itch.io

I misinterpreted the enemy cards and was wondering why I was taking damage from them. But, I still made it though despite this.

The graphics are a bit flat, but they get the point across. The lack of sound makes the game feel a touch empty. The game was a bit simple, but likewise fairly easy to grasp. The project feels like it was properly scoped for a 10-day game jam (as a chronic over-scoper myself, that is a good thing).

But, it is a complete game that makes luck a core mechanic. Certainly a better outcome than what my team accomplished.

Also found the optimal camping spots on the edges, and survived the time limit, only to find the pies stop.

The text font was more blocky than necessary, and I felt it made it hard to read.

Not sure how scalable the inverse roguelike progression (the curses) would be in a larger game, but you seem to have made it work great for a jam-sized game.

I'm not the best at dodging (despite playing Monster Hunter; you'd think those skills would transfer lol), but I see the gameplay progression, and I like it.

Definitely not the only first-person dungeon crawler submission (mine included), but this takes the broad principles of dungeon crawlers and runs in a different direction with them.

Funny thing on the procedural generation was that I had it implemented in the first couple days of the jam.
I was going for something that had influences from Dragon Warrior Monsters in the dungeon design, but a lot of what would've been influence from that got scrapped in the first-person implementation. And I'm pretty sure the things I could've taken as influence still were the things I assumed incorrectly on how they were done in Dragon Warrior Monsters.

A little tangent, but yeah. Thanks for checking out our barebones concept! We're hoping to continue building out the concept to reach what we'd hoped to build in the jam (and probably beyond that scope, eventually too).

The wheel-spin popups are kinda disorienting imo. I couldn't quite tell what triggered them (or there was even a player-visible cue).
Though I kept making the enemies bigger as I went, which was amusing.

This is so much what the project I worked on wishes it could have been.

It was interesting playing the game and seeing how many things were approached similarly, even if most of the stuff in my project never got implemented.

If I open the WebGL player in a browser window on half my screen and don't fullscreen it, it crops off the right edge of the gui. For a second I thought it was a bug in the game, but the HTML padding on the player seemed the primary culprit, preventing the player from occupying a little more space.

The initial plan was to have multiple floors in the dungeon that progressively got harder. With that in mind, the two-tile mazes would have been unlucky (especially early in the dungeon), rather than feeling like the game glitched out.

(Technically, none of the mazes have a way out yet, anyway -- it's just most noticeable in small floors)

Digging through the supplied binary, and it appears to be expressly for MacOS x64, in the Mach-O binary format. Not sure how many people here are going to be able to run that without jumping through numerous hoops to effectively emulate macOS.

I couldn't seem to figure out what "order" I was supposed to catch the balls in. It felt like if I caught a dark ball, it'd take a life, and if I avoided it, also take a life.

Without figuring out what I'm supposed to do with them, it felt like the game just was "play until you miss enough light balls (fine) or until three dark balls spawn (frustrating)". Certainly unlucky, but hard to play more than briefly.

Conversely, the sound effects and music fit in nicely, and the graphical style catches the pea-soup feel of original GameBoy. The balls spun a little when bouncing off the basket, and as far as I could tell, correctly nearest-neighbor rotated to accomplish this.

The attack randomly working felt more frustrating than fun the way it was implemented. The way it just let you spam attacks until an attack worked just made it button-mashy, but in a bad way. I will admit bad luck is hard to make into a fun game mechanic, leading to pitfalls like the one you stumbled into here.

The final boss I think attacked me at the platform once? but otherwise stood there and took attacks from me.

I spotted the aspect ratio problems you mentioned on your page, as well as the white of your graphics not matching the white text of your HUD and the out-of-scene black being deeper than the darkest tone of the spritework, making for 6 colors on-screen at some points.

Regardless, it's more complete than what my team managed to submit, so that counts for something.

It seemed like the scoring worked such that the best bet was to get an even mix of positive and negative cards for as long as possible, and then standing when it came chance that you could bust. The stretchy score and telepathy upgrades are a powerful combo.

Some of the upgrades seemed to be more of hindrances, like the ones that made face cards all positive or all negative, since that would unbalance the card ratio and shorten strings of cards.

