itch.io

I really like your take on this :) I had a lot of fun playing.  I didn't realize the other cats were my previous runs until after several games.  Then I tried to 'use strategy' to optimize each round, but I wasn't able to think fast enough.  It's a really interesting mechanic I think.

Nice entry

Very interesting concept! I wish there were more levels, but I figure it's always not bad making players want more :)

I like how the different colored tiles had different timing effects and it was pretty intuitive to figure it out.

At first I wasn't sure that I liked the timer running when I wasn't doing anything, but since the levels are quick and the reload time is fast (and there's a pause button), it wasn't a big deal by the end of playing.

Nice game

Thanks for the explanation. I kinda figured as much since I've run into the exact situation several times! :)
Really glad to hear you will continue development since I would love to play the updated version. Good luck!

I agree with the other comments that this is a very faithful homage to Tokaido. Well done!

Overall presentation is very professional. The art and music/sfx really help you feel immersed in the world.

I do wish there was more explanation in-game or more graphical indications when food was eaten or damage dealt.  I also didn't quite understand the symbols that rolled(?) when the hounds respawned.  I assume it was stats related, but I wasn't able to figure out what the symbols represented. I also wasn't sure what the status on the upper right indicated.  

I was able to win (on Easy) and I think I learned enough that I could probably go back and win on Medium too. (I saved to one of my collections to check back in case you make any updates).

Overall very fun and enjoyable!

Agreed on all points. Since it was just a wildcard we didn't have a lot of time to balance/polish the cheats (half the team didn't even know it was even added since I spliced it in at the last minute).    I was hoping that the sound fx for activating and deactiving might have been enough to indicate whether the cheats were toggled, but I admit that's a pretty subtle cue :) 

Thanks for playing! 2.0 will definitely implement these suggestions.

Thanks for playing and sharing! We don't get many people streaming our games and the few times it's happened has been somewhat nerve-wracking since with jam games it's easy for bugs to slip in that can confuse or block players from finishing and it's really tough to watch that :)

However, it looked like you had fun and didn't run into any major issues, and quite frankly, your experience was almost textbook what we were going for (with respect to learning how to play and how to play better. i.e. learning to use the right item on each enemy and mixing up the ranged and melee).   It also sounded like the length was just about right for you (which was another tough thing to balance).

So thank you very much for playing and sharing. You got a few new subscribers from it :)

Thanks for playing and for the review!  Yea, balance was very difficult for us this game since some people think the game is too hard and others think the game is way too easy.   We erred on the side of being easier to give most people the chance to see the end of the game.

For the 2.0 updated version I think we will have more customized (and streamlined) controls (based on all of the great feedback we've gotten), and I think that will make the controls more accessible which should allow us to dial up the difficultly again without frustrating players.

Glad you enjoyed playing!

Nice entry for your first jam. I agree with Maack about considering only showing the tutorial hints the first time. Also, the game was really tough.  I made it to the third encounter several times but I couldn't quite find a good path through as I tried to run up. 

I think the music had a pretty chill vibe to it and the cat animations and level tiles were well done.

I enjoyed playing but I wasn't sure if there was an actual end/boss or if it was an infinite game.  I got to level 20 with I think 64k points (600 speed, 1.5 bullet speed, and maybe +100 damage?) but then got mobbed on a really bad 2 skull room and lost all but my last life. Then died stupidly in a 1 skull room trying to gain some hearts.

I liked what I played and the shooting felt pretty solid. I might have preferred to feel like I was getting faster or stronger at a quicker pace.   

in my next game I tried out the cheat codes and had a really fun time with the shotgun.

Music was great but after several waves it stopped. Maybe it wasn't set to loop?

Theme was a bit weak though :)

Nice game, especially for your first jam.

Fun game. I thought the layout of the puzzles were pretty good. I liked how you slowly expanded on a few different variants of essentially the same objects, but used differently. It felt like a pretty good balance of challenge for a jam (not so hard that it's difficult to finish, but not so easy that it got boring or repetitive).

Sound and gameplay was pretty good too, though I would have loved to see a controller option (I'm not very good at WASD platformers).  Nice game

Really fun game with a neat interpretation on the theme. I really liked the laser pointer effect. It did feel like shining a laser pointer around.

