itch.io

So I started off skeptical, but this game is actually pretty solid. I ended up playing for about 40 minutes. I did not finish the game, but this has good bones.

Good things:

• The incremental nature of the resource economy and fixing / upgrading / conversation at different spots is fun and kept me playing.
• Leaving your resources in the river is an interesting mechanic

Bugs (?):

• I couldn’t sell the bracelet? I could sell the necklace.
• Name mismatch between Nova Bombs and “Cannonballs” (for building fleet ships)

Suggestions:

• Add some tooltips for the stuff in the inventory. The bracelet and necklace were a little obtuse (had no clue what they were and what to do with them at first)
• Add a “crafting cheat-sheet” so it’s clear what can turn into what
• When you are docked, it would be nice to be able to see the floating materials around you (in case they got dropped in the water because of overflow). Sometimes I would need to rapidly exit, try and pick up stuff, and re-dock to use stuff I needed to drop).
• I couldn’t tell how close I was to the “win” / “loss” condition of the castles being destroyed. A simple health bar would be helpful. Also a health bar for my castle on the UI at all times.
• Navigating the ship isn’t super interesting… maybe it could just be an “on-rails” game and you take a higher view of the map.

I'm glad you were able to figure out how to run the game! 

> It was difficult get rid of slow/poison buffs again once picked up, you basically had to throw away all your inventory to walk normal again which was a bit annoying.

We didn't have a lot of time to hone in on inventory management or teach it to the player, but at the last minute we had added a Q/E method to cycle through which glob you will throw. It's just when you are in the heat of battle you don't really have a lot of time to swap and throw the specific one that is the issue. We wanted to lean into it being hectic to be poisoned / frozen / have a bomb attached to you and making quick decisions about your globs. Chris had an idea where you could press a button to expel all of your globs at once, but we ran out of time.

>  I am a bit sad that we only had 4 different power-ups in the level because this is definitely a scalable concept but this is not something I hold against you.

We actually have a list of over a dozen different powerups! We picked the ones that were the easiest to understand / implement / teach in the time allotted. 

> I enjoyed your game to most so far, considering the entire game experience. Well done!

Cheers and thank you! 

Yeah that's fair, we focused a lot on Mouse + Keyboard and Controller input. The Keyboard-only was tacked on at the end. Thanks for trying it out and lesson learned we need to have air-tight controls for laptops w/o mouse, etc.

We agree that the idea can be taken a lot farther, it's just 48 hours was not a lot of time to implement and explore our concept. 

> I think to really push the player in to engaging fully with the glob mechanics, perhaps each glob can have both a positive and negative - even if it's just something like the more globs you have attached the slower you move.

We actually had these very same ideas! One idea was also to make the globs stick to each other as well, meaning you form a structure around you making it harder to fit in spaces, move slower, etc. Also, throwing the health at an enemy will cause it to become a bomb, which was one way we thought would give you incentive to throw your gun / health globs. 

> I really hope you continue fleshing this out post jam!

That's the plan! Cheers and thank you for writing.

We took inspiration from Paper Mario (simple 3D world mixed with 2D characters), which ends up being easier to implement for a jam than a fully-realized 3D characters and environment. Cheers and thank you.

Thank you very much! I was a little worried about going to 3D but it worked out :^)

Took me like 5 minutes to figure out I could walk to the right... maybe add some arrows in the environment to help guide me where to go?  Getting reset to the beginning every time I fell was kind of rough, but I enjoyed the art style and the quirkiness of people blowing into pieces. 

I made it until the 4th wizard (where you have to start doing off-sync movements). Art and gameplay are solid! I think easing into off-sync movements would have been nice. I ended up having to just sit there for a while practicing and being able to maybe get 2 of 3 of the lines traced. If the line tracing was a tad more forgiving I may have made it further. Overall awesome work! Cheers.

Actually pretty fun! I wish I could switch perspectives using a hotkey instead of clicking on a button. The instructions said play in fullscreen, but I had issues with the levels clipping off the left and right hand sides. Switching the music between perspectives was a really nice touch. Cheers!

Haha those death SFX were a little much (the falling music was nice though!). Other than the sound of squishing bodies, this was a relaxing game. Great artwork and vibe! Cheers.

The main mechanic for this game was using your shield to reflect fireballs? The boss at the end definitely was hectic and fun to have particle FX playing everywhere. It wasn't clear when I could reflect and when I would get hurt, so I ended up dodging the fireballs rather than reflecting them. Thankfully the boss appears to hurt over time to it was fun bullet-hell dance. With the jam being so short it's probably good to lean into the mechanic (what was the key + chest all about? why did the NPC's say I should take someone with me?).

Cute game! I like the simplicity of the design and your original artwork (very 90s!). Congrats on a great submission.

Other Notes:

• It took me a second to figure out that you auto-shoot the scientists and how the tower toppling worked. Do your stacked allies always face right?
• If you stand perfectly still the tower doesn't topple, but if you make a move you are now stuck going back and forth with no steady state. It could be nice snap to "steady state" if the player gets close enough to straight up and down.
• Had to play the game in Chrome (Safari wouldn't open the game)