itch.io

Hi!

We are a 2 person team (designer &  programmer) and started 2 days ago building our game for this jam: a lightweight deckbuilding roguelike where you battle your way through several everyday annoyances to make it in time to your date with your potential dream-guy.

As we would prefer to focus our work on our respective strengths, it would be great if there is any artist out there who is up for a last minute project.

It doesn't matter if you specialize in 2D or 3D, we can make both styles work. But if you know some graphic design basics that would be very helpful. Cards won't need individual card art, a stylized icon like in stacklands at the absolute most.

The game is build in Unity.

If you are an artist and this sound in any way interesting to you, leave a message.

Quick disclaimer: some of my points you are probably aware of or already have on your to-do list. I just give feedback based on what I’ve played in its current state

Things that could be improved:

• Slight pacing issues. I.e. the tutorial with the lever puzzle was way more complex than the following levels.
• Your rooms could use some form of landmarks or point of interest to make it easier for players to orientate themself and build a mental map of the space.
• It’s nice that south walls cover the player but I had it a few times that they obstructed my view on enemies.
• General player feedback could be improved. Things like particles for destroying pots and the like.
• You can very easily get stuck on an edge. Having a system that nudges the player slightly around the corner of a tile (like the coroner would be rounded)  would help the game feel a lot (pretty sure Zela does something similar).
• I’m not a fan of invisible switches for secrets. It doesn’t make me feel clever for finding the secret. Instead I suggest you make subtle visual or auditory cues that hint that something is there for players to figure out.
• Pushing crates feels janky and wobbly. I suggest you snap the player to the crate and switch to a dedicated pushing animation. Of cause despite the snap the player has to be able to immediately do another action. Also I felt the crate pushing speed is way too slow.
• Some edges with the same visual are inconsistent regarding the ability to jump off.
• The player character could use an idle animation. In general I would say the player animations feel a bit stiff and could be improved, while the enemies are fine imo..
• The map isn’t too helpful. I really had to look very close as it doesn’t really show landmarks, a player indicator or points of interest.
• The red spider and green “spider blob” enemy feel practically identical. The bats and blue slimes are also very similar. As I player I approach all enemies in the game exactly the same.
• Sound effects sound very harsh. I’m not an audio expert so I can’t really describe it better, but maybe something you want to get additional feedback on. All I can say I found them very unpleasant.
• Camera sometimes zooms in too early / at inconvenient times. I especially recognized that in Level 3.
• Level 3 feels rushed or as if you got a bit lazy with the tile-set usage. The ground is uniformly green and none of the walls uses the nice variation with moss.

Positives:

• Despite the game utilising the mouse buttons I’m glad you use a 4-way attack combat system which feels pleasantly oldschool and is really rare these days.
• General directions of aesthetics look good.
• I really dig your room transitions.
• Having an elevated and a ground floor makes rooms more interesting to traverse and generally visually more appealing.

You have a solid foundation here and I’m looking forward to play a future version!

I hope my feedback helps.

Hey Meeka, thanks a lot for playing my game and providing such great commentary.
Stacking hats is noted for part 2 ;)

I'm glad you enjoyed playing my game.

I love the diversity in the characters and that the story tackles many topics we rarely see in video games while still keeping it's focus.
The visuals are very cute and the artists did a great job making the most of the style with very expressive animations and framing.

Play time was around 8 hours for me for anyone who cares.

The game has a few bugs, but I fortunately encountered only a single "significant" one (could not complete one of the side quests).

The gameplay itself is a bit "sloggy" at times. Some quests let you do pointless trips from A to B to A to B to A to B without much meaning behind hit.
I can see the merit for the designers and artists to know exactly where the player is at a certain time but the choice to move the character to a specific interaction point for every interaction made the controls feel quite unresponsive.
The Inventory system is rough. It's often not clear what an item does or how to use it. With all kinds of items mixed (cosmetics, consumables, quest items, mini-game modifiers) it's also very messy. Fortunately most interactions with the inventory are optional.

