Thank you!
Balance is definitely still a work in progress - Ideally I'd like the early game to not feel like too much of a slog, hopefully I can nail the numbers down to get things feeling good...
But there's definitely at least one more update in the pipeline, and I'm open to more feedback from players and the team as far as requests on what content to add!
Thanks for checking it out!
Thanks David!
I'll talk to the team on the abilities to get their input. Honestly I mostly implemented them as a gate to prevent the player from just taking on the boss right out of the gate, but maybe just removing them in favor of some more stat upgrades, and letting the player attempt that challenge whenever would be a better shift...
And I'll look at increasing the base time some more, since that seems to be coming up as an issue. Likewise on the tutorial - I honestly had no guard in place for the player just outright killing the test enemies before even seeing them, developer brain moment, I guess lol.
But thanks for the feedback, we'll definitely get on incorporating this into the next build!
Thanks for checking it out!
Genuinely think the music does so much to carry the rest of the game, Mechpie did such a good job, I don’t think the game would play the same without his hard work!
Likewise, R’s got a knack for adding flair here and there that I normally put off till the end, and subsequently overlook as a result. Glad that he was willing to work on another project with me for this jam - He pulled through with the voice clips for Calli and Kronii during gameplay and in the menus, really helps add some character and to break up what’s otherwise a relatively serious game!
I’ll make sure to relay your compliments, in case they don’t see it!
Thanks for giving more detail - definitely sounds like I need to turn the health down a bit then!
I originally envisioned hopping in, opening some crates, killing a few enemies, and then at that point needing to make the decision to extract early or push your luck to get some more loot but run close to the time
So tuning down the enemy health a bit should skew it in the players favor a bit more to squeeze in a couple more kills before having to leave (hopefully)!
Thanks for sticking it out!
I'm doing some more tweaks for the next build that should help with that - reducing enemy movement speed a tad and increasing Calli's movement speed, also a couple upgrades to help - life steal and critical hit chance! But there are also some more changes to balance that out (ehehe), so that makes me wonder if I might need to reduce the enemy health slightly too...
Same with Kronii, she's being adjusted a bit too. Unfortunately I went a little overboard on the number changes after the first build went up, and it might have hindered the gameplay loop a little too much.
But it means a lot that you kept trying and beat Kronii despite the odds!
I haven't seen much comment on the time limit, but if it continues to comes up as an issue, I can tweak the numbers on the upgrades to increase the time modifier and time gain during a run. I wanted runs to be quick, but the actual time management to continue to be an issue, even in late game, so I didn't want to be too generous, but I don't want it to hurt the gameplay experience, either.
Thanks for letting me know what we can continue to work on!
Thanks for playing!
Glad this hit a chord with you, to be honest I hadn't really considered how it evokes flash games until this very comment, but I can totally see that! Used to love playing on AG myself, too!
I had mentioned it in a previous comment, but I was concerned about the upgrade scaling, since I wanted to preserve the feeling of power progression that a lot of these games have, while still requiring some initial investment to be able to fight Kronii. I think that was where the main hump came in, since I balanced her with the player having a decent amount of upgrades in mind (and as a result she's been a little too tough for what I envisioned a tester or player would need to complete, with respect to their time).
But I've tweaked her a little bit for the first post jam build, and I think she feels a little more fair if you aren't geared to the teeth. But thanks for taking the time to invest into the tree and get to the point where you could just walk over her, that's the affect I was going for if the player had a full arsenal.
Thanks for the feedback!
Absolutely adore the art, everyone is so scrungly and adorable!
I need to get a pic of Gigi's shouting sprite so I can use it as a reaction image.
Really fun uses of the time stop, even if some of the puzzles made me frustrated because my brain is too small and couldn't work around the 10 second time limit.
I think my favorite level was the Kaela one, since I got the solution on that one pretty quick, but aside from Gigi's puzzle (which I accidentally cheesed by pausing the spring fast enough at the start of the level), they all felt pretty reasonable!
Just enough dialogue to break up the puzzling pace, and the final dialogue at the end got me in the feels. Great work!
