itch.io

Thanks for playing!  You can't get soft-locked because if you're out of money, you get a free pity ticket =).  Similar for crashing if you have no money, it's not game over.  For viewing instructions, yeah, Itch's "fullscreen" is a bit weird on the setup, but the back button on your browser will get you there (just make sure you save, I'm not 100% certain itch won't unload the game... or actually the back button will first navigate to my main menu which probably isn't desired here).

For the final NPC, it auto-saves before the choice, so you can simply click "load game" after making a choice to get back if needed.

% completion would have been a good idea, that probably would have made a better leaderboard secondary factor than the nebulous/grindable "wealth"...

Thanks for playing and the kind words!  No plans for an "episode 2", it was just fitting for the comic book theming =).  Maybe should have started with "issue #7" or something instead to be clear :D.

Tutorial was fantastic.  Playing 1 character at a time was a nice easing in to the combat.  The *bawk* *bawk* at the start of the combat theme is golden.  Thanks for not forcing me to spend all of the wild dice before hitting Confirm if it'll kill them =).  Not sure if it was me confused by something or not, but the Sling's power ability, (at least when in my off-hand) didn't give the +3 accuracy it says it gives, I had a similar issue with another bow's power not giving any accuracy.  I had a lot of difficulty telling which were the doors in the gray tileset (made some terrible mistakes in combat from that :).  The variety in levels was very nice though.  I had a lot of fun with this one, enjoyed it all the way through to the end!  The "shop" in your inventory was really simple and fun, that's a great mechanic for a jam game.

Really impressive amount of content!  The town especially had a lot of charm, although a lot of the visuals and interface felt really inconsistent with different resolutions and such.  If you get into a second combat before the victory music from the first combat finishes, the wrong music starts playing.  Also, probably that means the encounter rate was way too high :D.  Though it was nice getting to spend stats on level up, I didn't really feel much of their effect (even after pumping my last few levels all into one guy, still felt about the same).  Difficultly wasn't too hard, maybe slightly too easy (I didn't use any of my consumables), though that's better than too hard for a jam game =).

I really like the look of this one, was that mostly original art?  If so, well done!  If not, nice job putting it together anyway =).

The hacking minigame broke on me.  On my first game it started giving nonsense results (actual answer was 3 purple, but with 1 purple, 1 cyan, 1 green, it said "1 correct, 1 in wrong place"), and then it totally broke - next one I could only enter 1 color on the first turn, and then on each game after that I could just keep on entering colors (would say "8/3").  After a complete exit and reload it mostly behaved though, at least enough to progress.

I found the difficulty a bit too hard, at some point there were 3 stalkers in front of me in various directions, I was all out of medkits, and not sure what to do.  Turns out if I just slammed the "forward" key I'd attack them multiple times before they get a turn, which really seemed like a bug (it was supposed to be turn-based, right?), but I was happy it let me advance, and eventually escape the planet with the relic =).

Glad you liked it!  I hoped at least one person would get the Kali4nia joke =).  In practice I think most people only read a few of the item descriptions though, judging from watching streams, and some were better than others, so that's fair.  "Civillian" was a typo, which I blame primarily on Chrome not doing spell-check if the text is in all upper case :D (and secondarily on the comic book tradition of using only upper case).   As for knowing what you're doing, we wanted to make the game feel open, so I mostly intentionally let you go around and do whatever you wanted, although if you followed the exclamation marks on the map and only flew to new areas when someone had given you a reason to do so, it should give you reasons for things... but ended up pretty easy to just stumble through things in any order and maybe it should have actually gated people from going to the various locations until they had a reason to do so...

My first game ended rather unexpectedly (ship destroyed, I guess), and I hadn't saved - would have been nice to have some flashing screen or something if I was low on ship health.  I didn't have much problem with ship health after that, so I'm not quite sure what happened.  Maybe there were ships hiding behind the wreck and shooting at me I didn't notice, that seemed to happen later =).

I love the secret door augment - it gives just enough info that I've still gotta be paying attention, but removed the need to smash my head into everything.

