itch.io

This one played smooth as butter! As expected tbh. Looked fantastic. That curved shader and the bounce at the end of the movement. The music was also really good.

So if there’s any reason for me to complain really, then it would be that it is playing it a little safe. Which, I mean, it is fine, but I would have loved seeing some evolution on the spatial puzzles of last year, a bit of enemy variety and I guess more cool stuff.

Still a very, very well made game. About perfect in length, even if it leaves me wishing there was more.

Play-through with more thoughts:

I really like the setting and the quite unique game play. I was a bit confused about some parts but I did manage to get to the end after a little break. The game also crashed on me, but I’m running in a VM on linux so maybe not that strange there are hick-ups.

The style was cool, the cats cute.

More feedback and discussion on what confused me in the play-through:

No last year I was still on Windows…

Yeah with Ludum Dare during the voting period of DCjam it’s quite hectic tbh. So many games to play now! Did you do something for LD too?

Glad you liked the clicker/stanley parable-esque act of the game. It sounds as you played that to its end, which is actually a false end. There’s a way to progress to act II through interacting “correctly” with the clicker part that then hopefully also explains why you are destroying those computers.

Yeah the exclamation marks are on a steps-timer until they return. It was our fast solution for not soft-locking players in the clicker act if they were unlucky and ran out of easy enemies and still needed some.

The DPS calculation in the UI is based on rolling the outcome a few number of times, because I don’t know the math to actually calculate the expected average of this system. Way to complex. So the estimation error is unfortunately quite large in this build. We’ve fixed that already for our next version so that the error is much smaller.

Yeah that beginning is on the top of our todo list! Glad you liked it.

Thank you very much for your extensive feedback!

We totally agree that the on-boarding early in the game needs a lot of work and is something we’ll try and fix after the jam as well as balancing the difficulty so that it’s not that unforgiving early on and easy during later stages. And at least ensure fights will always end. You might have been able to spend the time upgrading your equipped weapon to max and then get somewhere with dealing damage, but I agree it shouldn’t be like that.

Very glad the creature was scary to you and honestly we sort of ran out of time and what we in pure panic made as an ending does have that implication yeah.

I liked the vibe this one gave out, the retro-futurism was strong in it. The movement was a bit on the slow side, but having a relatively small map, and being able to keep forward pressed made it maybe even a good choice as you tried to get away from the robots in the hallway.

It was a bit, or rather very, hard to know what to do. I know there was a long list of steps on the page but unfortunately as I was about to check that out I got cornered and killed.

Play-through:

I really want to try your game, but I cannot get it to launch on linux inside my linux vm using proton/wine. In the off-chance you have some idea this is what the logs output:

I think there’s a quite superb little jam-game in here, but for me there’s one major thing holding it back. To the extent that I was getting quite grumpy in the end of my recording ;) The map is huge, and it requires you to backtrack and that really, really, requires the movements to be snappy. Instead they are on the slow side. And the way (and I understand why you wanted the tweening to look more like a step) stops between each move just doesn’t work. It might have worked with that tween and a 1/2 or 1/3 movement time (or a running mode when continuously tapping stuff making movements go fast).

I like the wall and floor textures quite a bit, the dungeon layout was cool too with the small airlock-type rooms.

The dragons though, I felt like they clashed a bit with the pixelated but detailed backgrounds. Maybe a transparency with outline shader or something making them look more other would have felt better for me. Or just more detailed.

Still, I did like it enough to try three times and at least get to see the boss / a boss?

Play-through:

I very much like the art direction of the game. Cardboard and hand-drawn is a sure way to stand out.

The movement was fine, the camera perhaps a bit high up. The grid alignment felt a bit off at times, but it didn’t much hurt the experience.

I also think the game was more or less perfect in length for its content.

Play-through:

I got to the end!

I found the key-mapping quite unhinged, so it was quite the struggle to just move around. I would strongly suggest using WASD plus QE as turn as a baseline. Then have attack, doors, and looting that chest all be done with space. The camera position also made navigation problematic.

The enemy animations were funny though, and it was short enough that the input scheme didn’t cause too much problem.

Play-through with more detailed feedback:

Yeah it was a pity that I only got to see that cut-scene for a single frame :)

And I did totally feel that each enemy was at puzzle, it was just the boy’s role in the puzzle and the streamlining of the whole thing that needed work. The actual puzzle of them felt quite intuitive and nice.

