Evacuation successful!
This game have a bunch of nice elements to it: the atmosphere is really good, movement is instant and have a good feedback, discoverable map is such a good way to lead the player towards the goal, and specimen hunting was quite nice.
What I would love to see, is as with most of the games with instant movement, some variety in wall/floor art, even some projected decals with some dirt or scratches on them, as that will help orientating quite a lot.
Great job!
Thanks for playing!
We kind of think of this kind of spinners as “disorientation spinners”. They try to disorient you, but not completely fool you, like vertigo. We haven’t implemented the “illusionary spinners” in this entry, though it might be a great thing to have in the engine - absolutely seamless disorientation toolkit :D
For the playtime we’ve specifically didn’t want to make it long, so people can go through all of the content and see all the stuff without repeating ourselves too much. We are brewing some ideas of how we can expand on this one, and after the jam we’ll definitely make a patched build (already have a bunch of improvements).
I loved the retro style in this game! I haven’t encountered TIC-80 before, but will take a closer look at it, as this game introduced me to it :D
Instant movement cannot go wrong, which is great, animated background (was that just a camera parameters, or some other technique?) and menu added quite a bit of polish to the game.
Fights were interesting, once you understand how to use all the abilities, but I think having some gold at the start (or going into debt!) can help as otherwise you cannot use abilities in the first fight. Also discovering that you can use number keys to select abilities was super helpful in fights.
Nice retro sci-fi game!
I liked the Wolfenstein era aesthetics, nice music and crawling looked pretty solid.
For combat I mostly used cards which instantly killed enemies, which was not that hard to come by.
The thing I think needs improvement and is detrimental to the game process right now is the minimap. It’s too intrusive and I end up crawling minimap and not seeing the world in the process.
That was quite a long game.
I liked the story, though I still feel a bit confused by the resolution. Finding all the notes was very nice and provided an incentive to exploration.
Battles were nice, they’ve provided enough tactical choices, though at times it felt repetitive and I didn’t understand the strength/weakness system very well. Due to the sheer number of weapons it was hard to keep track of what you have, what to keep and what to “fuse”, it almost felt like I was discovering new weapons too fast, it might work very well for a long game (10h+), as you’ll discover them less often and can have a very deliberate choice of what to use.
Graphics were nice, clear, readable. Though I felt like perspective was a bit strange/wide, but that might just be the whole acclimatization to all 3d crawlers we have in the jam :)
I was very reluctant to explore the dungeon due to the amount of encounters, so I ended up quickly trying to navigate the minimap and draft where the boundaries of the map is, so I’ll have less encounters :D
Well done, it ought to be a good basis for a bigger game with a slower progression and more variety in tactics!
I have made it to the final fight, though I haven’t grasped the combat system, so I just lured the final enemy out of the room, sneak in the room and pretended that I won :D
I loved the forging mechanics, they were a nice combination of mini games. Sneaking was hit and miss in some areas, however it gets way better with instant movement. I was able to have 0 fights to actually get to the “end”, you just need to observe enemy pattern, utilize chickens and be fast.
Graphics remind me of games of 90s, which ticks nice nostalgia, well done!
Overal I spent quite a while in the game and though I hated it sometimes (due to difficulty) it was also very satisfying when you get how things works.
Hey, nice rhythm crawler, I quite liked the battle portion of it!
I’ve encountered a couple of bugs: sometimes directions in the battle will show up only for a frame and then you have to guess when you need to press the button and what button to press. It wasn’t happening that often, but it happened several times.
Another bug I’ve encountered was related to the FOV of the game. As it’s quite narrow I mistakenly tried to walk into a corner of the corridor and got stuck there.
But other than that it’s a short and nice dungeon crawler which I’ve enjoyed completing, well done!
Ah, interesting, 120 “should” be enough, but it feels almost like it’s 100 or less. Maybe specifically for the shooter it’s never enough, due to the need to shoot diagonally sometimes? It almost feels like free mouse view will help with that in this particular game when you’re actively shooting, something like holding down right mouse button to unlock the camera might be a good alternative (it’s allowed by rules afaik).
Thanks for playing!
Survival is too slow at the start, we’re going to fix that after the jam, it sounds like you should be able to kill enemies and get your level faster, but maybe the number of enemies should be greater (and they should be more dangerous).
