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Thank you for taking the time to create a large writeup. I noticed the game plays really dark on PCs ... usually. I'm genuinely unsure why. Somebody mentioned it has to do with the fullscreen mode but I haven't looked into it yet. Basically the colors are exactly what the LoSpec DELETE palette wanted but rendered in a "increase contrast dials to the max" way for some reason. This is a new one to me.

The first area does kick people off of it a bit too early I think. Lots of people leave without grabbing the loot or XP. The game does up you to level 2 invisibly if you don't kill the wolves and drops very good loot near the beginning of the cave but that's the less exciting route for sure. The true expectation is a complete map covered with empty chests and corpses of course! I love that you're still thinking in terms of "low AC may be good" lol.

You're correct about the fire serpents - once they have been injured with water magic (same for Trickster's brother) they are vulnerable to all attacks. The Trickster's brother's flames disappear if you hit him with a water spell but it's so subtle I don't know if anybody saw it.

The reward is a lightning trident that makes it easier for Hargir to harm the water snake but the thing was underpowered and Lightning Strike was really meant to prevent the players from being underpowered late game so I guess you don't need it. As for missing content - I'm fine with that under some circumstances but I don't think this game really nailed it.

Too bad about hitting 'E' and missing a screen - LocalMinimum had the same thing happen to him and he missed the conversation where he got exiled. He was walking through the forest and BAM he's on a boat starving to death. So, I think in the future I'll prevent WASD/QE from ever being the keys that accept/dismiss a conversation.

I'm really glad you liked the combat and the visuals. Those are the things I'm the most proud of. Cheers.

Thank you for the kind words, thoughtful feedback and full play through! I learned a lot about my game watching you play it. To answer some questions from the play through:

• Attack means "melee attack monster A" and Fight means "choose your melee target".
• "Martial vs simple" weapons relates to who is allowed to equip the weapons according to the game engine, but this game allows both characters to equip everything. So it had no effect in this game
• There is no downside for resting, you're right about that. Resting uses a food resource in the engine I built but that doesn't work for this game so I just balanced around every fight being against full health

I agree the hit balancing is off - my idea was to have each creature be a bit of a simple strategic puzzle - bats are supposed to be very high AC but they were a huge part of the game and Hargir just kept missing them. Other things often had an AC too high so he just misses a lot in most fights. Very unsatisfying.

I completely agree it would be nice to see what the spells do. I built the game on top of a "Might and Magic 2.5" engine I had created. The very bizarre UI is an artifact of that. So it may have nostalgia value for some people but now that I've used it, played with it, and seen people respond to it I think I'd prefer something more modern in the future. Having to hit C3A etc over and over is authentic, but the UI isn't the part of 90s games we generally want to bring back.

I enjoyed seeing you figure out that you're not ready for certain fights and then going back to them. That means the balance somewhat worked which is good. As for the map being much more clear than the levels, you are right about that for sure. It seems to be how our genre works.

Thank you so much for all the effort in your video and write-up.

EDIT - on more thing - I noticed the "move sideways" button 'A' was also "(A)ccept" during the conversation at the end of act 1 where you are kicked off the island. So you moved into a guy and immediately missed the conversation and arrived at a cutscene on a boat. That must have been pretty unsatisfying to see. Basically the event was you got yelled at buy a guy and then exiled from the island for stealing the figurine.

Oh yes, last day functionality always goes this way doesn't it? It's too bad. 9 days is not a lot of time to make a game for sure! I'm excited to see the post-jam version of the game. Regarding the speed of turning or walking I do think making them faster is a good idea. Probably about 2x speed. Although I love instant step so I might be biased towards fast movement.

I'll make sure to give it another go post jam :)

You know, I have to say I completely agree. Also thank you!

Whoa. This was incredible! Do I really have to wait 6-8 weeks for the registration code or can you just DM me? All of this without even having a math coprocessor! Impressive! I literally had to google whether or not a coprocessor was an option for the 286 - I thought it was 386 onwards but no, 286 had the option. Awesome.

I'm not sure what to say other than to send praise. The writing was short and punchy, the levels were well-made, the town was full and interesting, it stopped about 10% after I was ready to stop playing and that's great, honestly I don't know what else to say so I'll just describe my play style and strategy.

