itch.io

This game does require semi-active play to progress in a timely manner. For folks who want to speed up the game, here's what I did:

In the beginning, go into the training ground map and kill as many dummies as possible until dying, then spend the manastones on the passive skills or base damage. Eventually, deathrunning the training grounds just becomes clearing the training grounds, and then progressing to the Village Scout map where the elder provides continuous healing. From there, run the Training Grounds until almost dead, then return to the Village Scout to heal until it and the following map can be cleared.

Once Towns are unlocked, turn in gear to increase stats. The shops can provide equipment with HP, MP, Attack, Defense, Magic Attack, Speed, Crit, and Crit Damage. Clearing the Village Scout rewards gold, so use that to buy gear which is then turned it in for the stats of your choosing. Eventually, there are enemies who can drop gear with Magic Defense and HP Regeneration. At that point, it's just a waiting game: farm loot, turn in, repeat.

At the current end of content after about three days of semi-active play. The pacing does improve once towns are unlocked, since you can accelerate how quickly you grow in power, but it's still a very slow pace, and without pressing on early advantageous feedback loops, it would like take significantly longer to progress.

I don't appear to have unlocked town development yet, but it's good to know all that gear can in fact be repurposed into something.

I'll continue chipping in with more bugs or abrasion points as I find them.

Edit: It would be nice to see what specifically is causing temporary penalties.

Edit: Attempting to leave the game open and active overnight lead to a tick freeze -- the UI elements could still be clicked, but ticks did not progress.

Edit: The descriptions for towns cuts off after the first line, as there is no space in the UI for the rest of the description. Once a town is fully built, the space for the description is pushed off the window entirely.

Edit: Was the prereq for the Battle Caster achievement's 1.5t reward intended to be one million uses? Or is that a placeholder? Because jumping from 5 digit uses to 7 digit uses is... yikes.

Edit: In the donation menu, clicking from Glenharvest to Tidewatch fails to update the tooltip when hovering over items after you've made a gear donation, and while clicking back to Glenharvest properly updates the hover tooltip, clicking back to Tidewatch again fails to update until the player donates another piece of gear.

Edit: Why does gold truncate to 1k when there are costs that require 2.5k gold? Why does the truncation to 2k happen before I have 2000 gold? Fuck, it should not say I have 2k gold if I can't afford something that costs 1600!

Edit: Dying at the guild test in Rivergate or at the Drowned Battery locks progress, as it is currently impossible to reattempt either stage post-failure.

Edit: The highlight showing the last thing you clicked under Bestiary and Maps don't update until you click off and back on. Same with upgrading buildings in towns; you need to click off and on to see what you bought reflected in the UI.

For such an atrociously slow game, I am baffled by the inability to respec. It would also probably help to inform the player, at all, that they can spend stat points under the Character tab and manastones under the Skills tab; hell, it'd be nice to tell the player that they can change targets by right clicking. Suffice to say the on-boarding needs a lot of work. 

Edit: The Map, Shop, and Quest tabs are inaccessible after unlocking until the player reloads, too.

Edit: Bestiary doesn't track when Goblin Iron Helms drop. Not being able to do anything with weapon/armor drops you can't use, or bought and don't want, just feels bad. So does the limited selection of equipment. I get that you likely don't want to allow players to sell gear since the shop is a slot machine, but the only other option being to discard them feels wasteful and discouraging to even engage with the equipment system beyond the bare minimum. Having to use manastones -- the permanent upgrade currency -- to buy temporary buff potions is an incredibly questionable choice.

Edit: The listed reward doesn't match the description for Monster Slayer, and considering how inconsequential a 1% damage boost is, I really hope the description is the erroneous part.

Edit: Description boxes on the right side of the screen constantly resize when the cursor is moved. The Objective and Settings buttons often lie in front on the map tracker, obscuring how far you are and how many more maps you have to clear. Said tracker itself obscures the HP and element of any enemies on the top grid row.

Edit: Loading a character, returning to the title screen and loading a different character makes the game quite confused regarding equipment. Returning to the title screen and reloading the initial character then triggering a message box makes it stack repeatedly.

Edit: Having a toggleable skill autocast button would help if the player wants to not perpetually be at zero MP without removing the skills.

Edit: Using the system clock to track away time leaves the mechanic open for abuse.

Definitely questionable that a single wheel and strut drives perfectly. A lot of the text is also incredibly difficult to read.

I'm not saying people don't deserve to be compensated for their time and effort, but choosing to make something in a space which is primarily filled with hobbyists working on passion projects with the intent of profit first and product second isn't something I can get behind. Like I said, I'd strongly prefer a Ko-fi link over a Steam WIshlist placement.

