Thanks for giving it a go, glad you liked it! Yes lots of settings need to be added along with balance, more content, etc. Definitely agree on the volume!
Yeah the Russian is currently a placeholder as the title keeps changing and I needed a subtitle. I was indeed going for "mini chess roguelike", so would "минишахматный рогалик" be correct for that?
Accessibility would work for me, but also don't feel like you have to make it for everyone unless that's the direction you want to take it in. Naturally, I'm not really the target audience for this game so I'd trust your instinct and feedback from genre fans more than my notes. :)
Hey, very nice early systems here. The map gameplay is quite smooth and intuitive, with the conquering feeling very satisfying and having a good pace of progression. The overall vibe of music, UI design and sprites was nice too!
My major hurdle is the density of the menus. I understand some players like menus like these, but I'm not really a strategy game player so big menus with many numbers and little buttons are quite overwhelming. As such, I feel like my decisions turned out to be a bit more sporadic than carefully considered. Beyond being raw information, I think this is also in the presentation. The text is all central and quite small. But perhaps the info about armies, units, region etc could be slightly separated out. I'm thinking of how Total War games put units in a dedicated area so you can easily see who you have where.
Beyond that, I also couldn't quite figure out how to defeat the enemy armies (again, may be lost in the menus which I honestly found too much to fully engage with). I ended up just throwing all my armies at one enemy army thinking I'd whittle them down, but all my armies died and I felt pretty cooked from then on. Currently, it felt like I'd always win at taking land, but always lose at taking armies. Making strategy hard to plan.
Please take all this with a pinch of salt, as heavy strategy games are not a genre I play... I tried crusader kings last year and it fried my brain in minutes.
Overall, I really liked the map interface, conquering and turn-based pacing. That all felt great. But when it got into stats and menus, I got a bit lost and struggled to figure out why I was losing.
Cool concept and pretty fun to drift around, while having that pac-man like hunted-to-hunter flow. The core concept is pretty strong.
Like others said, I had a few aesthetic concerns with the audio playing during pauses and the stark nature of the menus, but these are minor.
A couple of thoughts I had while playing: - It felt quite strange to use drifting as a way to gather the resource required to attack, as after a certain threshold of enemies my drifting would almost always force me into them, so I'd lose health. So I wasn't totally sure how to gather resource while staying alive. And in that equation, staying alive is way more important in my mind. It could be that there's some kind of grunt enemy that you kill by hitting, and gather resource that way. This would also give you more moment to moment objectives beyond the charge up-kill loop. - I wasn't totally sure what the enemies were? Drones? Tanks? Bots? The theme didn't fully come across for me. - It felt like I should perhaps do some damage while bashing into the enemies anyway, without the boost.
But overall a strong concept that played well and could defo work as a larger game.
Playing as a slime was a nice role-reversal and I can see that framing a nice broader narrative. The systems are impressively deep and I can see all the work put into stats, inventories, and the flow of combat.
I enjoyed my playthrough but did get a little bit into a rinse and repeat formula of using default attacks then the character special abilities, and that only fell apart against the 100hp Knight squad at the first town. This felt like the intuitive way to go for me as using consumables feels wasteful against normal enemies, so my brain was trying to minimise resource loss while still surviving. In some ways I feel this butted up against the overall mechanic of having lots of unique items you use very quickly to overwhelm the enemy (after all my inventory had LOADS in it by the end. I could see a couple of roots here: either allowing the sale of items to facilitate level ups etc or the total removal of default attacks/specials to be replaced purely by loot-based attacks. Both of these would have made me consider and use loot differently.
The flow and gameplay was all pretty intuitive and clear. I would perhaps increase the size of the forecasting icons above enemy heads, as I forgot about them because they're so small and low contrast. Similarly some icons were quite low-contrast and hard to tell between their cooldown and available state. Beyond those minor things, the flow and my comprehension of what was going on was good.
As someone who's not a huge fan of this genre in general, one thing that would put me off would be the intensity of the menus. There's a lot going on when you enter the end round menu with characters, items and other things all showing up in panels at the same time, taking up loads of space and presenting loaaads of information. For me this is a little too much, but, as mentioned, I'm not a huge RPG or turn-based player anyway. So could just be me.
Glad the vibe landed with you, it is a bit melancholic currently and I do like that. But I imagine I will shift to a slightly different vibe later on mainly through other music and perhaps stepping away from the black/white. Thanks for playing despite your aversion to the genres!
Fun game, very intuitive gameplay and I enjoyed the lighting effects. I guess the next step is differentiating this from other survival twin-stick shooters.
A few thoughts I had while playing - I wasn't sure what the red fast enemy did? Was he damaging me or just being a jumpscare? - I couldn't tell how much health I had, so I still don't know if it's like one-hit kill or if I have a hidden health bar. - Enemies continuously spawned in one direction for me (by the boss), which made sense but restricted my gameplay to just backing away. This could be fixed by adding some drops and other things to make me want to rush towards/around the enemy.
