itch.io

I think that the best way to make progress on those ideas is to make small proof-of-concept versions of them first.  I did not know how to make a platformer, or an FPS, or an RPG, so I made little ones.  The RPG plus the other experience I had gained by that point was enough of a springboard to start making a bigger RPG, which is something that I had tried and failed at years earlier.  I used game jams as self-leverage to make those games, but you don't have to.

There probably aren't very many comprehensive tutorials for more involved and specific games, but you should be able to find plenty for their individual components.  I'm sure there are plenty of guides for inventory systems, click-to-move controls, basic idle mechanics, various camera perspectives, and so on, which can be glued together into the the kinds of games you talked about.  A lot of your programming experience does help here, you just need some practice with the Unity layer.  For example, an inventory is just a data structure with a user interface; Unity's role would be in displaying the UI and detecting the user's input, so that you can translate that input into commands for the back-end data controller.

There are also some patterns and algorithms that are very commonly used in games, but not so much in, say, enterprise web development.  A* is one example that comes to mind, which is a basic pathfinding algorithm.  You're bound to come across those when you need them, so you'll pick them up over time.

Hooray, nice progress!

Fighting fascism is something I personally think should be on everyone's agenda (obviously not with violence), but I can understand if its too provocative for a store page. Thanks for the tip, I will try and see if removing it will help.

Honestly, I disagree with removing it.  I'd leave it there.  If it's core to your game's message, which it seems like it is, I don't think it would really be beneficial to hide it; it's going to become obvious pretty quickly once somebody starts playing.  Someone who is turned off by that would just stop playing right there anyway, but putting it right up front might actually garner more interest.  If you feel strongly about it, then if anything, double down on it.  This is your game and your creative vision, after all.

I do think the #fightfascism hashtag is unnecessary since that's purely a social media thing, but you could call the game KILL ALL FASCISTS and I wouldn't think it's too much.  Of course, others' mileage on that may vary.

Visibility is zero on Itch unless you're one of the top games of all time on the site, so don't worry about that.  There's not much you can do about it inside of Itch itself.  None of mine get much attention or have much better than 1% CTR, either.

The game does look really cool and I'd like to try it out when I have some time, but I do think the page could be improved.  The following are what stuck out to me as opportunities:

• It's very long.  For a start, I can see that you have an in-game tutorial, so I don't think you need the instructions on the game page.  Offload these into a text file or a thread in your forum.  Also, consider using a bulleted list (or more than one, with headers) to highlight the main points.  For example, the companion seems to be a key feature, but it's buried in the middle of the page.  I'm undecided as to whether the illustrations are helpful here, but they do take up a lot of space.
• You have a lot of mixed bold and italic faces, which I find hard to read.  I would suggest using regular typeface most of the time.
• I don't think you need the outside links here.  These can go on your creator page.  Definitely remove the plain Google Drive link; it's not even clear what this is for.  If there's documentation that you need to include, either include it with the game download itself or add it separately to the downloads section.
• A 13-minute gameplay video is fine to have as a supplement, but I think your key trailer should be no longer than a minute and just rapidly hit the highlights.  If someone is just browsing and hits on your game, that is probably what they want to watch.
• The screenshots look a bit similar at a first glance.  A short trailer could probably take the place of the GIFs, and I think the rest would work better without the logo and subtitle.  Maybe include something else that would break up the series of images a bit and communicate something different about the theme and gameplay, like a still of the propaganda tower tutorial at 0:56 in the video, or a shot of an inventory/subscreen, if there are any.

Stick with the second one.  The first is full of those distracting little AI mistakes that add up to a jumbled and confusing picture, the most obvious being the floating torso on the left, which also makes it hard to tell which parts of the image are intentional and which are also mistakes.  The central character also doesn't resemble the in-game character portrait at all, which I realize was common in the 1990s, but I think it's an additional negative.  The second one is clean and has a more sensible composition, and being drawn from a real photograph makes it more personal.  The two images are very different in what they attempt to convey, though.  If you really want to use the first one, maybe just use it as a guide for your own pixel art scene.