Oh I never noticed that exit. Yeah, the darkness might be from my monitor, but also felt like there were invisible walls in some places around the village edge, which probably meant I needed clear ways to walk to trust them.

I think what threw me off with the inventory a bit was that the compass ability was gained when just being in the inventory.

I really like the tone you are setting with the visuals, the music and the little pew-pew sound. I do wish there was more.

Play-through:

I like how many verbs you have in the game and how you work with elevation in the maps. It does make them come to life quite a bit.

There are a host of things to pick up too, but there, I think starts my problems. I didn’t quite understand the split in the inventory, why some slots had numbers and others don’t. I got the feeling that a big part was just picking up stuff which meant no real reason to keep reading their info. Also especially since the system confused me and there seemed to only be two slots that did things to my available actions. That meant quest items maybe got stuck there and in that big heap there really wasn’t a way to try which interacts with what. And since people would go through their standard loop if you interacted with the wrong thing, it taught me not to do that.

The movement felt a bit sluggish at times and so did the fights, due to excessive queuing up and not clearing queues when bumping into things or fights ended. But the jumping and scaling and peaking over ledges was really neat.

I was also a bit fumbling grasping the world. Why did we end up at a smuggler’s den after being shipwrecked? Why was there a village just outside and everyone was fine with it? I’m not saying the questions need be answered questions, but it might have been part in becoming lost and not knowing where to continue.

Play-through (but I accidentally had chromium muted so I got no game sounds):

Could it be that you didn’t click on the XP button and buy/click on the various abilities as they unlocked. Maybe also didn’t find the health-stations? The battles play themselves out, this is true, but your job is gaining XP by clicking and improving your abilities. And also managing health.

I did like this quite a lot! I’m not one one to be very nostalgia driven so the control scheme and menu systems mostly adds friction for me without any clear benefit. But I also understand why you go for that stuff lol.

So my main issue is probably the chance to hit balancing. It didn’t feel at all right to me to have the boy miss the overwhelming majority of time. OR if that was gonna be the situation, I would have wanted an auto-block on him. Similarly, each fight, which can last quite a few rounds, I found myself repeating 1.5 intricate patterns for the sister (C3A or similar or C[heal]1) and I think I’d found the experience so much more rewarding if there was a “Repeat last” type action (for both of them). Some modernization / quality of life. Similarly, though I’m very happy there was resting, why did we need to do that ourselves? I saw no cost of resting.

I’m not sure exactly why, maybe because the map was so good, or something in the very rectangular shape of the tiles in the view-port or how the walls were painted to break up the grid-lines, made it so much more easier to navigate via the ever-present map so that I did quite a bit of map-walking. And I think that is a pity when you’ve put so much effort into the “3D” art.

I found that the firestorm spell was bugged out (but it was funny to get -800 mana/energy). It could ofc be an effect of running a windows executable through wine/proton inside a vm.

I did like the structure of the story / maps. And they were reasonably structured with some variation.

So overall, I think it was a very good entry!

Play-through:

I really loved the visuals, the little intro and the music. That was honestly what got me to want to play it. So really good work there.

The movement is a bit slow, binding A&D as turn without being able to change it for the more common strafe and having those very small tiles was quite the struggle.

The card battle seemed quite thought out and intricate but unfortunately more or less completely inaccessible to me. From being asked to buy cards without knowing that they were gonna be equipped, not knowing which equip where, not knowing what they do or their requirements. And most cards having requirements already from the start. The cards weren’t that well structured either when playing, which meant I basically said nope and just played the simplest attack.

The difficulty of the enemies and the dungeon layout also felt like it required the player to know what to do from the start to stand a chance.

So with a better easing in the complexity, UX in the UI in general, I think it could have been really neat! As I started out with it has a great presentation otherwise!

Play-through:

I’m so happy right now, that is exactly the reaction we were going for!

I really liked the choice of using or consuming the essence of slain foes. I might have misunderstood a bit how that worked tbh, but still seemed interesting :) The game played well and was perfect in length for its content.

Neat little game

Play-through:

Glad you liked it and almost got to the end. The thing that triggered you progressing to act II was buying one of the skills (with a bit delay). And I think, as with any clicker, it is a valid strategy to just buy buy stuff as they become available.

The boredom doesn’t have a special event, it scales the amount of xp each click gives. So if you got 2xp per click at 0% boredom, then you get 1xp per click at 50% and always 0xp per click at 100% boredom.