I completed the game in about 1.5 hours, with a few reloads.  The wrecks mostly seemed very easy, except one wreck where I just got wrecked :D.  There I expended all of my energy shooting out from behind a secret door at a drone, and still didn't kill it... I just turned around and went to a different wreck and was fine for the rest of the game.

The ship combat was nice, I'm apparently 100% unable to know which way strafing is going to move me when flying any direction other than straight up :D.  Wasn't too hard, but definitely wasn't easy (although I never upgraded my ship stats because that seemed like a waste since it could be compensated with skill).

Nice game!  I, however, never saw a chicken.  I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask the judge to disqualify this one.

Thanks for playing and your feedback!  What browser were you using?  Any chance you were playing on Mac OS or iOS Safari (they don't support OGGs so we fall back to MP3 there, which isn't ideal, but better than no sound or crashing downloading a gigabyte of .WAVs :).  The last door on the first planet is for the quest to locate The Ascending Sword, but I'm guessing you must have found the ship manually by going through every docking bay on the station instead of talking to people, which is totally okay =).

Thanks for playing and for the feedback!  I've started watching your playthrough and have been taking notes of lots of little things to potentially fix =).  Yeah, the controller support is a little finicky (and didn't get around to adding on-screen icons for them, mostly because I figured not many people would use it anyway).  Thanks for sharing the video!

Thanks for playing and for your feedback!  Good catch on the typo, that'll be fixed after the jam for sure.  I blame that on having to use all caps to be "comic-book-y" and Chrome for some reason not doing spellcheck when things are capitalized :D.  The walking past people artifact bugs me too, it was on my polish to-do list, but I didn't get to it, definitely something I hope to fix in the engine before next year.  It's actually worse than just clipping through it, it's part of some complicated logic that moves them over and to the side when you're in the same cell with them, but then as you're interpolating away it goes a little haywire and snaps them back to the center of the cell and then you clip through it ^_^.

Great game!  I managed to beat it, ending the game with 16 attack and 41 corn... I'm not sure I ever ate a corn, maybe I'm a carnivorous chicken?  I really like the different zones, and showing them in different colors, gave a nice sense of exploration (and knowing when I should go back and fill in my map), and variety.  No real complaints here, only nitpick is when the map is closing, and I'm moving, the map clear animation pauses, and then out of the corner of my eye I see a new line of text "appear" in the log, so a few times I read the last lines that "appeared" and I was like "what, how did I just dodge an attack while moving around on the map?".  I love the Cornish hen.  Nothing too corny for me.

Nice game, and a nice introduction to a genre I've only played once (in last year's DC Jam :).  My first 3 days were anomaly-free, which felt weird, no idea if that was intentional or just random luck.

I seem to often have to hit Space twice to interact with things - I think it seems like the "Space to open door" message is popping up before I can press space to open the door, so I'll hit it as soon as the message appears (and I'm still moving), but it doesn't do anything, and then need to hit it again once I've stopped moving.

Art is really nice and consistent, gave some nice atmosphere.  The minigame was also fun, I kept trying to survive without ever using dash (at my best made it to about 5 seconds left, but never quite made it).  I didn't ever actually fail the minigame though, and that felt good, having multiple hearts in it was forgiving and seemed a good balance.

Thanks for playing and glad you liked it!  Yeah, the artist really knocked it out of the park with the UI design!  He's done many projects and jams before (check his Itch page).  I've also done quite a few before, including a few commercial indie projects, and the winning entry to this jam last year (Snake Eyes), which uses the same base engine as this one, which I've been working on for a while.  Having a working engine going into a jam like this is pretty key to being able to focus on what's important.

The other two are new to game jams (I think this was their first jam, but don't quote me on that =).

Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!  My comfort zone is "weird game mechanics that don't belong in a crawler", so I thought I'd get out of that and try something with (more) traditional gear and enemies :D.  Nah, in seriousness, while brainstorming we had a lot of different ideas, but wanted to explore this "heist on a space station" theming/plot and focused as much on enabling that as possible, somewhat to the detriment of no particularly stand-out mechanics, but gotta budget the time =).

