Omg, I felt like I was doing decent when the giant trans T block came down and wrecked me 🤣 Managed an even 50 at least. Nice fun little game, I could see this getting addicting with the addition of some special blocks or powerups or something!
ian-h-chamberlain
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Nice game! It reminds me of Banjo-Kazooie and certain Mario 64 levels. I had lots of fun flying around and I loved the book gliding animation. The music and sound effects really fit the game well, I especially liked the noises the cultist made.
The controls were pretty good, but it took me a while to figure out that the best time to start gliding was immediately after jumping - usually I would expect I should try to glide starting from the peak of my arc, rather than at the start of the arc. Also, it seemed like there was no good way to “resume” gliding once you cancel it, which threw me off.
The platforming was a fun challenge, but I would have liked a little more difficulty dealing with enemies too - I think a cultist only captured me once, so maybe giving them a little more aggro or some additional enemy types would have been more challenging.
I did have to download the Linux build as the web version was stuttering quite a bit, but it ran with no apparent issues on my Steam Deck.
Congrats on the entry! This was a fun playthrough.
Fun potion brewing game! I liked that the alchemist’s notes were effectively the tutorial, teaching you how to brew. The sound and visual effects both added a lot of pop (literally, sometimes) to the game, and the flavor text on some of the potions were funny too.
The fill meter was fun to watch change colors as you added ingredients - I don’t think the glow effect was overdone, honestly. Holding down the mouse worked fine for filling the cauldron, but my instinct was always to click and drag rather than just clicking. Maybe a little free motion on the bottles (similar to the ladle) would have made it feel a little more satisfying.
Once I realized that you could just try to make stuff and get hints, it was pretty easy to get to the end of the game. It might have been fun to have slightly more cryptic hints, rather than just telling the player directly which ingredients were needed more or less.
Overall, very nice work. Fun and well-polished, congratulations!
Fabulous presentation and nice story. I enjoyed exploring the environment and trying to figure out how to escape, but in the end it was actually fairly easy for me to finish the game (maybe I just got lucky with random events?).
I was a little confused about how the map worked - every time I looked, it seemed mostly empty / hadn’t changed since I discovered anything? I didn’t really need the map anyway, so it was okay but I wondered if I was missing something there.
The control scheme threw me off a little, I might have preferred a click-to-move system. Also, the cold from not moving sometimes seemed to tick down when I wouldn’t expect, like while the map/journal were open and maybe once during a cutscene? Still, it wasn’t too hard to keep warmth since the gauge was pretty forgiving.
Overall, nice work! With a bit of expansion to the world I think this would be a fun survival game with good replayability!
Wow, lovely visuals and beautiful story - I wasn’t expecting to have all these feels while playing jam games!! The controls felt pretty good, and the game had a handful of challenges leading up to the final battle. Once I got the hang of it, the first half of the boss fight was not too bad but I struggled before eventually beating the second half!
Would have loved some retro sound effects/music to go with this game, but honestly that was one of the only things that I felt was missing. I like that you even included a little self-reference to the short length of the game - with a bit longer levels I think this would make a great full-fledged arcade game in its own right.
Congratulations on the great entry!
Thanks, I definitely spent the most time on the constellation and spellcasting pieces which left a lot unfinished in the other parts of the game, haha. For example, there was no ending and meteors would come forever until quitting the game, as you noticed.
I didn’t notice that about the music, will have to check that more carefully next time.
Thanks for playing!
I wanted to add different spell types for different constellations but ran out of time since I had focused so much on the spell casting itself.
Adapting the spellcasting to a different RPG-type of game is definitely an interesting idea… if I keep developing this I’ll have to consider that. It could be cool to build up a spellbook over a longer game and use those spells as part of the core gameplay.
As for the graphics - yeah, definitely “programmer art” over here, haha! The explosions especially were just thrown together quickly because it was even jankier without them, lol.
Thanks for playing!
This was fun! I liked the difficulty ramping up, although the timer for drawing got incredibly short - it might have been nice to have a little more time to place things, even when the memorization timer was really short.