I didn't have any trouble following the tutorial and was able to restore Peace to the Galaxy :)

Music was pretty good and I really liked the button sound effects when the cats got on the platforms. 

The only gameplay comment I can think to suggest is maybe having another type of puzzle/layout for one of the later levels, but that's pretty minor since this is a jam game.

Art was on point and I liked the state changes in the cats/dogs. That felt pretty solid.

Nice job

Hah! this is a pretty ridiculous premise (in a good way).  It's a little buggy (or maybe it was intentional for the cat to phase through the roof, off the screen?) but fun to play.  I could only get 9 points at my best.

I think this is a really unique and distinct take on the theme. Looking forward to seeing what else you make.

Nice entry! I had fun playing and winning the game. Looks like there's only 1 level currently. Do you plan to keep working on it?

I really liked your tutorial level. By the end it was clear how to play.  I do wish there was a controller option since I am very bad at WASD platforming.

I got stuck at the spot about halfway through (you see the checkpoint above your head with the rope, but you can't jump through). I kept thinking I had to walk off the (left) side and try to fall to the right (where the climbing marks were).  This took a while to get right, then I had to try to jump to the left platform.   

After I got past it I realized I could have just dropped. whoops!

The other tricky spot was the first jump from the tree into the house, but I finally managed it.

The cheat codes were a fun addition.  

Must sounded good (the military drum seems to set a good rebellious tone).  There was some audio stutter, but seems like godot 3x does that sometimes. I read that enabling the "Threads" release in the project export settings for html5 might help. 

Overall nice game!

Was the secret getting pushed out of the level? :)  on level 3 the dog pushed me through the wall at the bottom of the level and I spent some time flying around outside before I had to reset.

I really enjoyed playing and I've dabbled with a 'survivors' type game before (it's a fun mechanic to code I think!).  

I think the art was pretty good if you are all non-artists.  The intro cutscene set a fun mood and seeing the dog show up every level (seemingly learning new tricks) kept me on my toes.

I couldn't figure out if the meowing did anything so I didn't really use it much.  I originally thought the 'garlic' force field should have stayed up longer or recharged faster, but I was able to beat the game with only a few upgrades for it (and maxing out the eyeballs? moneybags?)

Was there a difference between red hearts and blue? When I finally found my groove I stocked up on blue hearts and managed to win. 

I think the music and sound effects fit well and the controls were good too (I felt my vampire survivors instincts kick in).  My only comment gameplay wise might be to increase the pickup radius for the hearts.  Several times I swore I was close enough to grab one and instead of gaining a heart I got clocked by a bat, but for a short jam game, that's probably a reasonable tradeoff due to game length.

nice job!

Neat concept! We tried to do a rhythm-like mechanic in an old jam so I know how fiddly it can be to get music and code to cooperate.   I agree with some other comments that sometimes it feels a bit out of sync, but I think it's a pretty good entry especially if this is your first jam. nice job.

I really like the concept here. I felt like a weary cat at the end (when the baby finally 'dozed off') and while the difficulty was tough, I think the length of the game matches the learning curve very well.  

I think because there's so many entries this jam that it can be tough for people to have the patience to spend much time with each game if they want to rate as many games as possible (which is what I used to do for our early jams which meant I probably missed out on solid entries like this one).

I like all the little touches with the baby-cam shader and the laser pointer effect and it's fun to play a music/sfx focused game.  I did want to hold down left-click so that the cat would 'keep following' the pointer (hopefully as easy as just polling the mouse position in _physics_process or something), which I think would have addressed 90% of my learning curve time.

Your title screen provides a lot of good info and after winning I can see clearly what you intended to communicate.  One thought could be to tweak "Find Melody" to "Find Correct Melody" or "Choose Melody", but I kind of think that could have spoiled things.  Another option to combat the learning curve could be to give a tip after losing (i.e. indicating you need to choose the right melody).

The music was really great and for a lullaby game that's pretty key.  And wow, while writing this review I finally noticed the 'street noises' which was a really interesting 'white-noise' kind of sfx touch that I don't think I'd have thought to do.

I ran into one bug when I jumped near the bottom of the screen (I didn't really understand the strategy of jumping).  

Overall very fun!

