itch.io

Yaaas! I swear every few hours we would say something like "ok now lets add the cat batting down ornaments", after which I would immediately be like "no no no, out of scope for v1!".

love the music, the whole game is a vibe.

I wasn't able to find this in game, but it would be nice if the unemployed suspects had their houses labeled (or maybe a way to look up suspects addresses in like yellow pages or something if you want to preserve the old-fashioned-ness). Better than wasting a bunch of time traveling to every house in a location looking for a single suspect.

I would love to see this game developed out further, I like the idea and was really stoked to play, but I'm definitely left wanting more exploration of the concept. I was hoping there would be: investigating to find motivation, investigating to find people's routines, interrogating witnesses and such (judging from the unused "talk" option, it looks like you wanted to add some of this stuff and didn't have the time for it yet).

Good luck with your continued development! This game was dope!

As a heads up, I got an error when generating the harder case, I submitted it to the git repo if you end up working on this project further later on.

Fun concept, kinda like real-time Super Auto Pets. I really like the diverse and striking character designs, very creative and really out-there.

Misc Notes:

That font choice is a bit rough. It might fit the aesthetic you are going for, but people already don't want to read a bunch of text when gaming, you should consider choosing a font that's kinder on the eyes!

I both like and dislike being able to see the enemy lineup. In one hand you kind of need the information to construct your lineup. On the other hand it means a lot of keeping track of information and swapping back and forth (which at least can be done easily with the SHIFT key).  

There might be some UI ways of handling this, or maybe a "simulate battle" button that basically lets you test out your lineup before submitting it, or like a "see the future" button which shows what your lineup would look like after the fight without showing the details of the fight. 

This sort of trivializes the game (just throw in random units, test it, then re-arrange test it, re-arrange, test it etc...), but maybe that's a good thing? Since you have limited use of your units, the real decisions the player makes is what units they are willing to lose and take damage on each round instead of just trying to win and lose.

The music could use a bit of work. The melody isn't bad (although it's not very background music-like. It's a bit more in-your-face punchy in execution than I would expect for a strategy game), but the repetition of the base chords gets a bit grating. Maybe dressing the base chords up with some arpeggios or grace notes could help. The issue might also just be that the progression is  always two chords, when usually we want at least a three chord progression like I -> IV -> V -> I to feel some movement and resolution. Just some thoughts.

The art style is very unique. It lacks cohesion, but I could see that being a cool thing if you lean into it enough. A lot of the art borrows visual tools from DBZ which is neat, but is a bit distracting since it's not shared across all the assets (so it sticks out as inconsistent instead of a conscious choice).

Overall I really like the game feel and execution of the ideas. Very similar to what I was going for in my game (although this one is much more Stanly Parable, Superliminal, Portal, whereas mine was more like Half-life + Terraria had a Portal baby). Great job!

Misc Notes:

That audio buzz at the start might be too realistic, I thought the game was crashing on launch. might want to reconsider having that on the main menu on startup...

jumping is a bit floaty, might want to scrap gravity based jumping for a velocity curve jump if you are going to have the player doing anything more than basic platforming.

Getting the enemies to die is a bit clunky and frustrating (if they are supposed to take 5 cubes to the face to kill, at least show that in a health bar!). 

Also the cubes spawning and shooting out off-center to the camera makes aiming hard, if you want the player to be shooting cubes accurately as an attack you might want to change that, or just make the ragdoll kills easier to achieve with less accuracy.

The enemies are super creepy and creative. I love their aesthetic and animation and sounds. Great design all-around;

being able to store cubes after shooting them would be cool. without adding that one might be tempted to conserve ammo by running around picking up the same cube which would get tedious. 

Maybe even scrap the ammo system entirely, make cubes disintegrate over time or even better after a certain number are in the scene and let the player shoot as many as they want with a cooldown. This might get weird with using those same cubes for puzzles, but it also might be a really cool solution to the player just using 30 cubes of ammo to solve a puzzle vs. them knowing they can only use like 3-5 cubes before they start dissolving the older one. This has the added benefit of once a puzzle is completed, they can just move on to the next section and start shooting cubes to use for the new one without having to run around collecting cubes or whatever. This would allow you to have longer form levels with less elevator intermissions.