With more juice and progression this could defo be fun, although there's lots of competition in the genre. :)
The concept and atmosphere are very nice and chill, I can definitely see this appealing to a lot of people. It reminded me of games like Alba: Wildlife Adventure or Heartopia which have lots of camera minigames/features.
The low-stakes aspect of the gameplay was nice, but it did feel a little aimless. It could be cool to have a mini objective to take a picture of X or Y in a level.
The biggest feature I was wanting was to have a first person view with zoom, so I could frame up some nice shots in the environment that weren't centred around the character. I think this would add a lot more variety to the game, and allow more objective based things.
The controls also felt a little unintuitive on PC, but would work well for mobile.
The narrative concept about venting and relieving frustrations is super nice. And the overall vibe and aesthetics show promise.
Gameplay-wise I found it a little hard to fully get behind for a couple of reasons: - The amount of inputs required for the simple attack felt a lot. I was almost always holding directional inputs, space, shift and LMB--the ability menu felt a little redundant as the mouse controls didn't seem to have another use? Unless I missed something. I also stopped using the other two actions as they felt less impactful. - I found it hard to tell where the player and enemy health was, so was shooting them without any real plan of when they'd die. And I wasn't sure if there was a way for me to recover health. - I also wasn't sure where to go really - Some SFX for movement, taking damage, hits, attack, etc would be HUUUUGE as well.
I think the main thing from all that is just clarity, as I felt quite confused about the systems. But I did like what I understood.
Please give my game a shot if you get the chance :)
It took me a couple of trys to realise I need to RELEASE the mouse for the slider to take effect. This feels a little unintuitive as sliding/turning a radio dial irl has immediate effects. It was also quite challenging given how fast you lose health and how the frequency changes felt random. I also wasn't sure whether there'd be a win state, or whether it's just a "survive as long as you can" kinda experience.
Please give my game a go if you get the opportunity :)
I like the concept of building melodies and songs from components while the gameplay systems are pointing in a different direction. And the overall high concept style currently works.
To answer your questions:
- Is this even fun? What elements are engaging and can be expanded on? What elements are annoying and need to go? -> During my play session I reached brick walls 3 times, with a full hand and absolutely nowhere to place the cards. This effectively killed my run all 3 times, leaving me with no option but to quit (at least it seemed that way, I may have missed something). This felt pretty bad, especially after the satisfaction of building up the planet defences.
- Is the time pressure right? Too stressful? Not enough? -> Didn't feel it at all, as my playthrough ended due to hand limitations instead of time pressure.
- Do the card placement rules feel clear? -> Not really. My understanding was that I could place anything anywhere to start with. But after making a decision that planet would need only that type (O/M etc) and that slot on other planets would need to be the same suit. This made sense to me, but I ran into limitations when I couldn't discard anything or had to stack meaning my hand would just fill up no matter what.
- Is hearing your final composition satisfying? -> It was nice, but didn't fully pop yet.
- UI/UX clarity -> Quite clear, but the card formatting of the casettes really threw me off initially. I think cards have a lot of baggage when I/people see them. So when I saw a "M" of hearts it became a bit confusing. Thinking "this card doesn't exist..." I'd say it could be worth changing the aesthetics of the casettes to be typed differently (i.e. colour coded instead of suited). It also felt bad to have to draw my own cards manually, as it was a bit tedious.
- Bug reports -> No bugs but my run was soft locked each time by a full inventory and seemingly no way to clear duplicate or deadweight cards. The main menu also felt a little strange as clicking "new game" didn't start a new game--it was the button next to it. haha.
Thank you for playing and for the feedback. Yes, the box was a recent addition which hasn't yet got enough of a tutorial. But the easy way to think of it is like your deck, in a deck builder :)
Ah I see, well if you wanted to go for a more random-based game I think that could be possible. But then I think you'd want to draw more inspiration from idle games; so that the player's gameplay is about being a football manager (so getting all the cards together, making trades, etc) then the matches can play out relatively quickly WITHOUT any player input. That could be a way towards having the core RNG remain (if I understood you right).
I think the main issue with the RNG right now is that the game is saying "actively play" by making me click to reveal cards but if my expectation is set up to be "this part is totally out of my control", then that issue falls away.
In other words it's all about setup and expectation. The current version made me feel like I was a player drawing from a deck. But if that expectation is shifted to being a manager creating the deck, then it could definitely work. Football manager games are popular with a particular niche, after all.
I could see this being a great ironic party game (or maybe minigame) where you're all trying to run to the other side and don't know where the mines are. Also got a lot of potential as a meme game. Either path I would say some more varied environment and movement options (jumping, sprinting, etc) would go a long way.
