itch.io

I really enjoyed the combat, once I got the hang of it. The trick seems to be to never use the second attack, and to always roll behind enemies.

I get a Dark Souls vibe from bits of the design, which makes me wonder: is the cheesing deliberate? I know From Software deliberately leaves in slightly broken stuff for players to exploit, and this feels similar. For example, you can bait enemies into hitting each other, and it seems to be possible to do massive damage to enemies on stairs.

My major complaint would be that this doesn't feel like a Metroidvania in any way. I never unlocked new abilities (unless you count the stronger healing items), and the branching paths were always dead ends.

Other things I liked:

- The art style is great.

- You put a health meter on the boss! That gave me the motivation to keep trying that fight until I beat it.

- The music is nice, and also unobtrusive. It never got annoying.

- Controller support :)

Minor complaints:

- Not much telegraphing on enemy attacks. It's quite hard to react, especially when you're just starting the game.

- I could equip healing items, but there didn't seem to be a way to use equipped items (at least, not on my Xbox controller). I had to open the menu every time.

Overall, good game, hope you can develop it further!

Honestly, this deserves more ratings. It's not perfect, but it's solidly executed and interesting to play.

I like how I can sweep up spikes to make them safe. That feels appropriate to what I assume is a cleaning robot.

My main gripe is the controls. There are too many to keep track of! Most of my deaths are to sweeping when I meant to attack, or shooting when I meant to jump. Could some of them be combined? I feel like sweep and interact could be one button, and maybe shooting could just be holding down attack. Perhaps space for jump would be a bit easier to remember?

I liked the music, and art, which is very readable. The way the character holds his broom makes it look like a big, bristly moustache, which I enjoyed.

You can use ENTER on the keyboard instead, if your mouse doesn't have a middle button.

Thanks for the feedback folks! I will try to push a bugfix, but it's not happening in the Unity editor, so it might be a while.

Until then, feel free to ignore Fisheye. You don't need anything from him until after the first boss, and the game does save your progress when you rest.

I thought the opening sequence was great. Seeing each part fall off gave me a really good sense of what my goal was, and the bat flying off with a bit at the end made me laugh.

The bad points are standard game jam platformer things. Add some coyote time so I can jump off the end of a platform without pixel-perfect timing. Make the hitboxes on the player and the spikes bigger than the art, so I can have a near miss. (http://devmag.org.za/2011/01/18/11-tips-for-making-a-fun-platformer/)

The sheer number of robot bits was impressive. I particularly liked rolling over to my legs at the very beginning, and getting my head back.

That does help, thanks! I didn't even know that was a resolution people used. I'm behind the times.

You have my respect for trying though. Rope physics is always hard.

I love the atmosphere. The empty opening areas, plus that music, followed by the ghosts, really gives a feeling of a land fallen into ruin. After talking to the king, I was intrigued.

I got stuck after getting the rope arrows. The way they worked felt too frustrating to me, and I eventually gave up. It's a shame, because overall I think the game is really interesting. I feel like I wanted rope arrows to be this dynamic, jump-shoot-and-swing thing, but instead it was more like hop-shoot-dangle-swing-swing-swing-plop. My advice would be 1) maintain the rope until fire is released. Holding down a button feels more intuitively like gripping a rope, and 2) let me jump out of the swinging state with the swing velocity: it felt like I was falling like a lead balloon as soon as I got off the rope.

Rapid-firing arrows into ghosts felt really fun. The energy arrows are a really interesting idea. There were a lot of really nice animations. Basically, I really liked this game, but I wish it were a bit more polished.

Wouldn't have to be UI. Just a sound, or character animation that plays when it's recharged. I believe that's how Hollow Knight handles it. Minimalist HUD is a fine goal.

I love how clean and simple this is, in visuals and design. You weren't kidding about your programmer being a UI wizard! Love how the charge metre is on both the HUD and the gun itself.

I wasn't quite able to put my finger on it, but the enemies felt weird. Like they were maybe glitching through walls or floors sometimes? Not a big deal, but it felt a bit disconcerting. Also they respawned a bit too often for my taste. It was annoying to clear a room, take a wrong turn, then immediately have to do the exact same combat again.

I like how open this felt. Straight from the beginning of the game, it seemed like there were loads of places to explore, even though it was actually a linear progression (as far as I could tell). Getting that Metroidvania feeling of "I'm excited to be able to go over there" early on was really nice.