Oh my god I love this entry
Cece's GTA RP streams really got me interested in her and showed off how much of a silly goober she was, to me
Love all the little details, like the key spinning faster with more speed, JUST-ICE on the license plate, all the mascots in the van, and Cece's arms being rigged to rotate with the steering wheel
The physics were hilarious, I had so many cars just doing flips into the air and driving on their sides, but the van itself controlled really well.
Love the Wind Up remix used for BGM.
Also saw the AutoFister easter egg, bless
Such a fun entry that was clearly crafted with love, fantastic work from the team!
Really like the vibes on this one!
Captures the WarioWare essence perfectly, and I love the little cut ins when you have a streak of completed minigames, and the jingle for the minigame transition being inspired by All For One. Also really like the choice of just using the time as HP instead of the normal heart system (also kinda like the stress watching the timer tick down between minigames, even if its a little evil). The art is really good too!
One thing I noticed, and I know this comes from me not registering what I was reading - all the minigames also seem to work with WASD, except the sound booth - for some reason it will only accept the up and down from the arrow keys, not W and S, despite being able to select the sliders using A and D. I was really confused and thought the minigame was bugged until I reread the control scheme and tested again with the up and down arrow keys to see it working as expected. Small thing, but wanted to point it out.
Aside from that, all the minigames were pretty easy to intuit, which is always great (the drink delivery got me the first time as I walked head first into the pon-de-ring, thinking it was set dressing lol)!
Great work!
What a fun idea!
Glad I finally got around to this very meta submission, but its clearly not true to life, since you can somehow manage to get everything on the checklist done in the time period.
Jokes aside, this was really unique, and its awesome that you gave us the tools to share and play other levels. And great job on giving us just enough tools to get the basics done as far as making the sprites, feels accurate to me trying to get art done on my very limited drawing skills and very basic understanding of many drawing programs.
Props for the unique idea and good work getting all the systems together to both make the simulator, and set up the level sharing!
Totally wasn't ready for this gameplay loop to come out of left field, but it was pretty enjoyable!
I only played on normal, and died once (I think), but it was already pretty tough to manage the boss stages and sometimes the beginning of the levels - which is to say I couldn't imagine trying to go through on hard mode, props to any players who tried to take that one on.
Controls felt like they took a little bit to get used to, but after the second stage I got a pretty good grip on it. Around that time I also go blocks that were more useful and didn't require me to rotate them, which I think really helped the gameplay pace - I found myself needing to stop to rotate blocks in the first 2 levels that made things much more tense than the end game, but the cooldown upgrades might have helped with that as well.
I do like those shop mechanics though, that make the coins worthwhile and directly impact the moment to moment decision making when trying to ascend.
Good job on the art, picking the characters to include in the game, and props for incorporating difficulty options, which I normally feel like are left on the sidelines for more jams. Good work!
Wow, this game really blew me away!
Everything from the gameplay, to the writing, to the art, to the music, was all so high quality and made with so much passion!
It would be awesome to have a gallery to view all the wonderful art and listen to the OST, but that is far from dragging this down in anyway.
Really gonna be thinking about this game for a while, massive thanks to the team for putting it together, and fantastic work!
Great work on all the visuals!
I do think making the game purely luck based is kind of a stinky move, but its your first game, so can't really shake my fist about it too much.
I did notice that annoying everyone seemed like it didn't scale the cost proportionate to the members, so I was able to win in a couple tries by annoying some members once or twice to get them low, then annoying everyone to fully annoy multiple members at once. After that it was just luck on whether the remaining ones were annoyed. Failing didn't feel super punishing since its literally like a 15 second gameplay loop, but I don't really think that's much of a cop out. If anything, I think it would have been better to lean into that with mechanics that weren't solely randomization.
But great work for your first game, your experience with UI and UX really shines through, and props for a building a unique idea and system!
This was a really unique gimmick - thank you for the walk through because there is no way I would have put two and two together on the timeline mechanics, but I think that just goes to show how inventive it is!
Great job on the art and the models, they're really stellar, and considering that you did all of that, its a wonder there's even this much in the demo to begin with!
And the story is really interesting, would love to just read the script as if it were a novel, in all honesty.
