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Thanks for the comment, very kind words.

You’re definitely not alone in your comments regarding both the movement and the camera angle, I’ve already improved the camera a little bit for a post-jam patch, and am going to be trying to improve the movement as well.

If I do take part again next year I’ll hopefully be going in with a bit more experience in crawlers, and maybe some tooling to help things get going a bit smoother.

Thanks again for the comment.

Thanks for the kind words. Hopefully movement will be better in a post-jam patch, I don’t imagine I’ll nail it, but hopefully it’ll be a bit better and less tappy.

You’re not alone regarding the terminals I’d have loved nothing more than embellishing that with codes for easter eggs, ways of discovering the codes without needing tapes, but alas. Maybe in a future game.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the feedback, and for imagining an awesome cutscene, it really is nothing without the player :D

It does buffer up to 1 input, I don’t differentiate a turn from a movement in that logic so double-turn is very possible. I’ll keep that in mind as movement is something I’m looking to improve on for a post-jam patch.

Thanks again for playing and the kind words.

Appreciate the feedback and kind words, thanks for playing.

Definitely looking to try and improve the movement for a post-jam update just to clean up the lower hanging fruit, such as the movement controls, camera angle and some input. Basically a bunch of stuff that was either rushed in, or I just didn’t have a clear enough idea of in the dungeon crawling genre.

Hey, appreciate the play and the feedback. All of your points are entirely fair, definitely some shortcomings from combat being a bit of a rushed in feature, and my lack of experience with the genre in general. That said your feedback does hit on a few points that have been brought up a few times, so I’m definitely keen to get a few bits actioned for an update once the voting period is done.

Lots of good points for me to try and keep in mind next year If I remember to take part.

Thanks again.

Thanks for playing, I appreciate the kind words.

Thanks for the incredibly kind review. Don’t worry I’m always overly harsh on myself by default, the poster child of “We’re our own worst critics” would be a fair analysis :D

As a programmer by trade I always like to use Jams as an excuse to dip my toe back into the art side of things, so I’m glad to see it came out well.

As for 2077, I’ve not played it myself, but having just done a search for breach protocol It is 100% one of the screenshots that gave me the idea. Perhaps I’ll have to grab cyberpunk at some point and give it a crack.

As for the fruit. You’re entirely right. I’m not a big dungeon crawling gamer so I lack the eye for the right perspective and movement going into this. But definitely something for me to improve on post-jam and try to keep in mind next time. I did try the hold-key movement near submission time, but it caused issues with the way I had already set up the rest so I just left it. Definitely getting the sense from other entries on what feels good there.

Anyways, thanks for playing, and thanks again for the kind words and feedback.

Enjoyed the old windows style feel to it. Combat was nice and forgiving (I suck normally at crawler combat). Had a couple issues with bugged audio and enemy corpses blocking progression. But other than that, nice work.

Fun little play. My biggest gripe was how the battle just started all of a sudden in the top corner and I barely had time to register what was going on before I timed out for a round. But once I knew to expect it and where it was going to be, it was fine.

Yeah unfortunately didn’t get nearly as much as I would have liked done content wise, so definitely on the short side. Thanks or playing and the kind words.

This is crazy, Is this a custom engine or something? From the real nice ascii rendering, the bios style options screen, this was just a gem visually. The sound worked really well and felt very appropriate to the visuals. I had a great time just begging, which I was much better at than combat it seems :D

Real nice work.

3 Kobolds in a trench coat, cracking idea :D. Really like the graphics, very old school vibes. The coloured letter hints for menus, the colour changing border chain, just a lot of really nice small touches that really make it feel like a well rounded product. Impressive amount going on given the time.

Nice work.

The room transitions were definitely a bit off putting, so nice work having a toggle for those. Another one where tracking navigation of an unfamiliar space in my head made my go in circles for longer than I probably needed to :D

But I did make it out…. can’t say the same for Enrique.. RIP.

Nice work, it’s straight forward to understand, plays well, and the dungeon generation seemed interesting enough to explore. Graphics we also clean and readable, I liked the spiders being this black mass with glowing eyes.

Thanks, I too enjoyed the terminals bit, if I were to continue expanding on the idea, there’d be a whole computer system you could dig into for clues and information (the original idea was a time loop with a lot of knowledge gate puzzles).

More than fair feedback on the camera. After submission I reviewed the jam page which is when I saw hints, but the ship had long since sailed by then :D

Hoping for future iterations of this Jam to go in with a bit more prepped as far as level editing and stuff go that might give me time to focus on things like that.

Cool of you to record a playthrough as well, fun watching how people navigate through it.

I was a bit torn between forcing you to find the tape in the first room, or just doing a 2x2 grid to give the player something that’s reasonable to brute force to get the idea across.

Definitely the kind of thing that, in a larger expanded version, I would have as clue to find in logs from the old staff, or in the computer system itself. Make it much more part of the knowledge gating aspect.

That’s fine, might have to give it another crack at some point with a note pad to hand :D

Enjoyed this, the one thing I think it took me a while to pick up on was that the right cleaner wouldn’t hurt. So I got to thinking a death loop was expected, and it what I saw as a stain fading was actually just it spreading. But once I realised I was idiot, I got the hang of it.

Neat method to spread out the stain, like a drunken blur or something, cool stuff,

Huh… I thought I had fixed that bug, it’s meant to show a game over screen when you get to that bit. Clearly I pushed the wrong final_final_thisone build 😅 my bad.

