I have finally hit true true end. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. A groundbreaking work of fiction and fun. Makes me want to revisit Embric a bit too.
Ended up signing up for the Patreon as well, because fuck it, I've paid more for worse, and I want to see more of this stuff. (And maybe contribute drawings)
/edit oh my god, my pic is still in the embric install files. amazing
I think it's a cool game (if a bit overly long without rests/breaks/ups and downs in terms of pacing; I got more bored than I was challenged after a while) but I'm not sure it's particularly related to mahou shoujo other than the ship being a girl who is magic. i think you made all the pre-made assets work together really well (I particularly liked watching the background scroll; I know making a looping background can be suprisingly annoying!)
Gave this a quick playthrough, fun times. I really enjoyed the management elements and the relatively large impact they had on the RPG gameplay in terms of ability gating etc, and the RPG combat has an interesting balance between being 'able to predict what will happen next' versus 'not sure how many attacks etc'. Pacting an enemy seemed nearly impossible and even on normal it took a few goes to figure out how to go about taking down some of them.
My feeling was despite the various choices I couldn't tell how much was going on under the hood in terms of changing of the story, or even if there was any (besides getting a hug CG or a kiss CG at the end), though it's more excusable in a short story form like this. I suppose the stat raising will be more Fire Emblem 3H, with a full cast and crew, in the full game?
I really liked the two leads, though not having any other character portraits for the students was a bit jarring, and I feel like there were timing elements with delivery (very click-click-click with no dramatic impact caused by pauses, screenshake, etc). But it was a good run nonetheless.
Thanks for your comments! Yeah I think we can sort of gloss over the checkpoint stuff... I will just say that difficulty adjustment is a lot harder than I thought, and I definitely need to allow for a wider range of familiarity with the genre/hand dexterity etc, especially for gamejam stuff where a lot of people are trying things very quickly... I will push back a bit on the theme implementation, but most of that was in the latter half of the game and the difficulty probably prevented you from getting there... if you have a moment I'd encourage you to try the checkpoint version and see if you can push through, just to see the extra stuff! Cheers!
Thanks for playing! Yeah, the melee stuff probably needs the most work in terms of gamefeel, I need to experiment more with a proper 3d engine or at least with not having it be so 'sticky' in terms of direction etc. I'm not a pure shooter fan as much, I really prefer a mix of melee and shooting, but I don't think I quite got the balance completely here.
I intended to make destructable objects but couldn't get it done in time, or rather, in 2d pixelart the asset generation was a bit more challenging than I thought, so I shelved it.
Thanks for playing! It's been a minute since I looked at the code but I'm pretty sure almost every state is dodge-cancellable, though attacks will only buffer into aim state, so you can line up an aimstate but you can't cancel into it (otherwise attacks would probably be too easy to infinite combo by using aim-cancelling). The attacks are too sticky, it's true, mainly because instead of proper analogue aiming I started with digital inputs and had to basically carry that through the whole project. I will probably do otherwise next time I revisit top-down action. I do think the crystal guys are a bit overboard and might need a bit of fine adjustment for the damage frames. Cheers!
Got the bad end - I didn't even know there were momentos to collect.
It's difficult for me to untangle criticism of the game specifically and me just not really liking the platforming genre as a whole, but I was glad of the tonne of spawn points, since it felt like I would Meat-boy esque die over and over. I think this style of platforming design to me is reminiscent of the "Nintendo Hard" genre where you have to learn puzzles by running headlong into problems over and over and only making progress by memorising stuff you couldn't see when you start moving, which is an issue. I can't count the number of times I said 'fuuuuuuuck' under my breath, and not really in a good way.
I think I struggled with the KB+M controls a lot, especially kicking off a wall. There was a lot of times I just felt like Camilla wasn't doing what I wanted to do, whether that was because the physics was strange (I had a lot of trouble with the golden wind segment; sometimes she would resist the wind a little, sometimes she would just get blasted straight back to the left) or she would wallkick when I didn't mean to. I think hitting the direction key into the wall felt very strange, except maybe for the narrow walljump bits; if I want to jump away from the wall, my mind defaults to wanting to use the dir key away from the wall, not into it. This could be like coyote time or other platforming things where some frame buffering trickery is needed to make the platforming feel good; I'm certainly no expert in that regard.