But personally, I would always recommend just avoiding AI-generated assets.  If you're not skilled at art, work within your limitations.  I am not an artist either, so my cover images are very simple and mostly composited from in-game assets and screenshots.  It's not glamorous, but it works for me.

The goal of a cover image of course is to get people to click, but using AI for it is a gamble.  You may get more views with a glossier (at first glance) cover image, but you will also turn off some people once they realize you're using AI assets.  Whether that tradeoff is a net positive, I don't know.

Minerva Labyrinth - a dark magical girl dungeon crawler. Influenced by Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Experience games.

Thank you for taking the time to try the demo and comment, it means a lot.  I'm glad you enjoyed it, and I'm trying to make the rest of the game even better.

I don't know, but I doubt I could, even if I tried.  I have fairly narrow taste, so many if not most genre trends do not appeal to me.  I can't make a game out of an idea that I don't like or see any potential in.  That would be a miserable way to spend my free time.

The type of RPGs that are my main focus were in fashion 40 years ago, but now almost no one will give them the time of day.  I will be lucky if I even make my Steam deposit back.  But since I am not doing this for a living, I can afford to ignore the trends.

Minerva Labyrinth

I am not remotely an expert, but I use LMMS with a handful of different sound fonts.  LMMS is kind of overwhelming to start, though, so if you are an absolute beginner, Bosca Ceoil is an easy way to get started.

So, what do the points actually do?  Do they factor into placement on the front page?  If so, what keeps the front page from being dominated by long-standing popular games, like the Itch "top-rated" tab?  I see a mix of old and new entries on the front page.

I'm guessing the food is a regular collider and rigid body?  If so, the stutter is probably from the food applying force to the player, since the player is basically running into a wall.  Making the food collider a trigger and removing the rigid body from it should get rid of the stutter, if I remember Unity correctly (double check me on that).  A trigger is just a collider that doesn't obstruct other colliders, so it's good for scripting "events" vs. hard physical objects.

There are a bunch of confusing rules about collisions, so the Unity manual is a key resource and reference for those.

Cool, nice job getting a new game made already.  The concept is amusing and the assets all fit together pretty well.  One thing that I think could be improved would be to prevent the food pickups from interrupting the player's movement (maybe with triggers?).

I have trouble relating to most of this post, because I don't make experimental games or what you refer to as "playable essays."  I make games that are, for the most part, very traditional.  They will not win Games for Change awards or be featured in museums, because they are not that type of game.  Your games seems to have (eventually) drawn attention and acclaim specifically for being outside the typical expectations of games; mine absolutely never will, because they are not, and are not intended to be.

Thus, I'm not sure if this post is really meant for people like me.  I'm not an artist or transgressivist.  I am just a DIY-er and bedroom coder making things that I want to make, and what I want to make is not fundamentally different from things that were made 40 years ago.

Ironically, being "outside the typical expectations of games" has itself become an expectation of indie games.  There is a narrative - and I am not accusing you of pushing it here, only pointing out that it exists - that that is what indies games are, or at least should be, and that all others are lesser things, not True Art and not Truly Indie.  It is the exact mirror of the narrative that Real Games are only about testing raw mechanical skill, and I feel pressured, frustrated, and dismissed by it.

Despite being broadly traditionalist, I feel like my work doesn't really fall into a comfortable audience niche.  It falls more between the cracks, but not for any high-minded reasons.  Consider my current project, my sixth released game and the first that I will be releasing commercially.  I expect genre purists to reject it because it doesn't look or feel authentic to the DOS era, while many more will reject it because my art and sound is in no way professional-quality.  Yet it also doesn't lean into being ugly.  Players and the press love deliberately garish experiments in haute shittiness, but this isn't that, either.  I tried my best, and I'm pleased with how much I have managed to do and how my skills have improved since my last project (which I was once told was too ugly to even play, an accusation that I expect to hear again).  It just still won't be good enough for most people, who expect either Space Funeral or Secret of Mana, but not something in between.

