itch.io

Didn’t get to participate myself this time, but wanted to check this game out since the WIPs in the Discord looked really promising.

Really cool! I wasn’t convinced by the combat at first, but once the kick was unlocked, it became very satisfying, especially with the focus on large groups. Tying your healing mechanic to (imo) your most fun mechanic is a good idea, because it really incentivizes players to focus on it.

The world design was solid too, it felt very “guided” which is probably sensible given the focus on combat and the simple environment. My only complaint about the level design is the “wait for the purple lasers to go away” hazard was a bit overused, it stopped being interesting pretty quickly without any real twists on it. I liked how you looped back to the start at the end, that’s a classic.

Aside from that and echoing some of the earlier comments about camera jank (the fixed camera sections were a bit disorienting at times), nothing complain here, great job!

It can be a bit finicky, sorry about that! Though once you get the hang of it, it is rather consistent, and it’s pretty close to the end of the game, for what it’s worth.

Cute game! Do the pickups do anything? I didn’t actually know why I was collecting them beyond the satisfying sound they make. The powerups were cool and creative, although I wish they were integrated more into the game/level design. I feel like most things are doable without actually using the powerups, beyond occasionally using the snake for a higher jump? The enemies all attack very slowly so if you just mash attack at them, there’s no chance for them to really damage you. The yarn idea has potential, I think if you really focused the design on that and forced the player to engage with it, it could be really fun.

Cute story, I like the dynamic between the two characters. An otaku magical girl is a fun idea, I like how she thinks in video game terms. While I liked the names of the attacks changing names with Kimiko’s state, the RPG combat wasn’t very engaging, especially the final boss where I had to spend some time just mashing the attack button. Still, it was a sweet experience, the ending where she wrote a manga about her story was nice. Good work!

I made it to uhh the area with the guy whose attack is 1 giant word, but to be honest at some point I deliberately stopped healing because the 15 minutes of nonstop focus and typing were making me tired.

Interesting concept, very polished, I like all the effects and pop-in and such. I think the game does get old a bit fast, since you’re often typing the same words over and over again, and it’s quite a lot of mental load to balance for a long time, since you gotta constantly pay attention to typing and dodging at the same time. Impressive amount of content too as far as I can tell, and I like the variety in gimmicks, especially the enemy that throws words at you that you have to type to stop them, or the guy who wants you to type the whole sentence as one word.

Nice work!

Definitely agreed that huddling up in the vents waiting for things to quiet down is a classic stealth game experience, and would’ve been nice, it was really mostly that only doing it on room reset was a lot easier to program, haha. Didn’t have to code a “returning to normal” state that way. Thanks for the comment, glad you liked it!

Thanks for the feedback, glad you liked it! I’m pretty sure WASD does work for movement, but admittedly, with Z and X for jump and attack, it’s far from ideal. Probably should’ve bound them to N and M or something as well.

I like the vibes of this, it’s very cute, the ending screen/splash art of the main character especially. And the overall aquatic/tropical vibe was nice.

The boss fight was tricky, but I got it in the end, the attack felt a bit clunky since the boss does contact damage and can move quite unexpectedly, so I just relied on ranged attacks, which did make things feel a bit less exciting.

It’s quite short, but nice job on getting this game out!

This is a really cool concept, I love the character designs and the theme especially. All Cards Engage seems like exactly the kind of cheesy pun title that a magical girl series might have. And it’s got voice acting too, wow!

While I like card games, I didn’t find the actual card-based gameplay all that engaging, I wasn’t really making decisions, I was just kinda playing cards and it all worked out. But designing a card game, especially with a small scope, is really hard, so this is understandable.

Very charming little game though, made me want to see more!

Very neat, hope this team is destined for great things!

The art is a highlight here for sure, the main character design is great and I love her transformation sequence and little respawn animation. The backgrounds were beautiful, but at times it felt like they didn’t really mesh well with the foreground. At best this would just be slightly jarring, but at times I thought something was a game object and it turned out to be part of the background. Despite my nitpicks, I think overall the artistic vision came together well, which is impressive for such a large team.

The bit of implied worldbuilding you’ve done was fun too, I like how the upgrades are presented as if they’re marketing leaflets or something, that’s good flavour. I like these kinds of nature-dominated post-post-apocalyptic future concepts.