I really enjoyed playing!

I think I managed to get the cats to coexist!

I think petting cats to generate static electricity is a really neat take on the theme.  

The options screen was well done. I always want to include a good one in our games but I always seem to run out of time (and I generally don't enjoy UI work).  I might have to check out the addon you used.

The sounds were satisfying and the music choices fit.

I liked your art; simple, but once I figured out how everything worked (I had to re-read the instructions a couple times), it went pretty smoothly.

The controls in general were good, but I kept wanting to Click+Hold+Drag+Release instead of Click to pick up and Click to put down. If you decide to continue with the game it might be nice to add that as a toggleable option (maybe accessible from the game).  I've implemented this before so feel free to ping me if you want.

The cats from different regions all seemed identical, so I wasn't sure if there was a strategy on how to handle them.  I also wasn't sure if stacking was doing anything noticeable since I didn't see a lot of differences when I put them closer together.

Also, the price increases and inventory/stock available didn't seem intuitive to me (I'm guessing that's probably due to running out of time to tweak balance).

Overall I had fun playing!

In earlier builds we had a transparent overly (colorrect) that would change opacity/alpha each wave.  However it made it difficult to see the enemies well in the first few waves so at the last minute we had to cut the feature since we couldn't get it balanced in time.  Since the feedback we were getting in testing was that the game seemed more challenging than we intended we decided it would be best to not cloud the issue (literally).

And as you noted, that had the consequence of making it ambiguous when the waves progressed. :) sorry for the confusion!  Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Good suggestion.  User Interface/Experience is something we are always struggling with. Making the numbers bigger makes sense and possibly even adding some audio sound when you are running out, or maybe some sort of visual clue.  Thanks for playing and for the review!

I really like this suggestion since it reduces multiple actions into a single one, especially when you start tabbing the wrong way and it takes several selections to get the correct item.  It's really obvious now that you said it (and I've actually had a couple nights of sleep) Thanks!

Yea, after we submitted we realized the Controls screen was missing instructions on mouse-clicking the weapon slots.  That was my preferred method when things got hectic.

Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Thanks for playing!  Yea, we've gotten a lot of great feedback that players seem to approach this game with a variety of preferences.  For version 2.0 we will need to add a way to customize controls, especially for Ranged attack and WeaponSwap.

Thanks!

That's a good suggestion. We actually had it on top, bottom, and side at various times :)

for 2.0, I think we'd add an options screen to allow some customization of the layout.  Also, we meant to add in mouse wheel scrolling to toggle weapons as well. whoops.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Thanks! Glad it was fun for you.

Glad you had fun, thanks!

Thanks! glad you liked it

Thanks for the review!  Yea, we've always talked about making a game where the base mechanic was RPS so we could hopefully simplify some of the design work.   And yea, I also had a tough time with the weapon selects.  We actually forgot (oops!) to say on the controls screen that you can CLICK on the weapons to select them.  It's not perfect still, but sometimes (for me at least) that seemed easier.  

Thanks again!

Glad you liked it!  I can see how a touchpad might not have worked well.  That might be something we should consider in 2.0. Thanks!

Thanks! Glad that you enjoyed the gameplay. Our pre-release testing indicated that some people thought the game was too easy and others thought it was way too hard/chaotic, so it was a challenge to balance.

The '4' was 'unarmed' combat which always applied the STUN effect.  The idea was if there was a cluster of enemies of differing types you could more safely stun them all then maybe take a step back and surgically pelt them with projectiles.  However, I don't think we had enough time to really introduce (and balance) that kind of strategy layer. Hopefully in 2.0.

And yea, the first couple levels were designed to ease the players in. Glad you enjoyed it!

neat little game :) super fun to try to balance rocks on the dino's head, then fling them away.

Thanks for playing and for the really nice review!  Also, really glad you liked the ending.

Thanks for playing! I agree that the game can feel a bit repetitive. It was a game jam game and like all jams, we weren't able to add all of the other features before the deadline (more tricks, ability to plan out the tricks for the show, ability to customize the tricks, etc).   

Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it :)

Thanks for playing! We definitely weren't trying to go for a classic Castlevania feel and were shooting for a more modern and easier-to-control playstyle, but we've got a lot of feedback that we didn't quite pull that off. So if we actually keep working on this game that's where we'll put a lot of focus into that.  Thanks for the feedback!