I never enchanted armor. Having to swap weapons and armor seemed like too much of a hassle. Picking the right weapon and learning which ones do what was great but eventually it got a little bit tedious since I didn't have much strategy late game, it was mostly "dig through inventory to find the weapon that will be the best now" a bunch of times. It was still fun but I would prefer a bit more strategy and a bit less obligation to mess with the inventory every fight.  

Every time the store got more weapons or I acquired a new weapon or trained a bunch it was very satisfying. The feedback loop just did the dopamine thing for me as intended.  The biomes were great and burning away obstacles was fun. I want more of that for sure.

This is one of my all-time favorite DCJam games. Well done.

Very nice! I had a similar experience with the bugs - small things here and there mostly. Text became "New Text" after I restarted a game, I was told there is no thief in the party when checking for traps on a test but Lupin had 39 health, stairs let me walk in, little stuff like that. Overall I think you've got good bones here. I really like the dungeon itself, it feels immersive and looks and sounds really good. I'm jealous of the water drip sounds, I want them in my game. This is a place I really want to explore. I also love cooking and crafting mechanics so I'm glad you added that.

I couldn't figure out how to heal (I think the potions are bugged) so I wasn't able to get very far after 4 playthroughs. It feels to me like a few tweaks here and there and the whole game would come together, but that's game jams for you. I think with some bug fixing and polish you should be able to re-use the core of this as an engine and hit the ground running next year. I'd also like to revisit this one if you make a post jam release. 

As for movement speed and combat difficulty my thoughts are the same as other people that posted. Lighter and faster so I can see more of the dungeon.

Overall it's good, well done! 

Oh, if I were only that cool! :)

Thank you

Thank you so much! Great write-up and play through video, I really appreciate both of them.

I really think you got this game. I intended it as a "puzzle RPG" and although the hit rate was too low (absolutely agree) it seemed like you went through it basically exactly as I hoped most people would. I know what you mean about playing the piano, I have muscle memory for everything including the gear given at the provisions lodge! This was my attempt to play with a M&M 2.5 engine I built that copies M&M 2 UI, but it's not exactly peak UI. I think I'll figure out something more streamlined in the future. Especially adding things like "don't pick a target if there is only 1 target" which is on my TODO list and never got done.

I loved your comment about how the longsword is typically a 2-handed weapon but in RPGs it's only 1 handed - you are so right! Believe it or not I had it as a 2-handed weapon for a while but 2-h weapons were bugged so I changed it at the last minute. I figured "if D&D has 1-handed longswords then I guess I can too".

Sounds absolutely would help. I really think the game would feel much more atmospheric with those, my time management was bad related to that sadly.

I found your play through very entertaining to watch and I really appreciate all I learn about the game watching you play it. Also glad it works on Linux!

This was fun. Short and sweet. The movement felt really good.

Superb game! The last couple of games had me thinking a lot and solving tricky puzzles so thank you for not making me do that :P 

The game feel was awesome, the audio was great (so cool that you have live music!) and the visual aesthetic really worked for me. I loved how the moon was spherical and I could go around it.

The master AI took me maybe 4 tries to defeat and I was very satisfied at the end. But then I saw there are 2 endings and twice as many power ups as I found, wow that's so cool! I plan to go back and accomplish more. Really good stuff.

Oh no, not negative at all. Very good feedback. When you spend the time writing a long and thoughtful reply I try and do the same answering your questions and sharing whatever I think might be useful. :)

I really enjoyed this. First time I got caught trying to solve the puzzle of "how to crane" which is honestly a great puzzle. The whole game felt very satisfying. Every construction site needs pirate-style treasure chests filled with cash! The rush after the alarm was triggered, pushing my luck at the Louvre, frantically figuring out the crane again, etc. I actually beat it with 0 seconds remaining. It was a very tense moment, quality heist game stuff! So well done on the game. 

On my second playthrough I couldn't get enough $$ to progress beyond the office. I kept going back and trying to find whatever I had left behind but to no avail. My first play through wasn't a problem, 1st play through I made it to the construction site. So I refreshed the browser and tried a third time and everything was fine. I'm not sure if I just missed something or not, I was $498 away from my $10k target. I also opened things through walls in the office.