The gameplay was solid, the jump felt good with the coyote time and the variable height. Combat was a bit simple, but intuitive enough. I think it was a good idea to make your final challenge a movement one rather than a fight, since I think those systems were more interesting. Although I do agree with a previous commenter that I would’ve preferred if the hover was just pressing jump again rather than a separate button.

My biggest gripe gameplay-wise is that there were several occasions where I had to make a “leap of faith”, where the level design expected me to go down, but I couldn’t see what was there. And sometimes it was spikes, and I’d feel a bit cheated, cause how was I supposed to know that? I did notice a few times where the camera zoomed out at a part where you’re expected to jump down, which I appreciated, but I felt this technique was underutilised for how much verticality there is in the levels.

(Edit: Seeing now that there is a pan camera option on arrow keys, oops! I don’t recall if this was ever tutorialized? My bad if it was, and I forgot about it, but since the up and down directions on the movement keys/stick were unused, I expected the pan options to be there)

At one point (at the cliffside) I managed to jump down so far I got out of bounds and softlocked the game, which unfortunately meant I had to restart, but luckily I was still quite early on, so it wasn’t a huge time loss. But if that’d happened near the end, I probably wouldn’t have finished the game.

The world design on a larger scale was solid, I was only stuck for a little bit looking for the sawblade. I like how you’re locked out of the tree and then have to loop back into it through another route for the ending, that was satisfying.

Great job you all, looking forward to see what you plan to do in the future!

All right, I played through the updated version, and got to the room that said “WIP :(” which I assume is the current ending, haha

Cool ideas, I like the idea that the shotgun can be used as a jump or as a dash and you have to plan your jumps around it. I think the reload time for it could’ve been a bit faster (but maybe only make it reload on the ground?) so you didn’t have to spend a bunch of time waiting between jumps, but it’s an interesting concept. The difficulty was a bit strange, the enemies do almost no damage and can be easily ignored/ran past, but then it switches to a focus on instant kill lasers. It still wasn’t too hard since it’s a relatively short section and checkpoints are plentiful (this was a good idea) but it did feel like a pretty sudden change.

The graphics were nice, I really like the character design! Could’ve used some nice crunchy gun sounds to really sell the impact of the shotgun, but it was still satisfying enough to hop around with it.

Nice job on this game!

I managed to get softlocked at the start of the game (if you go left and don’t get the savepoint that teaches you how to warp) but after I restarted it, I managed to get to the final room.

I noticed a lot of the rooms felt somewhat meaningless - the enemies are really tanky but also very passive, so you can just run past most of them and not waste your ammo. I had no idea how to beat the heart boss, but apparently you can just leave the room on that one too and still get to the end of the game. I did really like the palette and vibes, although some of the sounds are quite grating (especially in rooms with lots of shooting enemies). I think I would’ve enjoyed this game more if it had gone for a smaller scope and focus more on polish. The idea of a space marine magical girl is very cool though, there’s definitely potential here.

Nice job overall!

Wahoo I love going fast!!

This is very neat. It’s a very simple game but with quite some depth to it, and really pushing you to get the most out of the kit. I will say that sometimes the movement didn’t feel *quite *as precise as you want with this kind of game, which isn’t really a knock at the game, as the movement is still some of the best I’ve played in this jam so far. But when your goal is to shave off milliseconds, even small grievances like getting stuck on a sliver of terrain or sliding into a wall can be quite grating. It was sensible to go for short levels, as it really mitigates these kinds of frustrations.

I did not beat any of the leaderboard times (those guys are crazy!) but I had fun going for SS on every level.

Great work on this game!

When I started this jam I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but the one thing I knew for sure was I wanted to have a crack at a transformation sequence, it was top priority, haha. Glad you liked it!

This one, right?

It doesn’t seem to be working. Hope you’ll manage to fix the bug in time!

Congrats on making your first game together! For future reference, since the .exe and .pck file are both essential to play the game, it’s better to just put them into one .zip file.

The art in this game is very cute, I like the frantic run animation! With this much of a focus on jumping, it would’ve been a good idea to implement coyote time, since sometimes I felt a bit frustrated by falling off a ledge when making a long jump. The enemies are very fast, and I didn’t really feel like there was any reason to try to fight them, so I just ignored them. For a first game made in such a short time, this is really nice despite all the jank, I did manage to get all the macguffins.

