itch.io

Aha, I just tested the game again with a gamepad and found out that there was no deadzone for the stick. So the character can walk… very… slowly… and the animation speed matches that too! Which is pretty odd since MetSys (playing the sample) originally had stick amplitude speed yes, but also stick deadzone, but not dynamic animation speed. So it means you have spent some time on extra code to support gamepad stick but also lost the deadzone in the process… ?

This was also our first metroidvania (but not first platformer) and I think it would have been feasible with MetSys. But I learned a lot coding the Metroidvania features (following a tutorial for level transitions and save/load, but doing my own stuff for unlocked abilities), so I’m still not sure if we should have just gone with a framework and focus on making a really good game for the jam, or spend time learning at the expense of polish. Like we have fading/swipe transitions between rooms but players don’t seem to care (since nobody complains about instant transitions, not just in MetSys but also in most jam entries), but one player did complain about fading. But at the same time it’s definitely useful to have in a bigger game.

Oh, I didn’t know that! I see good browser compatibility (except some on mobile).

itch’s custom CSS must be older so I suspect that it’s using its own preprocessor?

This is a reboot of How to check my full post or comments history? (https://itch.io/t/5148568/how-to-check-my-full-post-or-comments-history) which has been archived

Currently I only see my posts until 13 days ago (I suspect the limit is 2 weeks), and there is no pagination system.

If the feature to see older community posts / comments not implemented, I suggested adding a pagination system as well as a search by content text / game title / time range system to find older posts more easily (if you implement comment text search, make sure to search “All words” by default to avoid the “Exact phrase” issue currently in forum search: https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/1591)

P.S.: The old comment was auto-archived despite having no answer and being less than 1 year old. While I understand the practice in entertainment context, in dev context (like Questions & Support and Ideas & Feedback sub-forum), it is common to keep tickets and threads opened until solved, to avoid thread reboots like this one. You may always manually archive a thread once it is solved and you notice a wave of messages that bring no new information afterwards, notifying people for nothing.

I went to the Projects to rate & review page: https://itch.io/library/things-to-rate

and it shows many games that I’ve never played nor downloaded.

Inspecting the pages in question, the common point is that they all have an embedded web version. I suspect that itch.io counts landing on a web game as potentially playing it, even if it doesn’t have “Automatically start on page load” enabled.

However, that means many games I’ve never tried are displayed and it’s hard to find the games I’ve actually played among them. I couldn’t make good statistics about this because for some reason there is no page navigation so I can’t get past 60 most recent entries (I can only Sort by Oldest to see the oldest 60 entries, but cannot display anything in the middle!)

Would it be possible for itch (web) to actually detect a click on Run game and only count those as played?

Bonus suggestions:

a. a filter to only show apps Downloaded at least once (via itch web) or Installed at least once (via itch app). That would require more tracking, and connecting back from itch app activity to itch account (but it would make sense to share playtime across devices as on Steam, so you don’t lose your data when changing computer anyway), so possibly some changes in Privacy Policy

Downloaded is quite a loose thing, you could downloaded for later and never play the game, but there’s no way to track what user does after downloading when using itch web anyway. In fact, even itch app Installation does not guarantee playing, so to me the best would be:

b. a filter to only show games/apps played/used for more than a certain time threshold. This is to exclude web games that I clicked on just to peek at what it looked like, or that were automatically started, but I never really used them (less than 1 minute, but threshold could be tuned by user). However I don’t know if play time is tracked on web, I only saw playtime mentioned in the itch app (but that’s a good start)

That’s quite a mix of bugs and suggestions. I can open separate GitHub issues for each if you want, but I wanted a centralized discussion first since they are all related to the same page.

I finished the game! And then again at 100%!

Only thing I haven’t tried is a different reply at the Celestial Guardian’s question. I should probably restart the game once to see the initial lore text anyway, because I saw it a while ago and forgot about it, and apparently it’s important to understand the Dream Guardian’s story. Maybe it would be better to split lore more across the story and remind player of previous events when meeting Celestial Guardian so we remember what we fight for (although I understand that the jam game was meant to be finished in one session).

Speaking of which, while the game looked super long and collecting pearls looked daunting, once I unlocked fast swimming everything went pretty fast. It feels like skills were meant to be unlocked more gradually since have double jump + wall jump + flight as the end was too much. Flight didn’t have an animation ready so it looked more like a “debug” skill to make sure player can explore the full level and finish the game at 100% (it could have been unlocked after defeating the last boss, as a cool “now you can become Super Sonic anywhere” bonus). Maybe it was meant to be a true skill like gliding (with some slow descent like Knuckles). For a proto animation, I think the Swimming left/right animation would have been a better placeholder (although probably even funnier to see her swim in the air). Anyway, it did help me to get all the pearls including those tricky ones in the tidal area.

Very impressive dialogue boxes, I didn’t remember them from my first run (maybe they were added in a later update, or I was confusing them with the first lore text which was very barebone unlike dialogues). And would probably require a lot of work on localization (but might as well not care too much about it for the jam).

