itch.io

I didn’t expect to lose by selling all of my blood. I guess it would be nice to put some kind of a limit on that. Other than that, neat.

I’ve gotta admit, this took me an unreasonable amount of time to figure out - I played it like three times over the course of a couple of days until it finally clicked.

I think the mechanics were so hard to understand partially because the animations whizzed past so quickly - the fears played by the ghosts are probably the most important piece of information communicated by the game, but they disappear so fast that my brain didn’t even register that they were trying to communicate something the first few times I played. When I figured out that some of them are discarded and some stay for the next round, that’s when it finally clicked with me. If I were you I’d definitely make the feedback animations play out a lot slower, so the player has the time to take a look at the result of a given round and check whether they hit any weakpoints.

It also didn’t occur to me for a long time that you could stack the jokes you play. I don’t think this was explained in the itch page at all, and ends up being really powerful if you know what you’re doing.

Overall, I think rules-heavy games don’t fare well on game jams because most people just aren’t going to want to give jam games too much time before they switch to something else. I think tutorializing the mechanics in-game would have made a big difference as well - for example introducing them slowly, maybe pointing out what to look for. I guess that’s more of a deadline issue though.

Took me some 10-15 minutes to complete, but for some reason, I have no idea why, I felt really exhausted by the end. That was probably the intention, with all the grating sounds and whatnot. The tiny FOV was a bit too much though, and a major contributor to the weird motion sickness feeling the game gave me. I’m a huge fan of the visuals though.

An interesting concept, and definitely a pretty looking game.

Not sure if it’s because I’m terrible at management games, but I feel like it takes ages to save up for new rooms and other higher value items. Even if it doesn’t get snowballing that slow (for a more robust player probably), I think it still plays rather slow due to how long most actions take, as opposed to more traditional, isometric management games. The elevator in particular feels like it was designed to drive the player mad, seeing how long one takes to get from floor to floor, and how often they’ll need to get there.

Also I was not fond of the game seemingly trying to gaslight me with beds disappearing out of existence all of a sudden, making the visitors very upset through no fault of my own. It’s especially puzzling since the game tells you the furniture can move around, but nothing about it disappearing outright, so it really made me second-guess if I gave a bed-less room to a visitor by mistake. I think making the beds end up somewhere else in the hotel instead would have been much less punishing, and it wouldn’t feel unfair being taxed 40c for a random encounter. When I realized the swish noises were actually being made by rats stealing my beds, it made me even more frustrated really.

All in all it’s still a nice prototype - based on the in-game week I played before it started getting boring with no new things really happening. I think increasing the pace would have made it more fun to play - having the player in a hectic rush to solve problems all around the hotel, then getting a moment of rest before starting a new day. The computer also could use some streamlining, maybe making it a tablet so you don’t have to embark on a journey to your room to keep tabs on things. I still played a whole week so clearly I was having fun.

Thanks for the detailed feedback! The thing with the invincible enemy is definitely a bug; while developing the game I had an issue with enemies not losing aggro when they reset after the player dies, and I thought I managed to get rid of it before submitting the game, but it seems it just came back and made them invincible too. I guess that mechanic is just really prone to bugs. I think it may be occurring when an enemy is killed as the player dies; I’ll try to fix it once the jam is over. Sorry it happened to you.

This was a fun game, and very well animated. Some criticisms I have:

The main character seems to be very reluctant to turn around. She has a noticeable turn radius while running, which, while it makes the movement more realistic, made the initial platforming section extremely hard. She also doesn’t seem to like to turn mid-combo, which made me whiff a bunch of hits. It also seems that some parts of the enemy aren’t covered by its hitbox on some of the wider animations, which made me whiff as well.

The dash has very generous iframes, I think they last throughout the entire animation. This meant I never really needed to jump over attacks - I think taking some iframes off the end of the dodge and adding some to the start of the jump would have balanced them better.

Still it was a really fun and competently made experience. All the attack animations were well animated and properly telegraphed. It was cool to fight all the default cubes I’ve deleted.

PS how did you feel about transparent backfaces of already scanned object, that lets you see environment you’ve already walked through?

I wasn’t 100% sure how intentional they were, but it was cool to look back at previous sections, especially that fenced garden part

It looks like this was inspired by games like Scanner Sombre, though projecting a whole-ass render onto an environment definitely seems unique. It would be neat to see a breakdown of the technology behind it.

Also it feels like the game suffers from the game jam plague of not completely realized vision - I imagine the “it” was intended to be projected onto the environment when you scan it, and then be gone when you re-scan the same spot - that would have made it more suspenseful I think.

I liked the way the gravity mechanic was introduced. I’m not sure if it was intended or not, but the big slime was easily cheesable by just hiding under the platform on the far left of the arena, since it couldn’t fit in there. A shame it was so short, it was fun and I was fond of the aesthetic.

I liked the theater stage aesthetic. The crosshair is a bit unfortunate color though, it was almost invisible to me against the 1st stage floor.

This is the first time I’ve seen CSG used as a game mechanic. A cool concept though I don’t care much for the backrooms aesthetic.

Ohh, so that’s what it was. I thought it was some exotic issue with not preloading the sounds until they’re played.

Normally I’m not a fan of tower defense games but I guess this is a decent twist on the formula. One issue I had with it was the static camera angle that sometimes caused some spike traps to be hidden behind other scenery.

I love how the spider controls and moves. This plays like a really solid tech demo, has a lot of potential.

These are ADVANCED tank controls - reminds me of the original Alone in the Dark. It’s a a bit of a shame that the base defense gameplay doesn’t really require you to walk around - I think the unique controls would’ve shone more if there were levels that you’d need to traverse.