Hope it was an educational experience for you three! It’s only gonna get easier from here on out!

I love the Summer Wars vibes of this game, I picked up on it immediately before I saw that you listed it as an inspiration on the page. I especially love the in-universe “how to play” section, it’s very charming.

The actual gameplay I found a bit clunky. I’m not sure if the game was lagging, or if everything is just really slow? It was quite hard to control, and the conversations also flowed very slowly. The audio for typing was quite grating too. But I did really enjoy the concept of having the final boss right there at the start, and having to go through the level to get strong enough to defeat them. Fun dialog with all the chatters too.

Very creative take!

The thumbnail art for this is extremely cool.

I might be missing something, but is there a place to go after getting the shotgun power-up? I managed to find what looked like a place to progress, but I just fell out of the level.

The name of this game spoke to me, so I was happy to see it in my rating queue. I quite liked it!

There’s some funny dialog (nothing beats a jelly-filled donut!) and I like the implied worldbuilding and the dynamic between the two main characters. The decision-making about combat wasn’t the most interesting to me, it seems like just attacking and healing is enough to get you through most fights, and that + moondance was enough for the final boss. RenPy isn’t really made for combat so the fact that there’s a fairly extensive combat system at all is impressive.

Very ambitious to try and include every theme and optional challenge too, nice job overall!

Should be fixed now!

I’m hearing more reports of this, so I’m guessing I broke something in the final build. Will try to fix it soon, sorry about that!

Hehe, very perceptive of you! Didn’t know if anyone would notice that

This is very pretty and cool. I agree with some earlier comments that the first area was rather frustrating, it’s so bright that it was really hard to see anything, and especially to orient yourself, but it gets a lot better once you get the three themed areas, both visually and structurally. I like the structure of the world quite a lot, with the three separate branches that each have their own sub-objectives that culminate in the ending. I encountered some minor glitches occasionally (flickering textures, got stuck in a corner once) and some things lack polish in a noticeable way compared to how pretty the rest of the game is (notably the bubbles disappearing) but overall this is an excellent 3D Metroidvania. Loved the ending.

I don’t think the browser build and Windows build are any different? The Windows build has a fullscreen and a quit button, but that’s about it. In both builds, you need any 1 block to get the block ability, but that’s it. And even that’s mostly because if you could skip the first block, it’d be possible to softlock yourself by having nowhere to warp to, haha.

For what it’s worth, I did add some redundant button mappings to up and down, A and B buttons should work for those without any rebinding required. Good shout on the deadzone though, I’ll be sure to adjust it a bit since the movement is at fixed speed anyway so there’s no need for it to be low.

Thanks for the detailed write-up, glad you enjoyed it!

Interesting game! I like the pixel art, but the mixels are particularly bad here, the art has such inconsistent resolutions, which is a shame. Movement felt pretty good, I liked the boss fights. I think it’s weird that enemies have iframes, but the player doesn’t, so you often end up dying instantly. I also don’t think it’s really a Metroidvania, you get your abilities right away and it’s just a linear adventure from there. Ended up beating the game with 2/5 skulls, pretty fun little platformer.

Pretty neat game! I don’t really know what a Gelava is, but Char is a very cute one. The movement feels fun, I like the kind of flow you get into, although as others have pointed out, it is a bit exploitably powerful.

The models look really nice, although I think the style doesn’t always match. The character models look polished, but the environmental textures are really low res, it stood out how stretched they were.

I didn’t really love the ranged attack. It was hard to aim because there’s no reticle, plus your target is directly behind your character. I wish the camera was a bit higher so I could see where I was aiming. What’s more, the ranged attack is really powerful. It’s extremely safe, and extremely boring, to just snipe all the enemies from a distance, which is way easier than actually engaging with them. Generally you should try to avoid giving the player the option to “optimize the fun out of the game”.

The platforming sections were fun though, I enjoyed getting to the health pickup at the start of the game, and generally zooming around doing constant flips was a fun way to backtrack. I enjoyed the bounce as well, particularly the little height puzzle at the end. I’m not sure if it needed an energy system though, since every area for the rest of the game where you will use it has energy pads everywhere, so it seems a bit pointless.