Now for some issues I’ve encountered:

Dialogues

• Leilana voice actress is much more clumsy that the artwork suggests (probably emotional face/body pose variants would help, as usual in Visual Novel, but obviously needs more budget)
• Dragon Guardian: “Magic, remember?” line voice is incorrectly played on “We’ve become intertwined. You wear now the armor of the Pearl.”
• when Celestial Guardian asks question: “my question If” has no punctuation but uppercase (not sure about exact text)
• On Celestial Guardian’s line “She’s right, It was an accident” there is no voice (and no need for uppercase I)

Level

• Trap triggers only activate when character goes through a certain area, so it looks inconsistent if player goes through the same rooms in slightly different ways

Combat

• condition to “reload” melee attacks is unclear: is there some cooldown? Sometimes I deal 1, sometimes 3 hit combo. There is no gauge nor visual/audio feedback to tell.
• We unlock move skills (3 at once at the end: double jump, wall jump and horizontal flight) but no new attack skills, so at the end, we feel super powerful having god-like power… but at the same very weak in battle (maybe the reason why last boss was made very simple, or maybe it was just a time issue)

App / Input

• I need to press D-pad or another button to have gamepad recognized, instead of just left stick. I myself did exactly the same in my game following the recommendation of the Metroidvania Forge Tutorial “not to accidentally recognize a gamepad plugged on the computer that had stick drift”. As it turned out, it was a pretty edge case, whereas wanting to use gamepad left stick to move immediately after switching window was common (when testing game in Godot or after writing a feedback like this one) so I decided to detect left stick anyway (still with a deadzone, as usual).

Yes, F11 works for fullscreen!

Could you add it to the Controls so people less used to it know about it?

Since this game plays in a different window, there is no Fullscreen button directly in the bottom-right of the embedded window, so it’s important to know.

EDIT: I just noticed the very small bottom bar and bottom-right button to toggle fullscreen added by itch.

In fact, F11 was simply sending Firefox to pseudo fullscreen and the bottom bar remained, I had to click on the fullscreen button anyway - Just clicking on fullscreen button does everything at once, so that was the true thing to do.

Hey I saw you featured in video on the 2026 jam page (https://itch.io/jam/floodlight-gaming-investigative-journalism-game-jam) but I now see that the page needs a password. Are you revamping the page to prepare for a commercial release or something?

Oops. I played it a bit, thought I’d come back later to finish it, but I forgot to come back and rate it. Anyway since it was in the category of “pearl mermaid” style entries like our game I got a particular interest in it (it was the first I saw to implement the swimming mechanic that we dropped, although I found another one later)

From the little I played, I liked the fact that enemies are just animals living in their environment and just doing their things. You don’t feel like killing them all, only if they stand in your way, and you feel more inclined to preserve nature as much as possible.

Unfortunately I got lost in a loop in the bottom-right corner of the map and couldn’t proceed. The tile-precision minimap looks great though, it should help me going on when I resume the game later. Now that rating phase is over, I’ll wait a bit for all teams to upload whatever patches they prepared for their game.

Oh, so there was another way to trick the first boss… I stood on a platform and it just stopped moving.

Aha, I didn’t even think about the optional trap challenge on the savepoint. In fact, it’s when I saw two entries about magical girls in jail that I thought the main character would be trapped by a savepoint and then end up in jail!

The inconsistent pixel art was also kind of put off.

Aha, I thought the same for the giant cat that looked like a scaled small sprite.

Looks like the team was aware of it considering the “that’s a normal cat upscaled with magic” joke. I suppose that’s a way to justify budget tricks…

Oh, I didn’t notice you had already reported the flicker bug!

Still at the beginning, but impressive and polished!

Most of all it shows how arcade controls and levels can be made and since you also have the first classic grounded and flying enemies I learn a lot about how we could make it working in our game:

• basic attack is between melee and range, as a good mid-range (and enemies are tall enough to take it). Also grounded melee animation somewhat works even if legs are standing on nothing, since character is moving and legs not detailed we don’t really pay attention to it. Air attack still makes sense with the chain and allows air control during attack. In the final boss in particular it’s very useful to play like Smash, doing air attacks only for full character control… (but the chain? that’s why she looks like a villain. Well it fits the prisoner theme with black & white…)
• grounded enemy is tall, fast enough to be annoying and not stunnable so it’s quite stressful when it approaches, but managing distance well you can kill it with repeated chain attacks. It also has a nice ceiling variant to trap player (we originally designed a separate hedgehog enemy and snail enemy that sticks to ceiling but I never thought about reusing the same sprite to save budget, clever!)
• flying enemy has challenging but logical pattern where it prepares for a bird of prey dive, which makes sense and can be learned. Our game and several others had issues with the “annoying flying enemy that keeps coming at you, not giving a break” (mostly because it’s easier to code), but I see how spending a little more time on enemy movement pattern can make a big difference! However the fact that it flies far below ground level makes it hard to punish it immediately by hitting it back.

Issues encountered:

• some scenes load with noticeable lag (and no fading or anything to hide it)
• Bobby tea / save point still plays attack animation when interacted with
• Some platforms look solid but are not

• Web build: when I came back to game after typing this, screen was black? Maybe just Firefox issue since I also noticed the animated GIF on the left side blinking

I’ll keep playing on Windows build to avoid this issue and finish my rating.

EDIT: It looks like the Windows build is DEBUG though, is it intended to unlock some cheat keys or something? Fortunately it’s Godot so that’s still just 70 MB. I also noticed it didn’t have fullscreen, so I preferred continuing on web where I had my save.