Yeah, voice acting was done in the last moments, so it’s of a poor quality, we have learned our mistake and will incorporate such things earlier in the jam, so we’ll have time to polish or to replace it with something else.
Escaped with the score of 3600 and around 2 minutes left.
Atmosphere is really nice, it gives dark, Quake 3 vibes. Music, graphics, audio, weapons, lighting all were done really nice to make this atmosphere work.
Shooter part felt a bit odd at times, when enemies were at 45 degrees angle from you, at these moments I wished for the wider field of view (which would’ve helped with a more classic perspective as well). Dodging enemies bullets and peppering them with shotgun or sending rockets their way felt nice, though a bit awkward due to Q/E being strafes.
I think I’ve completed the game? I saw something like “you win” for a frame after I’ve attacked a chicken and after that game restarts.
I liked the look and feeling of the game, felt really old school. Animations, palette, pixel art and simple sound effects were adding to that atmosphere.
Perspective was a bit strange, I felt like I should’ve been able to turn and move, but due to FOV being very narrow I was mistaken several times and ended up facing a wall.
What a nice game! I spent around hour finishing it and at first I was at loss about all the combat mechanics (not an expert in Yahtzee or a poker), but after some crawling and battling it clicked and I was able to do insane amount of consistently.
I didn’t understood what curse did and mostly I used any dice which is not damage dice as a way to build a combination for the damage dice.
Dungeon was a bit too big for the jam in my opinion, I started crawling the minimap at some point, instead of exploring the dungeon due to its size.
Music, sound effects and graphics were all spot on, very nicely built game I might say.
Well done, I see this is your first game on itch, super impressive!
Thanks for playing!
5/12 is still good in my books, as most of the treasures are hidden! It takes determination to find more than that.
I agree that battles are quite easy to win, with almost no way to fail, but we were expecting some people to die a couple of times at the first interaction with the fox slime swarm, but it looks like their numbers and stats were not enough to kill anyone yet :)
Voice acting was done in the last hours, after the hard crunch, so yeah, it’s very low quality. Though Zooperdan shared an easy technique on the discord chat to make radio voice more convenient and we’ve also learned our lesson about making sounds, music and voice overs in the last hours before submission when exhausted, we’ll plan better next time and incorporate all the sound work sooner rather than later, thus we’ll have time to either polish our sound or, as you’ve suggested, do a beep-bop sfx for speech. Though, in my opinion, voice overs (if done properly with proper quality) serves a good measure to make the player listen/read the story which should add additional immersion. Our another mistake (same as in the previous jam) was to have a wall of text, instead of short bursts of conversation or inner dialogue.
Thanks for playing!
At some point I’ve tried implementing continuous movement (in between some other things I was building at that time) and I’ve failed due to key repeat rate which is different on different systems and just forgot about that until now. Thanks for pointing that out, that would be a great addition, indeed, I will just need to implement it the proper way with our own version of key repeat which works in sync with camera animation.
I have saved the castle!
I liked the graphics, though rooms felt a bit empty (well some castles are usually not very crowded too!).
I haven’t figured out in my first run (in which castle have crashed) why those idols were disappearing, but on the second read I finally got the idea and saved the castle. Probably some kind of feedback from delivering an idol would be nice (I heard some sound, but it was so musical it might’ve been just a part of background music).
I was also pleasantly surprised by the UI work. It’s not perfect, but it feels right for the jam game!
Nice implementation of the themes!
At first I was thinking in the old ways and was “what movement speed have to do in the dungeon crawler” and then I suddenly realised the whole concept after a bit of looting! I think it’s a very clever use of the movement transition speed.
I have found the chicken idol on my second run.
As other have mentioned, music or ambience would be really nice, or a more pronounced walking/turning sounds.
Thanks for playing and recording it, it is very helpful!
Yes, making that weapon targeting change is a great idea, I’ll look into how it can and should be done in order to feel and look good, thanks!
We haven’t thought about interactable objects really deeply. In my opinion they mostly should be obvious from the geometry and texture, but I guess we need to work on that part. We had a tooltip, but it takes 1s to show up, so it’s not that useful, we’re looking forward to reworking that after the jam, thanks for pointing that out!
Welcome to the 11/12 treasures club. I’m probably the first member of that club (though I know where I’ve missed the last one!). Batisdark really caught us all with treasures.