The final boss was a bit janky, he oneshot me several times, but once I got on his head I could just mash the hell out of my attack and he went down very easily, so it’s a bit too swingy of a fight for my tastes.

Overall, despite my gripes, I had a good time with this game, you definitely got the movement sauce down, which is important for a game like this. Nice work!

Ah, I see, unfortunate. If the intent is for the part up to that to be a linear introduction before the game opens up, I’m of the opinion that it’s too long and difficult for that purpose. The suit changing is interesting, but as I said, I didn’t feel much of a focus on it, so I didn’t feel particularly “hooked” by the game. It’d be better to lean into that earlier; put the cool stuff about your game up front! You spend a lot of time teaching mechanics, but it’s all pretty normal platforming stuff, I think you can trust the player to use the suits earlier.

To be clear, I do think this idea has legs if you keep working on it, so even if I found it too ambitious for a jam game, I think it could become something very cool if you keep working on it. Good luck!

That’s neat, feels very classic Metroid! I think it hits a lot of the same notes, though it also leads to some of the same problems, i.e. “oh, I thought I found progress, but it turns out it’s just another missile tank I don’t really need”. In general, combat was never challenging outside of the final boss (at which point I was so tanky that I could pretty much just facetank it), but the secrets themselves were fun to find, so I didn’t feel too bad about the rewards not being that interesting. Aside from that, I echo a lot of the sentiments of previous commenters about a lack of polish, which is understandable if you ran out of time. Hit feedback (i.e. the enemies flashing or having particles erupt from them when they get hit) would’ve made things feel a lot better for example.

Good job though, a nice amount of content for a jam game, satisfying to play!

P.S. The boss scream is so loud, holy hell, I turned the audio up cause the rest was fairly quiet and it scared the shit out of me

I bought a bunch of damage rings, died, equipped them all, and was suddenly no longer able to damage enemies. This made it rather difficult to progress, so I unfortunately wasn’t able to beat this game. It seems like a neat concept though, and while the combat is a bit jank, it is pretty funny to flail around and punch your way through life.

Interesting concept, but it seems like you might be trying to be too many things at once. A roguelike Metroidvania with multiple characters and some kind of cryptic lore (I think?) is very ambitious for a jam. As a result, I feel like a few things ended up kinda unpolished. I didn’t really feel like the roguelike upgrades had a lot of impacts, and the suit switching rarely felt tactical. From what I’ve played, at least, it mostly felt like “when you get a new suit, change into it, and never change back”. Maybe this gets better later.

There’s a ton of content in this game, but between the huge wide-open areas and the long runbacks, I sadly wasn’t able to beat it. I’m not sure if the big stone-faced guy that melts is the final boss, but I gave it several tries before calling it quits there, getting through that alien base every time was really starting to wear on me. I really think the suit change stations should’ve acted as checkpoints as well.

Cool project for sure though, and there’s definitely potential here, but it’s very ambitious and will take a lot of hard work to get there.

This is a very cool idea, I like concept of this very dense 3×3 map, but there sure is a lot of jank. I feel like I solved most puzzles by just shaking the box around until things worked, and it was hard to tell when that was intended and when I was just janking my way through. I don’t know what the magnet does, I never managed to find a use for it. I haven’t played the post-jam version, to be fair, but I do think that the physics are the main things holding this back, so if those are improved, that’s a big plus. Nice work overall!

Cool game! Any game that doesn’t use standard upgrades like dash, doublejump, walljump at all always gets bonus points from me, and this is a very creative ability set. I also enjoyed the structure of mostly guided progression towards the end, followed by two “final boss” backtracky puzzles, that’s very fitting for a MVM jam game I’d say.

Aside from some minor graphical issues (character gets a bit blurry, some tiles don’t seem to align properly - not sure if this a web build issue) my only real gripe is that I sometimes found it hard to predict how objects would behave. Like is a moving platform going to bounce, or stop in place once it bumps into something? I’ve seen them do both but wasn’t really able to figure out when they would do what. The scales also felt like they sometimes didn’t do what I expected them to do. This made some puzzles a bit trial-and-error, but since the checkpoints were generous that wasn’t a big issue.

Impressively done though, especially for 5 days! The final thing you have to do to beat the game felt very satisfying.