If we decide to keep going with this game we will definitely tighten up the controls, especially the jumping and overall speed. Sounds like a lot of people got lost so we'll have to deal with that too. We considered a minimap for the jam but cut it due to time. We also plan on trying to add better landmarks to make make it easier to know roughly where you are. 

Thanks for playing!

This is a pretty polished experience and a fairly challenging metroidvania.   very impressive!

Story: I think I read in the comments/discord that you had a lot more story planned. What made it into the jam version seemed like a good start and while it wasn't a super deep story, rescue missions are always enjoyable.

Gameplay: I have mixed feelings on the controls. Neither KB+M nor the Controller options worked well for me. I am horrible at using WASD or arrow keys for platformers so I tried the controller. However I couldn't make left bumper for jump work for me very well either.  I resorted to using AntiMicro to map the KB+M controls to different buttons on my controller(mainly mapping jump to A and mapping mouse moving to the right stick, which was clunky but worked).  This allowed me to more naturally play. I think due to the way you need to aim the gun/sword you really should consider a button remapping system since I don't think a one-size-fits-most approach will work for this game.

That said, holy cow, the overall 'feel' is really great! especially the sword. You just feel so powerful and you can bounce around like crazy and it's really fun.

One issue I did have was that for some reason it took me 30+ minutes to finally find the final boss after getting all of the powerups. I don't know why I had such a tough time and finally had to resort to creating a paper map.  

I thought the miniboss (to get the wall jump) was really tough and it took me several tries to win, but it was super satisfying when I finally beat it, so I'm not sure if I'd recommend changing much or not since I think having some hard challenges is fun. I think it just felt a bit stressful that I was forced to keep fighting the boss over and over till I killed it since I couldn't go back.

Also, I watched my brothers play and it looked like a few times they got to the mini-boss room with no mini-boss and were stuck till they restarted the game, so not sure if that's a bug or not.

Graphics: I thought the graphics were really good. Everything fit together really well and all of the extra fx (background parallax, chains moving, etc) were great touches. 

Audio: this was my favorite part of the game. I think your sfx were perfect. Everything that needed sfx had it, and the quality was top-tier. 

Enjoyment: I enjoyed beating the game and loved how powerful I felt with the sword. beating up on the enemies was fun and it was fun trying to learn to use the sword and gun to access different parts of the level to overcome the normal jumping limitations.  For a one-month jam this game is seriously impressive.

Wow this is a really well put together game/experience!  I think everything looks/feels/sounds polished.

Story: fairly light but kudos on incorporating the theme :)  It's funny to imagine that Sal has to head into the jungle to fetch ingredients for each customer.

Gameplay: In general no major complaints here.  Treat most of the following as minor observations.

Sometimes it felt like there were no good options in some situations, making it a bit frustrating, but maybe those were situations that I got myself into :)  

It was sometimes frustrating that I couldn't place the pan down where I wanted to. Seemed like I could only do it from standstill, or the height of my jump. Sometimes I wanted to place it at half the jump height but it didn't work.

I really loved the knife/wall jump. That was pretty fun. However I kept wishing for a way to just 'drop' from the wall straight down. seemed like I always had to jump off which made a couple situations awkward. 

The hammer didn't feel as useful as the other two items.  It just seemed like the end-game way to reach the final ingredient. Sure, I could also get a few other tomatoes, but by that point I seemed pretty OP.   I like the fact that the game is pretty non-violent, but a part of me wanted to be able to attack the enemies. Maybe the hammer could scare them away instead of hurt them?

Graphics: Really great job here. Everything looked sharply defined and it all fit together. The multiple zones were distinct and looked great. Nothing stood out and everything looked great together. 

Audio: I think the audio was fantastic. Multiple music tracks along with all the right SFX really enhanced the playing experience. fantastic job!

Enjoyment: I think this is probably my favorite game in the jam :) everything about it is very well done and at the same level. I think it's a bit on the 'easy' side due to the infinite lives and generous auto-save, but for a jam game I've found that generally making the game a bit easier makes it a lot more enjoyable to maximize the number of people who are able to fully experience it. very well done!