Fantastic game! The art is nice, especially the derpy tongue as he jumps. The story was surprisingly touching, and I enjoyed the final boss fight (this as someone who generally dislikes bosses).

A few minor quibble about polish: there are spikes which you can fall onto without seeing them, the "coyote time" doesn't seem to work on moving platforms, and the dash cooldown isn't indicated in any way I could tell. As I say, minor problems. Overall, this was a really nice entry. 

I liked the level design. It looped back on itself very nicely, and the checkpoints were much appreciated. That said, you could maybe be more generous with checkpoints early on, to help ease players in.

EDIT: And apparently there's a map screen? The level design was clear enough that I never found myself needing it.

The sprite work on this is very nice, as is the music. Really good aesthetics.

It would be nice to tell the player that they can double jump. It never occurred to me to try, and I got stuck for a while.

Is there any way to regain health? I'm not very good, and I keep having to restart from the beginning.

I absolutely love the way the slimes pop like a balloon full of paint. That's very satisfying.

Really great game! The way the art, design, and music all come together is fantastic.

I found it a little counter-intuitive that the bomb select wheel rotates counter-clockwise. I kept expecting right click to rotate the other way, and ended up trapping myself with mushrooms.

I think the recharging bomb mechanic is really neat, and the bomb capacity upgrades are a good idea for an optional pickup.

It kind of has that roguelite/Darksouls quality where rushing through rooms tends to get you surrounded and killed. I liked that. Even the early rooms never stopped feeling like a challenge.

There were a couple of points were the screen transitions felt unfair. One where I had to bounce up on a mushroom and land on a platform in a different room, and one where a rat was able to walk across the room transition and surprise me.

Overall, really impressive entry. It's scoped really well, and feels very cohesive.

The UI is meant to be multi-resolution. I tested with all the standard aspect ratios, and it worked fine. Could you let me know your aspect ratio so I can try to figure out why it's not showing up for you?

Thanks for the feedback! I've tweaked some of the level design to hopefully guide the player a little better.

You're definitely right that something is up with the input, but I wasn't able to figure it out.

Thanks for the feedback! I have fixed the geometry where I'm guessing you got stuck. If anyone else gets stuck anywhere, you can quit to the menu and continue game to return to the last checkpoint with all your progress saved.

Sadly there is no sound. I lost two days to camera bugs, so sound and music got cut.

First time hearing about the Itch app, so naturally I haven't tested it there. Thanks for the heads up!

EDIT: I've now uploaded it with Butler, so it should work through the app. Thanks again for pointing that out to me.

A very nice entry. The combat feels fun. I like the tension of not being able to move while casting.

The level design is nice, but the gates feel like a bit of a cop out. I would have preferred something more thematic, like freezing a path across water, or burning an obstacle with the fire spell. Being told to get fairy X to open the door loses some of the sense of wonder.

I really like the zoom in and blur when your character dies. That's a nice effect. Overall, very nice effects and animations.

Came for the nice mountain, stayed for the cute goat.

I don't know if I'm missing something, but I wasn't able to progress very far. I got the goat face (HP?) and eventually worked out how to ram the wall around the chest (by the way, the controls really need to be tutorialised), but I wasn't then able to collect the chest, and there didn't seem to be anywhere left to go.

Short and sweet. I liked it. I chose the virus option.

The art is interesting (AI generated?), but it doesn't quite fit together. Maybe some manual tweaking to blend the room edges a bit more cleanly would be good.

Your level design is clear and simple enough that I'm not convinced the big red arrows were necessary. It might feel more like a Metroidvania without such obvious signposting.

I really like the minimalist art-style, and the way you blend tile sets at zone transitions.

I found the screen transition was a little disorienting, especially when falling or jumping. There were a few places where I fell onto spikes in the next room.

I wasn't able to get very far (I'm bad at this kind of precision platforming), but I liked how all the powerups I found were movement related. That felt very clean and simple.

Really nice game! I really enjoy the aesthetic, especially all the effects. The way the rocks glow when you mine them is so nice. The ambience is also a nice fit.