There’s one room with some spikes on the ceiling where it seems like that’s the main challenge, so that’s probably fine, but the specific room I had in mind when writing that comment was the bottom half of the room with all the vertical shafts. Without the dash, it’s kind of a pain to get through there since you can’t really avoid attacks if you’re not lined up with a shaft.

Interesting base you have here, but I think it needs a lot of work if you intend to turn this into a bigger project.

I’ll echo the previous comments by saying, very cute model, but a lot of small issues with the movement that make it never really feel that cohesive and get you into that “flow”. But I think the other comments have given you plenty of feedback on that, so instead I’ll say that you should be thinking about what kind of game you want this to be.

Right now, it feels like a tech demo, just a linear series of rooms with jumps. Even saying there’s puzzles feels like a stretch. Do you want it to be all about platforming? In that case, is it even a good idea for this to be a Metroidvania? Would you be better off just making a level-based platformer? There’s no exploration showcased in this build, do you want that to be a part of this game? It doesn’t seem like you currently have a clear vision, which is fine for a MVM entry, but since it seems like you intend to develop this into something bigger, I’d definitely recommend you spend some thinking about what you imagine this game to really be about when it’s done.

Good luck if you do keep working on it, this could go somewhere if you commit to it!

This is very cool! Did not find the hidden sword, but I did manage to get to the end and the money room. The presentation is great here, I love the pixel art with the minimal palette, and there’s some very solid animation work in there for such a small timeframe and such a variety of enemies.

The core mechanic of bump-based combat is neat, even if occasionally quite difficult in tight rooms, although the rather forgiving amount of healing and save points meant that it never felt too unfair. I especially enjoyed the parts where you had to use enemies to progress.

I’m a bit less charmed by upgrades. While the dash is cool, and I like how it plays into the big bounce, I found the cockatrice feather a bit unsatisfying to use. I’m not sure what it is about the momentum, but it never felt natural, maybe if it had a very brief stall before falling or something? The wall jump felt even more “off” to me, it feels like it absolutely launches you away from the wall, when your normal walking speed is rather slow. Still, like I said, the core mechanics are good enough that this is only a minor gripe.

The overall world design is solid too. I was lost for a little bit at the start, although things started flowing nicely once I got an upgrade, I suppose I just happened to wander into the wrong part of the castle. It’s a shame you weren’t able to finish everything you wanted to do and the game ends rather abruptly, but hey, that’s gamejams for ya.

Very impressive job overall, especially for a solo project, the polish on this is great. Excellent work!

A very cool and cleverly unique Metroidvania, although I would say one that is in real need of polish.

The concept of being stuck in a painting is obviously cool, there’s some really good pixel art on display for the character, and I was impressed that the powerups you get are rather unique, even your double jump has a unique gimmick to it. The map functions very well too.

The audio and the music are a bit grating (I was on the download version). The jump, dash, the bouncing sounds, they’re all so shrill and loud, which I read in an earlier comment may be due to your hearing problems. Definitely good to get a second opinion on this earlier in development, haha. Aside from that, I also think the character controller could’ve used some work. It feels a bit stiff, perhaps some buffers and a variable jump would’ve helped a lot.

Still, a neat little Metroidvania with plenty of unique stuff to it, good work!

I’ll have to echo what most of the other comments are saying, this is a very confusing control scheme. After finally getting up the elevator and trying to jump off of it, the camera helpfully decided to shift 180 degrees and make me fall all the way back down again. Difficult to judge depth too, I don’t think the fixed perspective is really doing the game many favours here. The style you got down is very good, everything looks very nice. I managed to beat the game, although I might’ve skipped something, not sure if I’m supposed to be able to just jump over the door to the final boss? An interesting entry for sure, there’s potential here but it’s held back by the jank.

Now this is a cool game! The vibes are on point, this kind of moody grayscale world feels quite inspiring, and really highlighted the red/blue blocks. I occasionally had issues not parsing the difference between a wall and a background, but overall I think it works well.

The core mechanic is neat too, you squeezed quite a bit out of it. I think it could work well for some more puzzly levels too, there’s some potential here if you’re interested in working on this project more. I felt a bit disappointed there wasn’t a sort of final test of the mechanics, but perhaps it’s for the best those mechanics were relegated to optional content. I did manage to find all the cats, pretty neat how many secrets you managed to squeeze in. Nice work!