The first few rounds where new place types were introduced didn’t actually end up using those types, so it took until one of the very difficult levels for me to actually end up seeing e.g. a farm on the map. It might even the difficulty a little to ensure those ones get introduced earlier.
I really like the simple graphical style and the music + ticking clock provides a nice atmosphere that seems fitting for this style of game. Some extra visual feedback when the timer was running down might have added to that pressure feeling even more.
Nice entry, congrats!
Slowing down as you run out of coins is a pretty interesting mechanic! I think I would have liked having a minimum speed, since it was pretty easy to get stuck - I ended up falling down a hole and couldn’t get out or collect any coins because my speed got too low. The super-fast jump also felt a little odd when paired with low speed from lack of coins.
The first time I almost made it home, the block ran out of speed right before I got there, haha - but once I knew where it was, it was easy to get there again. For replayability you could try having the house spawn in random locations to find every time, maybe?
I loved the juicy animations on the box - for just being a red square he really felt alive!
Fun little game, nice work!
Fun game, nice work! I really enjoyed the core loop of running around avoiding enemies and praying my towers worked well enough to keep me alive, haha! Managed to make it ~14:00 and almost to level 16. There was a nice variety of enemy types, although I didn’t notice much difference between them other than HP.
The XP mechanic worked pretty well in my opinion, but there are two things I might add:
- the ability to pick the tower that gets upgraded, instead of random. I wanted to beef up my front line after realizing I had placed some towers sub-optimally, but instead the towers behind me were getting upgraded :/
- some kind of HP buffs, whether regeneration or one-time heals. I felt kinda “stuck” having only one life with no healing
Showing the range of every tower got kinda noisy on the screen, so I wonder if it might help to hide them by default unless hovered (or while placing a tower), or just show it in a different way?
Overall super fun to play, congrats on the entry!
Wow, incredibly beautiful game! I loved the chill atmosphere and just exploring the environment to find stuff! My Steam Deck did have a little trouble running on the default graphics settings but once I turned off “High-End Graphics” it ran quite smoothly.
The first time I brought knowledge back to the research station, I had a bit of trouble finding the “entrance” where you could actually use it - but once I knew where it was there wasn’t much trouble. It might have been nice to have a “leave” button or something to restore camera control without having to swim away - as is, I found it a little unintuitive how to close the menu.
I was a little confused about the purpose of the magenta map icons and the scary “red zones” I found exploring around, but it seemed like a nice change in tone - if I could figure out what the danger was.
Overall, very nice job - this is one of the most polished-feeling games I’ve seen in the jam, congratulations!
Nice work! I loved the music and the graphical style, and the grid of buildings moving around, plus the use of destruction over building made this game pretty unique! It took me a little while to figure out how the buildings interact with one another, and I don’t think I ended up understanding completely, but I enjoyed trying to figure it out.
One thing that I struggled with was remembering which tiles had effects on them from destroying the buildings - was that intentional? The particle effects only displayed after building stuff there (by which time it was too late). If the idea was to force me to remember, maybe an easy mode or extending the tutorial to show those tiles with their effects would have been helpful.
Very cool looking game with a unique mechanic, congratulations on the entry!
Nice work! I loved the music and the graphical style, and the grid of buildings moving around, plus the use of destruction over building made this game pretty unique! It took me a little while to figure out how the buildings interact with one another, and I don’t think I ended up understanding completely, but I enjoyed trying to figure it out.
One thing that I struggled with was remembering which tiles had effects on them from destroying the buildings - was that intentional? The particle effects only displayed after building stuff there (by which time it was too late). If the idea was to force me to remember, maybe an easy mode or extending the tutorial to show those tiles with their effects would have been helpful.
Very cool looking game with a unique mechanic, congratulations on the entry!
Nice game! The difficulty ramped up quickly, as I had no problem completing the first chunk of the game but got pretty stuck with the lava (I guess towards the end, based on what other people are saying?). I ended up not really using the “quickfall” ability, but maybe if I had practiced with it more I would have been able to use it to finish the level.
After playing for a while, I got a little dizzy from the quick bouncing of the camera following the player - it might have been nice to add a little damping on the camera movement, or just widen its field of view a little so it wouldn’t have to move as far to follow the player.