Though I admit that a couple of things can be improved in treasure hunting as mentioned by previous commenters. We are most likely revisit it after the jam voting ends and do some quality of life improvements here and there and maybe expand it a little bit, so it’ll feel like a complete tiny game.
Thanks! We never thought about fighting that chicken, but one of the themes we’ve floated (but obv haven’t implemented) is that you help the chicken build a new body it can copy its conscious to, as it’s the last of their “species”. In that scenario it will not tell you exactly what and why you are doing, it would just lead you towards it and in the end you end up with a choice of what to do, when you discover what it is. Feature creep :D
Nice, stylish and hilarious game!
I’ve really liked the presentation, the art, music is epic and fitting, dialogues are cool and funny. Platformer part was nice, but I would’ve liked more challenge there, the only challenge I found was jumping through the platforms, while fighting itself was way too easy.
On that regard I felt like fights was too repetitive, I had to go through the same fights over and over through the duration of the game. I totally get the time constraints is a huge factor here, but either simple progression/levelling or harder fights would’ve made them more meaningful. Even if progression was just making MP bar fill faster or your movements faster would’ve added a lot in my opinion.
But overall I think I’ve liked most parts of this game, great job!
Thanks for the video, as always it’s super useful to see someone else play your game, it shows a lot of design flaws :)
45 minutes timer existed only in the narrative, yes. We were planning a timer (in world, on displays), but as the end of the jam comes closer we saw that it was an unrealistic goal and scrapped the time pressure (though 45 minutes is a long time for this game, so it would’ve been only a sense of time pressure).
Hover prompt was delayed by 1s, so you have to put your cursor on thing for 1 second for it to show up. I totally understand how it’s not intuitive and will probably make the delay super short, like 0.1s (when you’re not moving the cursor in this case). That was great insight seeing you using this feature and feeling the pain of how unreliable it worked :)
For the treasure part I had a thing on our list: “add a treasure counter which is visible all the time” which might’ve helped a lot. Plus not locking player in the second part of the second level of course and clearly showing where you’ll progress to the next level, so you can go back and explore for more treasures.
Yes, level indication (like in VS) would’ve been super nice! And for the last battle - there was a monster somewhere far away, he was pushed by other monsters and failed to get to you fast. I know in survivors monsters are usually just move to the other side of the screen and that would’ve saved us in this case too, but we ran out of time :)
Yep, maybe there’ll be a post jam version :). We had scrapped a lot of features which we can build at our own leisure after jam. One of the things we wish we had time to build (except what I’ve already mentioned to Slippers about the Survivors battle) is puzzles and more interactive stuff in the world. For example we’ve planned to have some doors be controlled by consoles for which you have to figure out passwords (this is one of the reasons why we have a system which describes what is under the cursor).
I was also planning to open source the editor + game samples after I clean up all the Italian pasta, so hopefully that will happen and be a starting point for both us, and people from the community if they wish to go the C++ + ECS way :D
Survivors theme was underdeveloped and at the same time we’ve spent too much time on it. There were a several things we wanted to add, but kind of ran out of time: better explanation of upgrades, more weapons, better visual effects of weapons (it’s hard to see notice that you’re shooting different bullets from different weapons) and some other stuff, like push back from damage, running on the real map with dungeon collisions etc.
Spinners and illusory walls are what Batisdark loves to add :D
I wish we’ve fleshed out the battle sooner to see how it looks and maybe we would’ve chosen a different resolution for character and enemy sprites to better match the overall style aesthetically.
Yes, we tend to make shorter games, as we usually lack enough content for long games and are very aware that repetitiveness might be good for a some games, but for the jam we would prefer to be more concise.
Thanks for playing it!
That game has a scope! I think I’ve spent over 2 hours playing it.
It was very hard in the beginning, and I totally missed that you can (and should) save often and just explore the game systems via experimentation. But with that feature comes an interesting bug: each time you load (I presume) game spawns enemies from the save file and from the map again, or that’s how it looks like. Leading to crazy situations with tens of enemy ships, tens of mines stacked on top of each other, and generally providing (sometimes) an unfair advantage when you actually start looting the whole battlefield after wiping several times. Here’s the video of such a moment: https://youtu.be/h5jjyL5Pd2s
I appreciate the amount of systems you’ve built for this game. Fabrication was a bit obscure at first, as I had to go through all the items to figure out what is what and prioritize crafting what is needed first. Probably somehow marking what item is for the ship and what item is for R.O.D. would’ve helped a lot with the initial confusion.