It is also not the kind of game that the gaming press thinks is sexy enough to write about.  This is partly due again to my DIY assets, but partly because literally the entire genre in which it exists is completely snubbed by the press as unworthy of attention, aside from the occasional photogenic novelty, or one-off resurrections of once-important franchises.  Even flagship releases from staple studios like Starfish and Experience, or even from otherwise widely acknowledged publishers like NIS, are ignored except by niche sites.  Mine has no chance whatsoever.

I don't pull social media stunts, either.  Some people know how to bait the gullible press into covering something they otherwise wouldn't.  I don't know how to do that, nor do I really want to.  It's a kind of cynical showmanship that I find distasteful, and a waste of time and energy that I could be spending on making a better game.

There is one web community that normally appreciates this type of game, but they will not appreciate how I've gone about it.  I don't care if they like it, though.  I'm not here to please those people, even though a crude rendering of a "target audience" would probably center on them.

You draw a distinction between "art" and "entertainment made to sell," but what about just plain entertainment?  My reasons for making these games is neither to please an audience nor to make art, but I still want people to play and enjoy what I make.  I care a lot more about whether someone enjoys the experience than I do about whether they think it has artistic merit or an important message.  However, I also didn't really make this for a target audience.  The only concessions I have made are interface and tutorial features; the rest is uncompromisingly what I, personally, wanted to make.  I am completely unmoved by Tiktok fads, genre trends, or the Steam bestsellers list.  If I am not making what I want to make, then what am I even doing?

Aside from that, this game ended up being very personal to me.  A lot of my struggles and darker thoughts are reflected here, partly because the years I've been working on it and the years leading up to it have been some of the most difficult of my life.  In that sense, it is written honestly and without much concern as to who might want to listen.  It actually didn't start out this way, but it morphed into this form because to write it any other way would have been dishonest.  The game told me what it needed to be; I just listened.

So, where does this leave me?  If we look at financial metrics, I am obviously failing.  Since I work on this as a hobby and not as a job, it is sustainable, if slow.  Technically, then, I suppose I am sustainably failing, but I'm not sure this is quite what you mean.  Despite being a passion project, and as authentic as it possibly can be, it will still not stand out in any of the ways that you stress here.

I still agree that it is important to stake out space in gaming in opposition to fascism.  Fascists not only want but need to control all media.  If gaming wasn't an important medium, they wouldn't be here.  My games may not individually matter, but each game that I make is (I hope) one more brick in collectively building a more decent space.

Good to see new progress, looking forward to the demo!

This is neat! I haven't seen a Lemmings-like in a long time.  ETA on levels 5-100?

If you are interested in playtesting, that would be great!

Very cool updated take on the Secret Agent style of platformer.  Great job.

Thanks, not everything is perfect, but so far I have been fairly pleased with the results.

Hi, sorry for the delayed response.  The dark effect is a group of quads arranged around the player with a dithering shader applied, and a solid black one at the furthest distance.  When layered on top of each other, they create the effect of diminishing light.  They move with the player, but do not rotate.

I tried using stock lighting effects for this, but it just didn't give the effect I wanted.

I know it's a little old at this point, but I'm trying out your A3 demo.  It's very cool so far.  The dungeon seems pretty large, and the fast-paced combat is reminiscent of Might and Magic III.  I'm looking forward to seeing more.

Thanks - I had some trouble converting the shaders at first since I'm not very good at those, but Godot is more streamlined than Unity in that regard, so it worked out.

Thanks, I appreciate the encouragement.  It's not a fun spot to be in, but I am sure I will feel a lot better when it's done.

Glad it's going well for you so far.  Keep up the good work.

Cute and bite-sized, just in time for ghost season.  I wish it was longer, as it felt a little abbreviated towards the end, but you fit a lot into the jam period.