Feedback continued:

• Cutscene: Ebony doesn’t speak at all in the first cutscene, so it’s weird when villain says “3 vs 1”. Ebony and Ivory should probably ping pong some quotes

• Cutscene: Ebony face sprite is hard to see on dark background

• Cutscene: No button/command to skip full cutscene

• Walk: get stuck in low slope

You can also exploit this to trap the Hedgehog and kill it at your pace…

• Jump off one-way platform: great, although it’s easy to guess for veteran players, could be explained how to do it for beginners

• Pearl skill: funny nod to Metroid, I like the “undignified” gag. I also found it very odd when I discovered it in Smash for the first time. “How can she become so compact?!”. Smooth controls (can press down then left/right, or reversely, it chains well, you can even chain with down-jump to jump off one-way platform)

• Projectile skill: clever to bind it to a companion, and to require chain attacks to recover it to force alternating moves during boss and also vs minions. I like how projectiles really stuns the opponent, even a boss, making it much stronger than the usual projectile. (thinking about it, in Shadow Generations projectiles only stun enemies, it’s their role)

• Dash skill: classic, but nice detail touches (purple aura in air, blue on ground)

• Boss 1: nice blue hit and SFX feedback that hitting the cat with chain without projectile defense break is not very effective (I thought at first it would do 0 damage but it does a little - I wonder if I could beat it without Ebony at all, may try it again in speedrun mode, although I want to see if there is a funny dialogue after that)

Bug: waits a lot of time with the charge attack with red indicator toward right. Was very fast for left charge though

A dead spot where I can lock the boss to kill it safely, it won’t attack

… and thanks to that, I could beat the cat without Ebony’s help. OK I got the boots. Time to leave this place now.

Well, I guess the developers didn’t think about this possibility and just counted on the dark wall to stop me after all.

OK, I take it back. Now that’s a nice nod to achievers who try to do things their own way!

(note: the cage respawns after that, but it does nothing anymore when destroyed)

• Last boss: the huge ground kick smoke effect disappears when player character is hurt. Such a big AoE should stay on screen, not disappear like a projectile. Pretty hard to avoid the low frog jump, low enough that you can’t dash below, high enough that you can’t easily jump over it, and she seems to repeat them until she gets you. I think with right timing you can jump-dash over her, but not so easy. As she says: “Is it possible to jump too much?”

Mini-map: I knew I recognized this style somewhere! Metsys, uh? We tried it during the jam but we were already mid-production and using LDtk so we didn’t use it, but it looked interesting. Had to clear the default unknown space texture to avoid having ugly logos everywhere on the mini-map though, and I see you did the same.

And indeed, Metsys has immediate transitions so you can’t hide the loading times, but Godot should be fast anyway, I wonder what takes so much time when you enter the room with the dark wall broken by projectiles. Particles FX loading?

• BGM (area 1): too loud compared to other sounds. No clean loop.

• Level: the first (or second depending on how you progress) top-left bubble tea area with grass clearly shows edge tiles on the left. The tilemap should be extended a bit so it doesn’t show. On the right maybe too, although it connects to another tileset so it’s technically correct that it shows edge I suppose

• No checkpoint before last boss, I had to cross the whole forest again. It also means no healing before boss if you got hurt by some minions on the way, making things harder.

• Speedrun mode: timer appears correctly, but when Speedrun mode is enabled, play, then disabled and retart game, the timer will appear at 00 until you actually start the game when it will disappear.

Arg! I can’t find my comment at all, it seems I never posted it, and I can’t find a draft either… and it looks like I never rated the game although I finished it a few days ago…

Anyway, other comments probably say the same thing I wanted to say.

Overall very short, polished experience, more like a teasing, but since it’s in the same category as our game, I feel like we should have done that for our game instead of making too many rooms - but that’s the issue with a jam about metroidvania by nature.

Fighting in water was a bit hard, I had to stop to send projectiles and that would mean getting hit by the boss’s projectiles. I wish we had adapted attacks to cover wide ranges. However I found that using Melee attack while boss was moving and crossing arena center was an effective move (assuming melee damage is indeed bigger than projectile).

Idle animation is bit too “excited”, the chest and even the eyes are like bumping up and down frenetically… It’s unfortunately a common issue with pixel art idle animations where you feel like you have to show some change and the minimum unit is 1 pixel, but I think there are enough references today to see how it can be done more quietly…

I have not much time left before rating end so I’ll just focus on rating now.

I like the Summer Wars vibe, and how the new moderator explains the tastes analysis helps them understand you better than you are.

It was funny to see “meta spikes” coming during final boss fight.

However I was confused that I fought the final boss after only one upgrade. On my second run I managed to unlock Dash and Butterfly (couldn’t use it at all) and found the first fashion character. On my way to the second fashion character I accidentally entered the new moderator’s trigger area and they challenged me on the spot like a Pokemon trainer. I tried to close the dialogue window but the close button was disabled this time. My only choice was to wait until duel prompt, then I could finally click on the close button.

It would be more natural to have a Refuse invitation button besides the Accept button because it looked like I had no choice but to accept the first time. Also some warning that it’s the game end after (with a smart in-lore message) that so players who want to complete 100% know they should Refuse and explore the world more first.

Temporary short platforms that self-destruct was a nice challenge to make you use double jump and air dash.

• game looks slow in general, not sure if performance issue due to web build. I see it uses Godot so not sure why though. Try Compatibility mode. And normally if you update physics with physics_process it should “catch up” frames anyway.
• character moves too slowly, hard to jump to the other side, I have to make a full jump from edge to edge
• chat text appears too slowly and you can’t press a button to quick display it. In particular the first one after uniting brother and sister takes a few minutes (fortunately on second run you can just close it). Probably no need to show the 3 dots for a while. You can imagine it’s a voice chat and players just answer naturally and some voice parsing transcribes the voices in real time. Well I do see smileys so it’s probably a text chat, but looking at Summer Wars, .HACK// and all it’s probably voice. Text is fine too as long as it appears fast, though.
• a lot of text in big bubbles even if there is only one line, so you scroll a lot. Dialogues could probably be shorter, a bit of smalltalk is OK for the mood but not too much
• the dialogue with the new moderator was also slow so I took that time to write this comment while it was proceeding in the background, with the intention to read full text once it’s over. Except it immediately proceeded to the Battle invite without asking me for input to continue, so I missed the end of the dialogue
• a lot of lag when closing tutorial/chat window too
• small platforms should be one-way (we have the same issue in our game, but those are really thin and really look like they were thought that way from the start)
• dodge battle: easy to find dead spots (I put my character between two vertical lines of bugs arriving and I’m typing this comment while it runs in the background - even for final boss, the spikes arrive on the same lines). That makes the shield and bomb upgrades less useful.
• dodge battle: hard to move with WASD and keep track of the 2 key for shield. So I started playing with arrow keys but Up/Down keys didn’t move character
• dodge battle: on my second run I went through the firewall to the left and this one was instantly cleared. I thought “cool, the game remembered I beat that firewall on my first run and saves me time not having to redo the challenge!” but no, the second firewall challenged me again. So was it a bug?
• healing station effect is unclear since I don’t see my character’s life in world exploration mode. In fact even during dodge game I got hit on purpose and couldn’t see the green bar change at all

