itch.io

For the UI scaling, one option could be to just scale by integer and then pad with black or other suitable color around the game

But yeah I think you did great especially given the constraints you have!

Oh sorry to hear you didn’t manage to figure out the word game. I put a spoiler on the game page now for how it works if you are interested. With all letters gone though, it would be rather tough no matter what :)

I liked the UI design a lot, and the overworld fog of war exploration was really cool.

I feel like there was something fundamental about the game that I didn’t understand and that left me wandering the overworld looking for places to exchange some gold and not much else there to do except wait for the night to pull me down. And with that, I of course didn’t survive too long.

There was also something with the combat where I didn’t fully understand the sequencing aspect of it and that it was spread out so much over the screen that made it hard to follow. And most times I was either trying very hard to avoid all battles because there was no reward to them, or I was overpowered and they could basically have been skipped to not disrupt the exploring.

I’m not at all super critical. There were interesting mysteries with the rings and that castle, but with my general struggles I unfortunately didn’t make any progress towards unraveling them. There was a lot of content and things ran very smoothly and I did have fun playing.

Playthrough:

I very much loved how you had to craft to get a compass and a map ui (and the more usual things like health potions and such).

It was a quite large tutorial area, and when I suffered a crash, I didn’t do it again but just started with the main game. I was a bit scared that skipping tutorial (as it almost allowed you full gear) would off-balance the game, but it was forgiving enough, which I much appreciate.

It was nice to work around the patterns of the different enemies to avoid taking damage and it was fun exploring the maps. They were a bit large though and since there wasn’t much variation on textures within each zone, it got quite hard to navigate. Which for me was solved by looking a whole lot at the map. So I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to either make the levels a bit smaller or have a bit more texture variation within the levels to assist the player a little.

In the end I got another crash after having gotten quite far, I think. So unfortunately I did miss out on the end.

Playthrough:

Thank you so much for the video. Helps a lot. And hurt :) so see you struggle in that big room. I think I need to make the initial puzzle to get up onto the floating islands a bit easier or at least make the activators stand out quite a bit more.

I also agree, I should increase the trail some more. Don’t know if you figured out the mechanic fully that walking back on your trail you don’t loose health.

Very glad you made it to the end after two restarts! (I should really make it possible to skip that intro too)

it was easy enough to just ignore the UI after a while, so it didn’t bother me too much. But would of course be a good post-jam fix. I think both Unity and Godot at least have simple things you can more or less just check to have UI scale with screen size.

I managed one play-through and got 8 enemies. The visual effects when hitting and and especially hitting into a fire were great. The fires were really nice themselves.

There was some issues with performance though with the game freezing up without any apparent reason why it did so.

A replay option would have been nice too.

I didn’t quite understand how to use the button and the game staggered when first I tried to I didn’t dare use it. I guess that made my run an only kicks run or something :)

Playthrough:

It took me a death to mushrooms to figure out that I should not touch them at all, at least not until much later. I enjoyed the game all through to the end. In particular, I liked the way the secret walls were introduced. Very good level design there.

The danger of the mushrooms could perhaps have been done a bit nicer so that the player could recuperate after attacking them too early. Now you sort of had to restart.

Then they added a very good tension in the puzzle-rooms where you had to avoid them. Only thing there was that in the one where you had to get a key too, that they key was a bit too hard to spot.

There were some obvious problems with UI scaling too, which can be seen in the video.

All in all though a very nice game.

Playthrough:

Glad you liked it and got to everyone’s favorite, the credits!

And you are absolutely right, I hadn’t at all considered running out of health as you step into the same tile as the letter trader NPC entity. It should of course give you the good exchange rate!

You made it very far, the wind room was indeed the last room, after that just a small corridor and the ending.

I was just fixing the code for my audio manager to have dialogues queue up properly, which I’m hoping was the problem with the overlap you were referring to. There’s one instance where you can get multiple movable blocks making their sound at the same time and it’s not sounding great too, but that I haven’t gotten to yet.

Glad you had more fun than anticipated :D A bit curious what you anticipated and why :)

At first the game was really scary and stressful because of the bump into to activate made me think that you needed to bump into enemies to do the attacks. And with the fight speed, that fast… well as I said scary.