My complaints are mainly about communication. The fact that I can double jump and dash feels like quite an important point, but it's never explained. I was stuck in the first "room" for a while, because I didn't think to double jump. Small problem, but you don't want players to start frustrated. Similarly, the boss fight when you get the cannon threw me for a couple of reasons. First, the enemies have no reaction to taking damage, so I'm never sure if I'm missing, or if they're resisting the damage. That was fine for the bipedal ones, but not the long-legged thing. Second, the rocks on the long-legged thing aren't the same colour as the ones I'd been mining thus far. It took about 5 minutes before I thought to switch weapon. To be clear, I think that's a really neat mechanic, and a fun fight, it just needs more feedback to keep it from getting confusing. Also, I think a clearer "colour language" might be good for this game. Like "blue things are helpful, orange things are harmful".

I think you've got something really neat here. I hope you'll polish it up so I can really get into it. 

I love the atmosphere, and the character design. I wasn't able to get very far, but I'm interested in the creepy world. It reminds me of playing Axiom Verge.

My biggest gripe is the jump arc. There are so many ceiling spikes and spiky blob monsters. I found myself really wanting control over how high I jumped. I wanted to tap the button for a little hop, but instead the character rocketed into the ceiling, then bounced down into an enemy.

I'm planning to come back to this one when I have more time, so congratulations on a compelling opening!

Thanks for the heads up!

I wasn't expecting this to be as scary as it was! This is a really well-thought-out horror experience; the task that keeps you focused, the sound design, the half-glimpsed monster. It all adds up really well.

A very interesting idea, but a little tricky to control. I had to reload the game a couple of times because the ball went so far offscreen that I couldn't control the movement.

Really interesting idea to have the box evade the enemies, rather than the player themselves. I really enjoyed this.

It was nice using the spacebar instead of actually clicking. Much less RSI-inducing!

I don't know if this is just for me, but the link to the page doesn't work. Did you forget to publish it?

Good:

• The shortcuts are really nice. I had a really nice moment with the first one, where I had a choice of two paths, and was able to guess that going right would let me open a shortcut. It's a really good feeling, and I think it speaks to good level design.
• The atmosphere is good. Strange, unsettling colours, and oddly disturbing animations on the enemies. I think it comes together nicely.
• The combat works well. Getting a hit in, then dashing away feels satisfying.

Bad:

• Some guidance on the controls would be good. It wasn't too hard to work out on a gamepad (and thank you so much for supporting those!), but on keyboard, I had no idea. Eventually I triggered an attack by clicking on a menu, but I still have no idea how to dash.
• Speaking of controls, pressing enter caused the game to quit to the menu with no warning and, as far as I can tell, no save.
• Obviously, you ran out of time, but if you plan to continue this project, I'd like to see more juice. Combat is good, but it could be so much more satisfying with some screenshake, freeze-frames, and sound effects. I want to really feel the impact, especially from the big sword guys.

Overall, I like this game. It controls really nicely and it has a good atmosphere. Hope you find time to finish it!

"Gaping hole" is a bit strong. It basically worked, it just wasn't the smoothest learning curve.

Now that you've explained it, I totally get how this room was supposed to work. If I had actually held down J, it would have done a really good job. What actually happened when I played it was:

1) The first time I tried to drill, I must have been jumping. This caused me to shoot up into the ceiling and die.

2) Since I didn't want that to happen again, I made sure not to hold down the drill key, meaning I got stuck in the middle room. It wasn't until I worked out downward drilling that I was able to get past this room.

It's tricky to teach this mechanic without straight up telling the player what to do, but I think the game is better for it. Maybe if the ceiling on the left were really low, so the player could only enter the wall at ground level?

Btw, I feel like you're being a lot harder than yourself than you need to be. This is a genuinely good game, especially given your time constraints.

Good:

• Really deep platforming mechanic. It takes a while to get used to, but feels so good when you get your head round it.
• Nice, simple 2-bit art style. It's very readable, and looks good.
• Normally, I would hate a game this difficult, but your generous checkpoint system makes it so much more playable. No lives, no fuss, just back to the start of the room. Usually not far back either.

Bad:

• More tutorial would be good. I like how it's not shoved in my face, and you clearly built the second room to teach the drill mechanic, but it was very unclear to me for a long time that I needed to be falling to drill into the ground. I thought some floors were just drill-proof.
• While I like the sound effects, the music/ambience is not very pleasant to listen to.
• It feels like there's a conflict between the one-room camera and the multi-room level design. Sometimes I drill off-screen straight into spikes, that I had no way of knowing about. It's very hard to react in time when the whole room is popping in at once. That's a lot of information to process.