One major problem I had was with the rhythm mini-game.
The objects themselves don't show an input direction and that made it unreasonably hard for me to process what I had to press. I couldn't win a single round of it :(

Overall I think this game is a little yet rough indie gem that I can highly recommend to anyone looking for a quality narrative driven game.

Thank you!

To be fair my only contribution to the music was to find something fitting :)
For those who liked it here is the track: https://freesound.org/people/szegvari/sounds/593849/

Thanks for also testing our game!

Some others also found the attack range a bit too short, so if I ever revisit the game that's definitely on the to-do list.

I love this type of games.
Really well done and a neat twist on the concept!
Impressive for a jam game!

A cute looking game and a solid base loop.
You cleverly circumvented the problem that the only way to find out which clouds are real is pure chance by also making it reaction based with the reaper chasing you.

I really enjoyed this one!

Small things I would improve is to move a tile on tap of a directional button instead the need to also press space which was just an inconvenient.

I don't think I need to say anything about the art, great stuff!
Imagine a bonus 6th star for including cutscenes.

The gameplay is simple, responsive and engaging.

You have a slight balance issue with the flashlight refilling when standing still and the monsters not moving. If you want you can basically play infinite that way. 

Everything about your game is super polished and it just feels round.

[SPOILER]
Had to kill the cat: 0/10!

But in all honesty:
An interesting experience and in a format we don't often get to play, so big kudos for that!
I have to admit I didn't really get it and progression was mostly quite cryptic to me so I mostly clicked on everything until it worked.
Still glad I played it, worth every second of it!

As a side note:
I had a lot of issues with text being covered up by other objects which made it even harder to follow from time to time.

Really cool concept.
The art also fits the concept very well as well.

I had problems figuring out where to go and the camera unfortunately gave me often a hard time.

I would say the title is a bit misleading as it's not really puzzle and more dexterity focussed.
Nonetheless it was very cool for what it is!

But please, I beg you, don't push the limits on the jumps so far.
I think it took me 30 or so tries to get the last 2 jumps for the body. It was really frustrating and I was about to give up.

The maze part was actually the strongest part for me. Very well designed and the gates actually gave it way more "dimension" than I would have expected.

Your soundtrack fit the toy-like aesthetics pretty well. Also huge props to making you own music.

You delivered a very complete feeling experience, and besides the mentioned difficulty on the jumps one of my favorites this jam so far.

From the state of the project I assume it's one of the first games you made?!
I get the general premise you are going for. A surreal abounded arcade is quite the appealing setting.

Unfortunately there were a few things that really gave me a hard time.
(Please don't take this as me dunking on you but as genuine advice how I feel you could improve your game).

You goggles didn't look like googles so I passed them several times without recognizing that the ball is the item I'm looking for. If you don't have the artistic abilities (which is no shame at all) then you should use some layer of abstraction like maybe get a box asset and slap a "special goggles" sign on it.

Picking up the goggles was another issue. I picked them up at one point but didn't recognize it. A sound effect or a message "you found the goggles" would have helped enormously.

I also barely noticed that the goggles were active. A solution could have been to tint the screen in a certain color when they are active so it's immediately clear to the player.

The jumping passages were not well balance.
While the first one were super little steps that let me overshoot with a basic jump the second passage had jumps so tight I could barely make them. In fact I had to quit the game here because I fell and the reset didn't trigger correctly and I was stuck down there.
In general I would consider your game more as an "immersive experience" than a challenging platformer so I would have designed the jumps to be more on the easier to execute side.

The sound design was nice and fitting for your setting.

In the end you delivered a playable experience which not everyone can say of themselves in a game jam, so good job and keep on building games!

Huge pluspoints for doing voiceacting as well as great sound design in general.

The way you progressed the scene was simple yet effective.
I would have wished for no creature to appear in a place where I can touch it. The ones outside felt creepier in their static pose.

Your game feels very polished and complete!

The core premise of your game is pretty good.
I recognized pretty late that I get a time penalty for destroying the wrong evidence so I lost that round pretty quickly and I was a bit annoyed I had to restart from the detective stage again. As that phase is basically no pressure and a good introductory point, it felt like a waste of time replaying again. A checkpoint  for the thief-part would be a very worthwhile addition imo.