It did feel much more balanced when I figured out it was auto-battling. Also when I got to the upgrading. The loop felt good there.

There were some bugs, some walls missing/having the wrong direction. The equipment disappearing if you click on it when upgrading. Stuff like that. But it didn’t really affect the game logic fortunately.

Overall a nice entry!

Playthrough:

Very short little game, but it had the basics. I also like looking at the walls from the side. Very cool effect.

There was a bit of a problem with the camera placement, too far forward, but with this short game it didn’t matter much. But if you make another longer game, consider moving the camera back a bit so that the player can see the side walls of the current tile.

Playthrough:

Ah that was why combat was so relatively easy and the final enemy behaved so differently when I experimented and accidentally made them see me as a result?

Also you very much managed to make scarcity a thing, just scarcity of inventory space :D

Oh so if I didn’t understand the super speed solution, I would have to backtrack all the way? Or would it create a teleporter of sorts to let me retry? Because it seems quite evil otherwise…

It was a cool little idea of throwing all that you find at the enemies. The controls were really hard to manage unfortunately (non-typical use placement of strafe vs turns and that S didn’t back up). It did make the enemies much harder than intended due to me pressing the wrong buttons all the time.

There were some oddities with the enemy behaviors too in when they were allowed to attack and when you could wait for them to move closer and when you couldn’t.

I think I might have gotten to the final boss? Maybe? But unfortunately I died. In part because I had to turn around to face it. And that I think was a bit unexpected too, that turning cost a “turn”. Same for accidentally walking into them or a wall, i.e. attempting a move that wasn’t allowed.

But I did enjoy playing the game, placing all upgrades on a single type of item. As I said, a really interesting battle system that could be expanded and elaborated on.

Playthrough:

I did have a whole lot of fun playing. I unfortunately ran into a bug twice so I didn’t quite make it to the end of the game, but I was quite close I hear.

I very much liked the use of the assets. In particular in the green zone with the vines hanging down. And the music/audio use was also really great most of the time. Could have done with sound music in the title and at the start of the game too though.

There was a whole lot of loot. Quite stressful inventory wise to have to let so much go. And not knowing how far it was to the next shop, do you keep the gold or keep something you can use along the way? It was fun, though I really really wanted another row for the inventory. At least one more. Please!

I kind of didn’t fully understand the dice combat, though I also feel like I didn’t need to. In part because it was quite complex and with live fights there was no time to really grasp what was happening. But it wasn’t much of a problem, just find weapons and armor that had more dice to them was good enough rule.

So all in all very nice game. Had fun playing even though I didn’t get to see the end.

Playthrough:

Half the alphabet must have made the word game very hard towards the end :)

As for the floating islands, I do agree it was a bit of a problem the tiles that activate the moving blocks are way too discrete before stepping on them. Or I could have used the helper cat a bit more, don’t know if you encountered it. But yeah, should have had something pulling the attention to them.

It’d be funny if the credits is what people like them most. :)

That was a wonderful game indeed! Great that there were instructions on the page about what the different things did but even more so that you could sort out my confusion about how the level up system worked because it was truly a very hard game to play without leveling up anything. It honestly might have helped there if the game didn’t start with giving me points to level up. Or if there was a tooltip explaining what to do. I was trying to find a character screen button or just click on the very eye-catching blinking thing. Maybe one solution if the person doesn’t understand and hovers the 40 pts or whatever they have is that it stops blinking when you hover it and instead the plus 1 / 5:s start blinking then? For now just put a note on the page so people don’t play like I did.

It would also have been nice with a fullscreen button on the windows client, but as I needed to also see the instructions on what tool did what, it was probably fine to have a limited size.

The game looked great. I liked the style of the hacker areas and dream areas a lot. And the audio use was also very very good.

I did encounter a bug or two while playing but it’s probably easiest explained by watching the video

The quest story got a bit confusing but I gather you ran out of time there.

A blast to play all in all.