Oh, very funny! Totally not what I would have thought to make with just Python. I suppose it’s also good to put your own take on the themes.

The fact that the guy speaks in Spanish all along but Aruba just answers in English as if nothing just made the whole scene so absurd! Reminds me of Executive Koala when he speaks in Japanese with the Korean guy.

I think other comments said most of my impressions (lack of exit button, voice volume imbalance, using magical girl powers for personal reasons although in the end it seems to benefit the companion too).

A little more feedback:

• being able to manually advance and only choose auto-advance as an option would be better for better who take some time to read (esp. as voice of one character is in Spanish). That probably comes along with all the other feedback on dialogue lines and voice sync, which would be fixed by using a dedicated engine/framework as winterbraid noticed. However…
• using a general engine could be worth it if you intend to insert an actual DDR game (probably easier to code in Unity than in Renpy?)
• magic is not too visible in magical girl transform, it seems to just increase her dexterity?

Aha, interesting take on construct where most games (including ours) had evil machines!

The Magical Girl + fighting corruption aspect is not visible in the game, though.

It looked simple with coffee at first but then with the recipe randomizer it turned into hardcore Overcooked. Many UX issues also make it difficult to do what you want. Other comments already sum up most of my thoughts but I’ll add a few things below:

• It was unclear I had to click on recipe name to see recipe (I thought recipe name was a label, not a button). If there’s only one recipe per day, just show it, no extra click.
• multi-step recipes like flan: it’s not clear that it’s multi-step due to the icons looking like each other, you don’t see the progression in the bowl content. And it’s pretty hardcore to have to mix, cook and put to the fridge and then serve your customer who is very impatient and obviously doesn’t know that making a flan from scratch takes a lot of time

• easy to confuse white plates and white bowls

• having to check customers’ requests is an extra challenge compared to Overcooked where it’s just displayed in the banner (because in that game you play in the cook area and don’t get in touch with the customers). However their short waiting time makes it too hardcore. Besides, if there’s only one recipe per day, waiting for their order doesn’t make sense: you just start cooking the same meal again and again anyway (as in Overcooked when you have only 1 or 2 meals for the mission). So it just makes you waste time running toward the chairs but you already know what they want.

• Character walks by default and the walk is very slow. You have to hold Shift to Run (which is OK when playing with arrow keys) but you know you’ll do this every time anyway, so better just Run by default (and hold Shift to walk if you really need precise placement as sometimes needed in Overcooked, except done by pushing stick a little on gamepad)

• cannot interact with ingredient holding bowl to put ingredient in bowl. Overcooked allowed some reverse interactions, and Overcooked 2 supported even more to make it super easy to mix things in any order, I think it’s a good reference in terms of flexible interactions

Good:

• fullscreen option

Bug:

• … but can’t close options menu, so couldn’t really play in fullscreen in the end (in another comment you said it will be fixed post-rating phase)

• missing glyphs in recipe

• in one day where I had to make a chocolate flan or something, I couldn’t even grab the bowl. It was locked. Maybe better to just unlock everything and let player do the things right? Or remove the bowls entirely in missions that don’t need it, but if it’s present then it is usable?

• trying to interact with the coffee machine from the left, the “raycast” detected the tile too far to the right (the table on the other side). I had to interact from top or bottom

Typos:

• throg (through)
• an (and)
• acomodate (accommodate)

(just put all your text in a spellchecker, it’s easier)

Gameplay

I also thought about card, dice and gambling game considering the theme (the grid of boss sprites made me thought there’d be some geometrical play too). The classic RPG fight was okay and the individual “puzzle” fights were interesting to discover characters before they unite.

However, at the end Time Spike/Freeze was the key to everything, and the other characters didn’t have particular synergies (a little between their own moves like Agility Up then dealing attack that increases damage with Agility, and not particularly between themselves as a team) so I just ended the fight with Time Freeze every 3 turns and spamming attacks (with a little buff) for the rest.

Story

Theme is pretty clear. Not only Unity but also its opposite, how the party is split up, first by the boss and then later driven by self-interest.

Starting with an “advanced episode” reminded me of Fist of the Final Blade (Episode 12 Finale) for the BAF VN Jam 2024. Although I didn’t expect it to go further… sounds like it’s the start of a new season!

Interface

Same remark as Pure Dreamer J, please indicate that F4 is used to toggle fullscreen as it’s not a common shortcut for non-RPG Maker users.

Art

Very 80s-90s bishoujo indeed

Starting with last episode like BAF

Audio

OK

Performance

Good, as expected from a 2D RPG Maker game.

Build size

Same remark as Pure Dreamer J, while not as extreme, your build contains many unused assets from asset packs for around 70MB of images and 30MB of BGM

Only a few backgrounds, tiles, SFX are used, and the character sprites and facesets are custom so this could definitely be reduced under 30 MB or even less.

Make sure to tag your builds with the proper platform to show the platform logo, be searchable in filtered search by platform and be installable in itch app.