For some reason the game kept crashing for me (as we discussed on Discord) but I was able to get it to work on a different PC.

I really enjoyed playing and winning this game. 

Story: well, there's not much story here. I can kinda infer what might be going on, but nothing in-game really had much narrative.

Gameplay: the controls were pretty solid. Jumping felt good. double jump was good. the bombs worked fine. I kinda wished I could have used the joysticks on the controller to move, but DPAD was fine.

The only enemy I noticed were the square fires(?) and I thought it would have been nicer to make that more obvious that it was dangerous. However, I'm assuming that because that was the only enemy that fighting/getting-hurt probably wasn't a priority for the jam.

I liked the level design and how there were multiple flavors/colors. By the end I was getting excited when I saw Purple and heard the purple-room-music.

I really liked how after getting double-jump and leaving that room, you immediately get a payoff to use double-jump in the next room to pick up some Food.

I was kind of hoping that the score would factor into the game more or maybe show a leaderboard or something. Also, when I beat the game I realized that there were other places I could have still gone to pick up more points, so could have been nice to have the option to keep playing to find all the food (or even tell you "you haven't found all the ingredients yet. Do you want to keep playing?"

Graphics:  pretty simple for the level and the bomb and the bombable walls, but the foods were quite detailed. might have been nice to see cracked walls for the bombable ones and maybe having some more exciting explosion gfx/sfx for the bombs going off.  I liked the player graphic.

Audio: I really liked all the music and how each color room had its own. I especially liked the sound of the purple level music since it made me excited to see what I was going to get. sfx were good too.

Enjoyment: although a short experience, it was fun to play through and win, so I did enjoy playing.

Overall this was a fun experience. 

Story: Definitely a unique story with some interesting backstory that I was hoping might be fleshed out a bit and left me wanting to know more. 

Gameplay: I think others already mentioned the acceleration was pretty high which made precision difficult. Also the player hurtbox range was pretty small so it was more challenging to fight quick battles forcing me to try to be more careful. Probably just needs a bit of tuning.

Having a lot of jumps was pretty fun. initially I tried timing the jumps to try to get as high as I could but eventually realized I'd get much higher if I just jumped as fast as I could. 

Minor issue with an enemy dying outside the walls so the pickup was inaccessible, but because enemies respawn that's not really a major issue.

I talked to you in discord about the keyboard/controller issue. It was probably an issue on my end, but it wasn't super intuitive that the global option to use Controller didn't seem to override the player's save-game if they started a game with keyboard controls (then saved).  

It would have been helpful if there was a better way to replenish life other than grinding droid/probes.

The ranged attack was really interesting but sometimes it felt like the range-aimer thingy wouldn't disappear fast enough so I could move again. this mainly impacted me on the boss where it seemed to stick on the range-aim mode long enough that I'd get lasered.  wondering if maybe moving could insta-cancel the range-mode.

For the blocks that took multiple hits to break I thought it might be nice to make them change color or texture to indicate how many hits they'd taken (and when they were one hit away, make them look like the one-hit blocks maybe).  kinda minor since in the jam version the blocks weren't a major factor.

Graphics:  I think the overall graphical appearance was pretty consistent. I really liked the background (and the parallax in the far background).  The droid/probes were simple but looked fine. I liked the elevator drone.  

Audio:  I really liked the music and I think it fit pretty well for exploration. the sfx for the player were pretty good and I liked how the boss had its own music.  I agree with comments that it might be good to have some sort of sfx feedback for damaging enemies. I didn't realize I was even damaging the miniboss till I finally noticed the enemy health bar and that it was depleting.  Same for the boss; might have been nice for some audio feedback since you could hit the boss offscreen and only knew you hit it if the health bar went down.

Enjoyment: I enjoyed playing and was glad that I beat it. I felt like I'd accomplished something which is a testament to the challenge feeling fair and interesting. I'd love to play an updated version if you keep working on it for SMVM

I think most of my comments were covered by other commenters, but I'll lay it all out here anyway.  Full Disclosure, I wasn't able to get very far.

Overall I think there's a lot of fun stuff here and I'd love to play an updated version if you decide to keep working on it and submitting to a future SMVM.