As others have mentioned, I think the hitboxes might have been a big large on obstacles (they likely fit the sprite exactly) - what you end up with is a lot of dying before the sprite is seen to hit the obstacle (probably due to speed of sprite movement), so it doesn't feel good. I think a lot of games use hitboxes smaller than the visual object for this reason. The circular saws in particular I think suffered from this issue.
The only other real criticism I have is that Keygirl's weapon thing was often a very similar colour to the background, so every once in a while I'd get offed by a spinning blur I couldn't see. It was also possible to die while respawning, which was funny but not really much of an issue.
All of that aside, I still think it was a pretty good package all around. The sheer amount of content, art, level design etc generated in a month is so impressive to me. I think more could be done with the animation to make it feel more lively (the attack animation in particular feels a bit stiff) but considering the time constraints (and how annoying animation is to get to look natural when put all together) it's still quite cool. And so many magical girls!
Pretty good, especially in terms of presentation. but I think there's a few small issues that kind of could do with a bit of polish.
a) I don't mind the escort-student gameplay too much but as others have mentioned it could use either a minimap or an arrow pointing back to the safe zone. I can't say that it's very fun in and of itself though, especially when it is most of the game.
b) You can't get health back as far as I could tell, so it was pretty rough even to get hit at all, especially when you don't get full HP for the boss battles. Having to redo the whole escort section especially for Chapter 2 again if you get destroyed from the boss was kind of a pain. (Yes, I know this is ironic since my game doesn't have checkpoints yet).
c) It took me a while to work out the height mechanics; I don't think they're very clear without being explicitly explained, and I don't think the visual differences between projectiles is clear either.
d) I think this is sort of a common thing with SHMUP developers but it's very difficult to focus on dodging shots and shooting a small target at the same time, especially with how small the ghost girl's hitbox is.
As a bug, after I quit to the main menu while being in an introductory cutscene and tried to load a new level, I was unable to move WASD after loading (though I could aim and shoot).
Other than that, I really liked it! The Chinese-ness of it was aesthetically appreciated as well; my ma-ma gave me a jade pendant just like the one on the UI screen, and the music used and overall design of the characters really accentuated it all. I also especially liked the camera flourish on the menu when clicking start to begin.
Fantastic work honestly. I was really engaged throughout, and came to actually think about the characters as interesting and involved. The diary in particular I think did a lot to bring them all to life. Though the dialogue and overall concept is perhaps a bit more like, "Image Comics takes on magical girls", I think the end result overall worked out well, especially with Sakura playing the naive one and Gina as the more down-to-earth what-the-fuck-is-going-on person (with some experience). I'm not in love with the perhaps gratuitous usage of various insults, etc, which sort of made me think the story was going to be edgier than it turned out, but I think Sakura does a lot to take the sting out of it with her unending optimism. The ending was... a little pat (I honestly thought there would be a dialogue battle or something) but the scripted sequences and the way the story was overall set-up was fantastic.
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why this was set up as a shooter; I think the style of game would have worked better almost as an adventure game or walking sim without the guns in some ways (combat aside). The interesting part was the interplay between the girls for the most part; I was perhaps the most bored when I was fighting characters, not least because they don't really flinch or have hit reactions and there's no real tactical element to that part of the game. I wasn't entirely sure what triggered the game to move on after 'firing on the archer in the forest', and I didn't figure out what the magic key was (or what the melee key was) until the farm. That said, the FPS controls and the gunplay worked relatively okay for the most part - this is coming off playing Deathloop for nearly a week straight - so I didn't have any particular issues with it either.
I have to be honest though, I really think you would benefit from teaming up with an artist. I came to enjoy the sprite rendering style in-game (it brings back memories of Duke Nukem 3D actually) but honestly, the portraits, background art, UI and suchlike was very distracting in... well, how amatuerish it looked. I was quite impressed with how much the drawings worked functionally, if that makes any sense, as backdrop or to convey certain impressions etc; but they absolutely did not work aesthetically and I think they sort of hold back the game from being as appealing as it could be. Obviously I don't know your workflow or the Unity workflow in general, but my guess is that a lot of stuff implementation wise would be pretty much 'drop this PNG in here' and a dedicated artist would do a lot to lighten that load.
This one was a real puzzler! The magical girl transformation sequence at the start was great and the way the actual mechanics tied into stone ocean was also unexpected but well done.
I think the underlying fundamentals of the puzzler are quiet solid. I had a good time breezing through until I hit a wall and had to sit and think, then did a few moves and it worked out. That's exactly what you want from this kind of puzzler. I'm impressed with the water displacement mechanics - perhaps it's easier in a proper 3d engine like unity than I am used to, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.