Wow this entry was also very different! I’m… not sure what part is Magical Girl or Metroidvania though. We’re actually piloting a mech?

Visuals

A green goblin in pink suit, quite funny. Although it’s supposed to be a mech?

Shaky breasts generally get instant negative points from me, but I’ll overlook this one because for the first time, it actually feels like second degree humor (like a big mama goblin joke or something) and not added as some cheap selling point.

Audio

It’s pretty out of range too! It made me remember Intergalatic Wizard Force (I played the LocJam version: https://locjam.itch.io/intergalactic-wizard-force-locjam-edition ), complete with the fullbody skinsuit, it’s perfect!

Gameplay

I have about the same remarks as winterbraid. Past level 1 gem there seems to be no upgrade, and since there is no life upgrade (max 3 hearts) it’s very hard to survive bullet hell without using bombs repeatedly (and each bomb sacrifices a diamond for that area so your firepower gets weaker, so you must calculate it well to use them at the end).

3 hearts is general for a traditional bullet hell, but we’re facing (non-boss) enemies with a lot of HP so we can’t really apply the same rules.

It’s cool to shoot left and right and that’s important for the final goblin lady boss, however in many cases I just want to strafe. I found out later about the focus button explained on the main game page, that it also locks direction. However sometimes I want to move fast and strafe, so a separate trigger would be nice (but maybe one button that does makes sense for some players, and it simplifies input, I concede).

Some enemies don’t have a clear blinking when they get hit (esp. the “snails” that are small but have a lot of HP) which gives the impression that they are invincible.

The first boss throws money (and the last one diamonds too) and indeed you get a few coins when you get hit but it’s not worth it. Maybe it was to reuse the sprites for budget reasons, and play with the theme of fantasy creatures holding on money, but it would feel better to use different sprites for projectiles, to keep game design symbolism consistency.

It’s not exactly rogue-like since you can continue from last shop but it was in fact a relief for me, allowed to reach the end of the map at least.

Mostly, if progression with lifebar, weapon upgrade and bomb effects worked, it could be much easier to balance and make it a good roguelike adrenaline rush game.

UI

Some UI glitches like the popup that appears then disappears when you enter shop area, and player shooting in the background of the shop reacting to user input in the menu instead of having a separate “testing weapon” mode… that you must be aware of.

I have the bug on Windows 11, hardware specs:

• Processor: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900K (3.20 GHz)
• Installed RAM: 64.0 GB (63.8 GB usable)
• System type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
• GPU: GeForce RTX 3070

Same issue as KingdomPots, I get black title menu BG and black in-game (only HUD) on New game.

There’s a demo save packed with the game, so I even tried it and I could see some level indeed (still no BG) but still not my character, just falling to the room below, and could not really play.

Pause menu > Back to title prompt > I see some untranslated strings

Technical feedback: itch app detects “notification helper” executable. I’m not sure if there’s an easy way around it (besides just deleting that file) though since game engines just export things this way.

I found that game manifest can be used to indicate a canonical exe to launch (https://itch.io/docs/itch/integrating/manifest.html). It’s apparently preferred to change directory structure but if game engine exports it this way, not much choice.

Yes, some game engines export a “BugReport.exe”, “notification_helper.exe”, so it’d be nice to remember I want to execute the true game executable.

While dev can add a manifest

(although https://itch.io/docs/itch/integrating/manifest.html says that “It launches the wrong thing” is usually a bad reason to ship a manifest” and we should simplify directory structure, game engine export templates don’t always allow that)

I have no control over this as a player so it’s still a useful fallback.

Edge case: if developer uploads a new build with more executables it should clear the default executable to launch preference and prompt me again which one I want to run, just in case.

A checkbox “Don’t ask me again (unless executables are added)” + the mentioned preference reset per game channel looks like a safe bet.

Wow, that’s for a change compared to other entries! After the jam I wondered if I shouldn’t try metroidvania progression with another genre and thought about making a top-view game that takes place in a school… although not a horror one. Based on the description above, it is not meant to be a Metroidvania but with the key item and the colored blocks I noticed, I see how it could be one anyway.

The presentation is really cool, alternating cutscenes, exploration with paper flip sprite and dialogues with squishy character face sprites. I see it was done with RPG Maker + 3D plugin, and I think it renders well.

Generally speaking, a good effort not to make it look like a RPG Maker game (I just recognize it because I’ve played many… and I know the folder structure too).

Impressive cinematic with the 3D castle rotating too! According to the description above the castle is not even premade content, so that must have been a lot of work.

I like the pink dress knight outfit and reference in name “Joan”. The game over screen with the helmet was a nice touch too, reminds me of old games.

Some issues per category below.

System

There is no indication of toggle fullscreen key on the game page. I had to search for it on RPG Maker forum, and it’s F4.

It’s actually the 3rd game where I mention this. I think many people play jam games in windowed mode and don’t mind, but if you want to put us in the horror mood, explaining how to toggle fullscreen is important.

Visuals

The TV CRT shader is too strong on the text, making it hard to read. After some time I got used to it but I fear it strained my eyes anyway.

A small glitch on Castle animation where we can see the character flashing for a frame.

Cutscenes

No way to advance pure animation (no text) sequences (camera zoom, etc.) as in Renpy.

Exploration

It’s hard to spot some doors in the “South” direction. I couldn’t even leave the room after saving the first friend at first! Whereas the South door just after that is at least visible in the form of a shadow.

It looks like Dash shortcut (holding Shift) is disabled in this time but menu still allows to toggle Dash permanently, which is pretty cool to explore quickly, especially after respawning to a checkpoint far away (more on this later). However it’s not convenient to go to menu each time, I would have preferred holding Shift to Dash (or Walk if Dash is default) anyway. But I understand why it was disabled: when chasing after Clara, you can easily catch up with her and it looks ridiculous to just bump into her back, wait bump again. If you’re very agile I suspect you can even dash past her and enter the door before her!