For context if you were unaware: it's not free to list your game; every title you see on Steam requires that someone paid Valve a hundred dollars (which is refundable after the game generates a thousand in gross revenue), so every time I see a game with the wishlist, I see someone who had the confidence in their ability to turn a profit -- and many don't. For smaller devs, that can be demoralizing, and it would lead to greater gains for them if they just asked for direct donations by people who liked what they made. Lord knows I've thrown more money at indie devs through Ko-Fi than Steam, and that's before you remember that Valve gets a 30% cut on every sale. It also doesn't account for literally any other costs that come up.

So yeah, I think profit-seeking is bad for the scene, and bad for the devs who contribute to it. Not everyone is gonna make the next Nodebuster, after all.

What is with every idle game trying to get us to buy them on Steam nowadays? I know times are tough and money is tight, but you'd probably have more success getting funds by having a Ko-Fi link rather than trying to get anyone to buy a finished product. Personally, I just hate to see the indie idle game scene get inundated with profit-seekers instead of those who just like the genre and want to see it grow.

Excited to see that there's new content slated to be added to Jimmy! I look forward to once again fighting my two biggest enemies: literacy and acceptance.

The game is a fun enough proof of concept, but the control on the ship being imprecise screws the player who tries to dodge past half-broken rings. There's also not nearly enough power to get through, with all upgrades stopping the player in the green rings.

I like the aesthetic of black and white dithered pictures. For a longer project, I would have the passages flash once the player mouses over them before I highlight them, but it works fine for a short project like this.

My only critique: I wanted to open the door before I started due to the game's description of "You find a door.", and once the narrator turned away, I thought it was pretty obvious how it was going to end.

Came back to this game after about 5 months, and I can't help but notice that according to the stats page, I'm getting about 6k light/minute in the same time I was getting 220k light/minute before. So uh... yeah, that feels pretty not great!

It feels like you have a fantastic start to a fun little game, and I could see this working just as well on mobile.

Feels like the final room might be a little too tough; although I did manage to clear it without getting every last damage upgrade, it took about half a dozen runs of grinding.

It's lagging for me as well, every time I get gold. Might be a good idea to add an options menu, so a player can disable particle effects (and sounds and/or music) as they please.

Camera got locked on the sides of the screens after a little bit of progressing in any direction; red orbs and in some cases shadow enemies were visable in rooms cut off. Wandering off the edge of the screen locked movement but not gunfire.

In the future, you may want to reconsider having white text with no drop shadow on a beige background.

FYI, the black hole can be used after the final mask.

I'll try to give the game another shot at some point in next few days, then.

A little dramatic I'll admit, and I apologize for the tone, but the point was more that those delays strain the attention economy of the average new player, and it's very easy for someone to just get bored before having any real choices. And perhaps a full reload would be excessive, but something other than repeating the dialog would've been nice; the forced binary choice as the first interaction with a delay that long between clicking "Start" and having any interaction just left a sour taste in my mouth, to be honest.

Yes, that is the display resolution that my screen is at; of course, the UI was fine once I clicked the fullscreen button.

https://temp-image.com/0NDYKr5HjrNJhkc
This is what it looks like, the blue rectangle is the approximate location of the interaction space for Continue.

It takes a real long time for text to pass offscreen in the intro, something like 20 seconds?--so long I initially thought the game froze. Considering it takes a few seconds for screens to fade in and out on top of that... And the "But Thou Must" in the beginning, on the literal fifth block of dialog, after also lands on it's face; the player has opted in by virtue of playing the game, if they repeatedly click the "No thanks..." during the alleged one chance to opt out, just give 'em a non-standard game over and make them reload. And considering they've had to wait at least 45 seconds to get to that part in the first place... ...and that's completely ignoring the UI flash between the opening text and the introduction.

In short, the pacing in the beginning is atrocious. And that's before the player has even been given a chance to do anything.

UI is horridly misaligned in the window at 1760x990 requiring fullscreen to fix, and there was notable lag upon starting and initial hit with a rock. Closed immediately afterwards; regardless of how good this game may or may not be, that was enough to dissuade me from playing any longer.

You can't interrupt gathering with another different gathering, nor can you interrupt crafting with another crafting, but you can interrupt gathering with crafting and vice versa. It's in fact the only way to stop crafting if you select "Craft All" which is a pain in the ass if you wanted to craft anything between 2 and less-than-everything. There are other UX hics like that throughout the whole game.

The game obviously is heavily inspired by Runescape, but I just don't see the appeal of the game outside of "Number-Go-Up"ing. There's no direction outside of "unlock camp by having 325 skills" and honestly after unlocking it, I have no desire to actually flesh it out. Maybe there's content there that's different, that provides a sense of curiosity and engagement for a player, but it mostly appears to just be checklisting. As it stands, it's clear that this isn't a game for me.

Seems overdeveloped for such a short game, and the balance is nonexistent. Skill trees icons disappear after buying, the prices make zero sense, the unlock paths seem arbitrary, and swinging with every upgrade twice broke the game. All in all, took less than 8 minutes.

