itch.io

Thanks for playing. Yeah there's not a lot going on so far, and there's still a lot of boring netcode and engine stuff that I need to do before I add anything interesting, but I'm glad that the multiplayer seems to be working fine at least.
I've always been a gotad fan but I've never left any proper feedback, I will fix this now.

I've played your game in older DDs and I've always been a big fan, and especially with the new art it's pretty great. But I don't think I've ever given feedback except live during the streams, so I played it again and here's a nitpicky list of the things that I think could be improved.

- I don't like how the page turns fullscreen by itself Browser fullscreen is so janky, it makes the game flicker and readjust. Also, if I exit fullscreen and reenter it with f11, it goes into a "wrong" fullscreen mode with white bars around the game window. Both in this wrong fullscreen mode and when not using fullscreen at all, the game is not scaled correctly, which makes some of the text pretty hard to read.
Also, the browser caps the game at a low fps, I think, I'm pretty sure it would feel much better as a native game.
Because of all of this I think it would be a better impression overall if you treated the web version as just a demo, and had a big direct link to the native version of all times. It's just not worth it dealing with all of Chrome's crap in my opinion.

- I think the pixel rendering is off somehow, it feels that they jitter a bit too much when they move. Here's a video of me slowly scrolling past a sprite: https://files.catbox.moe/59r7fx.mp4
The full-resolution sprites like the trees don't have this, and if the pixel sprites were imported into the game already upscaled they should behave the same way as the trees.

- the ground tiles are nice for readability, but they are a bit bland, now that you have an artist maybe he could figure out some nicer backgrounds that are still readable.

- as a Notesman main, I wish that Mana Jam costed zero mana, so I don't get stuck at zero mana unable to use it to regenerate. I know this is a skill issue, but I want to play this game with my brain off.

- I think the item system could become more interesting with just a few changes. If I could drop items by dragging them on the ground, I could make more interesting choices about what I'm building rather than spamming E and hoping it's an upgrade compared to the one that gets switched at random. Also it could be fun if picking up an item that's identical to one you already have would merge them into a more powerful one.
Lootgoblining is the heart and soul of rotmg after all.

Overall it's a great game and I have great memories of playing it multiplayer in the old demoday streams. Hopefully we can get another match going soon.

Here's a video

https://files.catbox.moe/r8dfm3.mp4

I think I ran into a bug after these guys used their respawning pink orb thing. Now they're stuck in my side of the map, they're blocking the path for Mosca, and I can't target them.
I'm going to leave the game open in this state, if there's anything I can do to help debugging tell me and I'll do it.

I tried it a third time and this time I didn't run into the bug, and I was able to complete the game. The only thing I think I was doing differently is spamming spacebar a lot of times.
I don't have any complaints about the part after that, it was nice.

I had a lot of fun, but I've never played a game like this before, so it took me a bit to understand what the game wanted to do to get points. Even at the end I couldn't get past 90k. I couldn't really get the harder tricks consistently, for example spamming z three times didn't work most of the time. If it's not just me and there's actually a timing/rhythm to it, it'd be nice to have something visual to help learn it.

I got stuck on rails a couple of times and clipped through the floor once, but I guess that sort of thing is bound to happen some times in a game like this.

The game froze when I was facing the elevator ladder, after spamming space a bit because I didn't understand how to climb it. I could still access the menu but I couldn't move. I had to quit the game and restart but the same thing happened the second time.

I thought the idea was nice, I like the undertale-like fights and the atmosphere would probably be cool with some background music and sounds. But it was also a bit buggy. Here's some extra things I found

- after the girl gets submerged in the water, I can still access her old dialogue by pressing space in the same spot

- clicking the bomb really fast and clearing the fight while a dodge sequence was coming up bugged the game, and I had game over text remaining stuck for the next battle

- it's a bit unimmersive that the fights for the two ghosts come in the same order regardless of which ghost you visit first. Kinda ruins the illusion that the fights are a "real" thing that exists in the game world and makes it feel more like a random minigame that pops up.

- it feels like a bit of a slog to go through because of things like these: slow movement, no sprint button, space doesn't skip the typewriter animation, space doesn't autoselect the UI buttons, etc

Thanks!! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Honestly I'm just happy that you were able to connect and play. Thanks for tying it out.

Very nice game and atmosphere, I enjoyed it a lot. I think I found a bug: going backwards from Three Tracks to Stay in Line locks the door so I have to complete Stay in Line again. I guess this might be intentional so you can't softlock yourself in Three Tracks by clearing all ice but staying on the right side, but it's still weird.