The enemies need more audio cues so you don't just enter a room and die immediately when they are right there. It can also be annoying when focusing on enemies in front of you and one gets you from behind completely silently.

The audio for the enemies reminds me of Alan Wake 2 shadow people which is neat. This game was more entertaining than that one though :P.

Damn, that title screen art. Love the aesthetic here, and the music is dope.

This game is super interesting and fun and I'm going to download it to play it more later. Really well done all around!

Notes:

The menu buttons could use a drop-shadow or something to help contrast it from the background image though, either that or add a desaturation layer behind UI while navigating things like pause screen and tutorial dialogue

I really like the fact that the choices for each area tell you what the rewards are so you can try to tailor a build/have some agency in what playstyle the run will have

I feel like this game was very Noita inspired, and I love that. It's a really cool idea to take a hack-and-slash and have the player construct their attack combos

One thing that might be cool (it makes sense to be out of scope for this iteration though, you already added and achieved so much), is synergies in skills (think team fight tactics unity synergies, or SNKRX) which encourages diversifying skill usage in a combo (since synergies only apply when non-duplicated attacks happen), but also gives some more build expression and direction to a run. I really wanted to combine a bunch of spear moves into a single spear spell book and have that mean something more, like maybe increase area of affect/range of the attacks or something. (It's also possible something like this was happening in the background and I just wasn't aware because there are a LOT of numbers and keywords to keep track of in the game)

Voice acting and characterization, animations, build variety... The SCALE of this submission is insane for just a month, kudos on all you were able to achieve!

With some polish I could see this being a full-fledge steam release if it's something you want to pursue.

I think the areas that could be improved for a final product are:

1) A user experience pass on the information being presented would help this game a LOT. Really highlight the elements you want the player to be using for their combo construction. If it's more important to pack rarer spells into a spell book, making the rarity colors present in the icons while in the skill bar or on the details panels would be good. If you instead want the player focusing on the types of attacks, making the distinction of sword/spear/magic or whatever, emphasize those elements more in either the art or effects. I think with a game like this giving the casual player simplified feedback on how good their build is can help a lot, and the hardcore players can dig into the numbers on their own and optimize if they choose.

2) A cleanup pass on the in-between stage animations would be good (maybe speed it up after the first one, or make it skippable? The barrel roll is cool and all the first time, but after that it slows down the pace of the game to have so much animation between stages)

Thanks for the feedback!

I think I got carried away trying to add new features and explore different nice-to-haves (like ragdoll <-> bone animation transitions I didn't end up using too much of), where I could have definitely refined the physics more.

I did a refining pass early on that made it feel really responsive and less janky, but something I did later on re-introduced the jank (I think a lot of the jankiness could be fixed be re-disabling object-player collision while holding an object, and capping object travel speed).

I would actually call myself an animator first and a gamedev/coder second so it really disappointed me when I didn't get time to animate the character since it's what I wanted to do most!

I wasted too much time trying to get the enemy characters rigged up and supporting swapping between unity bone animations and ragdoll physics and then realized I just didn't have time to add animations without sacrificing actually having a game at the end of the month haha.

Definitely portal and half-life inspired!

Sorry about that, I would have liked to have had more time to go in and make the enemy shoot intentions and how to ragdoll them more obvious. 

Currently if you throw an object REALLY hard at them (40 units/s) they will ragdoll, but I wanted to encourage people using scaling (like throwing a small object like a grenade, then enlarging it), so if an object is enlarging and touches an enemy they instantly ragdoll and go flying away. 

I wish I could have explained that better through gameplay or tutorial, but there is never enough time!

Thanks! 

I also loved trying to levitate on the doors too! 

I can't believe I removed it, accidentally re-introduced it, and it ended up being some of the most fun people had with the game. Serendipitous!

yup, definitely something I had in mind, and I actually removed collisions with the player colliders while grabbing an object during one of the iterations of development, but at some point changes to collision layers reintroduced the ability to collide with grabbed objects and it never got fixed. 

I'm glad it made for some fun trying to break the game and I definitely used the glitch as a fun way to try and float around and levitate my way through the harder parts of the game!