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I really love the graphics and how hard you’ve lent into the specific aesthetics you were chasing! Superbly done.

The game-play was engaging too. Though real-time combat with a single ability usually can get a little stale, you solved it really good by having the enemies move relatively fast and forcing the player to rush into each level to not get stuck on the elevator and miss all the good heals!

Unfortunately the game crashed for me on the final boss-fight. So I didn’t get to see if there was a cool ending or something.

Very well made though!

Play-through with more comments!

The game was nice, and about perfect size for its content!

I got a bit confused at the end? As I read most everyone got. I was a little uncertain because at one time the prince escaped and I thought maybe I got to the triangle and the prince had gotten out of my inventory again and it didn’t count as a win. But if that was gonna happen the prince really had to escape forward in view first so you see what is happening. Even though his annoying crying sounds could be heard way too far…. because my brain just shut that out after a while lol…

Play-through:

Nice little crawler. I liked it for the most part, though the random encounters in the larger map (earth) got a bit annoying in combination with the spinners lol.

I think the difficulty was quite nice for a jam game but perhaps the xp level up system was missing a bit. I found myself mostly putting everything into health because of how specials had to be re-selected every time during fights and had no hotkey that i could find.

Over all though a good game!

Play-through:

What a weird little gem!

That intro voice-over was just marvelous. Beat-boxing fun. The art great.

Unfortunately, and maybe I missed something, I got game over because I ended up in a fight that seemed completely impossible and no way to flee. I’m also a bit confused about if there are ways to pass for characters because i’m not at all sure what options and strategies there really were. Sometimes the monster telegraphed its attack but most times no.

Anyways, I enjoyed playing it!

Play-through:

glad you read the comments then! We’ve got some plans based on those and own ideas to hopefully make the experience a bit smoother.

oh after finding four keys you need to find the exit, but yeah we could, if we had time added some guidance towards it.

Yeah the item stats are confusing and unfortunately not at all exact due to the complexity of the battle system. We should actually maybe give less info and just say brass > cardboard and such.

And I, well I finally understand: I don’t tap play at all, I hold down as preferred mode and the controls aren’t at all made for tappers first lol.

The early fights should probably have been much easier too. Good thing I actually doubled the starting health during the last day of the jam. pew.

and yeah i agree with pretty much all of your critique. we had some thought on how to adress some of it during the jam, but we very much ran out of time.

Oh thanks! That made my day! Sounds like you experienced the game more or less exactly like it was intended!

I really liked the tea concept! Walking and not walking through walls. That was the strongest part of the game by far for me.

My problem though is that I suck at tower defense and in all honestly never found one that worked for me.

So my critique should probably be taken with that in mind, but I feel like there are two main problems: available information while playing and player on-boarding. The latter is really hard, extremely hard to manage during the jam, but I also (?) didn’t understand or promptly forgot I could summon monsters and playing without it seems quite impossible even on easy setting. Might be easy still is way too hard for a jam-difficulty even with summons.

The second part, from my understanding of tower defense games, they generally have a zoomed out overview type of perspective for the player. Or fast ways to scroll over the map and get to places. Otherwise it becomes very hard, and starts to feel unfair. I would suggest, as a start making the side-bar much larger allowing the player to see the entire map at all times. Probably with a static north in the map (no rotation) and rotating player direction instead. Clear signage of what are heroes and monsters (and their state). I understand the map showed what you needed to know (mostly) but only if you know and remember what was a monster and a monster in need. And heroes and spike traps looked identical to me.

The heroes and monsters were cute though, and I like the work on the intro sequence!

Play-through:

Alright so I must say that even with a problematic camera position causing some friction in the crawling, that I enjoyed this game that much and it played so well with that handicap! That says a whole lot about the overall quality of the game!

Great visuals, nice soundtrack, and even if I would have wanted some parts be taken a bit further to their sort of logical conclusion, I’m still very positive about the game. And it shows you were having fun and poured love into what you were making too…

More detailed comments, critique and explanations about the camera thing and more in the play-through:

Yeah other way around (right to open, left to pick up) would have made much more sense… but also is there even a reason to close containers?

the game uses an auto-battler, so fights play out by themselves and the exclamation marks are enemy locations. So your job is balancing your health and running around being in battle collecting wise amounts of enemies at the same time to get better loot and still survive. And run to health stations when needed. The battle time is also a great time to get more XP since you cannot get bored while being in battle. That, i think is the core mechanics of act one of the game.

i’m sorry that it was a bit confusing and that the inner voice felt disconnected, but in part that was by design and sort of explains itself in act 2 of the game.

Thinking of a bed upset Kordanor put a smile on my face!

the attacks actually being turn-based makes so much more sense!

One day we’re gonna have to have a talk about suitable length of games on game jams ;)

It is cool stuff you got here though. Lots of systems and content, story and quite deep mechanics. But it would have been rewarding to have a chance to get to the end. I gave up after close to two hours and I didn’t get past the second boss in that time.