The ramp-up of speed after getting stuck behind something was a little jarring, although I guess you need to get back up to speed in order to get into the rhythm of the rest of the level, so I’m not sure what a good way to help with that would be. Maybe some camera lag or something would help here too.
The music and art are nice, and I definitely felt the pressure of the giant flame wall coming behind me! Overall, pretty nice work!
This is very cool, super impressed with the generative music aspect of it, and the game feels polished in appearance as well. Playing is pretty simple, which made it easy to get started and intuitively understand how the game works after only a few seconds of playing.
One thing I would have liked is a way to feel like I was doing more than just randomly deciding to switch the shape of the cursor - maybe this could be helped by showing the possible cursors (and currently selected cursor) somewhere on the screen? Especially since the time pressure is on, I think having that information readily available would give the player a bit more agency over their score.
Overall this is a very cool concept, and as someone who knows very little about music theory it’s amazing to me that a game like this is even possible. Awesome work!
Wow, nice work! The audio and visuals felt really polished, and the complexity of the different systems interacting (food, health, sanity) is pretty interesting! I had a lot of fun exploring the world you’ve created and learning more about the lore and forgotten knowledge!
As someone else said, I would have preferred a different font for readability, or at least an option to change it. Also, sometimes characters and places on the edge of the screen would not be rendered - I wasn’t sure if this was intentional (like a fog effect) or not, but I sometimes felt like I wished the viewport was just a little bigger so I could pick a direction or explore without feeling like I was wasting a ton of food to get there.
Gameplay-wise, I really enjoyed the resource management. I was worried about dying very early on but I think you gave enough “ways out” for me to stay alive for quite a while, which was nice. Seems you found a good balance for difficulty! One thing I would have liked to see is quantities listed for transactions (e.g. “(-10 food)” or something) - once I accidentally gave away all my food to a witch because I didn’t realize how much it would take!
Overall really nice job, I like the atmosphere you’ve created and I could definitely see myself playing this for a while if I had more time!
Very cool idea for a game! Flying around in the beautiful environment was very relaxing, and the ambient music complemented it nicely. The control scheme for flying seems pretty unique and I love the bird-eye color wheel filter as a “natural” way of doing something that tends to be a scanner or radar in most games.
Unfortunately, on my Steam Deck I couldn’t get the game to recognize inputs from either the builtin controller or a Pro Controller to use the optimal control scheme, so I had a bit of trouble getting the hang of flying around with mouse+WASD. Even still, after a bit of practice it was fun, and the relaxed pace of the game meant I didn’t feel too frustrated by it.
When I first started, it took me a while to figure out where the bird I was supposed to talk to actually was - maybe that’s just me, but it might have been nice to have an arrow or hint overlay showing me where to go just to start. That said, I didn’t mind exploring the environment a bit since it’s so nice looking.
Congrats on the great entry!
Thanks for playing! It definitely seems like controls were one of the biggest pain points so if I come back to polish I’ll definitely reconsider how that all works.
I was considering something kinda like what you suggested, where more stars = more power for a spell, or having elemental magic per-spell. The special effects based on the shape would be really cool if I can figure out how to implement that!
Thanks for your feedback!
I like the idea of this game. The timers are pretty tough and I had trouble finishing any of the levels although I got really really close once!
As some others mentioned, the graphics might have been helped by thicker lines / solid blocks, or maybe changing some camera settings? The aliasing sometimes made it hard to tell where things were and strained my eyes a bit.
In terms of gameplay, I would have liked the maze rotation to be a bit more responsive - either by skipping physical motion entirely, or maybe by adding a much larger impulse with more damping? As it is, the inertia of the maze feels kinda sluggish and it was pretty easy to overshoot and have to correct when I was rotating.
The mazes themselves seemed well made, and I would have loved a “free play” mode or something like that so I could try solving them without the time pressure! Overall I think it’s a nice game that would benefit greatly from just a few small tweaks. Congrats on the entry!
