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Dashing Strike

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A member registered Jan 10, 2019 · View creator page →

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Nice entry!  The movement felt responsive and snappy, felt good moving around.  Avoiding the patrolling guys was some nice little gameplay variety, and finding secret rooms was fun (nice job telegraphing the first one).  I wish there was more content =).

I love the lava and fire, they look great!  Combat was pretty fluid and fun once I got the hang of it.  On two attempts I managed to kill 9 foes both times, despite feeling like I was playing much better the second time :).

Really love the look of this an the atmosphere, nice job, feels unlike any other entry =).  I found myself constantly low on inventory space so just ate any mushroom I found, which, perhaps, was good for the theming...  Unfortunately at some point I died and got stuck :(.  I might have to come back to this one and try to beat it without dying, I guess =).

Very fun!  The walking on walls worked surprisingly well, strafing up a wall just felt natural.  All of the mechanics seemed pretty easily discoverable pretty quickly, which was nice.  Sacrificing letters was fun, and then trying to figure out what the text says while remembering which letters I'd sacrificed was a feeling I don't think I've encountered in another game.  I ran into one bug where I made my final step to get to 0 HP onto a mushroom and it only gave me the letter value instead of the 120 from the mushroom :(.  That, and the getting stuck at the end ^_^.  Other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing.

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What a very... ambitious... entry.  So many nice little parts coming together poorly and riddled with bugs, which is about what I'd expect from the experiment :).  High marks for the title and City of Phlegm, though!

I got a laugh after doing a few combats with 5-8 combatants to enter a combat with a Fire Dragon, and it was just him and one other, so I thought "ooh, boss fight!"... and then it died in a single attack.

I'm confused... I was walking down a hallway with a fireball coming at me, and I hit a spinner, and... it turned me towards safety?!  That was so surprising, coming from your team!

I had a lot of fun with this one.  Combat and trying to minimize incoming damage was pretty satisfying.  Dungeons were all interesting to explore.  I found one spot where I could fire an attack while my position was interpolating and hit someone down a diagonal to get some free hits in =).  I regret the first points I put into STR, I ended up with a AGL+BODY build and liked it.

The ending dialog seemed strange...  helped the fungal entity on every level, but when I chose "wake up?" it felt like a "bad end" without resolving anything.  Ah, reading the spoilers on the game page, maybe that was just missing content.  I'm content with my choices.

The visuals were great, really felt distinct and had a lot going on.

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Really nice!  I had a lot of fun until I crashed within the amber vault, not sure if I was close to the end or not.  Really nice use of transparency in the forests to give a lot of depth with simple tiles.  I liked figuring out the enemy patterns.  And collecting mushrooms, of course.  Played very nice with controller too, I love that!

The Overworld is fun.  It crashed after fighting the tentacle guy at the beginning, had to start over (and then saved slightly more often, though luckily didn't run into a crash after that).  Not queuing movement is painful, very often I'd turn and try to move forward and turn again and it'd skip my move forward :(.  I couldn't enter the castle the first time I went there, second time I managed to get in only by clicking around, not sure what was up with that.  On later visits I got in by pressing Space.  Better too easy than too hard, but I felt a wee bit overpowered pretty quickly (never had to heal during the game).  It was fun getting a tentacle of my own, though!  Nice use of the assets, they worked well in RPG-in-a-box!

Thanks for playing and recording, I'll try to watch some of it =).  Dungeons are procedural (I took and existing generator and tweaked it only a little bit for this, adding the two mimics per level and marking some areas as "indoor" to get a different tileset), and pull from like 15 tileset flavors - since the assets were there, making a new wall/door/floor/secret/detail combo only took a few minutes each, so I couldn't stop, even though most players will only see a handful of them :D.

And, yeah, stacking lots of hats of one color later can definitely block most damage, though each floor has at least 2 colors of enemies so you'd have to keep swapping to really abuse it.  In the post-jam version coming soon I increased the "in combat" range that blocks inventory usage to the same as the range that triggers multiplayer syncing, so it makes it slightly harder to abuse (and, more importantly, you can't slow down other people if you decide to do so).

