itch.io

Thanks a lot!

Thank you! I will try to add a feature to let you restart after dying. It shouldn't be too hard. I would also like to add a score for shooting enemies (shooting is already implemented).

Thank you!

Thanks for playing! I will upload a new version with a couple more features after the voting. Shooting is already done!

Oh yeah, somehow I didn't notice that. Well it obviously doesn't have 6 different letters in it, so I guess it's a glitch!

EDIT: And I didn't notice the var text color, which I guess is the reason 6+ letters came up positive. I bet it will be easy for the developer to spot the problem from that hint.

"Etrov" could have been the answer, but it's not a real word as far as I know.

Thanks a lot for playing & for leaving such nice feedback! I totally agree with what you're saying. I am considering a long-term project without a deadline for my next project. I could have managed my time better this past month, but it is hard to do very much more in such a short time, especially using programming libraries instead of an engine. There are quite a few things I would have liked to add to make it feel like a completed project and not just a demo - sound effects, animation, menus, a mini-map, etc. I'm glad to get your advice, & I will be looking forward to something longer for my next game!

By the way, I added a few upgrades to Gemful Caverns already, including sound effects, & will release an update as soon as possible!

Thanks for the info! I'm Azecy#8992, I just sent a friend request on Discord.

I just finished up your game, & it was not bad, but there were a few things keeping me from enjoying it more.

I liked some of the gameplay aspects a lot. The charge shot is pretty good, & it interacts well with the homing missle enemies. Fighting them would be less interesting if you just had a generic shot. I really liked the way you did secrets, by putting them in conspicuous places and then revealing them when you get close to them without needing to touch them directly. I think my game would have been better off with something like that, to be honest. I especially liked the long ladder in a hidden area just above the beginning, next to some spikes on a wall. It felt like finding a shortcut after I found that.

Some criticisms - like some other people mentioned, it would be better to be able to take another hit or two before dying, and the run speed should be higher. I also have a personal preference for playing on gamepad, and I can use joytokey to map keyboard buttons onto the controller, but if the mouse is used I can't really do that. That's just my personal preference, so I wouldn't call that a flaw, but it is nice to give players more control options, so it's something to consider.

I did find one glitch - when I played the game the first time, everything worked fine, but the second time, for some reason the spacecraft was invisible. I could still see the counter showing how many cogs were needed & I could still interact with the platforms in the area even though were invisible. It didn't have that problem the first time I played, so I have no guess as to why it happened the 2nd time.

One other thing, the ladders were a bit awkward. There was one area with cogs near the beginning that was very hard to get to, but only because you had jump past a ladder, and your jump turned into ladder climbing if you touched it. I think a seperate jump button and up button would be ideal to solve that problem. I would also change the jump so it only activates when you press the jump button instead of just holding the jump button down. Both of those things are a matter of preference, but the vast majority of platformers do those things as I described, so I would recommend it to make players feel more comfortable.

Not a bad game once I got used to the controls, thanks for making it!

The movement felt really good after I figured out how to exploit rolling + double jumping, it gave me that ninja feeling :)

I don't know if there's any private messaging on itch, but I'll ask some quick programming questions right here for now. First, did you seperate the world into sections for graphics rendering and/or activating enemies? I've been thinking about this myself when programming & reading about how other games do it, but wondering if it's even necessary for a 2d game considering how powerful modern computers are. I thought maybe you just have everything activated all the time after seeing how bats follow you between areas & there's no loading or transition when switching areas, except the camera panning.

The other main thing, how did you do the minimap? I was wondering if it was just rendered from the collision tilemap. It also looked like there was some kind of "fog of war" or "line of sight" used for revealing the minimap. I have never implemented a minimap, but I want to work on it soon since it's such a big deal in metroidvanias. I kind of like the idea that you can approach minimap programming like it's a sub-game where you control the pixel moving around the minimap while you control your hero in the real game. It looks like you might have used a system like that & I was curious how it worked exactly.

Thanks!

Wow, I was so impressed with this game! I just sat here for a few hours and played through the whole thing until I had almost 100% of the map, only missing a few spots that seem impossible to get. I doubt I will find a better game in this jam in terms of gameplay, it was so fun!