The main thing missing is bits and pieces of polish, mainly in the UI department. The exits early on aren't obviously marked (before the water mechanic is introduced). Also, the way that water is displaced if a block is summoned in it makes sense intuitively but there's mechanical elements, primarily to do with the gems, that are probably worth tutorialising or explaining.
I don't know if it's possible to trap yourself in a failstate and not realise it - perhaps an easy-ish way of preventing this is to allow players to rewind their moves (either placing or removing blocks) and reverting the water. Maybe this doesn't play well with the platformer mechanics, who knows, but it does seem a bit odd that players have to simply recognise when they've screwed themselves.
I also think the cursor UI is probably too small and slight than I would like, particularly when what you're interacting with is so big and how important it is to see how many clicks you have left.
Still, I really enjoyed it! Good job!
Surprisingly fun! I think the vivid colours and the sound FX made it feel relatively complete despite the relatively simplistic artstyle. I laughed really hard when picking up the flower made her punch hold a flower, thought that was a really cute touch, and having to jump on the heads to jump into a portal was also very funny while adhering to game logic. Not much to say about the basic platforming gameplay but it all felt very cohesive and made for a decent package, even if incomplete.
This made me laugh a bit throughout. The non-sequiturs and random-but-barely-connected-stuff happening was surprisingly entertaining, the easy-going puzzling and walking around was fine, it was all kind of nice. Not that much magical-girling going on really but there sure were a lot of diamonds.
There was some kind of bug with the walking around where some physics stuff seemed to be working on the capsule that I couldn't tell what was going on, where I would be encountering unexpected resistance sometimes for reasons I couldn't tell, but it didn't really get in the way or anything so it was fine.
Would probably say the copy editing could be better, the portraits larger etc, but ya know, I was feeling it. I actually really liked the music and the graphics were mostly cohesive (though the character models were a bit flat)
That's good! I don't want to stop creators making stuff, I want to help them make it better. But if you want to get genuine feedback, there's no point me sugar-coating that I enjoyed it if I didn't.
If you want specific criticism of the combat, aside from it taking far too long to get to, it'd be something like this:
a) I didn't feel like I was being effective. The point of taking out enemies is to stop them from preventing you achieving a goal, right? If they just get back up again, I don't feel like I was really achieving anything in that regard. If the goal in that area was to kill a lot of enemies to unlock the next bit, then I don't feel that was very apparent; perhaps a kill counter or some kind of feedback that killing them is what you're meant to do. Instead what it felt like was that I was trying to get to a goal, and when I got to the end of the map and realised there was no path 'up' to the circle and got cornered by like a dozen zombie rocks, I just felt dispirited.
b) The combat itself is clunky to control. This is to some extent because it's been put into a engine that's not really built for it, and to be honest having the strafe option really made it work better than I would have thought, but it mostly meant that I was just kiting enemies into a straight line then backpeddling while firing. Over and over again. Again, if I only had to do that once or twice and then the next map opened up, that's more paletable, but I felt like I had been doing that for quite a while to no effect.
c) This is a more minor thing but I found the giant explosive FX that you got on a successful hit to be a mismatch for the apparently tiny amount of damage each shot actually did.
Returning to the story for a second, there's aspects I like. I thought Mikka as a literal cat turned human was cute, the weird magician dad was fun, the animation scripting for the cutscenes reminded me of old-school Harvest Moon cutscenes, it was all sort of cute. But again, the pacing was just extremely long. Even the intro cutscene with villagers, that cutscene alone, the exploration of peaceful life before the lightning strikes - I was already anxious to get going by that time the lightning hit. Especially in game jams, where the people playing are often looking at a whole bunch of games in a row, I think it's important to grab people's attention quickly and effectively.
I had a pretty good time with this one, though I didn't make it past the defensive enemy before throwing in the towel. The chill vibes of the soundtrack are super well suited to the block-breaking and really put me in a zen zone.
The text was pretty hard to read, especially at fullscreen, though it was kind of irreverent and jokey anyway.
Gameplay-wise the addition of various spells powered up by various levels of collectibles was a good idea (though I never quite figured out what the ultimate level heart spell did - I feel like I launched missiles whenever there was a new ball?) and let the magical girl-ness of it really come to the fore in the gameplay as well as in the story. The character portrait art for the non-hamsters was also very nice.