I really liked that the kobold bosses get the rooms with the windows.  It works great thematically and also helps me find them.  Which lets me more easily kill them without killing their minions, so maybe they're regretting being promoted to a "room with a view"...

I, uh, apparently escaped the Underworld 10 times.  The last 5 went by really quick as I stopped delving dungeons and just explored the overworld, found all the teleporters, but never found any way to get a title, I wonder what I missed there?  I found some jewelry that never seemed to do anything...

The gear was neat, especially at first, though once I had my build laid out, it got _really_ repetitive (just looking for the same named item with 1 more plus after each escape).  I only played the first class, one using the magic items probably would have gotten more interesting (maybe I'll go back and try that later...).  For a single playthrough in a jam, I think I would have preferred no classes and just 3 "special" slots (fit any of the 3 special colors) that let me change up my build a bit more as the game progressed.

The presentation was great, really felt nice and cohesive.  Overworld was fantastic.  Lots of nicely swapped tiles that gave them some extra charm.

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You can download and play via the Itch.io app. (It is, however, and online-only game though, so that doesn't get you much)

I feel like I made a life-saving decision by picking up the heal spell before entering the dungeon :D.  Without that, would have been rough...  That was fun!  Auto-combat worked well, and upgrading my party was nice.  After 3-4 levels I also saw a victory-ish screen but could continue and ended up in a world with nothing, I'm assuming that's where the jam content ends.  I quite like the visuals, nice use of particles, lights, dripping water, all came together quite nicely.

Nice job making something!  Are the walls raycasted?  They have an interesting effect that's pretty cool.

Neat game!  The upgrade choices were interesting.  It was a little hard to tell if they were working (I had Staffs up to 5 damage, but I saw a `3` whenever I attacked with them, and my relics said 1 damage, but I also saw a 3 when attacking with them... I think?  It was hard to see because the numbers fly by so quickly though....).  Having S bound to flipping 180 degrees was deadly!  I kept pressing it whenever I wanted to take a step backwards and the enemy would get 2 free hits on me :(.  I think I died on the final level (was fighting the balrog-y guy).  It would have been nice to have a "wait 1 turn" button, I always seemed out of step from where I wanted to be relative to the enemies, but that made it challenging.

It seems pretty likely we, or Zooperdan, will organize something similar next year.  There's also the (non-limited asset) annual Dungeon Crawler jam which will likely happen most years.

I think that's basically saying a "dungeon crawler" must be RPG-ish - excluding games that are just finding your way through a 3D maze.  Honestly I think that's pretty well already covered by the rules above and below it though.

Thanks for playing and for the warm words =).  The click to move is one of those features I encountered in another game (which had a lot of large procgen levels) and it was such a nice (and, frankly, easy) feature that I had to add it to my engine right away =).  A lot can be forgiven (large, sometimes repetitive levels) if moving isn't a chore.

I played on the middle/normal difficulty.  And, yeah, I engaged with the crafting tech tree system somewhat because I like those kinds of systems, but also because your manual said I should start early, so I did (but, then ended up upgrading the wrong thing early and rarely having spares of the resource I needed to actually craft as I said :).  Maybe I would have enjoyed the hardest difficulty more if it forced me to / caused me to have time to craft =).  This difficulty felt about the right length, though (maybe spent about 1.5 hours).

I had a lot of fun with this!  Minor thing, but I wish WASD also worked from combat so I didn't have to keep switching which hand was holding my drink :D.  I also wished I could still craft white items when I upgraded crafting rarity (and similarly with green later) - had lots of resources, lots of slots with junk still, would have been fun to roll some items.  I just about got my crafting up to the point to let me craft purple items when I beat the game, crafting very little though!  I enjoyed the bit of crafting I did along the way (when I remembered to craft before upgrading rarity), and just a bit more engaging with that would have been cool.  The movement and combat and such was all nice and snappy and I like the retro look, it didn't get in the way of the fun =).