(I also got confused about how the pause button worked on OBS so might be a bit weird a bit in there)

It did seem very maverick to use AI to code the game and I think it does shine through. Still very intriguing though to see what you managed to coax it into making. It was a pity that most abilities couldn’t be equipped. Only walking abilities as far as I managed. Passive skills seemed to work but active skills didn’t do a thing or couldn’t be activated.

The battles did take quite some time too, which of course wouldn’t have mattered as much (and would have shortened them) if I could have used abilities. Right now it would have been better if I could have pressed an auto-battle button and let them run out themselves.

The exploration with the frequency of the battles and their length meant I didn’t really get a sense of progress in the world for the hour I spent playing.

But I did spend an hour, meaning there are interesting ideas that went in, if only the AI was a bit better at realizing it. :)

The game has a lot of interesting parts to it. Overland map travel, tactical isometric combat and of course the crawling.

It did feel quite easy though, with loads of resources I hardly needed to use. Only the early fights offered a bit resistance and then it got very easy.

I did like the 3d effects on the sprites a lot. Gave much substance to the enemies and buildings and such. Would have been nice if the enemies made sure the were facing me as much as possible though.

It also was a nice plot twist there on the far away lands.

Managing to make an online game for a jam is very impressive. And the hour I played flew by! I didn’t say too much while playing mainly because a lot of attention goes elsewhere when playing with someone else. So recording will be quite silent…

The dungeons were nicely structured, but of course they were a bit samey in how their geometries worked. But zones/environments/rooms in them did feel varied. Just that there perhaps wasn’t a great difference in the topology between a lvl1 and lvl6 dungeon.

I died a couple of times because I got complacent and then failed to notice health was getting low. So maybe there could have been something warning about that a little more.

Once I understood how the hats and books worked it was very nice stuff collecting and selling and upgrading. I didn’t manage to pet the cat though, that’s a minus! :)

Playing multiplayer worked very well in general, of course there were some “it’s not your turn yet” moments but it didn’t really bother.

So overall a very good game!

Should say though, that the depth of RPG actually required here is very low, so there’s no need to do skills, inventories and the like unless you want to. But there need to be some sort of stat such as e.g. health and a self or a group of protagonists.

If you have a rules question, the most efficient way to get a response is probably to head on over to the Discord server and post in the #game-jam-chat, but you can also post questions here and we’ll try to answer them as quickly as possible.

Thanks for the report, I don’t easily spot it in the code, but I took note to have a look after the Ludum Dare voting period has ended.

Thanks for the report. I will look into it after the Ludum Dare voting period has ended.

Glad you liked it. I’ll look into the previous button. And what might have happened. Might it have been during the bonus levels or one of the first seven regular levels?

That is correct, the boss themself isn’t an anomaly. Never thought of that being possible to confuse. I should write it down. I’m working on adding more easier to spot anomalies which hopefully will balance things out.

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

It’d be a bit interesting to know what anomalies you were struggling to find. Which of course is hard for you to say, but if you are up for it, the save is located in AppData under Unknown Incubator/Escape Work/GameSave_0.json and has a field “anomalies” under which there’s a list of “missedAnomalies”. It’d be a massive spoiler so DM me on discord if you feel like digging it up / if you didn’t start a new game that overwrote the save.

I’ll probably remove most instructions on the itch page and hope that the updated version with a slideshow in game is sufficient information, but it’s a good point that it is very bad if people don’t check the manager’s office. You’d also get a voice-line in the post-jam version if you forgot to check some room before leaving.

I’m a bit hesitant about setting the forgiving mode as default, to be honest. I’ll have take a think about it. I’ve added anomaly difficulty setting, but as there are only 13 or so of them, it’s not that many “easy” and the game will prioritize novel over solved anomalies. But I think I rather add more easier and obvious ones for the next release after the post-jam version.

Very cool graphics!

I liked the atmosphere and the style of the game. I knew it wasn’t fully working but I wanted to try just because it looked so different.

The pacing in the beginning felt a bit off, too much text in one go / too long wait before I got to start to play. I think it could have been broken up into parts.

The battle was a bit awkward since there wasn’t that much need for player choice it might have been better as an auto-battler or at least let me swiftly input all of my characters choices and then have the round play out.

