the idle clicker incremental. Well polished and serious (unserious).

Fun game, very creative and inspiring. One mechanic polished and pushed to its absolute limit. The intro was so good but I didn’t get half way through the game, diminishing returns and that. I’d have toned down the difficulty, or win length about 25%. Then again, I’m left assuming the end is as epic as the start.

Thanks. I missed this reply until now… and it turns out you were just the person I was looking for (talking about scrolling).

I have an update ready that removes negative health, because if it was a feature, it was unintuitive. Good idea to give respawns with limited health, but if you can’t make it to the first shop without being hit, you won’t make it to the end (at least not the new end with bugs removed). Starting from scratch, and some grind, is not without its advantages.

You mentioned having to scroll. I could set the height to 224*3 instead of 4, but I just can’t find the setting to get it to adjust this automatically, based on available space, like it does in the local, Windows build. If you could give me any pointers, I would like that feature in my web builds. Otherwise I feel assuming max 1080 height is a safe middle ground to not make things tiny for QHD and 4k displays. The top and bottom aren’t important in the platforming bits at least, so I’m not super fussed.

Hilarious. Genius.

Love the original mechanics and coziness here. Spot on for a jam entry.

Original music and graphics too. Main track just scream “serious”, whatever that means.

I took inspiration from your tutorial. Admittedly you kept the mechanics simple, to your credit.

I got 12k but didn’t know what I was doing for the first 20s or so.

Fun and smooth, with balanced sounds I didn’t want to adjust. Very novel controls.

The wrap-around on the screen edges felt frustrating, but was fair, in that the mobs couldn’t fire through the edges. I died by wrapping back around into them.

Very polished for this jam time frame.

I couldn’t see how to cram a tutorial under the time and 3 button constraint. Mostly the time, so much I’ve fixed already. A tutorial, sure, I can do that. Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks for playing. Agree with everything you said. Was it this level that locked up for you? I just tried a full playthrough, it was the first level to show me the gold. Sad times :(

Yeah, clay and iron bugged me from the start, but I thought I’d separated them enough. Just wait till you get silver and lithium! I think fantasy elements are in order next time.

On paper that’s more than my i5 7th gen, but I did notice the slowdown between my laptop’s 8th gen and desktop’s 7th gen. I think I can optimise better, thank you for pointing this out.

I’m happy you experienced the first level. Later levels contain bugs, which I’ll blame.

What CPU?

Thanks, but this isn’t the best place to share videos so I think we’re talking Discord, which is kinda sketch for me given the temperatures in my attic. If you can find me on Discord, please send, but I am not sure I joined this server.

I don’t use shaders here. The game doesn’t use GPU. Did you have background tasks or a weak CPU?

I just played through to level 5 without lag on a 7th gen Intel using Win10 and Edge. It was using 100% CPU, so room to optimise there, but better than going idle I suppose!

I’ve gotten to level 40 on my laptop; where I wouldn’t hear the fan for the sounds in my brain.

I’ve documented the known bugs now, maybe you conflated “lag” with one of them?

It was built and tested on my laptop, what hardware does this lag on?

Music is an issue on web builds. I spent little time on music, have zero sound effects, so no great loss but I am somewhat surprised to hear it is lagging. That said I haven’t used a MicroSoft product since the heatwave, in which case, I’m cooked.

Thank you.

I aim to please, so any indication you enjoyed it makes it all worthwhile.

I hated clickers for ages. I would have been much less polite about it. It’s nuts right. This was the first game I set out to make “incremental” so I apologise if I got that bit wrong. I thought their popularity was in automating the repetitive (or clicky) bits.

That said, I did discover what you questioned might be a bug, late in the day, as I had to test faster, so I just went with it. Holding the key is supposed to be marginally slower than frantic clicking, if only to give it room to be upgradeable to the level of manually clicking.

Tutorials are always a problem, every game (except clones of popular games) has that initial hurdle to grab the player in. I simply had too many irons in the fire to lock in on this earlier. I worried about it here, and thought adding animated gifs after publishing would work. I see tons of gifs on other games, though probably more demo’ing art than as tutorials.