The map is a bit too large for my taste, but on the other hand you did a good job creating this large space with limited art assets and time budget which is impressive on its own.

You did a great job creating characters that fit the style of the environment art pack you used. Everything looks as if it was all from the same artist.

Not to take away from the game you made but the way you start the game was hands down my favorite part!

The game concept was simple but surprisingly engaging, so I actually played a few rounds.

I would have loved a few particles passing as you fall to really make me feel the speed. ;)

Did you record / edited the audio yourself?
Because the soundscape was easily the best part for me. (Even if not, great sound sourcing and sound design)

I wasn't able to get anything but the medium ending.
I tried dispatching all phantoms and then kill the intruder and killing the intruder as fast as possible while elimination only 3 or 4 phantoms on the way. I also tried shooting him in the head and in the heart which did not seem to have any effect.

Using a gun on the intruder felt a bit weird, I guess too real, compared to the supernatural phantoms. But that might just be me.

Overall a nice and atmospheric experience.

Thanks for checking our game out and leaving this great feedback.

The game is meant to be played as a roguelike, so you are supposed to go through the forest again after you picked the wrong seed and gather more hints (they respawn with each reset),  so you'll get up to 12 hints but usually I found 5-6 hints are enough to find the correct one (unless you get super unlucky).
Form the feedback we received so far I we found out that we need to communicate the repeating nature more clearly as it was not clear to most players.

I appreciate that you made your core mechanic not super hard to handle.
As someone who isn't that good at platformers I was able to complete it without problems and enjoy it start to finish while comfortably interacting with the many required uses of your main mechanic.

When I encountered similar mechanics in jam games they are often quite janky but you managed to make it actually pleasant to use the drawn lines and their springboard effect.

I would have loved to see the asylum aspect being more present.
Some phrases written on the walls or so would have made the story way more clear. Right now it's only really portrayed via the description of your project / submission page. Also it would have given the world I traverse as a player more meaning.

Thank you for playing our game.
And yes, some more polish would enhance the overall experience quite a bit.

A nice, straight forward experience with some nice tweaks to spice up the simple core game loop.
Always bonus points for including an ingame tutorial screen!

I'm not sure if it's intended but you don't collide with the wrong ones when in "real-view", which made the game quite trivial and doesn't feel logical to me.

As you mentioned you want to revisit the game after the jam, so here are two things I suggest you look into:

1. The collision area of the vacuum head is too large to fit between some of the wrong pompos, so intentionally avoiding these is impossible and therefore a bit frustrating.
2. The spawning patterns are a bit too uniform for my taste, especially the "wall" formation that is coming up frequently.

Overall good job and keep going!

Thank you for playing our game and your nice words. :)

You made a visually appealing game from simple shaped assets, good job on that!
I also liked the eery atmosphere you created with you sound design.

I have to be honest that I didn't enjoy the gameplay as progressing further than your previous run was purely based on luck.
As remembering the sequence is the core skill a player needs to succeed in the game you could have flashed the right blocks at the beginning so the player doesn't have to obtain the information by brute-forcing their way forward to obtain the information.

Thank you for playing our game and leaving the feedback.

I understand your problems with the gameplay. I feel if our knockback would work correctly (I only tested it with a single enemy and it has problems with the enemies walking in a cluster) that would alleviate a lot of the issue as you have some room to breath after you got in close to attack.

I liked the art and music a lot.

The tip to lure in more fish by clicking was a fun twist to discover how the mechanic actually worked but it would have worked even better if it was told in the game instead of the project page.

I've read your submission comment and immediately stopped to check out the page otherwise I would have totally missed that.

I would not let the player go into the negative money. Getting back to 0 is usually worse enough.

There are some small annoyances like the eel spawning on top of the hook or some physics chain reactions that could be improved on when polishing the game further.

Overall quite an impressive project you delivered here.

Thank you, I'm glad you liked our game.

