Auto healing between rounds is a nice suggestion, we could've made an easy mode.
It would've required some thought though, because it would render a lot of player upgrades useless (all the upgrades that heal of give you passive Regen would have to be reworked).
Thank you so much for playing and enjoying our game !
The main mechanic wasn't fun for me, at all. There's no player agency, basically you roll and hope to get the correct symbol. It was wayyy too feast or famine. Either I get the correct roll, or I get nothing.
Beside the game design issue, the game is very well made and impressive for a short gamejam.
I loved the graphics & audio. This is a very well polished entry ! Congrats !
The color palettes are a nice touch for a jam game.
I think the robots could be moving a bit faster. I got softlocked due to a bug in level 3 when the bot dug down, they couldn't fall past the last removeable block
Gameplay worked, but it wasn't clear what I should be doing, without explanation and extra polish (removing debug mode, having a menu etc) it makes the game feel incomplete & like it lacks direction. To be clear, I don't think it does, but that's how it feels.
With that said it looks like there is good potential, the mood / lore is very unique & cool too. Congrats !
A ton of fun. Feels like a fully polished game. Insane work.
The mechanics felt unique and challenging in a new way. Optimising your equipment to land one shots was extremely satisfying.
Only thing I didn't love was the lack of information on elemental effets / weaknesses. It forced me to try stuff on the fly, which made the preparation part of each round less useful.
Fun game. I didn't love the sword length mechanic, because there was no real reason to ever craft inferior items. If the fight is doable, just farm.
This creates some mandatory farming that I think could've been avoided. Or, I think, it would've felt better if there wasn't a fake choice alongside it (game design is weird as a discipline)
Hi everyone, we accidentaly deleted the page... Now it's back up but all the comments are gone ! Sorry if you commented, please know that you have been read (I read all comments within 1h of their posting).
This was one of the best games I've ever played coming from a game jam, period.
Musics were great. Game was very precisely in-sync with the music, which is not the experience I have from most rhythm games I've played (even those that are fully produced).
The game is incredibly polished, tutorials are an awesome inclusion, esp for a jam game.
I played until I was an export, that was a fun little game.
I didn't love the random haggling mechanic, but I must admit it's pretty exciting. The loading between the screens was a bit long, making the game not as fluid. Still, all these mechanics that I find individually clunky combined into a nice experience.
It's very interesting for me as a game designer to play games like these for this reason. Fun can be found in clunkiness. In theory, you should have consequences for player failure other than losing time. But here, I think it serves to improve immersion as a management game. (In this case, failure is mismanaging your inventory so you have to go back to the store, or missing an haggle).
With that said I still didn't play all the way through because of these game mechanics issues I had.
Permanently losing inventory space due to leftover shields & swords that you cannot sell anymore because you've upgraded is pretty feel bad.
Huge congrat on a first successful jam game, you focus on the essentials in pushing a playable, polished game.
A fun and efficient little platformer, I appreciate the time you took polishing this. I love the double jump animation, that's a nice touch.
In terms of mechanics, it's a little bit dry for a platformer. Without any player acceleration, the game feels a bit too "fake", like there isn't any weight on the character. I also don't think there is any coyote time, as I lost my double jump quite a few times while jumping from a platform.
I understand these mechanics aren't easy to implement in a jam, esp since it's your first. I think you focused on the most important part : making a full fledged, polished game. Congrats !
Ok but this is an INSANE amount of polish. Great entry !
Edit : I ended up with a score of 17 ! Enemy design is awesome, I love that you made enemies that reacts to being hit so you can't just spam without thinking.
A fun little game, you focused on the essentials for a solo project. Congrats !
I didn't really like the blue "trapped" parts on the ground, I didn't understand why I was falling though, thematically. It didn't really read as an obstacle to me. I think it would've been fine being a hole.
VERY fun game. The mechanic was hard to understand at first, but once I got into it it was very fun to weild around a ton of lighting orbs.
For me the experience was good because I didn't loose, but I think the game really got fun once there was a lot of enemies and I lost control, which took a long time to happen. Regaining said lost control by understanding the syngergy between summons and your own electron generation was the most fun I had playing a gam this jam (yet).
Edit : I forgot to talk about the audio. It is VERY, VERY good. Congrats.
The game is simple but fun, despite being minimalistic the gamefeel is nice (good UI and sound design work). I really disliked the softlock, it happened to me twice and it's a dumb lose condition, that was quite frustrating. But the gameloop is cool.