The problem with tutorials in code is they follow the code, and can hold it back or refer to older variants. I think I was silent on prospectors. They weren’t base kit for a long time. I knew where everything was and had no playtesters. Concessions were made here. I also think the rock and ore tiles could be finer resolution than the boring machine. Writing up my TODO list earlier, this felt too much work if the game never sees players after the jam.

I read somewhere only incrementals get indexed by itch. Hence game.

Thanks for the review.

Not at all. I needed to make clearer that those glints in the rocks hint that they can be mined for ore. I updated the description in response to your comment. I do expect a certain level of curiosity from puzzle enjoyers, but thank you for playing whatever your preference there.

Those glints were not meant to be guarantees, only hints, but levels were too slow and numerous already, without sending you on wild goose chases. That and I ran out of time for better tutorialisation. Hence the scattering of GIF clips, which I thank you for prompting for.

It was only me playtesting. I really worried people would give up before finding ore, or upgrades. Ore locations can be learned. I was cursed by this, and the prospector area of effect was buffed hugely at the last minute. If you played 5 times, I couldn’t see how you wouldn’t luck out finding ore.

Thank you for your valiant attempt! If you dig a bit deeper you will see that there is indeed ore, and menus. Trust!

Well written and drawn.

Mostly my imagination, TBH. My joystick was always broken or still in the shop.

Barbarian and Barbarian (Psygnosis) could be early examples for the one-button joystick genre. That’s nearly 40 years ago, and jumping was rarer than I remembered it.

The one game I will never forget, is SF2.

TIL 3D chess really exists.

This is a deep game and well implemented. A bit too deep for my schedule but what I saw I liked, and the rules are faithful to the original so not hard to understand.

I noticed you mentioned forking Aurora Chess, which I thought meant it was an open source engine. When I found your existing game, I could see only cosmetic differences between it and your submission here.

The manual could use some TLC, a demo at the least.

The game is decent enough but your devlog shows it was made 22-24 days while the jam only started 17 days ago.

Can you explain how it resembles chess, apart from being turn based and top down?

Satisfying end game. Unsweaty opponent makes matches reasonably fast. Bags of charm.

This could absolutely scale up.

Good, just in terms of fun and looks, I didn’t find a new piece owing to my confusion about gold and selling my troops health then remembering it was mana, or karma, I needed for new troops. It was certainly, clearly, chess. Slay the Spare is kinda intimidating, in scale, but the chess was pacey. I guess replayability comes down to which you value most; chess, or STS?

Not sure it is as satisfying as chess, where you have an understanding of your opponent, and the game, in advance. Here you are learning by failing, or failing by learning your opponent sent the armada, which is kinda grindy.

I wasn’t expecting graphics, or sound for this first round.

The most polished game I’ve seen or played here.

More a variant of a variant. Making chess the RTS would have been engaging. Requiring me to learn a foreign game, and alphabet, not so much. A tutorial would have been most welcome in my learning. The opponent was nice to see, but as it’s mostly all in a Far Eastern alphabet, it is still a steep learning curve.

You seem to have move recording working, but without a mechanism to replay them, or deep understanding of the game, I can only guess it works. Elephant, horse, advisor, rook, cannon are all known chess pieces, so I don’t see how you met the 6/9 objective to design a new piece.

Nice progress meters, and I would have liked to spend more time on it, if I understood the variant from which it is derived. Learning games is slowww.

Fun game to practice a niche move, made even more niche by this variation of chess.

If I had an opponent to try it with I would have liked to explore how useful time travel mechanics (and the rest) would be. Most of what I needed to know was in the first paragraph.

I think this is supposed to be a game jam, not GDD jam. You have an idea for how to record games? Great! Demonstrate it. Don’t make it a thought experiment that you can change as easily as your game’s description. How would you record this, for example:

Very simple and elegant rules (if I’d known that was a rating criteria…), well implemented.

I had fun and consider it similar enough to chess to still build chess skills. The computer was too good at it!

Beautiful board (and pieces). Looks like it would fit mobile nicely, without the time investment of full chess.

This is an interesting variant.

When black pawns reach rank 1, they become white bishops! I’ve yet to find what black gets out of this. I unlocked the serpent, which was an interesting, distinctive piece. It wasn’t immediately obvious what you meant by “ladder pattern”, but I soon learned that they can move diagonally and orthogonally one square, but I couldn’t bust the black serpent diagonally out of the bishop’s starting position without first moving the pawn. So I’m not sure I really understand it, yet.