The combination of the thumbnail gif and title definitely caught my eye and made me chuckle.
Interesting concept which I could see being very popular, and cool to see the inspiration from the Amiga game.
Currently it's a little hard to assess, as I feel there isn't really any player expression in the game--at least in my playtest. The cards were dealt randomly and I could only turn them over randomly, so the actions I took during my turn always felt totally random, and I couldn't craft a strategy about what to do. Dealing the cards face up could help this allowing the player to string together actions meaningfully, while retaining the deck builder RNG.
It also felt a bit unfair as the opponent appeared to always have many more cards than me, so I felt hopelessly doomed to fail.
Menus, graphics and information are also quite hard to read currently as there isn't much hierarchy, but I understand this is very early.
Like another commenter I also had the feeling assets were AI, which was kickstarted by the thumbnail which is very uncanny and feels generated. This generally doesn't feel great especially when they are the only assets in the game. So unifying a visual style (even if it's all placeholder) would make a big difference user wise.
Ultimately, it's a cool concept that could be fun. But currently the very heavy RNG and lack of player information is a bit of an obstacle.
Really liked the educational angle of this game, with the very specific references. It was very satisfying to see the population grow and thrive.
I left a response via your form. Like I mentioned there, I felt the most effective strategy was just to spam place everything as much as possible (which stopped me thinking strategically). It could be cool to see ecological thinking emerge in the game systems, making the best strategy about management and balance between the Moa and the different other species of plants and animals.
Very cook concept and presentation. The intro, animation and vibe is great.
The gameplay has a very strong core, which is easy to grasp and fun to execute on.
Currently a couple of the objectives feel a little strange from a narrative standpoint. For example in the 4th stage, I need to execute both my remnants without them killing each other--this feels a little arbitrary as if my goal is to have them dead why does it matter if I or the previous remnant does it? In a similar way, narratively it feels a little strange to stop my previous remnant killing the VIP so that I can... as, again, it effectively changes nothing (narratively/world-wise). An interesting way to solve this could be providing each remnant with slightly different goals. I.e. new VIPs to also kill while your remnant clears up the others, then clearing your remnants. Turning you into some type of super-assassin who ends up clearing an entire building/complex through your clones...without leaving a trace.
A few small things that you may already have on your radar: - Would be great to have more movement capabilities. Slides, sprints, etc. - I would move the restart away from F to avoid misclicks, and make restarting instant (instead of the F - Space combo). - Some more work on camera to add life and motion would go a long way. - It could be helpful to lay out all objectives on screen, so you know how the whole level is gonna go. - Failing once and having to redo a full sequence feels a bit punishing, and eventually pushed me to quit. So I would suggest looping single objectives instead of whole levels. Then having a way to restart the whole level if desired.
Nice concept and world building! I love the UI of the book and creatures in particular.
I'm not sure if I missed something, but I was only able to catch one fish (the salmon), and then couldn't seem to find any more after giving it to the Palace character. So, if there is more some further direction could be cool.
If you haven't I would suggest looking into Dredge, which makes fishing fun and varied via simple but different minigames for different types of fish.
A few other small things that came to mind: - The opening text was hard to read as it was justifying while typing out (so words would move). Make sure the text is fixed while typing so reading is possible. - The camera felt very close (at least for me, it looks better in your screenshot), so I would suggest pulling it back considerably, and making the boat smaller so it takes up less visual space. - I would also agree with the other commenter that it was unclear how things would develop. So it could be worth making the hook of the game (pun intended) clearer.
Nice early build with strong design and real character!
Thanks for playing! Without a proper tutorial the game can be a little confusing in its current state, but hope you had fun! And yes, I will defo add some options to remove/reduce the visual effects.
Super fun experience, great art style and immediately engaging! Could be cool to have some instruments be bought with points, to help the sense of progression. Really enjoyed it, and could see it being really fleshed out to have you build and manage a whole festival!
Thanks! As I'm someone pretty from maths myself, I'm glad it still felt good! I wanted to dive into more complex knots, knot theory and a more educational angle, but the physics challenges were enough to melt my brain... haha.
Haha, while testing I got pretty good with the controls. A longer string will allow for more complex knots, but I kept the length short-ish for web performance. So I'll add in after the jam!
Thanks for the comment! There should have been a way through the pause menu or the game should have booted you back after the voiceover finished, but I'll do some more bug testing :)
Great thumbnail and nice mechanics. With some more floors and movement options, and enemies coming from all sides, it could be a fun movement roguelike. :)
Super cool experience. The VO narrative in the mind-bending world worked well to orient me, so I knew when progress was being made. No idea how you put together something like this, so hats off to you! Definitely one of the most satisfying experiences I've played from the jam.