Alas I was bested by the cursed weapons twice, is there a tactic to beating them, or do I just need to avoid them until I get all juiced up?

Nice visuals, kinda gave me the same feel as Blue Prince with some of the stonework.

Absolutely love the visuals here the dithered rendering is gorgeous. Fun combat too, I got melee cards before movement so didn’t know what that was about at first but then after the movement it made sense, neat little twist to the combat that.

Great job all of you.

Definitely not the target audio for this one, feels very JRPG or old FinalFantasy, with lots of character info up front.

That said, once I did get into the game it was fun, little challenging. The art for the maze view is good, the art for the fights are good, but they feel too different in style for me.

All in all though, nice entry, was fun to run around and try to work out the maze navigation, the rocks add a nice puzzle element to exploring that I enjoyed.

Similar to DamienDe I found myself a bit lost. The idea of identifying rooms with grid references is nice, but my brain is just not the one to be able to use that alone to build a mental map.

I quite enjoy the ascii style presentation though.

Love the tron-esque vibes for the art style, well done there. Took me a while to realise I could just strafe away from enemy fire but that’s on me :D.

Did feel like I spent a lot of time just trying to find the next elevator though, an starting so far from the different blocks on respawn was a bit of a pain. But overall those are relatively small issues.

Nice work. Alas I didn’t not see it through to full defragmentation, must drives will remain as messy as they are in real life :D

We’ll start with the last thing first, when you shut down the reactor. You give yourself a nice big pat on the back for a job well done… that’s all there is 😅.

The code stuff came partly from the original idea of a time loop, letting you get further faster by remembering codes instead of needing to find the tapes. Time loop got cut of course, but the codes were fun so I kept them.

The weapon diff is a bit invisible (left combat as an afterthought, so isn’t presented super well). Each weapon has 3 stats, base damage, crit chance, and chance to stun enemy. There is technically support for armour as well but didn’t have time to make any so those slots just remain empty.

Next time I do dungeon jam will be the 3rd time, so I really do hope i remember to focus on combat then :D

Anyway, thanks for playing, thanks or the feedback.

Not a ton of progress lately. Been busy with work, the dog takes not playing with her personally, and generally was a bit unsure about where I was going with the project.

That said, given the progress so far, the timeline, and possible disruptions ahead. I think I’m steering the project in the direction of a short walking-simulator kind of experience. Mostly just try and tell a very short story, give spooky vibes, that sort of thing.

But enjoying playing around with blender, although I’m sure proper artists would cry at some of my choices, topology, and uv unwraps. I thought I was done with trying to get the general ‘feel’ of the ocean bits done, but I feel I’m becoming obsessed with trying to tweak shaders, fog settings, particles, and lighting to get something that feels right to me.

Anyway, small or large, progress is still progress.

So youtube compression doesn’t do it any favours given it’s already low res PSX style rendering. Still working on getting the vibe feeling right, but think that’s mostly there for me now.

Also started just roughing out some of the core interactions, fading teleports or entering buildings, vehicles, or just generally changing perspective in a big way. Item pickup and inspection, floating objects on the water, and a boat vehicle.

Next up I want to move collision to ghost objects that aren’t moving with the ocean, only which should remove the snappy jitter when standing on those dynamic objects.

Once that’s done, I’ll have most of the individual components to start putting together an actual experience…. Just need to work out a couple of locations to visit/explore, a story to somehow deliver throughout those locations, and a butt load of PSX style art…. so lots of learning blender to be done XD

Hey, so personally I find the Itch community thing a bit limited and less favourable.

There’s no official discord for this Jam it seems, so I’ve taken the liberty of creating an unofficial discord server for anyone who might be interested.

https://discord.gg/Mkm2WZqdzK

All welcome to join. Chat, talk about projects, progress, etc.

Or if nobody joins, come and sit awkwardly in silence staring at the lack of notification…. everyone needs a hobby right?

Interested in this Jam because 100 days is a real comfortable time line to work with, and the theme stuff seems interesting.

Not got a real plan as of yet, just some random Ideas floating around the noggin.

For now, just experimenting with vibes, going for a sort of PS1 era look/feel. So breaking out the old PSX shaders to experiment with the feel.

Agreed, oddly I actually think the idea works better in reverse, in that you start manually creating bigger blocks, and to automate the inputs you go down a level into the block providers to rank them up, and that pattern continues. But not 100% that it would work that way either.

Thanks for the feedback though.

Poor execution is an understatement, I really dropped the ball on this due to distractions over the jam period. But thanks for the feedback, giving the idea itself some more thought to maybe execute on it better in the near future.

I still can’t explain what my actions were, but at least I worked out (I think) what I was meant to be doing, always fun to try and work out what’s going on with no text. Great job though, felt smooth, and juicy. Some of the automatic repositioning after a merge was a bit of a pain, but I get that that’s probably not a simple solve.

Appreciate the kind words. Maybe one day in the future I’ll revisit the project/idea and make it a bit more complete.

Just doing a self-reply in case anybody else wonders this.

Based on joining the discord and scanning some of the conversation in the Just-Chatting channel. My understanding is that either the words real meaning, or the ‘recursion’ interpretation from the movie are both acceptable.

That’s my understanding at least.

Curious on the theme here, do we mean inception the word, or inception the movie?

Just asking as most people mistake inception for recursion because of that movie so just don’t wanna miss the mark if I come up with an idea.

Really been enjoying nodding my head along to these in the background whilst I work.

The lofiamp skin is also great for that retro nostalgic feel. Great work.