It was a cool idea of needing to swap out gear to match the fights, but having to flee, go into the inventory and the swap and find yourself back and the monster probably moved. Unless special battle. For me that process would have needed to be much more streamlined. Giving free weapon swaps in fights and honestly hot swapping for the best weapon would more have suited me. Or map areas needed to be much more consistent so that you (almost) only encountered enemies of one type in a large area.

I also think that the layouts of both maps were quite similar (though a bit different) with loads of paths giving a relatively reasonable sized map a lot of density. The same size but more rooms-focused could probably have cut playtime in half. It was fantastic that you had the click on map tech and without that I think I would have given up almost before the first boss. So that was a great choice.

You do vary your game in style, and you never know what the fighting system is gonna look like, and you did switch it up again and that was for me the most fun thing to see where you were going this time.

Play-through:

It is an auto-battler because we imagine you’d be busy exploring and doing the clicker things and it’d be much to busy also doing the manual fighting.

I think the heist concept is under-explored in our dungeon crawlers in general, so great to see one. I would have liked more of a push your luck mechanic to the level design whereas here it was either when going to the inner bit to get the loot you anyhow needed or at the louvre where it existed the minute and change felt so very short compared to the long distance to the exit that at least for me I didn’t get to explore the room there much at all.

Otherwise my largest problems was the left click right click system, I just kept left clicking over the loot because that’s what i’ve learnt I should do lol. Also missed a whole lot of loot because you didn’t get prompts standing next to it where it seemed the most reasonable to do the interaction.

But I did eventually get to the end and get to re-enact the famous heist!

Play-through:

I really liked how the level was designed and various areas flowed into each other. How there were corners of rooms cutting tiles and making them inaccessible and increasing the SF feeling of it all. I think though it would have been nice to see the room shapes a bit for even the tiles you couldn’t walk on because now it mostly paints out as a bunch of halls which makes it much harder to use for navigation.

It would have been nice though with these large areas and quite long halls to be able to hold down forward and just run.

I understand the systems didn’t get fully implemented and fighting was a bit unfinished with no way to regain energy. Or at least I didn’t find any. The game in general seemed quite turn-based, but in the fight it seemed like I could spam attack.

Also the mouse sensitivity. Scrolling inventory took for ever so I stopped looking while free looking was wild and very hard to aim on the chests.

Then, I don’t know if the game currently have any end state, but my computer crashed playing the web-version. Might have been because of OBS too. But that is the reason why the recording of the play-through just ends that abruptly.

Otherwise very slick looking entry and I’m always a sucker for a bit of SF.

Play-through:

The thing I liked the most with this entry was the manual mapping and I’d say it was about perfect size for the mapping exercise. And I liked the dungeon layout too.

I did find that the bed and to some extent the sink were a little high so it was hard or impossible to see if there was a door behind them, which did confuse some. But more importantly the dungeon was too dirty! And the menus to deep to give me a chance at actually completing the game. With some UX improvements, either (or pref both) with the menus having a way of doing same action for all(or as many as needed) of item of same type and hotkeys for using all rags and rinsing all rags would have made cleaning it all much more feasible.

Play-through with some more thoughts on that:

I’ll try and pick your brain about the input over on discord because that sound like something that would be useful to understand.

We wanted the two acts to be as distinct as possible and using plain versus detailed was one such distinction, but disregarding the vista that slippers worked really hard on, we didn’t really have the time to iron out the aesthetics of the first act as much as the second tbh.

I hadn’t thought about the boredom in that way! And I agree that’s a bit unfortunate and not intentional effect of you getting more and more auto-clickers. And trying not to spoil here, but being stress about boredom while exploring the first act very much doesn’t work as a contrast to the second act. So maybe a dedicated keybinding to toggle gaining xp:s at all by auto-clickers while exploring would have been good. The boredom going up isn’t actually that problematic though, if you start moving about or take a fight, even when maxed out, it drops quite quickly. But it is hard for the player to know that.

Thank you very much for playing and recording <3 I’ll be sipping my tea and taking notes

Oh thanks for playing and enjoying the silliness, we had quite fun ourselves at time making that!

Very glad you liked it! And happy we might have managed to make the game about as long as it ought to be, which in all honestly is so very hard.

I really very much like tiles lighting up like that and giving you a reward for mapping out the entire level! Very neat thing.

I enjoyed the combat but unfortunately I got confused at on e point and then it snowballed and there was no way for me to not die from it in the end. We’ll see later if I come back and give it another try.

There were some unfortunate keybinding things (it wasn’t possible to rebind strafe vs turn) but fortunately escape could be changed as it is quite problematic on web builds!

As always I liked the art style and the transition into battle was very good!