Great game, I really enjoyed it, I played through the mario world 3-4 times but I kept getting stuck behind the boss and gave up. But I have a lot of nitpicks:

- Spamming right click doesn't go into rewind mode every time, looks like there's a cooldown between when I exit it and I can enter it again. Not sure if this is intentional but it doesn't feel great. Sometimes this got in the way when I died, rewinded until I was alive, immediately died again and tried to rewind again.

- I feel like I'm spending more time than I should watching my guts being rewinded into place. When I'm dead I just want to go back to before I died, so I guess maybe rewinding could be faster after death.

- The jump doesn't feel too good to me, can't put my finger on it but it feels a bit delayed and the arc feels weird. The sliding and acceleration on the movement is also a bit much, it's not as annoying as it would be in a regular platformer since you can rewind all mistakes, and I got used to it in the end, but it still doesn't feel great.

- The idle animation is a bit too fast probably.

- Camera is jittery when sitting on top of a moving platform like the swing near the end of the 1st area.

- Having a big sign that says "save spot over here" in big letters seems to defeat the purpose of diegetic UI a bit.

I don't want to be the guy that says "the unfinished parts are unfinished", but it looks pretty interesting so far. I don't know what you want to do with building/digging eventually, but one thing that could make it more usable is to make it affect four vertices at a time so that you build and dig square blocks instead of narrow 1-vertex spikes and holes. 

The crafting menu is in the pause menu (Esc) but it doesn't really do anything yet. You can just pick between 3 potions with different animations for the explosion. Thanks for playing.

>Was there anything else that made it feel janky besides wanting y inverted or going straight up? Did you use controller, mouse, or keyboard to control?

I started with mouse and I couldn't figure it out at all, then I switched to controller after. The way sharp turns worked was a bit confusing at first but not necessarily bad

Got to wave 6. Flying controls are a bit janky but it was fun to figure them out. My first instinct was to look for an "invert y"option, but in the end I got used to it anyway. Going straight up gets pretty weird, might be related to euler angles instead of quaternions or something (I had this stuff figured out for my filesize jam game but now I forgot).

I know that the endless waves are temporary, but in my opinion even just for a demo you should make so it's not so open ended. You could just set a target number of waves, and when the player gets there show the vampire girl and print "thanks for playing". You can even give an option to continue anyway after that, it's just a way to give an objective and to make the player feel he got something out of his time.

I thought the orbs worked well enough for ui, no complaints there.

I think mipmaps on textures and/or antialiasing would make it look better, but I don't actually know anything about 3D.

Tried out the linux build: the game is not executable, I had to chmod +x it myself. To be fair this happens with a lot of linux programs. Also the windows/super key didn't work except when paused, which was weird. Seems to work well otherwise.

I think there was some kind of jitter on enemies when moving fast close to them, might have to do with me using a 165 hz screen and possibly their movement going at 60 hz or something.

I wish there was some bigger effect when I hit enemies, the bloody spot is pretty small and hard to see from a distance.

Level design looked good,

I played this way more than I should have, but I finished it eventually. Loved every moment of it, great game

Hello, it's me again, I ran into a bug that froze the game right after finishing a move. I think it's the first bug I've seen, but it did kill my run, so it's probably worth reporting.

Thanks for playing, I stopped checking itch after the demo day hype died down so I missed this comment, but I really appreciate it.

Yes the alchemy only affects the visuals of the attack for now. The plan is to make it so you can brew potions with both different looks and different effects, and hopefully with some more interesting customization than just picking between a few static animations. I'll get on this someday, but for next demo day I'll probably just focus on making some new enemies with different attacks so that the dodging becomes more interesting and you actually have to jump.

I also thought that the bats are too easy to defeat right now, but many people were saying that the game was too hard, so I didn't dare changing them for now, lol.

Also glad you liked the toad.

Thanks a lot for playing, I stopped checking itch after the demo day hype died down so I missed this comment but I really appreciate it.

Yes the plan is to make the alchemy system affect both the visuals and the effect of the potions, and I've started experimenting with that, but I think I'll wait on that for a bit right now and work a bit on the level design and on some new enemies.

I'm not sure but I think the farthest I got was 1 or 2 zones past the graveyard one.

By the way, I played another game today and I think I ran into a bug: when the mothman spawns the moths I'm frozen in place and I can't move, attack or use items, and esc for the options doesn't work. I can still select things and move the camera though. I tried alt+f4 and reloading the save but the exact same thing happens when I run into him again.

I was enjoying it but pressing esc once took me back to the main menu, and I had to start over to the first level after that.

Really fun game. I was a bit surprised at first because I was expecting an open world style game, but I really enjoyed it anyway.

I expected the camera rotation to work the opposite way (left = clockwise). I think it'd make sense to have an option for inverting in the settings, although personally I kept it fixed at 45 degrees for basically all of the time. I would have liked it if it remembered that position when I started a new game though. Also autoequipping starting weapons at start sounds like it'd make sense.