Very nice work! This was a lot of fun and the number of features you added is truly staggering to me (number of enemy types, codex, aspects, etc.). The music had me head bobbing while playing and the graphical style and sound effects all mesh together very nicely. I definitely enjoyed playing it through all the way to the end, although it might have been fun if I had died at least once to try another aspect after unlocking them, before getting all the way to the end.
Excellent entry, congratulations!
I really like the idea of a dialogue-driven game like this where people forget things instead of “X will remember that”! At first I wasn’t sure how much influence my decisions had on the outcome, it might have been nice to have at least one dialogue choice to make, to really feel involved in the story. Enjoyed finding the secret as well!
This was cute, I loved the background music and sound effects! The world felt interesting with lots of decoration, obstacles and areas to explore. I liked that you identified stuff as you collected the books and other materials, the flavor text definitely added to my enjoyment collecting all the stuff.
It would have been nice to have some incentive to take the box off once I found it (maybe you can’t pick stuff up while using it?).
Overall nice work, the style and feel of this game were fun to play!
Nice work! This game was lots of fun to play and I really like the concept of a “roguelite” where the progress is stored in the player’s brain instead of built into the game like most.
Presentation-wise, this game feels really polished. The animations, sound effects, and camera effects come together to make a really juicy gameplay experience. The feeling of the giant book crashing onto the floor was visceral!
The gameplay was fairly challenging - I didn’t get too far without dying, but at least I managed to learn some spells along the way! The friendly-fire lightning damage caught me by surprise and I learned perhaps too late that maybe I shouldn’t just blindly case Thunderstorm all the time…
Congratulations on the entry, I think you did a great job on this one!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to download the native build for my OS, since I kept getting this error:
Blocked Page
An error occurred during a connection to w3g3a5v6.ssl.hwcdn.net.
However, I played the best I could using the web build, and even though it had some texture issues as you mentioned, it was still fun to work my way to the end! I also had some similar issues in my web exports with Godot 4 so hopefully those get fixed for future jams :)
One thing that felt a little odd to me was the need to use the mouse to collect keys - since I could play the rest of the game with just the keyboard, it might have been nice to also support Space/Enter/E keys to confirm the dialogs that appeared when picking up keys or dying. Otherwise, the controls seemed pretty straightforward.
Congrats on your first Godot game!
I love the art style and feeling of this game! The music, sound effects and little enemies running around are super fun to look at even if they are trying to kill me :)
I definitely would have liked to see the concept for the reverse map visibility - that sounds really original and I’m interested to see how it works if you do decide to continue developing this after the jam!
This was a solid base to start from, congrats on the entry!
This was an interesting play! I like the idea of a first-person brick-breaker type game, although I guess this is more of a guessing game the idea is still novel.
I had some trouble aiming the balls sometimes so it might have been nice to have forgiveness for missed shots, plus I think a reticle or something like that would help dial in some of the shots.
I misunderstood the goal at first (and simply tried to break all the blocks), so I wonder if it might have been helpful to show an example first (maybe by coloring the bricks for the first round to show the target, or something).
Pretty unique concept, not sure I’ve ever played a game like this with binary search before! I wonder if you could turn it into some kind of memory game…
Nice work! The sound effects and the darkness creeping in really made for a good atmosphere, and even for a 2D game like this I felt pretty spooked at times when the monsters came out to get me.
I like the idea of exploring the cave and looking at the runes, although I wasn’t totally sure if I was meant to simply activate all the runes, or use them somehow? But you mentioned there is no end game currently, so I’m guessing that was just something you didn’t have time for.
It might have been nice to have a little more feedback when attacking enemies - the fireball seemed effective, but I wasn’t sure if the melee attack was actually working, or if that was just meant for lighting fires? Still, it was fun to try and stave off stress until eventually having to fight off the monsters before resetting to a checkpoint.
Congrats on the entry!
Nice work! The presentation was very consistent and gave the game a certain atmosphere and feel that I really like. The gameplay mechanic was also really interesting, and a great use of the wildcards for this jam. The s
I did feel like the game was a little repetitive after a few keys, although the random paths made it a bit more interesting. Perhaps making the enemies faster or adding some obstacles onto the map would have made it feel just a bit more varied.