Pretty fun!  I like the style and mood.  First playthrough was very hard, exploring everything, died after killing the beastie, couldn't find the gold key it mentioned (presumably hidden by the water on the deck) so died :(.  Second playthrough went super quickly and I had plenty of time and took what I have to assume was the "peaceful" ending (actually didn't kill anyone the whole way, which was fun).  Was the water height cumulative based on the timer, or did it reset after each floor?  I feel like I barely saw it after the first floor on my second playthrough and it would have been better with a little more tension (though, maybe I was just going rather fast).

I like the authentic EGA looking style.  Lots of different environment and tiles, were those original or some assets crunched down to this palette?  I like the indoor/outdoor minimap change, I'm not sure why it's useful, but it feels very old-school :D.  It took me a while to realize I could click on the things on the right (no hotkey for that?).  I managed to assembly a party, kill some goblins, but my dear friend Lord Cluckingham passed away and I was too distraught to continue (and, it seems like I saw about all there was to see :).  Would have liked to played more!

The "Perfect Pixel Ratio" option didn't seem to work - only used 800x600 of my 3840x2160 display, should be able to perfect stretch by another 3x to 2400x1800.  Wasn't too ugly at "ugly stretch" though =).  Really enjoyed this game, I made it to the end and won.  Definitely would have had a lot of trouble without a Doctor in my party though =).  I liked that a "death" in combat came back after combat, at first I was worried I was losing people so just reloaded when someone died.  The tactical combat was kinda perfect - controls were good (especially after I realized I could just bump to attack) and snappy, terrain was just varied enough to make hiding around corners and other tactical choices interesting, the grenades really helped make it interesting too.  I barely used my medkits (figured I could just reload if I died...) so maybe I would have preferred "rest spots" that just healed everyone once instead of picking up medkits, or something like that.  Lovely simple aesthetic that doesn't get in the way of the fun.

Nice entry!  I really liked the lockpicking, I wish there were more unique levels of it =).   Though the minigame was fun, maybe would have been interesting (and feel more like interacting with a device) if the whole pick had some physicality, not just the tip moving like an avatar in a sokoban game - I'm not sure if the puzzles would actually be as interesting in that case though :). The visual style was really cool too.

Really nice!  I love the puzzley levels and no combat.  Visuals were nice, everything tied together well.  Movement felt good and the place was fun to explore.  I ran out of O2 a couple times, which felt just right.  Autosaving on the O2 tanks was really nice, I didn't need to (or want to!) ever manually save once I figured that out.

That was fun!  I liked the equipment-based puzzles, was pretty clear what to do, and ended up getting me killed as I didn't have any of my weapons out when some things came out of the wall :D.  I managed to win, although maybe just because the final boss got a bit stuck and I could just hit him over and over again and he stopped attacking back...  would have been hard without that, I think!  I like the aesthetics and the variety in level styles.

I love the look of this and the bit of writing I got to read.  Seeing the map made me excited for what I was going to explore... Sad that's all there is to it :,(.  Looks like the start of something nice though!

Really amusing!  The art is great.  The writing is delightful.  The minigame was a little lacking, was never really much of a challenge, except for accidentally learning how to double-jump.  I even tried double-jumping early, but it never worked (I'm used to needing to do the second jump at the apogee or something, instead of so early, maybe?) and then accidentally did it later :).  I couldn't find the third secret, but I think I found the rest.  I even searched quite a while out of bounds :). Nice job!

Just lovely!  The graphics, especially all of the enemies are really impressive and just gorgeous.  The "classic" perspective takes a little getting used to and turns it into a bit of a puzzle to figure out exactly where enemies are standing :D.  I only found 2 secret doors, but, I really like that the map highlights the walls that I've bumped into, so very satisfying.  Took me a while (like, until the final level I played, which was the pirate island) to figure out _exactly_ what the aggro range of the enemies were (I figured it'd be either a diamond or a square pattern, neither of which was quite right, didn't expect the circleish pattern :).  I managed to beat all levels on hard mode, and really enjoyed doing it, though I probably spent nearly 2 hours on it, with drawing a map by hand for one of the levels =).

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.