Sometimes there's some green-blue non walkable tiles that I assume are water, but it's kind of hard to tell, they probably need an animation or something.

I wanted to complain that there was no visual distinction between night and day, but it looks like the "lighting" option fixes that. I think it adds a fair bit to the atmosphere.

For the rest no complaints, it was very fun with a lot of content and stuff to do.

Thanks for playing! I had a dash at some point, I'll think about adding it again when I start making some better enemies and levels

I thought it was pretty normal to use a-d for movement with the fingers and space for jumping with the thumb. But then again it doesn't cost me anything to add W as another option, so I did it, there's probably a lot of people who expect it to work that way already if I tell them "wasd: move".

You're right that the level design is very lazy at the moment, I mostly just copy pasted the same 2 enemies and 1 platform around to make it look a bit more like a game but I haven't put any real time into it yet. Once I'm done with the mechanics and when I have a few more enemies I'll try to do a better job with it. Thanks for playing and for the feedback.

I already said most of this in the thread when you posted it, but I'll elaborate a bit more because it feels rude to not comment back, lol. It's a really cute little game, the sprites you fit in are nice and do a great job of making it feel like a real game rather than a programming exercise. I didn't notice the agdg logo on the textbox corner until now, it's a nice touch.

As I said the fact that you move slower when there's many rats because you have to wait for their moves doesn't feel good and made me think that the game was lagging at first. it probably would have been fine in a game where you have to plan your moves one by one more carefully, but when you're just pressing left 10 times in a row to walk up to the rats you really feel the delay.

I liked that by planning your moves a bit you could get the rats to walk straight into you so that you'd get the first hit, while if you walked into them the wrong way they'd get an extra hit on you. It could be fun to extend this sort of mechanic, for example adding some mouse traps or other hazards that you could get the rats to walk into by tricking the AI.

I think it'd be nice to have an end, just something simple like printing "you found the golden cheese, you won" on floor 25 or something, so that you don't have to keep going until you die and you can walk away happy. Or at least write on the game page that there's no end, so you don't keep going just in case there is.

Thank you very much for playing and for the comment. Yeah there were really a lot of things that I left unfinished and that could have added a lot to the game, but when the jam started I was feeling like I spent a lot more time on this than I should have and I wanted to go back to my other project. I might return to it someday though, especially for improving graphics and shaders because that's always fun.

In my mind the pink fog was supposed to be an ocean, since I was doing everything by raytracing I thought it'd be fun to try out some stuff like wavy reflections, refractions and a underwater effect when going inside it. But all those things ended up being pretty time consuming to write and to debug, especially with the very basic openGL setup I was using because of the size limit, so I couldn't get any of that done in time. Making it a fog might have been easier to do now that you mention it though.

I agree that the rings suck in general, I thought they'd work okay as an enemy projectiles but as soon as I put them in I realized that dodging them with the ship was going to be pretty unintuitive and annoying with the 3rd person plane camera, so I just gave up on them and left them the way they were until the end, lol. I probably need to play some plane/spaceship games like Underspace to figure out how to make dodging fun from this perspective.

Actually pretty good for the effort. Sneed

This game was very hard for me. For someone who knew absolutely nothing about match-3 in general I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to get more than I match at a time. I figured it out by watching the vid you posted in another comment, if I was my own it might have taken me a while. The "strategy" I've figured out so far is that to move orbs I mostly spin my selected orb around a square or rectangle so that the orbs I wanna move shift around the perimeter around like on a conveyor belt until they move over. I also realized that by using diagonal swaps you can do things a lot faster than that, but (playing with a mouse) it wasn't easy to get diagonal swaps consistently, and it made things more difficult to visualize in advance, so I didn't do it much, except in "tangled" mode against the lizard.

Tangled mode was actually even harder for me, even if I had time to think and plan ahead, which makes me think I'm probably still missing some basic strategy.

Anyway using this information in normal timed mode I managed to beat 3 stages for 3 or 4 times but never managed to beat 4.

Most of the time, I wouldn't pay too much attention to which orbs I was popping because popping a decent number was already kind of a challenge so I had to go for the low hanging fruits anyway.

From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner. But I guess this doesn't matter to someone skilled enough to beat all the stages.

In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.

Overall the difficulty curve was absolutely brutal, I had to learn how basic match-3 works, how to move orbs around the map efficiently, all while being on the timer, and how the turn-based battle system worked at the same time. Infinite mode (and tangled mode) helped me a lot to figure out the basics, but the skills weren't exactly 100% transferable as timed mode kinda required me to come up with new strats to actually get things done in time. Also in general nobody expects to find the tutorial as a special seed. If you want this game to be accessible to normies you'll need to have a way clearer and slower tutorial mode that goes through all these things slowly and one by one, and to have it clearly labeled as a tutorial within the game.