Play-through:

Short little crawler. I was really scared when I saw the controls, but when I decided strafing wasn’t allowed it was quite fine to walk around and there weren’t that many interactions with space and at least not the same time as using the mouse.

Interesting using more or less aim trainer type gameplay for the battles, though i was a little confused what would be armor to start and what were weak points.

Playthrough:

It is always a treat to see what you cook up and I think I see a trend towards easier to find secrets and less evil spinners lol. The graphics was neat, the dungeon layout in general very good. The most mazy bit got a little confusing and I lost track of all nooks and had to go back for one of the chests that I had missed.

I think you said that it was a struggle to make the engine do UI but you did have loads of menus still. It was quite easy to navigate around once I let go of the mouse… especially when shopping from the dragon.

I did for the most part cop out of the rock paper scissors aspect of the game and it was a bit of a pity because it got more fun when I actually started to care. Even though it seemed and OP build to just invest in strength more or less.

Very solid entry!

Play-through:

The defense card that didn’t end the turn was the only one that made sense using in the end for me. I think defense only is useful if you know you’ll defend more than the monsters hurt so you can build up, or if you get an extra turn by it.

One thing I thought about was that ranged attacks have -1 penalty for both sides when done in melee range, that way it is more fine to hurt closing the gap too, I think.

Nice cleanup crawler! There was plenty of different styles of puzzles and it kept it interesting. I did either get a bug or didn’t understand how to put stuff back on the pressure plate the first play-through so I had to restart the game and play it twice more or less. It was also quite messy how one skeleton lacked pieces for the puzzle quite a few times (hope that wasn’t intentional because it felt like a bug).

I also got caught by the spikes one too many times. At least part my own fault, but something with their cycling made it hard to memorize / predict and sometimes you couldn’t really look that well onto all spikes that you needed to actually learn / time the whole thing.

My brand new computer also really struggled around the trees, so I don’t know how older computers will fare there…

I did like the game though and liked it enough to replay just to get to the end!

Play-through:

I managed my way through the maze. One of the levels was quite big for such a tiny map view, but I still think that was the right choice!

Lovely character art and great storytelling with them and their names! The wall textures were also nice as well as the UI. The music I wasn’t too keen on and that was even before I noticed it was AI generated.

Here’s the playthrough:

Absolutely stellar voice acting! I loved it, I wanted more of it. Give me more of that voice acting!

The creatures were nice looking and had a charm. The environment didn’t fully live up to that standard but was working all the same.

Over all I liked the dungeon layouts, though the one-way doors felt a bit unnecessary at times when I was a bit lost and had to trek through the whole level again just because I missed something.

The Gloomhaven-esque card system I like, probably spent more time thinking about what I should do rather than just relaxing and running through the game a bit faster. It did take me quite some time to play through though… (I realize I left without recording my name to the highscores!) I also totally broke the system towards the end so the fights were pure one-sided.

The telegraphing of the next move felt good but needing to be next to enemy didn’t so much and it also felt quite frustrating with defence being more or less useless against ranged enemies.

Here’s the playthrough:

I’ve asked our musician, who was doing the mac builds if he has any clue. But no that’s not supposed to happen. I just checked the Linux build and it spawns you right back to the beginning. There’s a bit of monologue before that happens though. And also if you hit escape during that period you may need to hit escape again after respawning. That’s all I know for now unfortunately.

Please note that your game doesn’t follow the rules of the jam as it now stands. It correctly rotates 90 degrees on turns but it must also have grid based stepping. That means you must have designed the world with a grid in mind, say that each tile is 2x2 or 3x3 units large and when the player presses forwards the character must move that distance to place themselves in the next tile. It doesn’t have to be instant teleportation, but if the player lets go of the forward button the character cannot stop until they reach the next tile. This is opposite to the free movement that you have in your game at this point.

Unfortunately, unless you update the game before the jam ends, it will have to be disqualified.

Also the voting and listing of the games will start as the jam ends, no need to ask for plays.

I would urge you to allow keyboard input too though because at least to some of us with weak wrists clicking can be really straining and i honestly doubt i could play a crawler where i can only use the mouse to explore for more than 1-2 minutes.

i don’t quite understand what you mean, but if you jump on to the discord there are probably people there that can help you out with the details

Exactly, jam starts your time the time it says on the jam page. Please note though that the themes will be decided roughly an hour before on twitch. So the jam will probably be more or less start a few minutes early for those that want to get going.

As for contacting xidee, I don’t know what/to whom you are referring. But a lot of us participants and hosts hang around on the dungeoncrawlers.org discord server. (invite on the jam page)

Hi! It might be worth joining the discord and look in the #game-jam-teamup channel there!

Hi and welcome back! Looking forward to see what you cook up this year!

Hi! If you are using Discord consider joining the dungeoncrawlers.org server https://discord.gg/XerEseQ and head over to #game-jam-teamup too.