But yeah, it’s a good start for a dungeon crawler and it’s a pity you didn’t have the time to make it more of a complete game.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/6S8BmqosJ6Y

I liked this game. The environment, especially the destructible parts was really cool.

I’m not very convinced about the spelling gimmick in its current form. I think all it does right now is force you to remember 3 words and keep switching between mouse and keyboard. Also, because the game is turn-based, there’s really no tension to it. I’m not really sure what would make the spelling game for the spells fun while keeping it turn-based. But it would require some sort of challenge. I think in its current format it would do better with three more buttons for the three types of spells.

Exploring was fun though, and the map was about the right size and right complexity. I was getting a little scared about getting lost towards the end though. But then I stumbled on the goal. However, I encountered a bug which prolonged my playthrough with about 15 minutes. The destructable walls are indestructible if there’s loot on the floor of the tile!

So pacing was entirely upended for me thanks to that bug, but still I liked the game.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/4wAymbAWGmo

Neat little game!

I liked the style and it was an interesting locked door / key puzzle once I understood the instructions. Was a bit confused first and some might have been fixed with wording, but also placing of the instructions on the tile you were supposed to stand on for the first such door could also have helped.

Fighting was nice too, the boss got bugged though so it was very easy, though it did start out a bit too unfair with a huge amount of egg thrown at me before I could get my bearing.

I think its door could have been triggered by stepping off the stones onto the mud/soil.

Movement and exploration was nice and the hidden walls had about the right difficulty!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/qp1oZ50Llnw

Fixing instant step is on the todo list, the problem is that the manger shouldn’t run at the same speed as the player but the player should also not have it super easy just spamming 10 instant step forwards and leave the manager in its spot confused about where the player disappeared to.

Glad you liked it and thank you very much for finding the false anomaly so that I could fix it! The boss might have been slightly inspired by Lumbergh.

Unfortunately I had absolutely no chance in the rhythm game. It both needed more visual feedback on when I was supposed to press and it had much to narrow tolerances on what constitutes as “on the beat” for it to be accessible to me.

So I hardly got to experience anything of the game.

The visuals looked neat, especially the effect when activating the computer, and I was intrigued by the promise of the crashing relationship.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/sFfE7_GjHz0

Nice game!

I liked the variation star map, fight and then rushed crawl. Movement worked well and the layout of the ship was nice. If it was a longer game where you were to loot several ships, I think it would have been too harsh to require all treasures before leaving, and in fact even now it might have been more compelling to allow the player to leave whenever and let them decide how much they dared to push their luck.

The game started rather abruptly, and could have done well to use the nice graphic you have on the itch page as a title page before actually starting. The grey win/loss screens the same.

But I think it is an interesting starting point that allows for a compelling loop of flying around the galaxy, getting into battles and looting the downed ships. But I think it needs looping around that. With all the ships flying around the star map it feels a bit odd that we pick one at random and are done as soon as we’ve plundered it.

I was also too focused on the dogfight to really have awareness to spare on what they were saying.

But again, a nice little game.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/BBbGJH44FUQ

The game had a quite interesting style to it, but was extremely short, especially compared to the non-skippable intro. First time I did of course want to read the story, though the play instructions could really have been left out of there. But since I just walked the right way and got the ending I wanted to see if I missed something, but waiting all that time in the intro again was way too much.

The little I got to notice of the game before it was over, I was surprised that the movement was so very slow while the turn was normal speed. The key was kind of hard to read too in its sort of exploded state, it felt like it would have looked better from above.

The music is really loud on the title screen too.

It would have been cool to see what you could have built with that particular high contrast style.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/B8hVOfoYGdo

I really dig the graphics, and though I didn’t fully understand the rules of the mini-game/fight I think it was cool, the part of it I did understand.

There might have been instructions in the too fast scrolling initial text. I think it would be good to copy it and have it on the itch page too. At least the parts that matter for gameplay. Or available in-game on a button press.

The exploration without strafing and turning on AD together with wall rendering bugs and invisible walls that I could only back through unfortunately made the exploration a bit uncomfortable.

I did finally manage to figure out that numbers 1-4 could select the various abilities. That was absolutely essential for playing the game in my opinion. I managed a few fights without even taking damage, which was cool, but also since there was no obvious way to speed up the fights… they also got a bit tedious, that is I think they are too long.