I ended up going until I crashed the game trying to skip an upgrade screen with stuff I didn't want, having regularly been getting 300-500 point hands. (I guess I should have taken the face-card removal upgrade, that'd reduce the average point swing of the cards and thus increase the length of card stacks)

And, for some reason, half the score displayed off the screen for me playing in browser.

We were pulling inspirations from a bunch of different GB games, like Mysterium, Sword of Hope, Final Fantasy Legend, Dragon Warrior Monsters (technically GB-compatible GBC, but I digress).

I'm hoping we get a chance to continue fleshing this out. I feel our idea was good, but we dropped the ball on implementation. Literally getting the items to draw at your feet while facing a wall was a last-second polish feature lol.

The blackjack duels was not something I expected. Definitely a different approach.

Mechanically, though, it seemed like the best route was to Stand the moment there was risk of busting, since the punishment for busting not only took away your chance to hit, but also gave the enemy a huge free hit. The computers also approached the game a similar way, and at the end of the day made the final boss feel a bit like it was pure chance if you could win it (even though I got it first try).

I also feel it would be a boon to pull cards from a deck for both you and the opponent, and give them suits. It would make the blackjack aspect feel a little more there, and maybe add some strategy in the way of card counting.

The movement felt like it took inspiration from the likes of *Crypt of the NecroDancer*. It took me a little bit to figure out how to move and not just turn.
The wheel of ammo that is chosen from at random definitely feels unlucky. Did one run, ran out of ammo until I got more through reasons I'm not certain of, and then promptly died to two slimes.

Music is snappy, art is thematic. In all a solid entry.

The controls are extremely floaty, making it easy to crash into stalactites or enemies. The art is competent, the sound unobtrusive, and the premise fits the theme. Looks to meet the four-color limitation too.
Getting a jump sound attempting to jump when already in the in the air is funny at first, but becomes a hindrance when the player graduates to hops at some point in the platforming, losing the ability to use audio cues to determine if they should DI their jump or not.
In all, it has the feel of what's normal for a game jam game: the core gameplay, enough art and music to get the feel across, and not a whole lot of polish.

Well-polished "point-and-click" (well, a menu instead of using the mouse). Didn't go particularly far, but it seemed mechanically sound. Art was good, the sound effects were on-point.

For whatever reason, the menu options would change in weird ways when you tried to go a direction you couldn't, leading to choosing an unintended option.

All around good game. The controls felt good, the soundtrack was fitting, the sound effects were on-point.
The fact it took so long to break things open added to the mood of the game.
The one time one of the monsters pursued me, I hid in a locker and they just waited outside. I don't know if they don't have a wander mode for idling or if they actually have object permanence, but it mechanically made the lockers unhelpful.

Couldn't get past the pong, for whatever reason pong against myself was too disorienting to score above about 350.
The music is decent, the graphics look nice, but would not translate well to a GameBoy screen. The if we exclude the weird JPEG-like background noise, I count six colors easily. The sprites (for Pong) are built for what seems to be around a 250-300 pixel wide screen area. (There's about 4-5x upscaling into a 1000+-pixel-wide screen area.) And there's a bit of anti-aliasing in there to boot.

Functionally, I'd prefer having the option to choose minigames instead of having to beat one to play another one.

The game was mechanically sound, I will give it that. Some QoL, rendering, and sprite tweaks and it'd be right there with a GameBoy feel.

Charming little game. The realistic cat sound was a nice touch.

I died a little on the inside when I saw Alt was a control (I detailed on another game how my Window Manager gets overexcited when I press Alt and a direction and simulates a continually-pressed key). I desperately searched for an alternate binding, but grudgingly accepted my fate when I found there were none.

The jump is a little stiff, but otherwise seemed decent.
I didn't get particularly far, but it seemed the amount of cats was intentionally ludicrous.

I'm not sold on the color palette in use here, tbh, but it looks like you made do with it as best you could.