The roll was really interesting, especially after getting the double jump. You can move very far and very quickly vertically by rolling in the air, and you can do your 2nd jump after the roll to get across really vast distances. I also noticed that you can gain height by wall jumping and rolling into the wall if your timing is just right. You can sequence break & get to areas without the sprint, although I don't think there's any point in doing so with the current map. Anyway, it was really interesting to see the synergy between mechanics.

The graphics were not bad, & I kind of liked the hero, it reminded me of the hero of Iron Sword. All the particle effects really added a lot to the visual aspect. I liked the sound effects & ambient sounds, but I really missed having some music.

I noted a few things that I thought could better. Don't take it the wrong way, the game was awesome! First, I wish the save bonfires were more conspicuous. There were some times I was exploring and I was jumping and rolling to go faster & skipped right over bonfires. A few bonfires are in a position where you can miss them even if you're just walking. If they were more visible, there wouldn't be any issues. It would also be nice to see them on the minimap.

As I mentioned above, there are some things that can be exploited by players to break the intended sequence of upgrade. The ones I noticed were climbing the wall by jumping & rolling, and also jumping off bats to get extra height. A lot of metroidvanias put in stuff like that on purpose since they can be really fun for players that are looking for stuff like that. I wouldn't consider it a flaw or something that needs to be taken out, but it's good to be aware of the existence of anything like that while building levels.

I would have liked the wall slide not to trigger so easily, perhaps making it trigger only when holding in the direction of the wall, because it was easy to stick to the wall by accident. Going up the stair-like sections was tricky, and some areas with a small gap were hard to get through because of it too.

And just a couple minor things - When there were 2 of the giants (the first boss) in a room, one would just kill the other if you waited. Also, if you were directly above an enemy, it would constantly switch from facing left to right, almost like it was spinning.

Anyway, I'm really impressed, & I'd love to ask some questions about the programming too if you wouldn't mind. I am using C with Raylib to make games right now so I think I could learn a lot from some of the things you've done, & I was wondering how you did some things while I was playing. Thanks for the great game!

Thanks! There is a gem in the first room that you need air dash to get & is very hard to find, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the last one. I like the idea of having a gem counter for each room, that would make things much easier.

I'll have to look into making the map feel more connected. It gives a nice feeling in MVs to have a connected open world, but the doors are much easier to program. That would be a good project after adding that the basic stuff that is missing like sound effects.

I'm glad that the graphics were acceptable. I did everything except the hero sprite by myself for the first time & didn't expect it to look very good. I feel like it could be a lot better, especially the dash upgrade sprite.

Thanks a lot for playing & for your feedback!

By the way, I assume I got to the end, but I wasn't sure. I got to the screen with "Parasite" and a button to go to the menu. Is that the end of the demo?

I enjoyed the game! The respawning enemies had a lot of synergy with the switch-hitting mechanics. It's a really good idea for an obstacle since those kind of switch puzzles usually just require time, and the respawning means that there is a lot of time pressure. I liked all the gameplay, and the graphics & story were both cool too. Nice work!

I had the same experience - I haven't beaten the first boss yet since you get thrown all the way back after dying. I also had the same opinion of the graphics, the lack of detail wasn't bad since everything was the same style & it looked kind of nice.

I also wanted to give a little feedback besides just reporting bugs. I really liked the music and all the visual effects. It had a polished feel thanks to those, even though the art wasn't detailed. I like the swiping mechanic a lot, and the TVs showing whether or not you can pass an area is a really good idea for a metroidvania.

The dialogue was a bit too wordy for me. The only other criticism I have besides the bugs is pressing up to jump, I never like that. I used joytokey to map the controls to a gamepad while I played & I had to map both W and Space since W climbed and Space moved dialogue. I didn't map W to up on the d-pad though because of my preference. It's not a big deal in a game jam game since we don't have enough time to make customizable controls and do everything else needed to make the controls feel perfect.

I enjoyed the game while I was playing & wanted to keep going. If you fix the bugs later on, I will definitely check it out!

I tried out version 1.0 (Win64 by the way) & got past the ghost, but ran into several glitches a little while later. I got to this part in the screenshot and was standing on top of some invisible space above the platform. After that, I went left and something weird happened were I kept re-entering the room over and over if tried to hold left. Then when I came back to the previous part, I couldn't swipe the block anymore. I left the room from the bottom and came back and the block worked again, but when I tried to swipe it left while hanging on the side, I ended up stuck inside the block and couldn't do anything. It got the same glitch again where you couldn't swipe it anymore.

