itch.io

oh my god john horse played my game??

I did it. I'm complete as a game dev. I can finally retire!!

My first fight was against a leach with no upgrades. That one fight by itself took 15 minutes. John Deckbuilder does not approve 😠

Anyways the idea is pretty good but I'm not a big fan of gambling deckbuilders. There's way too much RNG most of the time so it feels like an auto scroller without much strategy and that applies here too. Just adding more options for the player to do while its their turn usually helps with this problem; stuff like consumables, being able to draw additional cards from your deck, discarding, replacing, rerolling etc.

Not being able to see the enemy's attacks while its my turn is kinda a bummer although even if I knew, I couldn't really do anything against them since it's all just RNG again. A cool idea could be to have a way to modify the enemy's rolls or ability ranges.

I played till the start of 2/3. Overall still a cool little game!

go into this expecting all the jank

https://kristoff-red.itch.io/horse-arrow-grapple

good luck if you ever try again! I put my personal best on the bottom of the game page if you're curious

thanks!

sick!

thanks for playing

I used my custom libraries that help with polish that I made for my previous games, but all of the gameplay was made during the jam.

Thanks for the feedback!

Welp I don't have much to yap about. It's a very cute idea!

The only thing I can bring up is not really an issue I guess? It's just that the solution to every level is to make a wheel; but that's part of the core idea of the game and I'm not really sure what you could do against that. 

Maybe making the shape "flatter" makes it more slippery? (idk how you would even code that in xd) 

Or maybe you can control the rotation of the biscuit like a motorized wheel and then you need to eat the shape in a different way to be able to cross each level? (more puzzle game-y)

But again, this "issue" doesn't really take away from the game and having different shapes for the biscuits helps counteract it a little bit.

My only criticism is that I cannot see my deck which is a really important part of deckbuilders since I need to know what I have to be able to make descisions. At the start of the game it felt like something was adding new cards to my deck that I didn't add myself because of this and I'll never know if that was the case or it was just part of the starting deck.

Holding onto cards for later is a really cool idea!

You can look up/down using the scroll wheel as shown on the game page

You need to place your blocks in a way to maximize your score x mult. Some blocks have conditional bonuses that give you extra points.

In the start for example, if the long cookie is fully surrounded by other blocks, it gives +5 multiplier.

ty Quinten, I'll add things to the list of feedback!

Not letting some cookies to be eaten is a good idea, I'll add that to the list ty!

Thank you Kelvin, I'll make great use of this feedback later :)

About the deckbuilding: It's one of those genres where I get to do a lot of backend work and systems design which I enjoy the most when it comes to gamedev. It's also usually easy to add more content to without it being very art heavy, which is the sort of things I need as a solo dev. Alongside that, deckbuilders usually have a lot of opportunities for reusing assets, and I don't need to create a polished player controller, unlike for the majority of other genres (though this depends on the game again).

Hi there, I saw that you were giving some really detailed feedback to other folks, and I really appriciate that! ❤️

So here's some of my thoughts about your game as a thank you for your work.

1. Bit of onboarding feedback: you don't want to bombard the player with lots of dialogue from the get go without hooking them in with gameplay beforehand. It's hard to care about story without caring about enjoying the game first. If I were to do this story choice thing, I would let the player go through a dungeon or two to get some context about the game, and then let them decide whether they want to go with the princess or with the rebels. I didn't even realize that I was going to choose one or the other in my first playthrough until reading the description.
2. The enemy patterns are really nice! They feel like swarming enemies, but they move in a much more interesting way which scratches my brains
3. I pretty much never used the dash and it's a bit pointless since there aren't any projectile based attacks or large ramming hitboxes to dodge.
4. Both the enemies and player lack visual feedback. The most common ways to do this are: sprite flashes, shakes, screenshakes and particles. The few times I got hit, I didn't realize I took damage. This is the sort of stuff you have to write code for once and then you just reuse the same thing for future projects, so I would recommend investing some time into making a library for that sort of thing.
5. The throwing daggers stuff reminds me of ROTMG (Realm of the mad god) which is fun. You could definitely spice it up by adding charged throws, or you need to collect your thrown daggers to be able to throw them later etc. but that's more for a post-jam update than for anything else.

Not too sure what else to say. I could go on a rant about stuff you can obviously tell about the game, like the use of premade assets, or missing a bunch of polish here and there, but I feel like making a polished and complete game wasn't the primary goal for you, and for what it is currently, it's a nice project.