Thanks for playing and glad you liked it!

I did use seeded random in the combat, somewhat because I thought there was some mathematical possibility of you actually losing your very first combat (if they got all crits and you got all whiffs ^_^), and I really didn't want that to happen, and also because I hate games that encourage save-scumming as problem solving.  The seed is from the number of things left alive on the floor, so generally everyone's experience should be the same (although in theory you can use that to your advantage, go fight something else, come back and the guy'll maybe be slightly easier).

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!  Hopefully you join the '25 jam, I'm sure it'll be fun again =).

Yeah, that would be fun, will maybe add those during the next ProcJam ^_^.

Or... maybe there already are creatures, but they're very, very rare? :D

Pretty sweet!  I like the music.

If you use the Itch.io app, you should be able to download it and run it locally.  No bookmarking currently (although I considered keeping your view location in the URL instead of local storage and that'd implicitly let you bookmark / link / etc - I might put that on my short list of tweaks to do ^_^)

Thanks for checking it out and glad you liked it and/or I'm sorry it gave you vertigo.

If you install the Itch.io app, you should be able to download and play the game offline.  Let me know if it doesn't work, but it's worked on my previous projects, so should work on this one too!

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!  Hah, love the random luck you got on your leader choices (didn't even occur to me that could happen, but with 100 names and 3 faces to choose from, odds are it'd happen to someone, I guess ^_^).

The CRT filter may have a bit more of an impact on a lower resolution screen, though it also helps more with the hard pixel boundaries and blending colors there too, but it is a bit of a matter of taste.

There are no plans for a separate downloadable, however you should be able to download the game via the Itch.io app and play offline.  (I haven't tried in a year, though it worked for people after last year's jam, let me know if you try!)

The cat is simply a reference to my game in last year's Dungeon Crawler Jam (same engine and similar quality, though pretty different kind of game), you may enjoy =).

That typo is just a reflection of the mental state of the captain when she wrote that log entry, all part of the story! ;)  Good catch on the typo, fixed now, thanks!

I don't mind at all, I love it! =)  Glad you enjoyed the game!

Nice job on these assets!  I used these (purchased in a bundle a while back), in my recent entry to the Dungeon Crawler Jam, and it came in first place!  Apologies for using them basically verbatim on my game page's background though -_-.  They're slightly better integrated within the game itself =).

Wonderful job on these assets!  I used these (and a few of other packs I've purchased of yours), in my recent entry to the Dungeon Crawler Jam, and it came in first place!  Couldn't have done it without you!

Wonderful job on these assets!  I used these (and a bunch of other packs I've purchased of yours, here and on HumbleBundle), in my recent entry to the Dungeon Crawler Jam, and it came in first place!  Couldn't have done it without you!

Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it!

Party members left (and you get a replacement at a higher tier) once they were fully upgraded (assuming they weren't at max tier, and a couple extra little checks like that you had enough XP left over to level up at least one of their skills, or if they were way behind the rest of the party's tier), but there was no way you could prevent it (and, mechanically, you probably wouldn't want to, as the higher HP+shield from the tier increase kinda trumps everything else).  It understand it didn't really feel good though, as a player =).

Originally I had the party dialog all deactivating after reading it once, but a little too often I ran past one, and then stepped on another, and was like "wait, what was that?", and of course there was no way to go back.  I'm not sure if anyone actually went back to read things they kinda missed or not though.  Glad to know it spiced up backtracking though!  The quantity and quality of those dialogs is all thanks to the writer on the team, they really do add a lot!

Ah, restarting at the latest health point wouldn't have been too bad =).

For the visual bug, at first I thought it might be an enemy, as the first time it seemed like it was right when I walked over a corpse (that maybe came back right when I stepped on it?) but it didn't seem tightly correlated, and there was no enemy anywhere nearby when I escaped the bug.

I did see the game restart, and saw the "Later..." message, and I guess it does say "THE END" and "Thanks for playing", but I couldn't quite remember if that's also what it said when I died =).   I thought it might be the end, but since it felt like it was half way through a level, I wasn't quite sure... had it been right at the beginning / after going down the stairs, or a clear end of level dead end, maybe it would have been clearer =).