Thanks for making this available to everyone! I used this to make the hero in my game for Metroidvania Month Jam 13: https://azecy.itch.io/gemful-caverns

Hey, thanks for all the feedback! Someone requested analog controls in a past jam where I was also using raylib & it turned out to be pretty easy to implement, and I was able to make a reusable control scheme. I know how it is from the other side - I hate using analog stick instead of dpad - so it's only fair that I should make both options available.

For the dash, I was basically emulating some of my favorite metroidvanias - Hollow Knight, Environmental Station Alpha, and the Assault Crisis series (Japanese indie games) all have a similar dash. There's some other cool things I want to do with dash that I didn't have time to implement in a game jam, like walls that can only be broken by dashing into them, damaging enemies with dash, etc. I'll keep it in mind that the dash felt robotic. Also, I noticed that you can dash in the air multiple times & at first I thought about trying to fix it, but decided it wasn't really a problem in this particular game. In the future I will probably limit it to 1 dash before landing though.

As for the spikes, I think the problem probably comes from not having visual or sound effects when taking damage. Your health resets to 40 whenever you enter a door, so maybe you were thinking of damage taken in a previous room. Also, there is about 1 second of invincibility frames, but there is no visual or audio effect for it yet. Sorry about that being underdeveloped, I would like to add that in an update after the jam is done. If you end up running acros it again, definitely let me know, I'll try to fix it. I'll check it out on my own too.

Good luck collecting all 50! I will post a video on youtube of collecting all 50 in case people are stumped and want a spoiler.

Thank you! Sorry it is so unfinished. I wish I had added sound effects, & some visual effects for taking damage and collecting items, but didn't get around to it before the deadline.

I think it's fixed now. Let me know if it still doesn't work for you.

I'm sorry I let that bug slip through, I'll try to fix it right away. Thanks a lot for letting me know.

Hello. I got to the part where the ghost tells you to move some blocks, but the character is still lying down & I can't seem to move it or do anything else.

I ran into some glitches. I died to the 2nd enemy, and during my 2nd attempt, the enemy was invincible. It think its I-frames were never running out, it seemed to have the i-frame shading on its sprite. The 2nd time I tried to play, the game froze on the dialogue when I got to the 1st white box/checkpoint.

Hey, I just finished the game & it was awesome! Really fun to play. The 2nd upgrade is really neat & had a lot of synergy with the 1st upgrade. You did some really good enemy design that combined with the upgrades in interesting ways. The graphics were good & the music was really good. I thought each song was better than the last. Nice work!

No problem! Thank you very much for addressing the issues so quickly.

I am really glad you made Respacker available, it's just what I was looking for. I was concerned about using other people's assets in my games since many game engines and frameworks require you to put assets next to the compiled .exe. Many royalty free assets have a loose license and they all have different licenses, so I didn't want to cause problems by distributing the asset outside of the derivative work. I saw several things that other devs do, but unfortunately a lot of people resort to things like renaming the file extension & hoping users don't realize they are really .mp3, .png, etc. I also like having a single file for resources instead of an entire tree of folders, it makes everything much cleaner for the user.

I'm really glad you made the library to make it compatible with any c program, not just Tilengine. I have been using Raylib for a little while & am very happy with it, so it's great that I can add it right into my workflow. I am hoping to try out using Tilengine and Raylib together as well at some point in the future. I really like how Tilengine has Tiled so tighly integrated, it seems really easy to use .tmx in your games. I certainly am interested in the graphical effects too. They are very sophisticated & it would be cool to take advantage of that.

So, thanks again! Sorry it was so much trouble just to make things work with mingw-64, but I'm glad the project could be improved by solving that problem.

Yes, it works! The zip on itch didn't work, but when I compiled from source, it worked just fine with a password. Thanks a lot!

It didn't work for me. It still says the data is not valid for loading to .png/.mp3. It still works fine with no password. I put it up on github again in case you want to check it out:

https://github.com/Azecy/RespackExample

The .ps1 files work now (at least on my computer).

Thanks! I didn't even need to change anything in the makefile, mingw64 compiled it & it works now, at least with my VS Code debugger. I got a .png to display and .mp3 to play using raylib. The only thing I didn't get to work was the password. Is my syntax wrong? I put this into my command prompt to create the .dat:

respack list.txt Y4Dti74#@4

Then put "Y4Dti74#@4" as the 2nd field in ResPack_Open.