I also encountered the freezing bug, I noticed it had occurred when I picked up the bottle and then the wrench in quick succession after jumping into the timeline, not sure if that might help pin down the pesky thing.
But great work and amazing concept, would be great to see it expanded, if you can find the time after the jam!
Fun little idea!
Love Biboo's sprite, really embodies her frantic panicking.
If I had to log a complaint, I think the timer counting down instead of up would help - I looked and saw 20 when the game was over and thought the game had bugged, until restarted and caught the timer counting up from the start
Nice simple gameplay loop, would be awesome to see you come back and expand it with more items, maps, obstacles, and different movement patterns for Biboo. Good work!
Love the writing here, even if it forced me to confront feelings that I do my best to suppress for the most part.
Great job on the art, and I like that there's still some interaction in jumping, and singing once you get past the story telling.
I think the pacing is an interesting choice - I feel like it parallels the message of the game well, and it's not a big deal if you have something else to do in the background, or are really patient, but I can see how it would turn some players away. At the end of the day though, its obvious this is intentional, so I respect building the game to your vision.
And good work with Luca on the music, the chill vibes of this Rock In remix suit the game really well. Great work!
Really love all the models for this game, especially Shiori and Raden, excellent job!
And its nice to see Raden get some love in a game, never mind one that's so close to her personally, that's awesome!
I think most of everything I had to comment on has already been covered, but one thing that got me was that in the tutorial, it sounded like you would have more time to plot out the route Raden would take, but then it turns out that you can only see the next exhibit she's going to, which led me to panick and end up with the worst score on the first level, since there was no real time to prep or learn the exhibits, since you can't view the model for exhibits that aren't active. But after the first level there, you get the gist of exhibits for the most part, and its easier to come back out swinging in the next levels.
Can definitely feel the love in this game, with all the small touches in the flavor text, and the couple of exhibits that use voice clips from the girls.
Unique idea that is pretty well executed, great job from the team!
Super solid for a first game, good job!
I like the fact that the level doesn't end after the timer is up, so you can still get the order done, you're just dealing with the stress factor
But I do think that the stress system needs a little bit of tweaking - donating removes a chunk, but since you can't bank stress relief, you want to donate around halfway through, but by the time you start another cookie, you're already back to where your stress meter was, since it increases faster with lower time. You could help with this by pausing stress build up for a short time after donating a cookie, that way you can balance needing to lose a cookie towards the order with more easily being able to make better quality cookies for a slightly longer time.
I think the minigames are simple and easy to get the hang of once you mess around with it in the first level, but each station having its own minigame would go a long way in helping gameplay variety.
But otherwise its a nice idea, and you did a great job with the art and incorporating unique mechanics. Great work!
Great job on the writing, I was really invested in the multiple timelines story!
Likewise, awesome picks for the Amelia variants, who all feel like different aspects of her and her personality at different points in time.
Love all the possible endings (especially the Watoto timeline good ending, MythBreakers my beloved).
Overall ambience between the music, SFX, art, and writing really brought everything together into a great submission. Fantastic work from the team!
You've got a lot of really unique ideas, between this game and the submission for the last jam, it's really impressive what you're able to put together!
I do feel like some of the enemy design was a bit hard to handle, like the space invader sort of enemies who would suddenly speed up out of nowhere, or clip through obstacles on the map, but I'm not sure how much of that is intentional, and how much is the physics system just doing something whacky.
I like how if you land a shot you don't have to reload, makes it super satisfying to take down a group of enemies and make it out the other end.
This might come from me not playing the source inspiration games, but I kept wanting to feel like the dash should dash towards the mouse cursor, and not in the direction the player is facing. The vast majority of my deaths on the last level were due to that, between dodging over the spikes, and trying to dodge past enemy attacks.
But otherwise its a pretty simplistic art style that really adds a lot of character to the game, and I like the framing that it's supposed to be an aptitude test to tie it back into the theme. Good work, and looking forward to what you cook up next!
Took me taking the L on a round to realize that you had to type the name of the character in the icon, and not the character in the display box, but after I crashed and burned, I figured it out.
I think this is a really cool idea, if a little rough around the edges right now.