My only complaint about the game is that the Universe section ultimately feels entirely divorced from the rest of the systems; when you ignore the x500k on atoms, it's entirely self-contained outside of a check on your Stellar Nursery count, seeing as how Stardust and Energy have no use outside of being spent on Galactic Upgrades--half of which feed back into the rate of return on Stardust and Energy anyway. Beyond getting over a wall and pulling some disparate and ultimately almost invisible boons in the way of a bonus to Super Human gain, Life production, and some PP multipliers, it's unrelated to the Atoms>Lives>Humans>Super Humans/Mind progression path. To be completely honest, it feels like that entire mechanic could be removed and nothing would meaningfully change, so long as the boost to atoms were integrated elsewhere; at worst, the four upgrades that actually impact anything else could be moved somewhere else, or excised entirely as well.

Wow. This is by far the most elaborate rickroll I've ever fallen for. Kudos.

It's lacking an endpoint, or aspirational goal, or loop, or some other reason to keep a player engaged for a sustained duration of time.

There's also no reason to keep knives, so instead of having an inventory, why not auto-sell and convert the inventory to a Crafting History; just add a  "Sort by acquisition" option and auto-sort to whatever the player has most recently set when opening it.

Alternatively, there could be some benefit to keeping certain knives; perhaps a Glitch knife could increase the sale value of all knives, or Eternal Knives could increase the Multi-Hit chance or something.

Speaking of, considering there's seven rarities, it feels strange to pull a Special (Glitch) or Eternal considering the only benefit is higher sale value; if you're going to have hidden rarities, there should be some update to the UI to acknowledge that the player has pulled them afterwards.

It's be great if one could disable the filters. Personally, I haven't used a CRT in decades for a reason, and would rather not be reminded why in the games I choose to play in 2025.

Absolutely wild to have a game this long without any save feature.

"if you pay $19.99 USD or more"

lol. lmao even.

Auto turret doesn't work when the game's browser isn't fullscreen.

For that matter, the game doesn't run well when it's not fullscreen'd in general.

Not great.

Edit: You may also want to rethink the combination of "coins that require multiple mouse swipes to collect" and "coins that disappear after so many are generated on screen at one time."

I didn't realize you rewrote the game from scratch, obviously, and that was a pretty rude assumption on my part; sorry about that. I can definitely understand the chain of events, and I'm not trying to throw shade at picking up someone else's game concept, it's just... well, no matter how much you add, the beginning is too similar to PK to divorce it from the original. Perhaps calling it a "branch off/continuation" or something would be more apt? Less accurate, but it would solve the framing issue.

Knowing that this is effectively an alpha work-in-progress, it should be low-priority to remake the things that already work, but varying up the beginning, even if just in superficial ways, would probably help to shake the comparisons. The problem people seem to have at first blush is that it seems like it's not just a copy, but a knock-off; having a stronger unique "identity" (for lack of a better word) for your game would give it stronger legs to stand on.

To the dev, Szklanka Herbaty:

This game would be much better received if you presented it as a mod of Progress Knight, not a new game inspired by it.

That framing is specifically where your major hurdle with this project is, since the biggest change is the skill trees you've tacked onto the base game, and modifications of idle games for QoL or new features aren't unheard of.

Just something to bear in mind next time you tackle a project of this nature.

Try to be more iterative in your design instead of just lifting parts from other games whole.

Look at how Proto23 inspired multiple games, each with their own takes on the Cultivation Incremental. They are similar, but different from each other, and distinct enough that playing one doesn't feel like playing the others.

This? This is just Progress Knight with a different skin, and what changes are present aren't meaningful. This is derivative in the worst way; if you wanted to experience Progress Knight again, you could just replay Progress Knight.

Perhaps the dev, Szklanka Herbaty, can use this as a rough blueprint of what they want their game to eventually be, but it would require going back to the design phase, and remaking the game from scratch instead of piggybacking off of another game's code.

Understood at this point. However, I would suggest having that information expressed within the game itself.

It looks like your game isn't bad judging by the other comments, but the glitched (or unintuitive-if-intentional) invest button dissuaded me within minutes, and the lack of mouse support put me on a bad start to begin with on top of that.

I'm not sure what you mean, but at the very least, reset the ball when it hits the floor. It was done that way 49 years ago for a reason. You don't need to reinvent the wheel here.

EDIT: After reading the other comment you've left, I have no faith in you making anything good. Don't change a thing; it's perfectly representative of your ability and design philosophy.

Just barely lost the ball once, ball bounced under the paddle on the bottom and all lives were lost.

Breakout is a 49 year old game, glitches like this are frankly unacceptable. Try to get it working properly before you worry about scrolling tiles or static upgrades.