Another thing, I won't pretend I know anything about this, but does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine? From what I knew about match-3 in most cases it's way more casual and you do just a couple swaps then just let it fall.

I will say though, art and visual style, music, UI design, and everything else is amazing. As I said a million times before I had no clue about match-3 games and no real interest in figuring them out, if this game managed to keep me interested it's because of that too.

I'm sorry, this is a very long post and I think I've repeated a lot of stuff in more than one place, but I hope it's helpful somehow. Good luck with the game, I hope to see it again next time.

I played the game on linux with default wine and I didn't have any issues, except that my screen automatically went dim every 5 minutes as if I was AFK even though I was playing the game.

Someone said already this but it was annoying for me as well that I couldn't use the joystick for the menus.

When fighting the "tough enemy" he fell into the water and he was having a really hard time getting out of it. I murdered him as he was slowly trying to swim back. I felt pretty bad afterwards.

As for the combat mechanics, I don't know how much of it is placeholder, but here's some feedback anyway:

- The input buffering for attacks seems way too high. I don't think that double-pressing attack should result in a 2 hit combo. Especially with such slow swings the second press should be only registered if it's reasonably close to the end of the first swing. Maybe I'm just too much of a casual to understand this though.

- I don't like the running, I don't think it should be so much faster than walking. The whole dash->run->drop system as it is feels a bit clunky and I don't think it's much of an improvement over just spamming dodgerolls.

- The poison wizard guy needs some clearer windups, otherwise it's hard to guess what he's doing and it's annoying to have him shoot at you point blank when you try walking in.

It's pretty promising all things considered. I can see the combat being very fun with some more polish.

Good game. I ran it on linux with wine and had no issues at all.

At the beginning it wasn't too easy for me to guess what my abilities did exactly. For example when I saw an enemy launch the spiked balls onto me I thought I'd be able to do the same and proceeded to ram straight into them. Also when I held Z for the first time and went into rainbow mode I thought that'd make me invulnerable for a short time (probably because it reminded me of an item in Binding of Isaac that had that effect) and also proceeded to walk into some spiked balls. It's not a big deal because I didn't die either time but it'd probably take just a couple more words on the floor make it easier, if you want to.

There could probably be some kind of "charging up" effect or animation when holding Z but before rainbow mode starts. Also it could be nice to have a different sound effect for taking damage and slamming into the walls.

You're probably aware of this already but a pause menu would be nice to have.

The outer part of the wall tile in the second world is too similar to the grass time to really look like a wall to me. It looks off especially for narrow walls like these ones

At some point in the second level something weird happened where my character sprite's scale got messed up and the pixels became rectangular:

I'd call them rixels but I think that's what people call rotated pixels already. I don't really know what caused it unfortunately, maybe slamming into the walls too much and/or going into the swamps. Anyway it fixed itself a couple rooms after.

Thanks for reading my essay, hope it's helpful.

Great feedback, thank you! I've never done anything with sound yet, but I'll try to figure it out before next time.

You can get on platforms by double jumping, I thought it'd be good to have it that way so that you always use your first jump to dodge projectiles without accidentally ending up in other platforms. That doesn't really come up in the demo though because there's only one type of projectile and it mostly moves vertically.

Yeah the visuals need a bit of an overhaul. I've always been bad at picking colors and I've found it pretty hard to make the important parts stand out while keeping everything visually coherent.

Don't worry you didn't miss much, just a couple more rooms with a bunch more skeletons. Thanks for playing!

Yeah unless itch didn't show them until later or something they were always there. Still, you made me realize that I didn't even mention spacebar for jumping and that you can double jump, so it was for the best.

Yes, the original idea for the game was to have something similar to the spell crafting system in Noita but with alchemy instead, where you create different kinds of exploding potions by mixing stuff together in a cauldron. To be honest I got kind of discouraged with this game because even after spending a bit of time on the graphics I still don't like how it looks too much, but if I continue working on it that's what I'll add.

Controls are written on the itch page, but not anywhere within the game. I admit that was a bit lazy. Thanks for playing!

I liked it a lot, the gameplay was nice and fast-paced, and dashing around was very fun. Observations:

- The fact that you can't disengage enemies is a bit unintuitive in my opinion. It was pretty easy to get used to in the end, but it still felt like an artificial restriction. I think it might have been fine if you were allowed to fly out of it but you had to be inside to shoot. Also you can probably get a similar result if you make enemies follow you more closely once they've engaged you.

- Some enemies were spawning pretty far from me and I had to run to them a lot

- The blue laser hit me about every time when it shot directly at me instead of rotating. Maybe I'm just bad though