Have to echo that my biggest complaint is swapping from mouse to keyboard, especially when the legendary tier items are on such a short timer.
I can get that's part of the challenge, but maybe adding keyboard controls would help alleviate some of that issue - so the challenge would come from the actual typing, and not how quick you can get your hand from the mouse to the proper position on the keyboard.
And if that tones down the difficulty of the legendary tier items more than you'd like, you could give longer came prompts, or names with spaces to help balance it out a bit, or something along those lines.
Got to 7/9 for my best run, but failed the skill check on moving my hands fast enough to type on the last two items.
You sorta had it like this with the stands and the FWU, and it might have been too much to research to get in during the jam, but it would be cool to see the tier of the item also correspond to real life prices - that way you can really sink your teeth into the player on getting merch that they can have in real life lol
But otherwise super cool premise, love that you can display the items in the room, and they're hued to match their rarities. Good work, and props for creativity!
Feel like my brain has turned to mush, and I'll have Above Below stuck in my head for the next 2 weeks but we got there in the end
Fantastic job on the art and designing the rooms, its literally like you ripped them out of OBS and put them into Godot lmao. But Cece and Gigi's rooms really had me tearing my hair out trying to find everything (which I suppose is a good thing).
BGM was really catchy too!
Not too much to pitch in on as far as improvement, high quality for a jam game, and no bugs that I encountered - though it looks like Gigi's bed and dresser might be up too high on the z index or visibility layer, since you can clip under them.
Otherwise I'm going to go grab a bucket to pick my brain off the floor! Fantastic work from the team!
Made it to the last level, somehow, but had to throw in the towel there
Seconding that sometimes the movement feels a little too floaty for the precision jumps needed on these maps
I think it might help if you made it so that any input overrides previous ones - for example, right now if you jump, hold left, then hold right while still in the air, you stop in place. But there are a handful of jumps that require you to make a quick switch back in the air. If you could work it out so any new input will override the last, you could make that jump much easier (but also lean into it with more hazards around them, I dunno I haven't studied kaizo level design). But I think it would also help with being able to quickly reverse your momentum for those precise jumps (at least that's how it works in my head, but it might not end up working that way in the back end when implemented)
But otherwise I really love the pixel art across the board, and the music, everything else about the submission feels really good. Great work, and thank you for helping me confirm that I am indeed not a kaizo gamer, went through like 3 biblical crashouts to make it as far as I did.
I really love the idea behind this one!
Love needing to plan out the movement of your past selves to progress through the puzzles.
And it felt like there were multiple approaches to them, which is super impressive!
I think I might have cheesed the last one, where I was able to slip over the button while past Kronii was standing in the middle of the room, but the door at the top didn't open so I didn't get locked before making it to the end.
But I also had her facing the other direction, so I'm not sure if the crystal would have tagged her anyways.
But super impressive for running out of time, and it doesn't feel half-baked, which is awesome Great work!
Love the vibes on this one!
The music, the art for the events, all the different art for the otomos, its so cute and cozy!
I definitely do think the stat mechanics could use some ironing out - I think most of the events might have a stat that seems like it would fit, but I'm not 100% on that. A quick tutorial could help a lot with clarifying some of that - even if its just a text blurb!
But I do like the variety of chores to help with!
And that you get the upgrade choices at certain thresholds!
It would be awesome to see the team come back and polish up the placeholder assets and iron out some of the kinks, but it's a solid foundation for a unique little game in its current state. Good work!
Really like the idea here!
And you managed to tie in the optional objectives into the core mechanic too, which is really impressive!
I really like that collecting all of the clocks will sometimes require you to purposely fail the level to revert back to the start after changing the environment.
I will say, I had minimal trouble collecting them all except for level 5, for some reason it took me like 15 minutes to get the clock on the far right - for whatever reason making that jump felt really precise compared to pretty much every other jump in the game. Maybe it was just an issue on my end though.
There's a lot of little touches here, like the full clear icons for each stage, and the music properly rewinding when the level does - things that you wouldn't normally expect a jam submission to have.
Really like the art style, and the fact that the title screen is also pixelated to match the rest of the pixel art.