The only thing with breakout/pong is that often aiming for that last brick or whatever is a huge pain in the ass. Also there was the occasional strange physics quirk with the ball that wouldn't bounce quite the way I was hoping...
Overall I would say everything came together really well here and I might honestly come back again. That defensive one is kind of rough though.
I'm definitely thinking of patching in a checkpoint mechanic (and maybe just tallying deaths at the end). At this point even I am getting sick of dying to my game too often haha. To be frank almost all of the difficulty tuning happened at the last 2 or 3 days of the jam by which point I had lost track of how hard or easy my game was.
The controls infodump was there before I actually managed to create a proper tutorial, and I kind of just left it there tbh.
So I probably didn't explain the ammo stuff sufficiently, but basically there's two types of shots, default shot (large shot) which doesn't take ammo but does take your mana/time juice, and weapon pickup ammo (the HMG or heavy machine gun) that takes up actual ammo and also takes time juice but has a way faster firing rate. The default shot you can fire one at a time, but you can hold down fire on the HMG and it just fires a spread.
You're probably right about the shot spread, it's really meant to be used when you get right up in an enemy's face to burst their shield. I think I mainly added it to feel more like a machine gun, but a +10/-10 degree variance is a big factor when trying to hit enemies on the other side of the room.
Thanks for playing and your feedback! I think I will probably end up patching in a checkpoint system at some point at least, just so people can at least see the end of the game. A good point on making these things completable by jammers.
This might just be my own old school sensibilities speaking but I think I'll always be impressed even with a bare-bones 3D sandbox. Anyway, this is an incomplete entry by all accounts and it's sort of apparent. I don't really know anything about making a good 3d controller but I can't say this is it. Seeing the path of action that your sword strike will take is actually sort of nice, but the delay on the attack is a strange feeling; you definitely don't feel very nimble. The first kobold somehow dealt a bunch of damage to me and I couldn't even really tell if they were swinging their sword or not. There was an interesting sense of, like, parrying/dueling almost like Skyward Sword in a weird sort of way that is probably worth exploring, but yeah, hitting an enemy didn't really feel very crunchy. The navigation in general was also a bit weird, you stop all momentum if you land from a big jump'tall vert height which is strange. And yeah... not much in the way of magical girl-ness or themes here, so...
There's a lot here and it's the sheer amount is impressive, but the pacing is atrocious. Not only is there a lot of cutscenes before you get player control (and that's even before you get a tutorial), but it's all... so very... slow and meandering, and there's like 3 starts (village, then the kingdom/rebels, then the magic show, then you play as Mikka for a while longer?). If I wasn't do the jam rating I would have exited out already really early on. It's more exciting to either throw people into the action right away to let them understand what kind of game they're in for, or give them an immediate hook. To then get a joke about having to wait a long-ass time for something to happen was like getting a slap in the face at that point.
To be perfectly honest, going through all of that to get to the actual gameplay was... a disappointment. An action game being made in RPGMaker is very cool, but actually playing it was mostly an exercise in tedium. I got to the bit where you're being chased by zombie stone enemies that just keep getting up again and quit. I know I'm supposed to get the circle, and if you kill enough enemies paths will open up, but at this point why? I'm not having any fun, I've spent 20+ minutes on this already, what's even the point?
I'm not saying I hated the game; if anything, I'm impressed by the amount of work put in. But I think it could have been put to better use if planned around what a first time player's impression would be. Everyone's project is their own special creation, but what is is that makes it enjoyable is something you have to actively show to other people, and this doesn't do that very well.
I really like the concept! Positioning the matching game as a RPG battle was a great idea. I think it could have done with a proper interactive tutorial instead of just the instructions page but once I got it it fit together really well, with your combos converting into 'moves' that you could cast. The poppy sound and the graphics were a good fit, and it was a very smart use of asset packs that felt vaguely homogenous even though they came from a variety of sources.
That said, I think it's probably a bit too hard. Even once I had gotten to grips with selecting the right wheel and spinning it, I found it difficult to see at a glance what combos were possible and what was impossible. Add a timer on top of that and it became very very hard to keep track of what was going on.
The magical girl theming could have probably been more explicit or more tied into it overall, but the cutscene at the beginning got you pretty far over the line in that regard I think haha
Specific bugs:
1) Backed out to menu from in-game and the menu music began playing simultaneously with the game music. Recommend making sure the game stops any currently playing audio (store it in a var when playing and you can check to see if audio_is_playing before running new music)
This is a very strange entry, I really wasn't expecting a souls-like at all, let alone one quite as... almost fully-featured as this? Technically it's extremely proficient, with lots and lots of features; inventories, spells, casting, character control, even camera pans on player actions etc all implemented and working.