Lighting is really limited, I get it for the horror feel but sometimes I found it a bit exaggerated. That said I got used to it and learned the corridors by heart so it was okay later.

The slow enemies are okay but the “denpa wave” enemy is too fast. I tried to move with Dash to avoid her but then I would accidentally bump into her and die. I tried to walk but I would still notice her too late (due to small camera FoV / big zoom in) and she would still kill me (even if she seemed to be 2 tiles away!) So I have to learn all the corridors by heart and just never let her approach me. For a more horror improvisation feel, I’d rather see her chase me slowly (like a zombie?) and me walking/running away while quickly planning the next corridor I’ll take to avoid getting trapped in a dead end or something. Being insta-killed felt more like I didn’t learn the map by heart correctly, or I misinput and turned to the wrong direction at that corner, try again.

Combat

The tutorial is wrong on fire input, it says X but I had to press Z, so I did nothing for a while (and lost). It’s a bit hard to move relatively in cardinal directions but once you get the hang of it it’s okay. It’s also hard to see diagonal neighbors so you really need to pay attention and move the cursor quickly to check if enemies are not hiding in the shadows.

Progression

It wasn’t clear that the red silhouette was a checkpoint, it looked like an NPC. Maybe it should have a different shape unless there’s some lore behind it, then the very first checkpoint should say something like “I’ll remember you” or “come back here whenever you feel in danger”.

The lack of checkpoint before the room with the “denpa waves” enemy who walks fast is really problematic, in fact I gave up because of that. I found two different paths to reach the denpa room, but one was shorter from the checkpoint after rescuing first friend so I used that one (exiting South then going West to open the door once locked when you chased after Clara the first time). Then after several tries I got past the first denpa enemy, but would get killed by the second one anyway. Redoing the whole path every time was too exhausting. Framerate slowdown also made it worse (more on this below)

Otherwise, unlocking all doors with the key was nice, and the colored blocks hint at more keys/powers for a Metroidvania progression. If there was a power to actually defeat the chasing enemies (with a shooting game, once and for all), it would be great too. Because right now it seems the game oscillates between having a magical girl who’s able to rescue her friends by shooting magic, and who’s unable to save other characters like the denpa girl and we don’t really know why the difference.

Performance

Probably a limitation of RPG Maker but some rooms had extremely low FPS (we’re talking playing on RTX 3070, but it doesn’t matter much because GPU is not used much, maybe it’s because RPG Maker exports a web/nw.js build?)

I suspect they were the bigger rooms, except some of them were a simple corridor. I think it’s because they were a small part of a very big room and just happened to be made this way. So splitting them in smaller rooms could help. Although it doesn’t justify the lag, I’ve seen 3D web frameworks that are much more performant. Maybe it’s just the RPG Maker 3D plugin that’s underoptimized. Or it’s something specific to your game in how many things you put in one room.

Build size

Finally, the game size. It’s almost 1 GB which is the size of that 3D Unreal game build (which may be a debug build?): https://itch.io/jam/metroidvania-month-31-magical-girl-game-jam-13/rate/4382782

Before uploading, you need to check that your build is not surprisingly too big (probably got debug and unused files) or too small (probably failed to export some assets and non-functional).

A quick TreeSize analysis showed that audio and img folders are the biggest culprits, with 360 MB and 300 MB resp. for a total of 660 MB.

Digging deeper, I found full audio asset packs, with things like Kitchen sounds, Toilet flush and 9 different SFX to open a door (although among them, the door squeak SFX are probably the most relevant for a horror game). There are 25 BGMs although the game itself is mostly silent. For some reason they are put in the Custom folder although they are not the original BGMs used in the game (if there is any).

Then we got loads of pictures, including photos of street and character asset packs.

In pictures Intro there are even sketches, albeit not as big as the final art, still take an extra 3 MB.

(that’s cool if you want to upload some making-of though)

The final assets are png, should probably be webp (if RPG Maker can handle it, and image is simple enough so that webp is small indeed) or jpg (more support, easy to make small files but quickly gets artifacts under max quality).

The original sprite assets in the custom sub-folders actually used for the game take only 2.1 MB, and faces are super cheap. With cutscenes (9 MB) that would make 11 MB. I don’t know which SFX are really used since there is no obvious Custom folder but I suspect they would take no more than 5 MB. There are also 3D models and textures I haven’t checked, but even with all of that I don’t think it would go above 30 MB, so that’s 630 MB you could spare.

I’m also worried about your game project repository, if you committed and pushed all these extra files there.

Hm that’s something to take into account when playtesting prototypes indeed.

I think it’s okay if the cheat is just temporarily here to replace a feature that’s missing, like checkpoints. I suppose that in this case the cheat would be to directly face bosses in a “boss rush” manner, so as long as players use it after dying many times and feeling they will be better at boss fight that platforming between levels (and dying due to stupid mistakes because they’re in a hurry because they have to redo the same paths due to the absence of checkpoints), and just giving feedback on the bosses, it would make sense.

If the players learn a lot from platforming and minions (such as the good timing for wall jump) it wouldn’t give the expected boss experience indeed. But I was more thinking of this as a patch to replace unimplemented checkpoints, for players who have reached them already but just happened to die and restart from zero, and not learning anything new on their way to the checkpoint. If players use the cheat just to cheat, that’s another issue, but between game devs I think it’s okay to trust them on this kind of thing (but have them write down clearly if they used it or not).