Visuals are just lovely, although the pixel-art UI being misaligned by half a pixel in places relative to the pixelated world bugs me a bit =).  I love the lighting and the monsters, it all comes together really nicely.  The reload mechanic was great, I thought I was dead once, but apparently two enemies lined themselves up and politely died to a single shot ^_^.  I would have liked a little audio cue when a tick of the reload completed, as a couple times I thought I was done reloading a segment, so let go, but apparently it had visually finished the segment, but not actually finished it, or something like that.  I made it through to the end and it was very satisfying.

Overall, love this!  Visuals are cool, although maybe a little less variance on the font would have made it easier to read =).  Monsters are really cool.

I made it through the 4th, I think, level (lots of invisible walls), and on the next level my one remaining character committed suicide shortly after entering the level.  So sad.  I can't remember if anyone died along the way (besides the scripted events), but if I had lost no one, was there potentially more content after that?  I liked having to choose who to sacrifice along the way, although I couldn't imagine playing with automap!  On that note, the dungeon design was wonderful and devious, all of the elements I'd love to see.  Unfortunately after my scout left me, it turned into a bit of save-scumming (just reload if I stepped on a trap).

I couldn't tell where consumables were coming from, seemed often like exploring the dungeon wasn't providing much of anything except danger?  Were consumables just coming from combat drops?  I was definitely low on medkits the whole time, thanks to my Doctor being the first one to go mad, I guess =).  I had *tons* of ammo though, so started just minigunning through everything.

Great job on this!

I'm not sure I trust the yellow "energy drink" I found in the bathroom...

The objectives were nice polish, but honestly it may have been a bit more fun exploring without them (or, slightly more work, but if they only show up if the player hasn't made any objective progress in 2-5 minutes or so?).  I don't think I was ever confused on where to go (e.g. the dialog about dumping liquid on the console was perfect to get me to remember I saw a bucket earlier).  OMG, I love the fidelity transition, the different lock-pick UI even was a nice touch!  Cutscenes and such were great and really showed a lot of polish.  Nice job!

You had me at "Rescue cats."  Visual style is cool, although I think the scan-lines on the main viewport was a bit much (doing something like just duplicating every other line and dimmed by half, like you seem to do on most of the interface itself, would probably give a similar feel but not be quite so hard on the eyes).  The UI and framing around the viewport looks stellar.  Monsters are great too.

I didn't like that rotating counted as a turn, more than once I tried to turn to face an enemy, but strafed into the square instead (stupid game I played before this one with backwards turn/strafe controls confusing my brain!), and then I got attacked, and then got attacked twice more as I turned to face them, instead of getting the first attack in as I'd planned and thought I instructed my character to do ^_^.  Having no queuing of movement nor being able to hold down a button to keep moving made navigating the dungeon a bit of a chore.   I would have liked a little more choices in combat, there didn't seem to be anything I could do to increase my longevity, no healing or anything, so whether or not I survived just game down to luck of how many times I missed between now and my next level up :(.  I got down to 2hp before my last level up, so, luckily, didn't die, but it was close!

I would have appreciated a compass somewhere instead of having to look at "moved north".  The fact that the map just showed a general overview was really nice, made me feel like I had to keep track of where I was exploring, but still got a general sense of where I was.

The verticality was great, those rooms really had a nice sense of place and were fun to explore (and recognize, as I learned my way around).

There's a bug/issue where if the game is not in focus it's still capturing my mouse, so if I alt-tab to another program, my mouse is locked to a tiny corner of my screen ^_^.  Overall, cool entry, glad I rescued all of the cats!

Graphics are lovely, really nice consistent style and sense of place.  I'm glad I was invincible, I would have "died" once and restarting would have been annoying ^_^.  I got what is I guess a bug a few times, some big black blob seemed to attach to my camera, couldn't see where I was going unless I was strafing and could then just see a little bit, and it usually cleared up when I got near a healing area.    One time near the purple orb, something similar tinted part the screen yellow (subtractive purple?), I think, instead of black, maybe some effect was going awry?  It took me quite a while to find all 3 orbs (just didn't see the door to the purple orb area ^_^), but I made it back home in the end!  I liked "forward" being attack for the simple combat, made things flow pretty nicely.