Story: I liked the overall vibe here but I think would have appreciated a bit more "show" rather then "tell". the intro cutscene was pretty cool but I think it over-explained some things and could have been reduced to about 25% of the current length. then you could sprinkle in more of the color-commentary later on.  I also would have appreciated the game only triggering a cutscene a single time per 'life' so I didn't have to hear about the red fog power so many times :)  

Overall there's a lot of Lore here and it really makes the world feel unique and somewhat mysterious.

Gameplay:  The controls felt a bit floaty and I felt myself wanting to 'feel' more in the combat. The sprites changed colors when getting hit or hitting monsters, but for some reason this wasn't enough for me to really feel like I was engaged in the fight.  I think SFX would help and maybe some sort of 'force' when sprites are hit to push them back or stop momentum.   

I think adding some screen transitions would be helpful.  Same for music transitions. maybe fade the old track out as you fade the new track in. 

I had a pretty inconsistent experience with jumping. Sometimes I could jump really high and sometimes I could barely get half as much airtime. I thought maybe it was momentum based, but that didn't seem to be it. Also, I think adding some sort of 'coyote' time when walking off ledges would be very helpful. The edges of the ledges are often lush grass, which sometimes makes it difficult to know where the true end is so coyote time (allowing the player to not start falling immediately after walking off a ledge) could be helpful to provide a bit more forgiveness for some of the jumps). 

Had one situation where I left the game for about 5 minutes then came back and died then when it respawned, the game was entirely black.  I managed to get it back by (I think) trying to walk out of one level into the next then back).   There was another situation where pressing the dash button always respawned me back to level 1 (with the vertical column of light scene playing like I was respawning again).  I was unable to reproduce both of these issues.

In the High Boots level, I couldn't read the sign in the bottom left since it was behind a parallaxing tree. 

Minor gripe that when I would jump on the roof in the starting locations and leave the screen, I would spawn in the new screen at ground level, not on the roof (from a gamedev perspective I get why this is happening but as a player I wanted to still be on the roof :)).  

The intro cutscene said that I was brought back but part of the contract was to give all of the Souls to the demon who brought me back.  Maybe I never made it far enough but I wasn't able to figure out if Souls were something that was actually part of the gameplay? or if that was just flavor text.

After finding the High Jump boots, I was not able to figure out how to exit that level.  I kept trying to make the jump to the far right to get out of the level but it didn't seem like the boots were making my jump higher and I wasn't able to leave on the left.  There was another jump in the top middle that I tried to get to but it also didn't work.  I'm hoping to try to play again sometime to try this out some more but I'm open to tips (either here  or you can DM me on discord).

I agree that the insta-death is pretty tough, but I think with maybe some intermediate checkpoints or not always playing the voiceovers every time could help that feel less frustrating. 

Graphics:  really solid! great style! I love how this game has a very distinct feel to it that I don't think I've seen very often.  The player art is great and I really like the parallaxing effects.  

Minor gripes that some of the button text doesn't quite work when everything else is so stylized, but I'm assuming that's probably due to the one month limit. Hopefully something could be addressed if you decide to keep updating the game. 

Audio:  I loved how there were multiple music tracks for the various areas and they all felt distinct yet connected.  See my comment above on maybe considering some better music transitions between levels.    

You really need some SFX though (which I think has been discussed below).  When I first killed a skelly I didn't really realize the stuff it spit out were actually pickups and not just random graphic bits that it dropped. I suspected they were pickups and when I finally stared at my HP/Stamina meters while picking them up and seeing them change, it confirmed it, but I think it would have been more satisfying to hear some sort of audio cue when picking them up.   Similarly with the combat, having some sort of 'hit the enemy' sfx and 'enemy dead' sfx would have helped the combat feel.  

I did like the player sfx (walking, jumping, dash, fight) so I think you are on the right track there.

Enjoyment:

I had fun playing but due to dying a bunch and the handful of glitches and having to sit through the cutscenes (after restarting the exe, or in the red fog level), I had a hard time grinding through the learning curve to make it very far.  However that said, I really really want to know more about the story and this player. What is the ulterior motive of the demon who brought the player back to life? what other sorts of moves will the player learn? etc.  So I hope you keep working on this and I'll keep an eye on your studio and this game in case you make an update for a future SMVM.