I never considered the dragon heads and I don't know if I had anything activated at the end or not. I learned how the mechanic worked I just didn't bother with it. It seemed unnecessary.

Overall I think the polish, visuals, game feel, duration, and fun are just great.

Thank you! I appreciate the thoughtful writeup. I absolutely agree with you that the UI is a bit clunky and it really could have used more ambient sound. The sound part I ran out of time on, and the UI was meant to be a near clone of Might & Magic 2 which I thought was interesting to play with. As for difficulty balancing you seem to share that opinion with most players. I really wanted another day to just balance it but it was so much work drawing everything and creating everything I ran out of time for that as well. I'm surprised the map was broken, I never saw that bug.

As to how I got this done in as short time it was a combination of having a M&M 2 engine ready that was pretty efficient to create content for and having way too much time spent developing the skillset of making these games and their content quickly. For example for the wolves I took a wolf asset I had then did a really, really fast scribble paint-over of it with very few colors and called that good enough. For the druids I took 3 photos of "google image search creepy older woman" and I just bit crushed them, erased half of them, and drew over them / used fill tools to make them 3 or 4 colors. Lots of stuff like that. Fullscreen illustrations took about 1-2 hours each. Each component of the game was very small and fast to do but only because I had a combination of techniques and tools to make it so. The UI was text because that's the fastest way I know to build a UI, the background of the cave and the lodges were solid black because I didn't waste time drawing backgrounds, the cave sky is black for the same reason, I re-use the water in 7 or 8 place, etc. 

I absolutely agree with the screen resolution stuff. I really dropped the ball on that one. I'm glad it's able to work though.

I really appreciate the write-up, thank you for taking the time to write it.

Sweet! I'm glad you got to the end. I would love another day to play balance it. I don't have good systems in place to play balance quickly or easily. Maybe I'll solve that later.

Thank you for the kind words! I hadn't thought of the witches of MacBeth but you're totally right. I see that now. 

Yes, black outline and limited lighting made my life so much easier. The feel don't look good? Just erase them. Don't want to waste time on a background? How about solid black. As for the UI it's the same idea. So much easier to create a "button" by just writing the word "Rest" on the screen with a green 'R'. 

I really enjoyed this game. It felt so very authentically Rogue-era. It also was a series of puzzles for me to figure out - how to fight (reading instructions after first play through helped :), how to charge the special before fighting the final warden, how to block attacks effectively so I can special twice, it's just a perfectly build short experience. So good!

Awesome! Thank you for such a long and thoughtful writeup. It feels so good to hear you say you loved the game! 

The VGA DOS look was something I tried forever to accomplish with 3D texture maps and I never found a reasonable way to pull it off. So I went "actual 2D" but it's really hard. Drawing things at different distances and the such is a gigantic amount of work but I have some tools to help with it. I'm very happy with the aesthetic myself but by the end of this project my finger hurt like hell (where my drawing stylus rested on it) and I was so very over drawing pictures of trees and stuff. Also fire, I may never ever draw any fire again. The room full of candles broke me. Why the hell did I do that? No idea!

I totally hear you about the missing flee button - running away during the fight was bugged so I removed it but I figured if the game auto-loads right after the fight ends badly then the consequence of failure isn't that bad. M&M2 options before the fight are "attack, bribe, hide, run" but I wasn't going to implement all of those.  As for fight and attack - one of them lets you choose the target and the other targets monster #1, this is taken straight from M&M 2. It's not particularly intuitive I know, I think later M&M games have a much better system of selecting a "target" monster and having everything just target that guy unless you change the target but I figured I'd go with the M&M2 system just for fun. I don't like it, having both "attack" and "fight" is really not intuitive at all. I plan to change it in the future, "attack" + "fight" is a bad system. The feedback about Unity's default background is interesting. I intentionally placed a blue border between the windows, that's just the color choice I went with. M&M2 uses a solid maroon red border but I thought that didn't look good with my color palette so I changed it. I intended to change the color to red when a combat started but I ran out of time. I configured the Unity solid skybox color to be black and I show that when you're looking at the character sheet. 