Very cool idea, and nice job on implementing all these different items. I can see the RoR inspiration.
However, I feel like some of the time you spent on these could have been better spent on properly introducing the mechanics of the game. I'm guilty of the same, on my first jam we were so infatuated by the gameplay that we forgot to put any menu or tutorial. So nobody played our game :(
Once I read the description I had a bit of fun !
Still, it felt a little pointless. Some kind of progression system, like a boss or more varied enemies, would've been nice. Without points of interest or anything to show that I'm advancing in the game, I didn't really feel like anything was happening. Waves are coming, but that's it. I also didn't understand that the items were upgrades until I read the description.
I hope I don't sound too harsh, I think you've got a nice start that can be expanded upon ! Being able to unlock more and more wagon, and the cahotic fun of having to manage all their cooldowns, is a nice starting point for a fun game. I also like a lot what you're trying to do and your ambitions for this jam
Here's a few design hindsight. It's not to devalue your feedback at all, it's just that I thought it was interesting to share, and may give you another perspective on what we tried to do with the game.
I feel like getting punched from behind isn't that much of an issue because you can heal a lot. Our combat design was inspired by doom eternal, where you can't really dodge damage but you also heal a lot when glory killing and stuff.
So for this reason I chose to not dedicate too much time to give players ways to avoid damage. Because I wanted to create tense moments when you lose all your life and have to run for it, until you find an opportunity to heal (which requires agression, so there's tension between dodging and attacking)).
With that said I can understand that it may feel bad to get hit without any way to know about it. There are a few things we've identified that could help with that (namely, lack of sound to tell you when an enemy is about to hit / when you get hit, and enemies spawning instantly and often too close to the player). Sometimes you take damage and there was nothing you could've done, it's pretty frustrating. There's a middle point we couldn't find yet.
Also, you're absolutely correct that we could've communicated better on a lot of the mechanics. That's a lesson I've taken from this jam : tutorialize and explain everything, the fun is playing the game anyway.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated, thanks again for sharing.
The panic of building train tracks while the train is moving is pretty fun. Simple but effective design. The additional stuff (esp the trees) were where thought out and implemented. Had fun playing through the levels.
I made my train blue :3
The copyright free music is annoying to me though.
Small neatpick :
- The red arrows looks like a speed buff, not a slow. Once you know it, you know it, but it's pretty unintuitive visual language. Inverting the two colors would've made more sense (or change the sprite to something less that indicates a slow).
You nailed a minimalist approach of the fun of combining additive and multiplicative upgrades. That's great game design, congrats ! :D
Once you get 4-5 turrets the game gets very fun. Unfortunately at some point I got stuck in the buy menu. I could buy stuff but there wasn't a "done" button, so it's a softlock :/
Audio is very agressive and loud. The sounds don't really add up properly so they end up scratching against each other. It is pretty hard to do though.
Strong contender for top 10 this jam. At least I hope so.
For me I prefer lack of audio to bad audio, still makes for a better experience, so I rate 3 stars games with no audio.
The graphics are incredible. Extremely charming. The gamefeel is also great, sure there's only movement, but running around feels awesome.
The enemies are also very interesting and scary, as they can detect you from very far. I enjoyed the level design a lot, there was just enough mechanics with the noise stuff to be interesting and varied. The levels where you had to run from enemies were my favorites.
My only gripe with the game design is that I hate mash mechanics.
Awesome achievement for a jam game ! Having a level editor is incredible.
As others have said, the turns take pretty long. An idea to counteract this is could've been to automate turns until something relevant happens. For example, when you press the next turn button, the trains could go until there's a train station with a red light.
In the level editor, it would've been better to have the ability to rotate shapes rather than have one variation for each angle. Still, the level editor is pretty smooth which is NOT EASY to achieve. Congrats.
I didn't play much beyond the tutorial and trying out the level editor, because this kind of game is not easy for me. Nevertheless, I can definitely see the potential with this puzzle system
The game is pretty hard indeed. Maybe a bit too challenging for a jam game ? Idk. (To survive longer, here's a tip : grab kills almost fully heal you.)
Can you elaborate on what made the controls difficult for you ?
Very good audio and graphics, soothing experience. Gameplay was a bit unclear as other characters appeared and disappeared all the time. I managed to pickpocket 350$ and escape, but I'm not sure if I killed the right target.
Bug : on game restart, you can escape the train immediately