Story-wise, I can only conclude that the player is a villain. An indigenous revolt against a colonizer? The colonizer is the villain there. You are sent with the express purpose to quell the rebellion, making you an accessory to the colonizer. Not sure what the sinister thing beyond that is, since I couldn't find the second key in town, but from what I got of the story you do not play a hero. What better horror than realizing you are the baddie, no?

Music is spooky, and loops well. The lack of sound effects made the game feel like it was missing something though.

In all, a solid entry.

If you fullscreen the window, the upscaling that is done by the engine anti-aliases the render, making it very blurry.
Additionally the Amazing Ghost text on the title screen seems to be drawn to the 320x288 upscaled window as if that was the screen size, rather than drawn to a 160x144 window and upscaled later. Once you enter the gameplay, though, everything is the right scale.

Taking corners is very unforgiving, and the moving enemies will get you if you get stuck even briefly on a corner, making for a frustrating experience. With some forgiveness on those corners, it becomes a fairly enjoyable little game. It combines the puzzle solving of figuring out where you can reach to open up another section with the reflexive play to avoid the moving enemies.

The controls on the page mentioned something about shooting black crystals? I didn't go particularly far, but I didn't seem to fire anything when pressing the specified key. I'm guessing that wasn't implemented in time for the jam?

The momentum of the dive is janky -- if you hold down a direction key, the swallow careens into the side of the screen, suddenly accelerating in the direction pressed very quickly.

The viewport is really small; if you had any post-process upscaling for it, it didn't work.

The death sound got rather grating very quickly, since it is rather difficult to not hit every obstacle on the way down.

It is, however, a functioning game, which is more than I managed to make.

The number font in the corners and the lighting effect absolutely disregard the 160x144 and 4-color rules, but it appeared the rest followed it well.

I quickly got annoyed that running into a wall blocked movement parallel to a wall as well. You had to back up a step to move any other direction.

There seemed to be something to collect while avoiding the weird monster thing, but it was unclear to me what or how much of the things to collect.

I found the puzzles to be on the simple side, once I figured out the doorway wasn't a waterfall when the door opened and I wasn't carrying a soul fire.

Spritework is solid, though for some reason your game is rendering a full spread of grayscale rather than 4 colors. I took a screenshot and it indexed to about 200 colors, and they smoothly went from dark to light gray. So, that seems to be a bug there. (EDIT: I re-checked the screenshot and all the colors are from antialiasing on the text, and a slightly darker dark gray around the key count. The rest seems to be working right.)

The lack of sound effects and music was a detriment, but you already knew that, given the statement of the game page.

Ended up playing until the room where the platform goes slowly around the room, and decided I was too impatient to wait it out.

I found a secret keybind to skip levels. I assume that was for developers lol.

The spritework was very polished, the music competent; the gameplay definitely felt very Binding of Isaac-inspired.

It's got some rough edges here and there, but honestly, so do most game jam games. Well done.

Very much reminded me of Super Crate Box.
The combat is fluid, the controls intuitive, the spritework is stellar. The sound effects are on-point.

A very good entry, in all.

Very surreal. Definitely a different direction than most people took for the secondary theme.

The extra-blocky graphics for some of the text game more Atari 2600 vibes than GB vibes. It also made the text very hard to read.
The browser version was scaled at a factor of 2.5x, which made for some janky distortion in the sprites. It properly nearest-neighbor scaled from 160x144, but it wasn't a clean scale across the screen due to scaling a non-integer factor.
The controls for which direction the up/down pumpkins would throw seemed inconsistent, or at least unintuitive. A better approach would probably have been to make one pumpkin on A, the other on B, and choose your direction with the D-pad.

The gameplay was simple, though the difficulty seemed to come from trying to throw lanterns in the correct direction. With some more polish, I think this could have been a more enjoyable experience.

The horror of only ever being asked about the number of colors allowed, despite that being very directly addressed in the jam rules.

If Discord existed in the GameBoy era, this would absolutely pass as an in-era parody of GameBoy games, instead of a parody of moderating the jam (and retrospective parody of GB games). Though I suppose replacing Discord with IRC would accomplish most of that. But I digress.

The game is well-crafted, actually managed to get Unity to behave and output 4 colors, and has a catchy soundtrack. The only question that seems to come up is the colors one, but considering the number of jam entries I've spotted that got tripped up by their engine in the color or resolution departments, I think I understand why its so common here.