Even though I like the core we have, we won't expand on this just because of other projects. It was fun working on it none the less :)

Thanks for taking the time to play our game and for leaving this detailed feedback.

The game is supposed to follow the roguelike structure that you go through the forest multiple times and each time pick up more clues (up to 2 per run). From watching some of my friends playing it I can tell that this was not obvious to people and your comment further cements that so that would definitely something to be improved.

I also agree that the combat feedback could be better.
There is actually a knockback but it stops as soon as the knocked back entity (player or enemy) hits something. And as the enemies walk in a cluster they basically immediately tough each other which stops the knockback but I didn't had the time to tweak that in the end :(

A very polished game and a funny twist on the Harry Potter trope.
Going the extra mile to even include an opening cutscene was very unexpected and welcome.

The gameplay being centered around shielding an entity instead of dodging something harmful with your player character is one of my favorite implementations of these top down games.

I appreciate you did the work to make me fling objects around but tbh I didn't found it enriching the core game.

And last but not least good job on the music!

Thank you for playing our game.

I agree that the combat pretty fast overstays it's welcome and I should have put in more hints to keep the experience way shorter.

Nice idea with the theming and also somewhat brave considering it's probably not a favorite of many indie-devs ^^
Good job on including a tutorial, it was easy to get into the game that way.

I had some issues with the controls as jumping off the walls felt somewhat clunky and I could barely feel if I was sprinting or not.
Checkpoints were generally generously placed, which I liked, but I had issues in the second level after I dropped down that I had no way to get back to the top.

Overall a nice little jam-game.

Thank you for checking out our game.
I'm glad you could resolve the bug by reloading and that you had fun with it.

From your submission info I assume it's one of your first projects and for that it's already really impressive.
Good job also including stuff like options and actually having sound which is not a given in jam games.

I haven't read the other comments so I assume most of this feedback you already got:
- very responsive controls
- text system felt a bit janky
- the game is way too hard
- the player bullets are too similar in color to the ground, but the sound helps a bit
- could use more feedback (i.e. a sound effect or screenflash when getting hurt)

The atmosphere was definitely the strong suit of your game good job!
And the slight jumpscare actually got me as I was not expecting it at all.

You managed to put in a lot of systems for such a little game which I did not expect when looking at the screenshot.

Even though it's underwater the whole pacing (movement, flashlight targeting, distances) where a little bit too slow for my taste, but I get that's in part personal preference.

I encountered visual some issues, like weird stretching of some assets or that I could see below the ocean floor at one point. I assume these were probably related to me running the game on a different resolution than on your test device.
Also the flashlight-cone was actually covering the mines instead of revealing them ^^

A small annoyance were the dialogue triggers.
I wanted to explore the starting "zone" and ran multiple times into the dialogue trigger so I had to click through it I think 3 or 4 times. Also I get the use of oxygen tanks after the first one, no need to display the exact same message every time I approach a new one.

Overall a nice experience, thank you for making it.

Surviving the first seconds of a round was quite challenging because the first row of leaves always seemed to be fixed color.
But after that it was quite doable while still retaining a good level of challenge.

I was just about to stop because I thought "okay I've seen enough" as the message that the bugcatcher left popped up which was a pleasant surprise.

You delivered a nice little arcade game, good job!

This is so cute!
I really love the art.

You already put some effort in the juicyness of the presentation. A simple sound effect when picking up a fish would have gone a long way to make it even more satisfying to pick up fish.

It's a solid game for the short timeframe.
I really would have liked a bit of an escalation curve, because your challenge is too low to actually be in risk of getting caught.

Thanks for playing!

I won't continue work on this project, but I took some valuable lessons from it.
With these I can actually see myself releasing a small mobile game similar in this arcade style.

Of cause tuning the difficulty is up to you.

Just to describe my experience I have to admit that it was too hard for me to finish.
I got to the 5th (can't remember exactly, the second one where you had to unlock the crystal before collecting) stage three or four times and then gave up because I didn't want to always start again from the beginning just to get better at the later level.

Thanks!

I'm glad you liked it and mentioned the graphics since it's my first jam-game where I actually put some effort in the presentation.