Would be awesome to see this expanded into a full release after the jam is over. Great work!
Always a sucker for a survivor-like game, and this has some awesome tweaks to the formula
Randomizing two spells and letting you pick is actually such a fun concept that I don't think I've seen before.
Is there a cap on the number of spells you can have in Ao-chan, or can you just get all of them if you get lucky? I feel like the randomization can kinda let you get away with just letting the player grab all the spells, since its notlike other survivor likes, where all your abilities are firing off on a cooldown no matter what
I love the enemy design and the ambience, but in general the art is really good!
I have to agree with David, soundwave felt like it was just hitting enemies at almost infinite range, it could probably be toned down a bit.
Likewise, AoE effects like void pool or natures wrath can make it hard to manage the enemies when they're inside of it, maybe lowering the opacity on those AoEs would help the player keep track of the activity going on while they're active in the combat zone a little better?
I might have missed it, or just ran out of time before seeing the effects, but I couldn't see what effect the sanity meter had on gameplay in my couple of runs.
But overall fantastic job from the team - this one is for sure going into the rotation for games to play in my free time. Great work!
This was a really fun idea!
Love the backseating Biboo, both in premise and implementation in game - her animations, the voice lines, rewarding the player for completing her missions. Very unique and cool!
I do think some of the audio clips for her were a little loud - kinda got my ears blasted by "Sticking Out Your Gyatt" (though maybe that was intentional)
But it would be awesome to see you come back and add more puzzles and content after the jam. Otherwise great work!
Really gotta hand it to you for the mission system
The missions themselves all feel unique, and the abilities do too. I think that's easily my favorite part of the gameplay loop.
Glad that you included so many members, and not just the EN branch too!
And the art is good (even if you feel like its not - still better than most of what I do with longer than a 2 week time limit lmao)
Would be awesome to see you come back and add more content - enemies, abilities, more randomization, using the dialogue system for some fun character interactions. There's a lot to work with here, especially for an idea that you just ran with on a whim. Good work!
This was a super unique idea, and its crazy to think that it stemmed from an offhand comment Cece made one time.
All of the systems at play here are super impressive and culminate in an awesome take on the theme!
The art, music, and writing are all fantastic, especially the twist with the final boss, I totally wasn't ready for that.
But I do think the combat can really weigh the game down at certain points. I had to cheese the Rissa fight by stepping in and out of her attack range, since they didn't spawn at the top of the room. I came to the comments to read the clarification you left on the rest notes, but it was after I finished the fight. Great idea, but if you don't know sheet music, that's not even something I would think you would consider, unless you noticed that the notes didn't do damage. I wasn't so lucky, and mostly just got caught ping ponging and stunlocked by the music notes until I realized you could walk out of her attack range.
Shiori had a similar issue for me, it was really difficult to weave around her projectiles, so it really just boiled down to me throwing myself at her until she died, since her health didn't reset.
I know the combat was intended to be difficult, which is fair, but it didn't really feel satisfying to finish off those two fights - I just wanted to get it done by the end.
I do think some slight i-frames or damage immunity after getting hit would help out a lot while still keeping the majority of the difficulty already present in the combat system.
I think I also somehow managed to erase the fat grem from every time period despite not killing him in any of them. Not sure if homie was just supposed to leave, but he peaced out for me and I couldn't finish the fight against him, which is small in the grand scheme of things, albeit a little confusing.
But otherwise I think this was an insane project to put together for the jam and deserves so much praise for its originality and unique ideas. Great work!
Really love swapping between the council members, I think that mechanic in itself can go very far! And good job on the art!
Have to second that the maps are a little too big - I was optimizing my movement by swapping to Bae/Mumei to get speed boosts to move around quick, but still could only get like 1 and a half levels done. Definitely would try to tone down the map size a bit so you're actively gaining time by playing well, and not losing it walking between rooms (or just make it so you don't lose time outside of combat?)
I noticed at one point all my controls got swapped? I think this might have been one of Bae's debuffs, but it was just permanently inverted and that was really disorienting cause it was near the end of my run.
But there's some solid foundation here and some interesting stuff to work with, and it sounds like the team is planning to come back after the jam and add more content, so it'll be great to return and see what's changed. Good work!