Fun fact, I just told another dev team not to upload a debug build made in Unreal because it was so huge. Well, cheat keys may be enabled in Release build too so that’s not an issue.

SOLVED: we had forgotten to check Display as collaborator on the Admins page. Checking it made us appear on the list of submitters and added the “Submitted” widget.

Very good onboarding, a static tutorial screen is the best when there’s no time of in-game explanations! Players complain a lot about static tutorial screens in commercial games trying to manage their budget in a certain way, but clearly they haven’t been playing enough obscure games with no instructions manual nor in-game explanations.

The level design is a little weird, as it looks like a top-view tiled map drawn like a maze of a character of 1-tile width/height. But the character is bigger than that and won’t fit in the 1-tile high holes, and repeatedly bump her head in the ceiling when jumping (esp. as there is no dynamic jump height). In the metal area, some “walls” are vertical, so 1-tile wide, it’s also hard to land on them. So navigation didn’t feel very good.

EDIT: just read the meta description again, and I see how the level is actually a blueprint map now. Maybe it could be a blueprint but seen in side view? Or with a different scale to give more space to move in? Or it could be a top-view game, not a platformer! But that would change it a lot, obviously.

The star almost hides the tile

The dotted lines have the same appearance as solid tiles so it was unclear you could go past them

This trapped rat moves left and right super fast, almost seizure-inducing

This jump is hard as the ceiling is longer than the floor

Melee attack looks good, and hitting the rat (horizontal moving enemy) with good timing feels good. The spider moves vertically too fast though, bumping immediately from the ground back upward, so it’s very hard to hit near the floor (maybe it’s on purpose to encourage player to kill it in the middle of its path?)

I got 2 MacGuffins out of 3 (probably only 1 was counted since I died and respawn after picking 1 so it was probably “lost”). It would be cool to get a power to advance in the level differently to be an actual Metroidvania.

since the .exe and .pck file are both essential to play the game, it’s better to just put them into one .zip file

Exactly, I couldn’t run it at all from itch app because of the separate downloads. Rating phase is over soon so you’ll be able to reupload the zip properly.

Meta

OK this is a prototype so I will give feedback keeping this it mind, but you should indicate it in your game description as we did in our game, explaining what is working and what is not to setup players’ expectations.

I thought that 1GB was huge for a jam game, even for an Unreal game. Apparently, this is because it’s a debug build. I can see debug files (unless that’s just build log), debug warnings and debug shape cast.

Or maybe it’s the models and textures. After all, the proto enemy doesn’t need that detailed humanoid model, a very low LOD / polygonal character would have been enough. I don’t know what a raw Unreal 3rd person template build’s size is so I’m not sure.

Players are less likely to finish a 1 GB download if they see no screenshots or videos showing that it’s worth the content, and also it takes time on your side to upload more, so be careful about this. Also naming the project zip, folder and executable (in Unreal settings) can help when players are downloading a bunch of projects from the same jam with generic names and can’t remember which one is which.

EDIT: I could confirm it’s the debug build, there is a Metroidvania.pdb that takes 279 MB so that’s also that you could save.

The assets however are all cooked in Metroidvania-Windows.ucas (573.5 MB)so I can’t inspect it further. Apparently Unreal doesn’t cook unused assets but in case it happens, there are ways to exclude from folders from cooking: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/should-i-delete-unused-assets-before-packaging-the-game/1681997

Gameplay

There is a lot of lag on jump and a little lag on shoot (a little on shoot is OK if it’s part of the animation as in our game, it depends how tight the action is - but on core movement it is critical to keep it to the minimum). Lack of air control means you must press left/right before the jump and cannot adjust mid-air, making it hard to land on platforms.

I suppose the demo is about beating the two proto enemies, so I can’t comment more on that.

I was stuck in the floor below so I assume it was meant to be a deadzone.

Anyway, the first jams tend to be like this, don’t give up and remember the key points that cost nothing (proper release build with meta data, balancing gameplay parameters to make the game easy to handle) and then you can improve your releases little by little when you get more experience and get faster with coding and integration!

Remember to flag your build as Windows so the Windows icon appears and people can play directly from the itch app.

Ah, too bad you couldn’t fix the build issue before the rating phase started, as you can’t upload during the rating phase. It means we won’t be able to rate your game, and we’ll have to wait post-rating to test it then.

Oh, I was on WitchWay’s page and saw that is was made by a certain “gleeson”, then I recognized the name from the LDtk Importer we used for the last Metroidvania Month (31 in collab with Magical Girl Game Jam 13)!

So thanks too for making this tool! I also opened a few GitHub issues on the way, although I wasn’t the person using it the most in the team (I was more on Godot side).

I’ll try to take more time after this jam to really see how it works. In particular I’m not sure how auto-tiles / terrain work and if they integrate well with Godot’s terrains or if they are completely separate systems (when quick patching things in Godot tilemaps directly, interoperability can help)… but that’s another topic.

I’m still at the beginning so I’m not rating this game nor giving feedback on gameplay, however I’ll post here for logistical feedback (similar to my technical feedback on Derelict):

I see no way to toggle fullscreen in the Windows build (and there is no web build which usually have a fullscreen button). The best I could find that maximizing the window (but it’s not the same). I tried Alt+Enter, F11, Ctrl+Alt+F, but to no avail.

There is no pause menu so I couldn’t check for fullscreen option in the settings. Is there a hidden shortcut or is it just not implemented?

I’m still at the beginning so I’m not rating this game nor giving feedback on gameplay, however I’ll post here for logistical feedback:

I see no way to toggle fullscreen in the Windows build (only on web build with the fullscreen button). The best I could find that maximizing the window (but it’s not the same). I tried Alt+Enter and F11 (haven’t tried Meta+Alt+F which I think is common on macOS), but to no avail.