Overall, not the kind of game I usually enjoy, but I had a lot of fun playing it. The fact that you made something so polished in just one week is frankly amazing.

Good:

• Really nice enemy designs. They feel genuinely challenging to fight, without being unfair. At least the Samurai do. I couldn't handle the ninja.
• Great art style. It feels like an old painting, or one of those wall-hanger scrolls. I love the pixel work on the background. Looks lovely.
• Good, interconnected levels, with lots of paths to explore.
• I was very amused by the merchant's fourth-wall-breaking comments.

Bad:

• I found the jump really awkward to use. It falls so fast, seems to have no coyote time, or leeway for jumping just before hitting the ground. I think the combat would feel amazing if I could reliably dodge projectiles, but half the time the jump just doesn't happen.
• It's a bit odd to have the map fully visible from the start. Hard to feel like I'm exploring when everything is marked on the map for me...

Overall, this was a really strong entry. I really enjoyed the aesthetic, and came very close to enjoying the combat. Some tweaks to how the jump works and this would be an amazing game. I hope you find time to develop it further.

Good:

• A really mysterious, interesting world. I seem to be some kind of stitchpunk creature, but all the NPCs are statues? They all talk in a strange, cryptic way, and the music is eerie. It all creates an intriguing atmosphere.
• The art-style is really nice. There seem to be a few shader bugs, but overall it looks really good, and felt like a really fun place to explore.
• The use of verticality was really good. You built a level that really felt like it made good use of 3D. I liked how the river flowed over the top, then down the waterfall.

Bad:

• I have no idea what I'm doing... The invisible transition to "zone A" says I need to earn everybody's respect, but I've searched very thoroughly, and I could only find three NPCs to speak to.
• The camera is often blocked by walls. Understandable in a game jam, but the fact that falling off the world seems to completely reset my progress makes it really punishing. I want to explore, but if I wander around blindly, I might get reset.
• The dialog system is a little glitchy. If I press to speed up the text reveal, it just does the same line again. Plus, whatever the number in the top-right corner is (I'm assuming spirit essence?) it seems to go up if I hear the same line again. I got up to 1050, but that still didn't open the other zone.

Overall, I think the aesthetics of this entry are great. It's a strange, mysterious world, and it looks and sounds lovely. I'm not really getting the game element though. There doesn't seem to be much I can do, and there's very little guidance on what I should be trying to do.

Good:

• A really solid card game, with some interesting mechanics. There were a few different themes I was able to build decks around, which was nice.
• I was so happy when I reached the first deckbuilding shrine. I think it actually works really well to have the ability to build a deck be something you unlock.
• The simple icons on the cards are great! Very readable, yet nicely varied.
• I have a couple of gripes about the interface, but given the time constraint, it's remarkably well-polished. It didn't take me long to grok the mechanics of the game.

Bad:

• The overworld mechanic is an interesting idea, but -at least as far as I can tell- there's no cost to passing a turn, which basically turns it into busywork. I would have liked a map with fewer rivers and mountains, but more of a cost to ending turn and re-rolling.
• It's great that you have a map view, but it's a little hard to use for planning. Completed battles don't look any different, and there are so many empty nodes that it gets a bit noisy. Obviously there was a tight time limit, but in future I'd like to see more decoration, to give the map a sense of being an actual space, rather than the abstract thing it is now.
• It's very easy to get enough armour to block all the enemy attacks. I'd rather the game be too easy than too hard, but something to reward riskier play, or punish safer play, would be nice. As is, the optimal way to play is to drag the fights out really long, which isn't super fun.

Overall, I think a Deck-building Metroidvania is a fascinating idea, and I think your game is impressively fleshed out. A few balance changes and I could see this being really popular.

You're welcome! Thanks so much for playing ours too!

Some examples of things to polish:

• The thing I mentioned with the projectiles. It feels like a bug at the moment.
• Some improvements to the level generator. It seems to leave some holes at the moment.
• The upgrades are very easy to get, and there seems to be more than one of each. It kind of robs you of the feeling of working towards something. With the current structure, you basically get all the upgrades in the first 30 seconds, then spend the rest of the game hunting enemies. Some more sense of purpose to the generation would be good. I recommend checking out Joris Dorman's work on dungeon generation if you aren't familiar with it. He talks about a layered approach to PCG, where you first generate the overall structure, then generate the actual level from that. In this case you'd want to start by laying out where each upgrade is, and what upgrades you need to access it, then generate the world from that plan.
• I think another commenter mentioned difficulties with colour blindness, and generally speaking fully-saturated colours are not so nice to look at. I would bring the saturation down a bit.
• Particles, screenshake, and squash and stretch are always good to include. 
• It's quite easy to trigger a teleporter by mistake. It also seemed a bit odd that all the teleporters start unlocked. That feels like something I should be working towards.