I think the problem with the voice-lines is that you’re thrown into the game and need to know everything at once from start. And we are planning on restructuring that a bit, which should ease up on the pace of them.

This game has a lot of things going for it! And a few things holding it back a bit. I really like how well thought out and coherent retro-futuristic vibe it sends off. The very cool animations on the terminals, the robot animations, the weapons… All very good.

I have some UX issues though:

There really should have been hotkey bindings 1-3 for the different attacks so that no mouse was needed.

The way the robot almost always had a sliver of health left should probably be changed. Also I didn’t feel like there was any progression in the weapons. And since the fights are sort of silly, I think it would made sense to have 4 wacks with first weapon 3 with second and 2 with final be the average. I’ve not been a fan of most rock paper scissors systems I’ve encountered in the jam yet but it could maybe be something here. If the robot telegraphed some stance and you get a bonus or small negative effect from not hitting. That with non-turnbased combat could make it quite engaging.

The camera placement in the player controller wasn’t really optimal. It makes sense from a physical point of view, but the genre expects and sort of requires it moved back a bit to help with navigation. (I talk more on this in my video)

Overall though, a very pleasant game. I even had to play it twice because it crashed!

Play-through:

I think this game has a lot of cool things going on. Letting you be in charge of toggling on UI, I like very much.

I did like the very simple and flat graphics too. Well worked out.

I did have some issues though, I didn’t start systematically clearing all things per level as the game and instructions hinted me towards doing a little and running to next floor. The way the teleporter color and floor level color didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other, I assumed they were just in a fix sequence and that the color of the teleporter had no meaning. The map also had blue things that I don’t know what they were this made me even less prone to reflect on that you could actually determine where you were gonna go between levels for the longest time.

Which caused another problem, I probably missed some soul in some corner, but where I have no clue. I think I spent something like 10 minutes in the end without finding any new data or soul. And that, I think comes down to a bit of UX, maybe missing ability/program, but also level design / game design.

You have quite a lot of space that we need to crawl (also without strafing, increasing the number of button presses substantially) and that becomes a problem if you have to find all parts of the soul. Even though it makes sense that if the soul is fractured into 10 pieces that the player needs to find, that there be 10 pieces in the level. But I’d say it should probably be 12-15 pieces, and you just despawn the remaining or transition to the conclusion as soon as the last piece is found.

I did overall like my stay with the game, just wish I could have seen it to the end.

Play-through:

While I recognize that is is more of a start and sketch upon which a game would have been built, at this time it breaks a host of rules in the jam:

• There’s no stat that the player actions can influence (think health as the simplest go-to example)
• We take the concept of a conflict very lightly but there’s no challenge to the player. It doesn’t have to be enemies, but there’s not even a lock-picking mini-game or other adverse situation
• There seems to be no win or loss conditions

There’s also as far as I see any attempt to follow any of the four themes.

Aside from that the there are some nice looking glass effects and stuff in there.

You do have a bug in your grid where the player is on the edge of the grid in one dimension and in the expected center in the other.

Play-through:

Hi, so I played through the game and does have some serious issues.

If we imagine that this game actually conforms to the rules, then the grid size must be in the range 10-20cm. There’s no absolute minimum size for a grid but when we are talking human-sized protagonist anything smaller than 1m is probably gonna have a really really good reason why it is so small. In general it is a really bad idea to ask the physics system to move the character around, and instead use tweening to move the player character from per-deterimined grid positions to next position.

I also don’t see any attempt at implementing the theme. What you describe is anachronism and while retro-futurism perhaps necessarily is anachronistic, putting a modern tool back in time is not retro-futurism. Neither is retro vibes.

Play-through with more comments:

I think the game started out on a good premiss but I found a parts of the UI quite confusing, and the balancing off. I played to the last / boss system and it took me over an hour to get there and in that final place there were no change in enemy difficulty that I could discern. So the fights had been near trivial, or at least I’ve been using the same strategy over and over since the start and, which meant that unfortunately there was no real progression in the game. The fights did take a while to go through too, if they were faster then it wouldn’t have mattered so much. Or say if I could have voluntarily not cleared the room and started on the terminal and then gotten all mobs at the same time. That could have been something.

Also having a star-map to select the path is a neat idea but that requires two things to become fun to me. 1) That locations are markedly different from each other and 2) That I have some prior information about what they are or what the risk will be. Otherwise it is an illusion of choice rather than an actual choice.

So I think a couple of days of balancing and streamlining at it and then it could be a really nice experience.

Play-through:

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.