I think it's less a problem of enemies being too tanky or too damaging, and more a problem of throwing too many enemies at a player who is really only equipped to take on one at a time. I could probably get through it by exploiting the AI, trying to lure them over to fight one at a time, but that would be tedious, or getting them to bunch up and circle around them safely, which would be inconsistent and tedious. Something with AoE damage would really help with those big mob fights, to quickly whittle numbers down to a more manageable size.
gman003
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The legs were rigged and animated in Blender. In Bevy, I had to set up animation events to trigger on each footstep.
It was my first time doing animation, so it's probably not the greatest. Especially since I made some big changes to the movement speed late in development, and didn't have time to redo it yet again to change how long each step moved. If you look closely enough you'll see the behemoths ice-skating a bit on the terrain. I was hoping the trees would hide most of that.
I keep having problems where I hit a surface and get stuck. It seems like if you have thrusters on, it redirects you to face straight into it, and sometimes even when you kill thrust, you're stuck that way. I never made it through a match without it happening at least once.
I also seem to be way too slow and imprecise with my twitch shooting to be much good at this. I got a round to go to overtime, though I'm still not sure how. I usually didn't do much more than put a balloon on it and maybe pop one other with the shotgun, before it got yeeted away by someone's grapple beam. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but maybe tweaking some scales would help, make the objects we interact with bigger and make things move slower.
I think there's some bugs in the menu code. I was able to drag some stones from my inventory to the cart's once, but when I came back with more, I couldn't take them out of my inventory again, only drag things back in. I can see what you were going for but I just couldn't get through the full gameplay loop.
I think I'm not understanding what to do, here. I made it into the maze, but as soon as I saw the Creature after the initial tease, he went straight for me despite walking in stealth mode, and no amount of rocks thrown would distract him. I even tried turning the flashlight off to see if that worked. Is that not the intended way to sneak around?
I also think you might have forgotten to put a limit on the framerate, because it made my fans spin up to 100%. Made it a little hard to hear the audio cues.
I think what I would try, is to make it so pieces which are correctly locked together, slide together. That would mean moving pieces across multiple rows/columns, but I think it would be worth the complication. Or maybe something where you can manually lock a piece in place, and things slide through it?
On top of what Kwigg said, I got screwed on a few attempts because I saw two of the same animal near each other, but only one of them actually counts. Even if I did memorize every position, I'm not sure I could beat it in the time allotted, it seems very tight.
Maybe instead of just failing as soon as the water touches one of them, make it so they flee to higher ground? And probably close off more and more of the map as the floodwaters rise.
Fun, although I'll second Jootdev on the balance being off in places. Particularly in pens 5 to 8, there were times I had my top tier maxed out but still had to wait for a minute to farm coins. I've seen paid games do worse, though.
The grammar is also off in many places - I'm guessing English isn't your native language? It didn't really detract from the experience, just an observation.
Probably the most fun game in the jam, from what I've played so far.
Puzzle games are usually my jam, so I was looking forward to this one, but it seems like just controlling things was more an obstacle than trying to solve any of the puzzles. I kept giving up out of frustration. Assist mode didn't make things any easier, I wasn't struggling to figure out where the beam was pointing, it was a matter of getting the beam to be where I needed it to be.
There might be something weird going on? I was getting inconsistent results from just tapping a key. Sometimes it would nudge the beam by a fraction of a degree, other times it would swing much farther. Not sure if that's something peculiar to my system or not.
Yeah, I knew that was going to be a big part of making the game feel right. I don't know if getting the camera to shake with every footstep, long before the actual core gameplay loop was done, was the correct game-dev decision, but it's the one I made, and it seems to be paying off.
I had plenty more ideas for equippables that also ended up on the cutting-room floor. Stuff like a flak gun that could shoot down incoming missiles, or a launch catapult for a little bomber (which might have been a small dragon instead), or some kind of melee option. So there's definitely room for even more depth.
Maybe if the tribe could flow better around obstacles, so they were less impassable but might scatter your tribe, make a clump of them weaker than the enemy? Or make different units that you get from different tribes, that have different effects, like axmen that can cut down trees to clear a bigger path, or archers that can slow down tribes that are running away from you?
Did you miss that you can refill your health by leveling up? So you hit 4-5, get enough xp, level up, that gives you another five hearts to work with. The cost to level up keeps rising, but you also gain total hearts as you do. By the end of a full clear you're working with 15hp.
Other than that, main thing is that there's rules to where things are placed. Different creatures have different rules, figuring them out can let you know things that you couldn't just from basic minesweeper rules. Look at the screen after losing, you'll start noticing patterns.
That's gotta be pretty close to the maximum I think you could get (assuming we're not counting 800, surrounded by mines). If the top left was a corner, you could get 10+7+7 in the top row, both 9s in the next row, then 8+8+11 in the bottom row, for a total of 69 in the middle. I can't think of a way to top that without breaking some level-gen rule, and it would take incredible luck to get there. Getting three 8s would require giving up the 10, and that loses you more points overall.
I hit a crash that I think is different from the ones others have reported - after taking the "hers" option, a bit later it crashes with:
While processing text tag {n} in 'YOU — Shall we keep going with the counting thing, or..?{n}'.:
File "renpy/common/00nvl_mode.rpy", line 395, in do_display
renpy.display_say(
Exception: Unknown text tag 'n'
And yeah, it's a shame the game's not actually playable all the way through, because the writing so far has been excellent.
Yeah, I just cannot figure out how to do anything. First time I didn't even find the phone, I headed off in completely the wrong direction and never saw anything but cones and mountain. Retried, found where I was actually supposed to go, but I've gotten completely stumped. I get that I'm supposed to recreate a certain song, but none of the bells seem to play the correct notes. One time I seemed to trigger something by walking through the columns, but I couldn't figure out if that was part of it or not.
If the game played faster, maybe I could experiment enough to figure it out. But when just moving between bells takes so long, and then you have to wait for the long audio sequence to finish, it becomes too tedious to play. I know you were going for some slow, spooky vibes, and you nailed that, but I think it came at the cost of gameplay.
I see we both had some similar ideas, even if we went in different directions with them. Your combos work a lot more interestingly than mine.
My biggest critique is that the early bits are very grindy. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but the second fight takes me absolute ages to get through, even though I'm never at risk of dying. Really, the only threats in the game are the dragon, and yourself. If I had a nickel for every time I've died because I combined a beam spell with the knockback-pulls ring, and sucked an enemy straight into me and instantly died, I'd have two nickels.
Still a great game. I'll probably keep trying it until I get a run through.
Pretty fun, although yeah, there's a lot of mechanics you clearly didn't have time to actually make use of. I only used the rifle/SMG after already beating the game pistol-only, I never needed to turn the NVGs off, the keypad doesn't seem to have a code anywhere, and the ammo pickups are useless since there's only like ten enemies.
But hey, it was fun enough that I went back and tried to beat it again, pacifist, so you did something right.
Was the "our base is under attack" scripted when you got past a certain point? It seemed to trigger even though no enemies should have seen me, and they went in a completely wrong direction.
I struggled a lot to figure out how to actually make a ring. Took me a while to figure out you needed to hold the hit button down to strike harder, and I'm still not quite sure how you control which ring shape gets made. I thought it was based on which ring you'd "selected" from the book but that doesn't seem to work quite right.
Cool idea though, and impressive quality for such little dev time.