You can look up/down using the mouse scroll wheel as shown in the game's description

Good luck!

It's screen UVs -> Voronoi texture where the offset is being animated by time -> step node for making the clean circles -> lerp for bg color vs bubble color

Thanks for letting me know that there are still softlocks around, it should all be hopefully fixed now. ❤️

Glad you're enjoying it now!

Thanks for letting me know it works! ❤️

hi, I literally just updated the game, can you try again?

Unless web is messing with the UI again, the first target is 6000

I was often very confused about why things were happening the way they were and lost in the end because I killed all chess pieces??

The UI lacks visual feedback, so it's hard to find what changes when something happens.

Managed to "beat" the game first try and I felt like I had solved the game after the first few rounds as I got a pretty simple but effective strategy down early on.

Very unfortunate that many of the ducks you gamble for are just direct upgrades of the regular yellow duck, but otherwise it was pretty fun. I think the whole duck battling has more potential, just needs some more variety and different abilites.

I stopped playing after the second day, since there doesn't seem to be much incentive to keep going. 

There isn't a score counter or a counter that shows how many customers I served during gameplay, there isn't an incentive to serve multiple customers since so many keep coming, and they seem to be happy waiting for the rest of the day.

I don't even really know why I'm serving these customers?

I managed to create a setup that lets me bake a ton of biscuits really fast and also traps the mouse most of the time, and after that the game just became a repetition-fest unfortunately. Definitely needs more chaos outside of the player's control and variety. 

The rat was a good start, but unfortunately it's way too easy to deal with. Letting it lit up the tables would be a nice twist though, since then the player would be forced to use the extinguisher, which "heals" the rat at the same time.

Definitely one of the games I had the most fun with in any jam. It's definitely on the weaker side in terms of innovation and theme, but I had a great time anyway. Took me ~30 mins to get my first climb to the top, please make more 👍

Only (sometimes) works on chrome sorry :(

Greg gettin shot is what I needed in my life ❤️

Anyways I didn't really understand the "gain another turn" part of the polarity switcher. A lot of times I also felt like the turn should have lasted longer (?). I'm genuinely confused about many of the mechanics of this game since they aren't explained well enough, even with the descriptions.

Some sort of a puzzle based tutorial would be very helpful if you end up expanding on the idea in the future, or planning on making a similar game.

Not really knowing the turn order or the exact cards of Greg, the game genuinely felt like gambling. In my winning attempt I pretty much just spammed anything with damage in the description and that made me win.

I definitely see the vision in the game and I'd love to see you expand on it a bit more post-jam!
The game just needs better onboarding and it'll be epic.

Hi rube, I see card game, I must play card game

I know this is very clearly a prototype, as you said in the description, so I'll try giving some feedback based on that:

1. The 5/5 counter is reversed. The order people usually use is: remaining/max
2. For drag & drop, the cards should snap to the closest holder when you let go, otherwise it can lead to some unintentional stuff
3. A cool thing you can do with tweeners, is to multiply (or divide idk) the duration of the tween by the distance to the target, so that the tween's duration is always consistent regardless of scale. Might be useful for the card place down animation.
4. The attack animations are really nice, good job on that!
5. Instead of resetting the positions of the cards in hand, you could just update each card's index, and then lerp/tween them to their new positions. This should eliminate the weird twitchy-ness. 

If you're having slow, laggy movement when placing, then it's a web only bug!

I cannot replicate it on my PC, but I've seen it happen for someone else...

Please try it on Chrome, if that still doesn't work, the downloadables should definitely work fine.

Hi matt :3

Hope you'll have fun with shaders!

I'm fine with picky comments because I actually want to know the things that I missed!

Thanks for playing ❤️

In testing it was way too hard to hit them from behind, especially with the attack range they had.

Oh that's a really cool bug! Glad you had fun ❤️

I made the early levels easy so people could get used to the boomerang throwing. If I had more time, I would have done it like a roguelite and would have made the earlier levels a bit more interesting on a second or third playthrough.

Thanks for playing!

Hitting enemies from behind was way too annoying from my testing which is why I decided on charge attacks for breaking the shield instead. 

I wanted to play around with the pixel upscaler more because I find the effect very cool, though this is probably not its best usecase.

I made the boss in the last 5 hours of the jam when I didn't even have an ending lmao but yeah I agree with everything.