You used a "dreamspace" to depict real quotes from real people after which a depiction of you, a real person, attacks them all. It is pretty clear to me that the message is not "I want to kill all of these people". Nonetheless, that does not make this any less tasteless.
Please try to consider the perspectives of the people that you've appropriated into your game. Would you feel it was justified if another developer took things you've said out of context into a game where they "ban" you with a katana?
This is not an appropriate way to address criticism, and I'm frankly a little disgusted.
"Game Boy game inspired by Battle Network" is one of the greatest elevator pitches I've ever heard hahaha! Glad to see this fella at least survived in a different project, I think he's very neat!
The joke obviously works well enough on its own, but the addition of small touches like that UI thing really elevated it for me.
The action sequences are actually pretty great, and the story isn't AMAZING but Reid's character development was at the very least amusing and pretty enjoyable to see!
I quite liked the portrait sprites! The rest was a little underwhelming though. The jokes didn't quite land, and there were so few encounters that I was very surprised when the credits started rolling.
This one's pretty solid! Good voice acting, animations are nice, and I still think the goblins are very funny!
Of course, the gameplay wasn't really my speed, especially when the autosave sorta softlocked me into a fight I couldn't find because I didn't grind enough (better than the previous setup of having no saves at all!)
I had a hunch this game would look very different once it was submitted, so I gave it a second run!
It's improved in just about every way! I still find it to be a bit slow at times, especially now that there are proper explorable areas, but everything else is quite good! I've bumped up a few of my ratings from when I tested it, so expect a pretty good score!
1. A figurative ascent is totally okay as long as the literal ascent is somewhere in the game at some point. You can put the ascent at the very end of your game if you want, and have multiple ascents, figurative ascents, or anything in between. The main important thing is that the literal ascent is present in all playthroughs of the game (so it can't be optional or postgame content)
2. We can submit as many entries as we'd like!
3. I'll let Human answer that one but from what I recall, there's no lower limit to playtime (5 minutes is a suggestion because it's difficult to have anything substantial under that amount)
4. I'll also leave this one to Human's discretion but I think as long as the player will see this ascent during their playthrough (which means including during or after the credits), it should be okay
5. The player does not need to be controllable during the ascent, but I think 'the player must go there' means that all players must see the ascent in some form.
If I got any of these wrong, Human can correct me!
I did not anticipate this game to exceed my expectations hahaha. Every time I see "maze" in a Harold Jam I automatically expect a comically unfun experience, but instead this was not only genuinely fun to play, but also had a really nice ending I didn't expect hahaha. The Evangelion joke was obviously hilarious, but I didn't expect the symbolic "moving on" of Harold among the other RM heroes to make me actually kinda emotional. Excellent entry!
Weird question for you! Let's say I have two entries, one that meets the criteria perfectly fine but another that is iffy. Would a disqualification on one project affect the other(s)?
Wonderfully worded. This has been a really rough time for the community, but it gives me hope seeing how everyone has been banding together the past few days and really putting in the effort to stay constructive and bring each other up. It's really hard to stay positive at times, but I think if the community as a collective took all of this advice to heart, we can get out of this chaptre and move forwards into something more positive.
This is a wonderful title, and I'm glad your hard work has been paying off. It is atmospheric, it has a rich story, and an engaging and unique combat system. Keep up the good work!
Haha, yeah, truth is our community has been going through a bit of strife at the moment, so I wanted to dedicate this post to reminding everyone just how great of a community it is. But... I just couldn't help being a trickster and pretending this was one of those Goodbye posts!
Heya! I'm only a half-entrant but given the nature of the questions I think my feedback is invited as well!
-What did you most like/dislike about the jam?
I admit, the whole theme thing made it feel a little limiting at times. Having to make a game about Harold already narrows down the possibilities a lot, but with the way the rules worded that the theme must be "prominent and obvious" it made me pretty stressed thinking about how to incorporate a lot of the sorta vague terms I was given. After later being clarified that the theme isn't that big of a deal, I felt a lot better about it, but I also understand that the point of the theme is to help prevent cheating by making preemptive projects, so I can't really recommend just getting rid of it, obviously.
- Where did you hear about the jam?
I'm in the RM Beta Testers server, so it's basically impossible NOT to hear about it. Frankly, at first I wasn't interested in joining the jam at all, so I was almost slightly annoyed by how prevalent it was. I definitely ended up warming up to it all in the end.
- What inspired you to join/submit?
I've been working with DJ for a little over two years now, and he's grown to be one of my closest friends, so seeing him learning RM by making extremely goofy games made me really eager to have him direct that humour into this jam, both because Human's aggressive marketing implied that more entrants would make him really happy, and also because a comedic jam like this sounds like the perfect training grounds to let my new student hone his abilities! Seeing him put everything he had into this jam made me really excited to help him out.
- If you didn't join/didn't submit, what was the barrier?
Probably comes as no surprise, but Axial is just a much bigger priority to me. I'm sure if I wanted to, I could have easily found the time to make a great entry to this jam on my own, but the time I would be spending working on a jam that I'm not 100% invested in would be time and skills taken away from my real passion project. It's possible by the next jam, my circumstances might be different and I can blow you guys away with my radical skillz ;D
- Future theme suggestions?
This is admittedly more Reid-y than Harold, but I think a Modern vs. Fantasy theme might be fun!
Or perhaps a Reid jam instead of Harold...? Hohohoho...
- Do you have any assets you'd like to make available to the community for next year?
I'd be happy to leave my 16x16 Harold sprite available, and I'm also going to double check with DJ to see if the Reid sprite in that art style could also be made publicly available. If there's any demand for more assets in this art style, I'd be happy to make some, but I also don't want to spend energy creating sprites that nobody wants to use.
- Any other thoughts or suggestions?
I think the rating categories were a little too vague at times. The "Harold" category, for example, was extremely hard for me to judge with. Was it meant to be the sheer quantity of Harold? How much I like how Harold was portrayed? The time limit thing was also supposed to affect the Harold rating which made it even more vague.
There was also a lack of any way for me to really rate how comedically funny the games in question were. Of course, I understand why: a good number of the games in the jam weren't comedies at all! But admittedly, it felt difficult to really rate how much I enjoyed something with the categories given (my top two favourites, HaroldHarold and Stuck In The Past, both felt they had to be rated lower than I would have liked due to them not being objectively "fun" or not being extremely Harold centric, for example). I'm not entirely certain how I would recommend fixing this, but the three categories given didn't quite feel satisfactory to me personally.
Overall though, I was pleasantly surprised by this jam! This was my first time ever participating even a little in a game jam, and it was definitely an interesting experience. I'm a little more open to the idea of joining them in the future now that I've seen that I don't necessarily have to make it a huge time commitment if I don't want to, especially since I had a lot of things that I chose not to do or suggest in order to ensure my partner had as much control over the project as possible; I think now that he can take care of himself, I'll be competing alone next time!