Once I found all the keys, I heard a different sound but I didn’t quite understand that I was “done” so I kept collecting more - maybe highlighting the end zone on the map would have helped me realize that as well.
Nice job overall, I really like the vibe of this game!
Nice work! It took a few tries to learn the minigames but once I got the hang of them I was able to get to 21 before the call of the void was too hard to resist :P
I think the sound effects and visuals are great for this type of game - simple enough to get the point across quickly but fun to look at, and I could see this game expanding with more minigames in the future!
I liked the fact that the minigames also told a kind of story about what the main character is thinking too, since a lot of times with these WarioWare-type games it can feel disjointed without any overarching theme.
Fun game, great job!
I hope it worked okay on Windows since that was untested! You’re right that I went a bit ambitious on this one, and the spell recognition could definitely use some polish especially with spells that have >3 stars. I think it would be nice to add some “guidelines” or guard rails for the player choosing their spells too, to make sure it actually would be recognizable later on.
Thanks for playing!
Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it! Complicated controls definitely seems to be what most people have struggled with while playing - some more on-screen help is a good idea, I’ll definitely need to add that if I come back to polish this game up more.
Thanks for the kind words, I really enjoyed learning to use Godot as well!
Wow, very nice entry! The visuals are spectacular and the atmosphere and overall presentation was very cohesive and polished. The spooky sound effects near the bottom, plus some of the UI sound effects are nice, but I think I would have enjoyed a little ambient music or something playing some of the time as well.
In terms of gameplay, it was fun to explore on my own as I waited for new messages, although the pace of new tablet locations felt a bit slow at times.I did really enjoy the fun messages coming in and some of the “extra” things to find around (how many were there, btw?). I wouldn’t have minded some extra decoration at shallower depths too, since with the low visibility there’s not much to look at until you get to the ocean floor.
The controls took me a minute to get used to (scroll wheel for menu navigation, in particular), but they grew on me after playing for a while. It might have been nice to have a slightly faster sub, but that’s a very minor complaint.
Lastly, the extra customization options, autosaving, and map were very nice! The UI felt very polished and adding these features really sold me on it. There was a small issue where sea grass would render in front of the UI sometimes, which I guess is a risk when it’s 3D like that.
Overall, fantastic job, I hope more people get the chance to play this one!
Awesome work! I love the look and feel of the game, especially the animation after defeating the bosses. The combination 2D/3D style is really cool and something I might consider trying out on some of my own games in the future! :)
The controls felt pretty good and fluid with the animations, for the most part, but playing with keyboard it felt a little awkward for me to press E for dash (as opposed to e.g. space or shift). Maybe I should have tried controller but in lieu of that a remap option would have been nice.
The levels felt a little wide open / empty. Maybe some one-off overworld enemies or something like that would help? The boss battles were fun and challenging though and I imagine you spent most of your time working on those, so it’s understandable.
Nice job overall, I would love to see more if you continue to flesh this game out further!
Nice work! The puzzles were challenging and I really enjoyed learning what the different controls meant - even when I thought I understood it, a new puzzle sometimes made me realize I hadn’t quite figured it out yet. The last puzzle was a real challenge but I was able to eventually solve it!
I sometimes forgot / had trouble telling when an effect was “active”, so maybe a more obvious indicator of that would be helpful, and perhaps some symbols or something to help differentiate the buttons from each other a little more (without having to give away what they do).
The graphics are pretty simple, but I think that works in a game like this - you don’t want to confuse the player by adding too much decoration if it doesn’t have any relevance to the puzzle. A bit of animation would probably go a long way here and complement the sound effects nicely too.
Nice job, this was very enjoyable to play!
Nice work! I really enjoyed running around fast, it kinda reminding me of playing Sonic running around collecting ores. The background music complemented that well and the character and environment were fun to look at too.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the depth (temperature?) dial on the top of the screen so I was a bit scared to go too far down at first (didn’t want to lose all my sweet loot!), but I got over it eventually.
The map was nice and helped me avoid feeling lost in the caverns, so thanks for adding that! Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend much of my loot after running around for a while since after I bought one of the teleporters (3, I think?) the game seemed to crash on me :(
Great job for your first game, I hope you enjoyed it!