You definitely captured the Pizza Tower vibes, with the music, art, and level design!
Genuinely think this could be awesome, and go far, if you come back to it after the jam ends.
You've already got a lot of the hard parts of capturing the feeling, I think with some more studying on the level design that you had mentioned you neglected, and tweaking the physics a little bit to fit with the difference in movement between Grem and Peppino (and take advantage of it), you could spin this into your own take that I'm sure Gigi would love to try to play on stream!
Great work!
Really like the idea, art, and music on this!
But I can't help but feel there's an issue with the difficulty that echoes what some of the other players have said. Even trying to evenly disperse my card options, there seems to be a pretty big spike on day 4, I was able to get to 7/9 at the closest. I wonder if a good way to balance this would be granting more time on perfect orders - which would let the player have more room to discard or play the correct cards.
It feels like sometimes the close enough gauge is a little finnicky, where it will accept dishes that are slightly off from the request sometimes, but not others.
Would definitely be good to see some more cards added, so its not just the same 5 card selection per run, since it seems like even if you try to evenly disperse your card options, its still not enough to get over that difficulty hump.
Otherwise, I think this is an awesome premise that has some great vibes, just needs a couple small tweaks to be a top of the charts submission, good work from the team!
Two horror games in one jam wasn't on the docket, but here we are.
Fun little idea, and gotta laugh at the idea of freeing a Calli clone from Gigi.
I'm not sure if they untextured walls adds to the horror atmosphere or not, same with the lack of SFX. It made it hard to tell where I was in relation to Gigi, which made moments where I had to bait her into a corner, or a roundabout, to get around her much more tense.
Some of the collision was a little whacky, leading to me getting stuck (or at least feeling like I was stuck) on flat walls that I theoretically shouldn't have been.
I think the flashlight mechanic and darkness really carried the horror aspect harder than it should have, but it worked, so I can only shake my fist at it so much. Good work!
I like the idea here!
But I think it might benefit from a tweak in the mechanics to allow the player to manually place units. Since they randomly spawn and the base cooldown timer for them is so long, if you get unlucky with either spawns or medal drops, you just have to wait and watch the grems slowly march toward you while waiting to spawn more deadbeats.
Could have just been me not really getting the mechanics too well, or tied into the same vein as what I was talking about above, but while being able to do something crazy like pop a sana medal into a calli medal into a polka medal on an empty row and watch a deadbeat zoom across the screen, winning didn't really feel too satisfying, to me.
Not really sure, though, would need to spend some more time playing and thinking on it to give some more solid advice, unfortunately.
But the music and art are great, so fantastic work and choice there, would be great to come back after some updates and see what's changed, if the team is willing to come back after the jam. Good work!
Fun game!
I really like the mechanics that you've got in place - the buff enemies that need two matches, the enemies that swap oshis, and the wild cards that will match with anything are all just enough to keep the gameplay loop interesting on the second level, and I can see it getting crazy to manage with more mechanics in play at once!
Great job on the art, and the cutscenes!
One minor suggestion would be making the pause menu look more different from the game over screen - I ran into the soft lock on 1-2 and I paused, but couldn't tell the pause screen was up, since the screens looked the same (thankfully the buttons still work so I could restart)
But it already looks like the team is planning on coming back to fix some bugs and add more content which is great! Good work!
"Grind" was real for this one thats for sure!
Last two areas definitely took a while to get through, when trying to play properly, but once you get all the pickaxe upgrades you can just dig straight down to the boss, so that kinda balances it out a little bit.
There should have been some kind of indicator after fighting the boss though - I won, and tried to jump over them, but the speed boost from the jetpack launched me up and I died to fall damage, so I dug all the way back down in case there was something in the arena I needed, just to fight him again and realize there was nothing else, so I had to teleport back and come to terms with the fact that I wasted close to 10 minutes or so.
I also noticed that you could interact with the stores without them being found - I was able to buy from Shiori and AutoFister shops without having found them yet by standing and clicking in their area. Didn't check with Koyori, but I would figure its possible. Also after unlocking her (Koyori) Cece and Gigi just kinda showed up, not sure if I managed to sequence break there, or it was intentional.