Hi, I'm sorry to bother you, but I can't get it to work. I made the simplest project possible just to test it out & it says "undefined symbol" for each function call. That was with tcc & the same thing happens if I try to compile with mingw, "undefined reference". Would it be possible to look at my project & see if I'm doing something wrong? https://github.com/Azecy/respacker_test/tree/main/respacker_test

Thank you!

Hello. You mention a library for loading the resources, is that available?

I turned off the music by accident once. Did you press escape and check the volume sliders?

I liked a lot about this game, but ran into a few bugs that really hurt the experience. I'm on Windows 10, not sure if that has anything to do with it. I haven't finished it yet but I will consider getting back to it later.

I liked the option to switch the palette in the menu. I don't like the gameboy-style palettes, so it was very nice to see. The graphics were pretty good all around. I also liked the fade effect in the menu.

The conveyors were buggy. If you get on at a certain point (too far to one of the sides I think) you moved very slowly and then fell off when reaching the end. There is also a glitch where the level flickers between 1 and 2. I had it constantly while playing.

The most major glitch was that you can freeze the game when saving. If you press the confirm button too early, the game freezes and doesn't accept any input. It's not the application that's frozen, you can still close it normally, but you have to shut down the game. It was a real downer to lose my progress because of that. There was some unpredicatable behavior at other times with the dialog too. If you clicked too early at other times it would restart the dialog. I suggest letting the player advance the dialog more quickly with the confirm button since so many games do that & people are used to it.

There were also a couple design things I didn't like. There's at least one part where you can go up into the next screen and immediately hit an enemy that you couldn't see. Also, it was too easy to fall off a cliff. Just walking next to a cliff would lead to accidental falls since the tolerance was so low.

Hopefully you can figure out how to fix the save glitch because it's a big problem, but nothing else was really that much of a problem.

The graphics and general polish were excellent. It was nice to see a full story as well, and the atmosphere worked well with everything else. The sound effects were very good and the music was good when it was there. I wished there was music during the body of the game. I liked the spear, it worked well.

The only real complaints are about the enemies, especially the archers. They could hit you from almost anywhere & it was very unfair. There's a screen near the end with 3 archers all near each other that I could only pass by rushing through as quickly as possible, ignoring all enemies. 

I also got hit a couple times in other parts by enemies after I had slid past them. It seemed like their attack extended slightly behind them so they hit me even though I seemed to have gotten out of the way.

At the beginning of the area with 3 archers, I jumped up into an archer that I couldn't see yet. There are also many areas where you jump down, but can't see where you will land. It didn't seem like there were any deathtraps, but I would still avoid doing that. One solution would be to zoom out the camera a little, but sometimes the graphics look worse when doing that.

One more thing, I recommend enabling the d-pad for movement on controllers. Either make it an option or just enable it at the same time as the analog stick.  A lot of people prefer it & I would have had a lot less fun if I didn't use joytokey to let me use mine.

Thanks! I had a plan that worked well with the theme of the jam, so hopefully I get to flesh it out. I was trying to learn some new things this month & then ended up busier than I expected at the end, so I ended up only getting a beginning & not much more.

Fun game! I was impressed by the variety of enemies, especially with multiple bosses! It was also nice to several powerups to try out. I also liked some of the features like displaying enemy HP and having ladders. The enemy death animation/effects were really nice too. In general the graphics were very cute, I liked the style.

I missed not having a variable height jump & would've liked to see that. It is a design choice so it is reasonable to choose not to make that feature available, but I would've enjoyed the game more & it would've made combat feel more skill-based. I also expected to be able to jump or glide after falling off a ledge, but those abilities are only usable after a normal jump. Again, if you don't want to add that feature it's your choice, not really a game flaw, but I would've liked that feature & I am used to it from other games.

The sound effects were much louder than the music, so I would've liked to see that fixed. In a fully featured game, seperate volume controls for BGM and SFX would be ideal, but making the volume of BGM and SFX closer would be good even if you don't make volume controls. I would also have liked more feedback when the player is hit. It was hard to notice sometimes, so a sound effect or a visual effect in the center of the screen or near the life bar would have been good. Some people like screen shake but I recommend against using screen shake unless you make it optional. Some people (including me) can't play games with too much screen shake. It would be a good choice if you make it optional, though.

All in all, it was very fun to play & there were no major negatives. Nice work!