In the end I died very abruptly on my second run while I felt like I should at least been blocking. And since the game closes immediately it felt like it must have done something wrong in its calculations. Especially since some previous fights seemed to have ended before they should, but in my favor, the “the game was unfair” felt reasonable. Waiting a bit, preferably for user input after death, before closing the game would have been very good.

The enemies and their animations were really cool though. And as I said in the beginning I really like the style.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/PLpgT92uYv4

Fantastic art style, nice atmosphere and cool concept for the fights too.

The game desperately needs some tutorials about how it works though or at least a description on the game page. It took me a whole fight until I started to understand it. And that made the fight extremely tedious since the balancing is completely around needing to build combos. I only discovered the redraw button after I accidentally locked a die.

But even when I got to a decent understanding of how the counting worked, I still didn’t understand the math in it at all. The multipliers don’t add up in any sensible way, and since we don’t see the dice when seeing the score it becomes very confusing. And also slow. I’d really want the summary to be on the same screen and still be able to see the dice.

The other problem with the fight is that I can’t inspect my bag, and that means I don’t know really what might or might not be worth locking. It’s fine to require me keeping track of what has been drawn, I suppose, but at least between fights I should be able to see the contents. And even better be able to select some to not be included / build my deck.

It is still a very interesting game to play, but it feels like relatively smaller adjustments guiding the player in, giving a bit more information in the fights, but mostly making the fights much faster (which they would be if we could get more multipliers too) with less clicks and waits after each attack, then it would have been quite a large jump in how fun and engaging it is.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/-C9ilt9MLy4

I liked the entry! I didn’t make it though, a ghost fox got me even though it looked to me as the game had just registered an attack of mine that should have killed it. And it felt too large of an ask to play it all again from the start. A checkpoint system when entering each zone would have been very welcome and would probably have meant that I had tried the last zone one more time.

The style was great, including the effects. And I liked the movement and camera too. The game could perhaps have been kinder and ensure that the first normal chicken you encounter in a new region always is the one with the map. But it wasn’t too hard navigating without for a while either.

The rhythm bit felt quite good, and I’m very bad at rhythm so don’t listen too much to my ramblings about if it was on the beat or not. But I do think there’s something odd, or odd going on with the ripost. It seems to disappear when I press one of the attacks that is ahead of it in the queue so to say. And that doesn’t feel right.

In general though very solid and nice looking game.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/jUwXEvk4sS4

I think this game was really neat. The fighting was relatively simple, but the tension from the water made it very interesting. The levels were quite simple too, but again, the water and the setting made it make quite a lot of sense that it was like that.

I would perhaps have wanted at least the first level to have much slower water, at least in the beginning to give the player time to acquaint themselves and look at the surroundings without just thinking “is that the exit, where’s the exit” If the game actually tracks what the water level is when you climb each stairs and remembers it for the next, then there could be a special rule that just fast forwards the time so the game doesn’t become all to easy for those who just beeline to the ladder on the first level.

I think the difficulty worked out perfectly for me. A bit stressed there on the last blocking enemy before reaching the deck. The switch up with the boss fight was also really neat.

Yeah, I think I liked the game a lot.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/PRXKOQTWZ-Q

Very cool and unique style in this entry! I like it a lot. I think the simple combat was interesting and engaging too.

But I did have some problems, first and obvious thing was the errors in where walls and such were rendered or not. It unfortunately made it very confusing to figure out how the dungeon layout was.

The way that enemies didn’t show up also if they were on a diagonal also made combat very unforgiving since you could be attacked from a side out of the blue. The combat also was a game of attrition as far as I understood it and that makes such surprises even more problematic than they would have been if there was a health regen or eggs we could eat to gain a bit back.

It’s fine to not have health regen, but I think I would have needed those things fixed and added AD strafing with QE turning to stand a chance to reach the end. It’s also important that as a player, I feel like it was me that failed, but these things combined made me blame the game for my deaths, which isn’t good for wanting to try another time.

Over all though, very nice style and an interesting core mechanic.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/XN07Cymbm8I