But there's a lot of content here, which is impressive, and the art, music, SFX, and general vibes are all really nice. Great job putting this together!
Man there's a lot to love on this one.
Great vibes between the stage design and enemies, and just general feel and design of the game as a whole.
Excellent job on all the custom assets, especially love the 3D models!
I have to agree with some of the other comments that a checkpoint before the boss would do wonders, especially in the later stages where you're constantly dealing with enemies from both sides, it can get tedious to have to play through the whole mission just to get tossed around by the boss and lose.
In a similar vein, I think a boss rush mode would be an awesome feature, to let you practice the fight themselves, then take that experience to a stage and try to shoot for a high score!
It would also let the player explore the other characters a little easier in a space where you really want to make the most of their abilities - I only played as Amelia cause I didn't want to restart from the beginning and lose my progress to try another character, mostly due to the fear of not liking them and losing my progress.
But I think the stage, enemy, and ability design are great for encouraging the player to use all of their tools - there are many scenarios where you need to combine time stop and your ability to make it out unscathed, but with them both having relatively short cooldowns, it doesn't feel overly punishing.
A couple of things I saw that might be bugs, so I want to bring them up here - I noticed the jailbirds would occasionally propel themselves off screen with their attacks, and sometimes would still keep firing when I couldn't even see them. And with the way the timestop recharges, you can just hold down the button even when it runs out, and it will immediately consume the charge when it refreshes, causing enemies and projectiles to kinda skip around. Wondering if you could try preventing timestop usage until it reaches 50% max when it fully runs out to help resolve this. Or maybe its not an issue at all. Also I think the Kronie projectiles weren't affected by timestop (I only payed enough attention to notice it once, every other time I was busy trying to avoid something else and couldn't tell), which makes sense for their character, but it is a little inconsistent, since I think they're the first enemy to do that and it's not communicated that that's something you need to look out for until it happens and you notice it.
But really that's just me trying to be as thorough as possible, overall great submission. Fantastic work!
Wow, there's a lot going on with this one!
A super unique premise, with a lot of systems, though honestly I think it might be to its own detriment.
I really only tossed a couple of levels into the shop upgrade system, after which I was able to reach the 30000 gold, and I really didn't play very optimally for the first half of the month.
Didn't recruit any of the other talents, though I do think its neat that you have the option to add more members to pick from.
I was able to beef up 3/4 of justice pretty well and just alternate between sending one in to grind a weapon and sell, then buy a new one that didn't put too much of a dent in my earnings to rinse and repeat and meet the deadline in a couple of turns.
While I do like the extra mechanics, and the 6 slot gear system, I think it honestly could have been trimmed down to reduce the clutter and focus on honing in the main dungeon mechanics more.
It really just boiled down to spam clicking and RNG, would be cool to see some additional mechanics tacked on to break it up, and/or an auto mode that will move through until certain events happen (like taking damage or a shaking down a monster)
I think it would also be neat to have certain weapons get bonuses or something when choosing a dungeon to enter, something like: the selected piece of equipment will get better levels per floor, but the difficulty will scale up faster, to promote a risk vs reward system when picking equipment dungeons to enter.
But in all honesty, those are just suggestions, and it's seriously impressive that all of these systems were able to be implemented and get working with minimal issues in the jam time frame. Great work!
Not a bad game. I've always a been a little hit or miss on these games, sometimes I do well and other times I don't
This was one of the times that I struggled honestly
But the bonuses between rounds was helpful, and the bonuses provided by certain talents was unique too
Like others, I got stuck at round 9. I think if you wanted to keep the difficulty, but still lean it towards the player a bit, you could reset the reveals back to 2 at the start of each round, which would help incentivize picking the extra reveals over the extra time. And I feel like picking the extra generations really isn't an option that should be given, it just doesn't really provide much utility over the other two choices.
I wonder if the option was given to let the player lean into getting more talents to give them bonuses? But I feel like it would be better to just add the generations between rounds anyways, when the board size increases, and just remove the option from the list of choices between rounds.
But still, solid game, great sound design and music, the logos all look very clean. Good job!