Sounds good!  Yeah, the combat was a bit janky, but working on atmosphere over better combat seems like it was the right choice =).

Cool entry!  I wish I had slightly more interesting choices in combat... it seemed very rarely did I have enough information to do anything other than "choose the safest row", or even when I had information, I really had to analyze things closely to find any row that was actually safer than whichever row had the fewest Xs... if it did something like the row patterns were (relatively) fixed so that with a little information you could make a guess about which row might be the one you want (e.g. I remember it had an empty spot in the 4th column) or something like that would make it just a little bit more engaging.

I figured out what everything did (eventually) except for CBT (which, I'm assuming, stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy here, and not what it usually stands for on the darker reaches of the internet...).  Reading a comment below I guess that's because I also didn't notice there was a map until I had 1 trauma left to deal with =).  I would have liked a slightly simpler way to pick up things in a room (maybe have one less menu and then just B = open menu, and A = pick up?), it got a bit cumbersome - same with repeatedly using the same item (maybe just press A on it repeatedly, with a 1-line message about what it did? =).

I like the visuals, nice, simple, clean, and the ending song was nice =).

Nice game with great vibes!  First combat was confusing, I lost 3/4th of my health and I'm not sure if I was doing something wrong or not.  Monster was in the same tile as me for most of the combat.  Second combat I tried dancing more, but still didn't get it.  Mostly figured things out after that.  I think my confusion mostly comes from the attack sound sounds like a miss/"whiff" sound even when I hit, and that I needed to keep them at least a tile away from me to be able to hit them, I guess?  I would have liked some clearer indication of a hit (both audible and visible) so that I could figure out if I'm doing the right thing or not much quicker =).  Not sure if it's a bug, or just ghostly enemies, but one moved through some walls and attacked me through them (right after going through the second torch-able door, I think - there were a couple spaces I couldn't get to myself to the north that the enemy went through).  The shark was great, and terrifying.  Did I imagine things, or did it come back to life and attack me from behind? (Or were there 2?)  I managed to make it through the end, I hope my sacrifice was not in vein...

Great, thanks for playing!  Very little of the visual art is original (mostly a bunch of the UI and some of the environment art), the portraits were from the same artist's assets (Tyler Warren), although with only a little bit of editing here and there - he might call them "monsters", but I call them friends and aliens =).  I've updated the page to better attribute the portraits to him now.

I'm glad you liked how it all came together, I really liked how the dying/recruiting/retiring ties into the story and setting, but not everyone likes their characters leaving suddenly on them ^_^.  Thanks for posting a video (and sharing bug report details), I will have to check it out later!

Thanks for playing!  I have played Dicey Dungeons, though I had to look it up to remember exactly how it worked (apparently I 100%'d it on Steam though, so enjoyed it very much =).  _None Shall Pass_ (board game playable on BoardGameArena) was my main inspiration for this, but there's a lot of good ideas in Dicey Dungeons that would perhaps blend well here too =).  Sanity was a bit tacked on, and was originally planned as a resource to limit reaching the next safe area with respawning monsters, but then balancing XP and player levels with respawning monsters sounded problematic, and my goal of many combats having 1-2 deaths didn't mesh with anything other than complete health restore between combats (with the low health numbers, if anyone wasn't healed it seemed the chance for a party wipe skyrocketed), so really only the "max sanity" became relevant (which, if you were playing really well, you may not have even noticed was going down ^_^).  We also had a *ton* of cool ideas for visual affects to apply as you started getting insane, but that simply didn't make the cut (it was either that or a day of polish, and polish trumps all ;).

Interesting bug!  I bet that only happens in browsers that suspend the tab when in the background (which I have disabled because it makes debugging really painful ^_^), and I should be able to reproduce and fix it pretty easy, thanks for reporting!