Static gap blockers enemies are not my favorite either, I'm on the same page as you with that. Since I wanted heavy M&M2 inspiration (which is also static enemies) I went with it and I found it easier to design strategic levels this way, but I really do prefer games where the monsters chase you. I think I'll go back to that in the future. As for monster AC being too high for Hargir I hear you on that. It's probably my #1 piece of feedback at this point. I want one more day to play balance so stuff like this doesn't happen but alas I didn't have another day. Oh well. 

I really appreciate the kind words and the effort you put into your feedback. Thank you.

I really enjoyed this game. The visuals were perfect, exactly what they should be for what you were going for. I really loved the character portrait. I started out with a weird haircut and outfit and later I'm a sex dungeon gimp with a suit of half plate one. Really excellent. I played until I reached 6 stones and then died because I got sloppy. I'll try again in a bit just not right now because I do want to see the end. Also I was going to say I really appreciate that you can play the entire dungeon with a "follow the right wall" strategy because I'm not motivated enough to draw a map - and then after I died I saw that there is a map. I feel dumb for missing that, it's right there. lol. So it's playable without the map I guess! Also I felt sad that I couldn't drop an item during item pickup, but then later figured out that items just live on the ground. So you thought of that as well. Really nothing seems amiss here, great work.

Play balance felt spot on until the very end where I felt we just missed each other a lot. Not really a problem though, overall I'd say you got balance very right. I managed health potions and used a bit of strategy to get through stuff.

The sound effects were perfect, the character display, etc. I really think you created a very good entry.

This was so good! I felt genuine fear when a combat started when I was standing on spikes. Each level felt very different, there was a little bit of strategy but the strategy of picking the order in which to go for each elemental was very solid. The duration was perfect, very satisfying, and the game feel was just fun. I loved seeing the waterfalls and the flying blocks, they really made the elemental dungeons feel better. As for me either gaining magic from an enemy or bending them to my will that was a fantastic mechanic! I had a pretty large party by the end.

I think I was able to double attack with spamming clicks. 

The end fight was me rolling well so I could nope out of it, I rolled very well this game which honestly I'm happy about.  

My absolute favorite part was the spinners. In the past I've never incorporated spinners in a game with a map because I couldn't figure out how to make them work but this game did it perfectly. I might have to steal that mechanic.

Solid movement mechanics and a good camera. I think there is definite potential here. I would recommend higher resolution textures or having them use "nearest neighbor/point sampling" scaling because they looked a bit mushy up close. The duration of the game was great and the rock-paper-scissors mechanic was on point.

2383 steps taken. That was a really satisfying game. Absolutely incredible. I really like your vibe and aesthetic. I found both acts of the game ended right at the moment they were about to overstay their welcome which means to me the quantity of content is perfect. I also enjoyed spending several iterations figuring out what was going on but I got there. That was all very rewarding. Great game and great voice acting as always.

Thank you for the compliment and for playing! I really wanted another day to tweak play balance - that combined 

One of these days I'll figure out how to make my games WINE-compatible. You're not the only one playing the games on Linux and that's something I genuinely would like to support. As for the compliment, thank you! I went on to Lospec and grabbed the palette of the day a few days before the jam and did an art test with it (the test was to take a M&M2 screenshot, change it to the new palette, and watch it get a million times better) so I figured that palette would work. It's called "DELETE". Very nice to work with.

Haha thank you for all the effort you put into getting it to work on a stream and for figuring out what the PowerToys issue was. I really appreciate it when people like yourself say such nice things about my games, it really motivates me to continue to make them. 

As for the soundtrack I 100% agree. I was listening to perfect soundtrack music the whole time I was developing but I didn't have rights to any of that, and finding ambient audio got left to the last minute sadly. Oh well, next time maybe. I should get you to help me set up some 16-bit Sandblaster era music with your tracker, that would be pretty sweet. 

Thank you! Last year my game was very "if you screw up you restart the whole game, and you'll screw up a lot on high difficulty" and I didn't want that this time around. The story evolved a lot during development. Early draft of it had the heroes spending a 1000 years on a magic island where you don't age leveling up boat building and druid magic. That ... didn't work for reasons. The whole of it was a bit contrived but really I just wanted an excuse to explore cool areas and kill stuff.