Hope that helps!

Good:

• I adore the aesthetic, and it's so well developed. The little touches like the shadows of the strings, and the way the platforms bounce a little are so nice!
• Both the upgrades were really interesting. Ziplining and swinging are really neat movement mechanics. I also appreciated how you can still use the paperclip for movement while using the thread as a weapon.
• The spider boss is really well designed. Not just a bag of hitpoints and bullet hell, but a test of the zipline mechanic. Zelda games led me to expect that it would die after three repetitions, but I guess there's no reason it can't be four.

Bad:

• It's very hard, especially at the beginning when you can't attack. I like how challenging it is, but you might want to ease off at the start.
• The climb up to the spider area, where you jump up strings through lots of spikes, is hard enough that it felt more like an optional challenge than the critical path. I only went back to it when I realised there was nowhere else I could go.
• I love the art, but I feel like there's too much sprite flipping. I think you're spinning the character every time you change frame, which makes sense from a card-craft perspective, but makes everything look a bit flickery. I'd be inclined to remove it from the idle and walk animations.

Overall, this is my highest-rated game so far. It's incredibly well-polished, with some really nice ideas. Fantastic work!

Good:

• Really ambitious for a solo project to have both PCG and multiplayer. It mostly seems to work, which is very impressive.
• The colour-matching is an interesting mechanic.
• The world feels very open, with lots of explorable directions.
• It controls nicely, and having the double jump available from the start is really useful.

Bad:

• I got stuck in a hole that was too tall to double-jump out of.
• I was confused for a while by the fact that the gun aims in the direction you're moving, so if you aren't moving, it just explodes on you. It would feel better if it defaulted to the direction the character is facing.
• Those sound effects are very harsh, especially the one as you collect an upgrade. They could do with being a bit softer.

Overall, I think it's interesting, and impressive that you made it by yourself, but it could use more polish.

Good:

• Fantastic sound design! The explosions and weapon sounds are all very satisfying.
• Some really interesting puzzles with the asteroids and lasers.
• It was really interesting to play a metroidvania that wasn't a platformer. I think that works really well.
• Not only did you implement a save system, but you gave me 4 save slots to use. Very generous.

Bad:

• I assume the missiles are supposed to destroy the cracked rock walls, but for some reason it didn't work for me. I got stuck at that point.
• After dying and respawning, I lost the upgrades I'd found since me last save. That's reasonable, but maybe it should save when you get a new upgrade? It's a little demoralising to find you forgot to visit a save point and lost a bunch of progress.
• As others have mentioned, it's a little hard to aim. Either bigger enemies, aim assist, or an aiming mode where you turn slower and don't move would be good.

Overall, I really liked this game! The combat was satisfying, and there was lots to find. Other people seem to have completed it, so I guess my getting stuck is either a rare bug or me being stupid.

Good:

• I like the aesthetic you've gone for. The circuit board/neon look is neat. The parallax background is also very nice, and gives a good sense of depth.
• The selection of weapons is great. I think my favourite is the sword, with the light-saber sound effects, but I also enjoyed the disc and the jetpack a lot.
• It plays very smoothly, with good character movement and animations.

Bad:

• I assume you ran out of time for level design. Maybe some other features could have been cut? I feel like you've got a lot of neat stuff in the game, but without progression, it feels more like a tech demo.
• I would like it if the jetpack recharged fully upon touching the ground. I don't think that would break anything, and it would be more fun than sitting around waiting for it.
• I like that you have NPCs with dialogue, but I feel like you over-tutorialised. It sucks a lot of fun out of the exploration to have someone straight up tell you "use the hammer here".  This is compounded by the fact that attack and talk are the same button, so I ended up triggering the dialogue five or six times while trying to smash the obstacle.

Overall, cool ideas, and well implemented. Shame your level designer dropped out, and I hope you'll be able to build this into a proper game later. It has a lot of potential.