I liked the little bit of interactivity as it gave the experience a bit more bulk.  I particularly enjoyed browsing the ghost wiki.  This added a lot more interest than plain narration.

The art is cute and very clean, and the ghost being totally silent was a nice touch.  I did think it was a little odd that Penny Bun always seems to have the lights turned off, but it's spookier that way.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!

I disagree that this is a cost-saving fad from big-money publishers, or even a fad at all.  It was very common if not the norm for many years across many genres, especially when storage space for frivolous text was severely limited, and digitized speech was an expensive novelty that sounded terrible anyway.  Over the years, text became trivial to include, while voice acting is still expensive.  If anything, protagonists that speak have become more common since the early days, not less, especially in games that aren't fully voiced.  There's no real financial incentive not to write some plain text; it's done for stylistic reasons.  Meanwhile, in fully-voiced games, you may have the budget to voice, say, 500 lines of dialogue; the pressure here is to keep the total script to 500 lines, not to silence the protagonist specifically.  At most, doing so might be marginally convenient.  It certainly isn't a bullet point feature to boost sales.

I don't see any evidence that there has been a large-scale shift in the industry towards protagonists who should speak no longer doing so.  That's a very strange claim to make.

Looks great! Congratulations on the release!

This looks cool.  I will have to try it when I get a chance.  "Dungeon" might not be the most distinctive title, though.

Thank you for your fair comments.  I agree that the last level does not put up enough resistance, for the reasons you state.  I am trying to avoid this scenario in my next game, although balancing that one is a much bigger task.

Thank you!

Minerva Labyrinth

 Have fun. The key to staying motivated on your game project long term is to make a game that you want to play. Don't let others kill your motivation by suggesting game mechanics and features that you're just not interested in.

I want to expand on this, because it's important to look at feedback the right way.  I use two rules of thumb:

1) When it comes to things like accessibility, usability, clarity of instruction, interface design, display and input compatibility, and things like that, listen to your users.  That doesn't mean you have to do everything they say, but you should at least pay attention to it, because user experience tends to be a big blind spot for developers.  You understand your application inside and out, but your players don't.  It's also natural to design around our own capabilities and not fully consider what others need or prefer.

2) When it comes to mechanics, gameplay design, writing, art style, and so on - all the creative aspects - consider feedback carefully.  Ask yourself "is this actually a weak spot that I can improve on?" or "if I make this change, will it bring me closer to my design goals, or not?" If the answer is yes, then it's probably a good idea.  If the answer is no, you should probably ignore it.  It's your game, so make it the way you want.  That doesn't mean that all of your own ideas are automatically the best ones, it just means that you need to filter out feedback that won't help you achieve your goals.

Keep a to-do list.  Any time you think of something you want to add or fix but can't do it right away, write it down, or create an issue in your repository.  Come back to it when you're ready and check it off.  Not only is this a good way to keep track of what needs doing, but checking things off is satisfying and good for motivation.  You'll also waste less time thinking "what should I work on next?" because you'll always have plenty of answers right at hand.

Also, one very underrated game development tool is pencil and paper.  If you are stuck on a design or math problem, or just need to brainstorm content ideas or draft a new level, try stepping away from the computer and sitting down somewhere else to work it out on paper.  I like to sit on my bed with a clipboard.  I find this to be the most intuitive way to work through my thoughts and decide on an approach.  Scribbling on paper is much more free-form than working in Notepad or Excel, and it removes all the distractions of your code and development applications.

I also often do this when designing new enemy sprites or certain other kinds of art.  I like to sketch the image by hand with drawing pencils, then scan it in and use the sketch as a basis for the pixel art.  I get better results this way than trying to pixel from scratch.  For my current project, a dungeon crawler, I always design and annotate levels on grid paper first.  The maps for this game are too complex to just freehand in Unity and expect them to turn out well.

Hi, I'm sorry you found this frustrating.  I hope you were able to move forward in the mean time using the solution provided in the manual, but I am happy to explain the logic behind it.  (Spoilers below, for anyone else reading.)