Thank you for making an exception to play my game! I'm glad you liked it.

Yeah, music would have helped a lot.  I wanted strong ambience and music can really help with that. Just ran out of time. Thank you for playing.

Thank you for playing and calling the game wonderful.

Thank you so much!

Yes, you can thank an algorithm :) Charming, fun, interesting, another fantastic game Jimbly. I liked how you incorporated the themes, particularly cleaning up after the hero. The "try to almost kill the guy" strategy made combat very tactically interesting and then adding the "overkilling = costly to revive later" made it even more interesting. I love when games let me play casually and beat them or opt-in to higher skill play.

The art style was interesting. Personally I liked the creatures more than the environment, although seeing the cat with it's Picasso face made me laugh. I did like recognizing the assets from the limited assed pack.

Please thank your voice actor for being amazing. They really added a lot of charm to the game. The enthusiastic delivery was amazing.

I think not having a map was smart - I actually got lost briefly in the fire level and had to make a map but that really this made the levels more interesting. 

Awesome work.

Wow that was fast. Thanks for playing! Space Prisoners was one of my favorite games of the 2025 jam so I'm really excited to play yours. Especially since you also went with "DOS-era text with green for highlights :) "

Absolutely fine. No requirement whatsoever that the input device be a keyboard.

I would love a way to listen to these before buying - could you create a YouTube video of the sounds?

The jam page should tell you what time of day it starts in your timezone. It starts at the some moment for everybody.

Yes, sounds fine. Things that can be used for multiple different games are "engine things" and those can be worked on in advance. The game itself and anything bespoke to that specific game must be done during the jam period.

Welcome CryptRat!

Good entry. I found it way too hard until I figured out (on my 4th play through lol) that you could upgrade your stats. Really helped a lot, really did! :)  The game got really interesting after that - each play though I was trying to figure out what stat to improve to have a  chance of surviving. 

I enjoyed the cyberspace a lot. Having a strong environment change is great. I enjoyed seeing that. 

I have mixed feelings about the visuals. I like the extreme low resolution strong choice, but also I found it hard to see what I was looking at. I got used to it and it was fine but I still had to concentrate to understand things like thin walkways and ramps.

I got shot in the face so hard the game crashed! Made me smile though.

I wasn't able to get the gamepad to work - I just kept spinning or walking forward. I think it was reading area that should be in the analog stick's dead zone as input directions. Keyboard felt good though.

The use of visuals was really good. I liked how it looked, particularly the forest.

The dialog popup was oppressive. It filled the screen and had a single sentence of text on the top. 

Really good. I like how the scope of the game was clearly defined "survive 7 times and become cleansed" was a great statement. I also enjoyed the energy it had - things attacked fast, moved fast, and generally felt much faster and more fun than many other crawlers can be.

The balance was really good. I had the option to heal, I pushed my luck, I got a TPK and then tried again with a "run to the cleric" a little earlier. Very nice.

The store completely confused me. I clicked on my weapons and they went away (sold I assume but I didn't find where my currency was shown). I never figured out what to do here other than see my items in place.

Making it an auto battle was a good idea I think, really worked well, but I couldn't tell what each individual characters' damage was because it went by so fast. I would like to be able to slow it down a bit.

Overall a very nice entry.

This is really cool! Very impressive. Visually stunning, I loved how it looks. The voxel effect and the torch casting shadows off of everything, so good! I enjoyed how the areas felt different, I really liked the tutorial (I enjoyed it more because it felt opt-in and because it was broken into small pieces.) 

I had a very hard time figuring out the combat - I kept bumping into a guy over and over and I saw cryptic icons in the bottom right that I didn't understand. Eventually he died (a slime I think?) but the combat gave no feedback so I didn't know I was attacking. It was also confusing to me that I couldn't put the torch or weapons in the attack slot, but it was a great mechanic having me hold them. It just felt a bit weird not being able to actually "equip" it? Dunno how it would be better, other than that the UI was fantastic.

I really liked the "inspect item eye" - retro in the best way.