The thing is, none of it is particularly fun. Combat is, at most, serviceable. Tutorial text indicates there is intended to be an interplay of sword and shield strikes but in practice there's no sense of action-reaction, or even real effectiveness. Enemies barely react to hits until they suddenly fall over and expire; there isn't any sense that enemies do different things, necessitating different strategies.
Exploration isn't particularly great either. There's a map button but I couldn't get an actual map to show up, and god knows I needed one, since all the corridors are very samey-looking with similar looking assets. It's difficult to tell what switches will do until you labourously hold down A to activate one. I got lost, eventually ran into two giant horses (why were they big?) and died.
That's not to mention the lack of any context, setting or story. Without any particular in-game grounding, beyond the occasional cutesy font and the title screen I couldn't see much of a connection to Magical Girls. I know the end boss is a magical girl, but I never reached her.
It's a bit difficult cos when i think of flight I usually think planes rather than people, but if you look at Weckar's entry for the last magical girl game jam, I feel like they had some good ideas. In general noclip flight feels like 'normal wasd but no gravity', whereas I think yeah, flight-feeling flight has like, a sense of inertia or drift, accel/deceleration, trailing animation stuff - a real sense of physics to it.
i laughed at the voice acting the first time, then realised there was no way to turn it off, restarted, and then realised there was no way to skip the intro... nonetheless I found myself pretty amused throughout. Stuff like starting out at Episode 4, the general sociopathy of Pyra... in some ways I kind of feel this would have worked better as a pure adventure game. Certainly the RPG battles bog things down; enemies have a lot of HP and interacting with the interface isn't fun. I don't know if this is an engine thing or what but there's weird stuff like the AOE attacks not showing AOE targetting indicators and suchlike.
Outside of the battles, I was impressed with the variety of strange minigames and custom animations, like Oceania jumping into the lake. The minecart chase sort of fell flat because the spider immediately caught me then we just... simply beat it to a pulp. Following the spider cave just felt sort of unfair to even try and avoid the damn things because they have, what, like a tile's worth of avoidance possible? Good scripting on them though, not sure how easy that is in that engine...
I think on the whole I liked it a decent amount, mostly due to the script and the various jokes sprinkled throughout. It's very funny, and that counts for a lot in my books. (The boss's casting animation is also hilarious)
it is pretty funny to submit an game literally called one of the themes haha. Well... in the end it's a card game based on chance. I don't know if the original is balanced this way but it seems like the probability curve for whoever has more cards is always higher right? I didn't know what the abilities did. The card art was nice and sort of hinted at a greater universe, and as someone who also ended up with Playing Card Magical Girls, I appreciated their designs.
The music was sort of driving me crazy after about 5 minutes of clicking though.
I don't really play tower defence, but this was interesting enough and a bit of a challenge. There definitely needs to be more explanations within the game itself though. It often felt like towers had inconsistent range, or sometimes wouldn't activate, or I thought a target would be able to target multiple paths but it wouldn't actually in practice... in some ways, given it is just the one map, it sort of was more 'a single puzzle to solve' than what a more freeform map might look like (maybe this is just what the genre is). I didn't really get past stage 3, so maybe there's more girls, but there's only the one girl, and you just see her from a top-down perspective so she might as well just be a standing tower...
Okay haha this was hella unfinished. First thought: French keyboard again? Dayum. I actually laughed when I saw the flat character model on the UE4 greybox world, I actually think there's a weird Danganronpa-ish appeal to that kind of thing.
Look I'm not gonna lie, there was barely any game to this and the script was really really unpolished. But there was a weird sorta heart to the excuse plot that I kinda liked, especially the joke about having to do a henshin sequence for no particular reason.
It's an interesting concept let down by the general unresponsiveness of the combat. It's buggy as heck, but the biggest problem is that stuff doesn't seem to happen when you actually press the button. Jumps are floaty, but more to the point, even in projectile shooter mode I'd be clicking away and only like 1 in 4 clicks would result in an attack, or even in the attack animation restarting properly. The two goddamn bats on the second level turned into my worst nightmare because their projectiles were near unavoidable given the floaty jump and they tanked an unbelievable amount of magic shots for a couple of bats. I do like the transformation idea but the first and foremost rule of almost any action game is that it has to feel responsive to player input, and this doesn't.