Augments which modifies your view (anomaly detector, radar) was a really nice touch, expanding dungeon crawling part of the game significantly.
One thing I would’ve loved to see in the dungeon crawler part is the way to distinguish different wall tiles from each other. That would’ve helped a lot in navigating derelicts, as you don’t have feedback on camera rotation, especially when you’re in the room behind the illusionary wall.
Regarding the space part I felt disoriented at times, probably because the camera is not oriented with the ship and sometimes up/down and left/right shifts places and I cannot just keep it up some times :)
But overall, the game is really solid, both space and dungeon parts are done really well and everything looks and feels consistent. I’ve enjoyed completing the game, though I felt frustrated at times by how easily you can die in the space :)
Nice game!
I was confused at the start, not figuring out what to look for and what is the optimal strategy, but after around 15 minutes trying things out and switching to “instant” move mode (it bugs the boss, as they cannot move from their office in this case, but that might be a bug of crossover, as I was running windows version on a mac). I built a routine which helped me detecting anomalies. I think I’ve caught seven of the anomalies in the play through. I particularly loved some of them, but some were a bit “scary”, I jumped at one of them due to it being too sudden. I also loved the aesthetics, chill music and nice details in the office :)
As I’ve skipped boss fight due to the bug the game started to feel better btw, in my opinion it added to the atmosphere, but I would’ve loved to see them in the “wrong” door and have a fight there with some consequences even if you’ve won. Like if you’ve won - you still move back a day, if you’ve lost - you move back to the starting point.
Grid step size was on a smaller side, but it makes sense in the office environment.
Great job! I’ve enjoyed crawling office spaces, looking for clues.
Really nice and disturbing visual style, felt really crazy. UI is a bit unintuitive and requires to pay a lot of attention to backgrounds of your characters to figure out which one is selected (for changing weapons and that stuff). Also I had to pull volume all the way down as some of the SFXes, like falling through a hole in a ground and taking damage from the traps were so loud.
Loved the idea that each party member has a certain function and loosing any of them actually reduces your party utility, that is really cool.
Great job!
Really cool game, I had a loads of fun completing it. Movement is great, a lot of nice mechanics, like spinners, secret walls, keys etc. Combat was really interesting, even though it was on a separate screen, it had a lot of potential depth to it.
Going through all menus was tedious, this, I hope, can be made more intuitive, especially in regards of action choice and movement. You probably can make selection of actions automatic with some additional key usage. For example if player select a tile to move, or creature to attack which is away from them, then you’ll need to spend one AP for movement, while allowing player to use exert feature by holding some key in this situation.
Great entry, will defeat meatballs and angry furniture again!
Super cool art, I love your style! Game seems quite polished, although too short :)
I’m not a fan of camera movement when moving, felt a bit strange, unnatural. Stationary enemies were super easy to defeat and were not posing any real challenge. Even when there were 2-3 of them in a row were just a matter of dodging all attacks at once and that’s it.
But other than that it’s a cool and enjoyable game with super great art :)
Nice small crawler. I like how you differentiate things by just using two colors, makes a lot of sense. It felt really nice and I don’t know what to add here. Making it longer (I mean bigger with more things to do, more quests etc) will always be a great thing, but I don’t know if eyes will get tired of this color scheme, which works great for a short game.
Great job!
Really nicely implemented retro style, loved how I really felt retro underwater :) Atmosphere is dark and lonely, with all those grainy audio remnants were really cool.
Combat was a bit clunky, I was not sure if was hitting something, and using rifle on a shark seemingly did nothing (had no feedback from hitting).
Great job!
Interesting mechanics of requiring hero to eat and smoke all the time + typing to defeat enemies + lighting the lighter to make it less possible for enemies to attack you. Nice dice mechanics as well, adding some randomness to outcomes of actions. And graphics looks nice too. It was too short though :)
I would like to have more feedback for hunger and stress, would add usability to the game, as I just haven’t noticed that I’m too hungry and perished, though I had a lot of rations left.
That’s a nice little game on scratch! I really liked sounds, movement and graphics were quite trippy I might say.
I didn’t get that you need to hold a button to move, but it was totally fine when I figured this out. Field of view was disorienting, probably too narrow for such a game, as I ended up just moving in random directions to find a key, punching bad guys :)
But it was fun!