I looked for an option in the pause menu but there was nothing. Is there a hidden shortcut or is it just not implemented?

Ending cutscene? Oh, right, I stopped at Boss 1 and thought it was a proto end, but there was another skill and area after that! Thanks for mentioning it!

Oh, a boss sketch at the end to indicate where it was supposed to be. We already had boss sprites, just behavior not implemented, so we could have done that too in our prototype!

EDIT: I found later that it wasn’t the end of demo, and found the last skill of “flying” which is actually infinite jump (I missed a room more above - I suppose getting “lost” this could easily be fixed with a mini-map). It’s unfortunate that it completely superseded double jump, but probably for budget reasons. A floating jump would be a better complementary skill. There was also no tutorial for it at all so it took me a moment to figure how to use it.

The metroidvania progression was functional, the projectiles felt fun to shoot with a (probably too) impactful SFX. I liked the small details on projectile colors being added when unlocking new skills, which are also the colors of the gates you can open. Although that wasn’t really clear at the beginning, that skills are also actual “gate keys” (in general Metroidvania games distinguish both), so it could be good to explain in tutorial. Or ideally make each skill truly unlock new areas by their geometrical properties (for double jump it was easy but for the stomp attack there could be actual ground to break)

Visual-wise I liked the theater-ragdoll-style animation (also a nice trick for budget to justify more simple animations), I suppose we’re actually inside some paper theater book?

The main issues I encountered:

• text displays slowly, as mentioned in other comments. When prototyping, start by just displaying text all at once especially if there is no voice acting. Then if you have time add progressive display but at high speed only. Then if you have time add a slider for text speed in the Settings. At first I thought it was just the intro cutscene but then I saw that it was on every in-game cutscene including the important tutorial text that explains the button to press… It was probably easy to spot when testing but I suppose you were fast-skipping all the text when testing yourself as we did because we know the text by heart. So it’s also good to send build to other people (starting with team members that may not be using the game engine) to spot these things early.
• shoot direction is done with left stick, which makes sense because you shoot with button on right side, but it’s hard to move wherever you want and also shoot freely. Since shooting is THE main attack it would make sense to map it to a shoulder/trigger button instead and leave the right thumb free to aim with right stick
• double jump has an issue where it may be accidentally triggered on first jump. Since the symptom is the same as Sonic Adventure 2 on GameCube PAL running at 50Hz, I suspect this is due to updating jump intention from input on physics frame (Fixed Update) and applying jump on render frame (Update), or reversely, which could cause two jumps to be applied for one input press before intention gets cleared. Or something like that. I’m not sure why my “powerful PC” would get unstable FPS but I was testing on web so anything could happen (and if it happened on GameCube…). Fun fact, it had the same effect as Tails/Eggman’s mech with air thrusters, where you would go higher faster by doing a quick jump + air thrust, probably because double jump is set to add extra upward velocity or not just set velocity Y to a fixed value.
• physics bugs (moving toward a wall horizontally prevents you from falling)
• I didn’t even know I could shoot in all directions at first, so the first breakable ground looked like a special ground that needed a stomp attack to destroy. In fact you could destroy it with a normal shot, and even a forward shot could reach it. So I was stuck of a while there
• Quit game does nothing on web, so remove it from main on web build

Credits:

• it was a bit weird to see all the credits after opening the first gate, I thought it was the end of demo at first! It works well in games where credits appear in the background while you keep moving, but it stopped the player character’s progression so I had to watch it appear slowly…
• don’t say “myself” in the credits. I’m playing fullscreen, I don’t see the itch.io username of the person who created the project page, so I don’t know what that means. Just put your creator’s name like the other team members
• I didn’t see any credits for voice acting in the in-game credits nor on the game page. I assume this is not the same as SFX. It did sound like Stock Japanese battle character Voice Acting assets. It’s not mandatory to put it in credits in the license doesn’t require you to, but in a game jam it’s nice to know whether voice actors actually joined the staff, or you used free assets, or you used premium assets.

Promotion: now that game is done you can add screenshots of the actual game in the list of media.

Thanks for the comment! There are definitely things we’ll work on for the next update!

Few things i didn’t like is screen switching like in old games black splash

Do you think the swipe transition animation is too much for small room transitions? Would it be okay to leave only for true area transition?

We also considered classic Metroidvania / 2D Zelda game screen transition with time pausing and the camera scrolling from one room to the other (this is in fact what I would imagine in “old games”, and we can also find it in old school indie games), but it was more complicated to do (due to the need to have two scenes scenes at once - but feasible), so I sticked to the swipe effect described in the Metroidvania Forge tutorial.

However, for big areas, the parallax background would completely change so it wouldn’t be feasible and we’d need a fade out anyway (what open world games do nowadays, continuous transition between “rooms” in the same area and fading on real area change like going back to hub or entering a sanctuary in Zelda: BotW)

Thanks for the feedback! We have plans to split the cutscenes across the game as we also noticed the starting time was quite long.

What platform did you play on, and which controller did you use? (I managed to make Xbox One controller work on both PC and web)

I saw the air motion feedback several times, so I will increase air friction to a high value on next build (after the rating phase) for arcade-like controls.

We also found the camera to be too zoomed out during dev - this happened because of a character scale change mid-dev. It’ll be costlier to redraw the sprites so I’ll try to zoom in the camera as much as possible without making it difficult for the player to predict what’s coming.

I also noticed that the main game page (showing game collections) does not use a #wrapper container. Should we use another safety container class or directly work with .collection_description, etc. ? (this could also be explained on the CSS doc)

Aha, very short but working and effective!

I thought there’d be more treasure hunting but that’s actually a way to finish it quick indeed! And some hints who’s lying or not…