All the pieces looked good and I appreciated not having to spend hours beating a chess computer to try out the mechanics. Could you even code a computer to play this, well? It’s very novel.

Thanks for playing and raising original points.

I liked the stair mechanic, admittedly, I’ve never played CV2, and got thrashed playing Zelda for research. I don’t know how you’d expect the stairs to handle. Pressing up jumps you off them, getting hit knocks you off them.

Dithering flickered for me too. I can probably can that gimmick post jam, which will be a long time, with many more fixes made in the meantime as I have to wait for MetroidVania Jam to end (unless I get DQ for not MV enough).

Being raised on 1-button joysticks, up to jump seemed the obvious solution. Secondary attack is a WIP.

Where do you learn to draw goblins like your cover art’s? I had to check it wasn’t the same asset from the amazing mind the stairs. I guess both those images are where I learn from.

I ran out of dice on my second run. Plenty of knives and guns though.

The graphics are too nice not to return. That, and the strategies from the other comments thread make it appear deeper. I like turn-based more than action, but running out of dice reinforces how hard it is to balance original stochastic systems.

That’s the biggest outstanding-bug/feature. I’m addicted to roguelikes so just accepted the dodgy respawn mechanic. Like every jam, corners were cut to meet the deadline, and I’m still thinking how best to tackle something as major as a game-over screen. If you say it is not a fair run, then I accept it is simply too bugged to remain. There are worse bugs, IMO, I have already fixed locally.

Thank you for your considered review.

Perfect, I should have been more curious.

I tried again and figured a way to “reshuffle” my inventory, at least when I have no more weapons left. I think that should be more obvious, because I was just mashing keys in the hope of reactivating weapons.

It’s a good game.

Can confirm. All genuine bugs. There are more, but the scythe guys deserve any exploit you can find.

The sword is random loot, dropped by the central enemies, far too rarely as it happens. They respawn if you want to exploit that, when you yourself respawn at negative health.

I did a lot of reading about NES and CV2 and felt bugs were sometimes embraced.

It didn’t fit your understanding of metroidvania. My understanding was such games required retracing your steps once you had items to help (potions, armour, and weapons here). You can level up, which was supposed to unlock more powerful equipment (the strength stat), but I didn’t think anyone would want to play that long.

I thought I made a decent stab at development, and am grateful for you finding a catalog of bugs. I got lost with all the key remapping talk. Maybe next jam I’ll use predefined, established, sets, but wanted to leave the door open for controller players.

Thanks for putting in the time to play and review.

I’d have played long if I’d known you’d finished the second level and I could have moved the cloud.

Why not just cut stuff out rather than saying its very unfinished? That’s why they call it software, because it isn’t meant to be hard to improve it.

Hard to know how to play the combat.

Rolling dice slowed things, in what was otherwise a beautiful atmospheric game. I didn’t see the point in choosing dice, maybe mechanic developed later. Dug the fallout vibe of sci-fi mixed with fantasy.

At 1:24 the toad had mugged me for all my weapons and I died, first combat.

Fun bullet hell, I just legged it.

I beat an early mini boss, eventually, but it is a hard game and the lead-in felt drawn out. Possibly a skill issue, but no one imagines losing when its their own game.

The audio was loud! VOD here (skip to 1hr) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2801841931

Nice game. Don’t know why we are all making such long games, for NES feel maybe. Appreciate getting to see the ending. It was great!

Second yoyo game I played this jam… This one really nailed it. Felt like Super Mario for a minute.

I thought I explored everywhere but didn’t have the 6, or even 4 bones required by the NPCs.

It was fun, and the 8 year old me might have persevered, but I think I let a lot of Metroidvanias beat me at that age.

VOD here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2801841931

At 17:20 I got stuck. No death, no damage to mob, no progression.

It may just be the lose condition as my health was pretty low. People complain about my lose condition, but at least I have something rather than the lock up / lock in I experienced here. It’s a minor complaint, maybe a bug, but I was ready to stop by then.

I like vertical scrollers anyway but the graphics were really appealing. Cool music, didn’t get old.