------------------------------

The first clue (found in Clocksworth's study) is "The path of the travelers leads to higher ground," meaning that you're meant to trace the route that the travelers took and orient the statues accordingly.  You don't have to move the statues in a specific order, but the direction of their travels informs the clues, and it's easiest to work them in that order.

So, where do we start?  All of the clues reference multiple travelers except one: "The dryad left home to visit her friend, the sprite."  Therefore, we know that the dryad started out alone before being joined by the others, so we'll start with her.  The sprite statue is east of the dryad, so we know the dryad is traveling east - so, we turn the dryad statue to the east.

The next one is probably the trickiest part.  There are two travelers at this point (the dryad and the sprite), standing at the sprite's location, and there are two clues that reference two travelers: "The crocodile chased two travelers beyond the castle grounds" and "The jester joined two travelers who were heading to the city."  All other clues reference three travelers, so we ignore those for now.  Note that the crocodile is immediately south of the sprite, whereas the jester is all the way in the southwest corner.  Because of the clue "The gargoyle greeted three travelers as they arrived at the castle," we know that the gargoyle represents the castle.  The gargoyle is one position west of the crocodile, whereas the jester is two positions west of the crocodile.  There is no clue that explicitly mentions what the dryad and sprite did after meeting up, but we know that only two travelers encountered the crocodile.  Between this and the fact that there is nothing east or north of the sprite, we can conclude that they traveled south to the crocodile from the sprite's location, so we turn the sprite to the south.  We also know that the crocodile chased the two all the west, beyond the castle, so we turn the crocodile west.  Because the travelers went beyond the castle, and because the gargoyle met three travelers and the jester met only two, we leave the gargoyle for later and move on to the jester.

The jester's clue is "The jester joined two travelers who were heading to the city."  From the clue "The soldier shielded his eyes from the sun as he watched three travelers depart the city," we know that the soldier represents the city, and the soldier is two positions north of the jester.  Since we know that the jester is headed to the city, we turn the jester north.  At this point, the travelers are the dryad, the sprite, and the jester.  All of the remaining clues reference only three travelers, so no one else will be joining them.

Next, the soldier.  Since he is shielding his eyes from the sun while watching the travelers, we can assume (based on Earth logic, at least) that the travelers are headed either east or west - towards either the sunrise or sunset.  Since there's only a wall to the west, we know that the travelers aren't going that way, and so we turn the soldier to the east, towards the merchant.

The next clue is "The merchant turned away from three travelers as they crossed the empty field."  The merchant is the north center statue, and the empty field refers to the empty space in the center of the room (we also know that the only remaining clue indicates that the travelers at some point went to the castle, which is directly south of the merchant at the gargoyle's location).  To cross the field, the travelers must head south, so we turn the merchant in the opposite direction - north.

The final clue is "The gargoyle greeted three travelers as they arrived at the castle." Based on the merchant's clue, we know that the travelers are arriving from the north.  To greet them, the gargoyle must therefore be facing north.

The final path of the travelers looks something like this:

5 -> 6
|    |
1 -- | -> 2
|    |    |
4 <- 7 -- 3

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I hope this helps you make sense of the solution.

I noticed a problem: Many, I really mean "the most", stay solo on developing. Why is it that way? There are indie devs who invested months and years into ONE single project. Wouldn't it have been easier when the devs form a group.

I work alone mainly because I don't want to argue or compromise on what I make.  Working alone means I can make only what I want to make, and I can make it however I please, without having to convince anyone that it's the right decision.  I also want to work at my own pace without other people depending on me, or me having to depend on them.

Unfortunately, working alone is also exhausting and demoralizing, but to me it feels like the only option.

Thank you for the offer, I will consider it.  I have not decided what to do about music, other than a couple of tracks I have already produced for demo purposes, but it will probably be a while before the project is ready for a serious music pass.

Thank you for the detailed review and thank you for sharing it here!