I was chuckling the entire time. This skeleton is funny. And surprisingly environmentally conscious.

That No sound effect was impressive, too. Well done.

A history lesson? In a spooky game?

It's more likely than you think.

/lh

The amount of sprite glitching made it extremely hard to tell when an enemy blew up or not. Projectiles are hard to dodge, especially once bosses start throwing out homing projectiles.

I kept counting 5 colors on-screen, despite it sounding like you used GB Studio for this. Not sure how that happened.

Though the ring section made me go "Oh no, is this Superman 64?" for a second, only for the game to go a completely different direction afterward. Kind of a funny little bait and switch there.

Definitely noticed some spelling errors, as others have mentioned.

The green background for the text box during parts of the story had lackluster contrast with the text, making reading the story more difficult than it should have been.

With some polish, this could be a decent game. But it's current state was a bit underwhelming.

One thing worth fixing as you continue forward with developing is the viewport.
The game opens in fullscreen, and deviates from the aspect ratio of the GB screen, as well as insufficiently upscales the imagery. It seems to be the case that it was not designed with this in mind, since I can see part of the space between maps when I load in. Incidentally, the space between maps is a different color from your main palette colors.

Looking forward to future, more complete builds. I want to go on this adventure as the (incredibly speedy) cat.

Very simple mechanically.
The little monsters looked like they have no thoughts in those heads of theirs and I love themb.
Rotations were, by what I could tell, handled in a ways that stayed true to our dimensions for a GB screen. Though I'm not fully sure if the duck was supposed to fly farther if you were hit multiple times in succession or not, it was funny to watch them spin away.

The music was a jam, though it sounded more like what I'd expect from a DOS game (or maybe a GBA game) than a GB game. Very 16-bit feel. One of the instruments in the non-boss section sounded exactly like something I worked with when I was using OpenMPT a few years ago. I think it was a sawtooth wave? It's been a little bit. Though, it's worth noting that were weren't required per jam rules to make 8-bit music, so I don't count that against the soundtrack.

The pacing was on the slow side, but the music was jamming enough that really didn't bother me.

I think the boss wasn't causing me to drop ducks and just pushed me around? I mostly dodged stuff and the couple times I failed to I didn't lose the duck.

In all, a good, albeit goofy, entry.

The follower was always somewhere else when I needed them, it felt like. The game seemed to expect I'd need them, but they were often lagging behind so much that I couldn't use them.

The float jump was nice, just the right amount of floaty to it. The sound effects were competent, albeit a little repetitive without background music to complement them. The platforming felt intuitive and forgiving, at least as far as I could get before dying to jumping on too many monsters.

In all, a solid entry.

The timing on the platform-to-platform jump is rough.
Then again, I stink at platformers, so maybe it's just me. I died at the first sign of an obstacle. Well, maybe second. I think I jumped over a small pit without issue.

A well-rounded entry. Music is solid, and doesn't do anything to make it obvious when it loops, so it kinda fades into the background a bit. The graphics are distinct, recognizeable, and detailed.
This feels like something that could have been on the GameBoy, although it appears to be a re-engineering (and improvement, by what I could tell) of the version of Ghostle Luife made at a different point.
The biggest issue is that while rotating, the tile sprite treats the upscaled screen as if it were not upscaled, making for a smoother rotation than would be possible on a 160x144 screen. While they are stationary, they follow the proper alignment, just not when they're rotating.

Really leans into the psychological horror side of spooky. An interesting take on the jam theme.

Loved the little throwbacks as puzzles and stuff. Definitely requires out-of-game knowledge of retro gaming to complete some of the puzzles, though.

Huh. If I unfocus the window to do anything else for a second, and then come back, all of the controls stop working.
And it performs awful on my 4-year-old laptop. The further I go, the more often and longer the pauses in responsiveness are. I assume it's having to garbage collect more often or something. My computer heats up like I'm running a game from like 2018, and I'm capping 4 CPU cores when it pauses like that.
Took some screenshots to make sure scaling was right (it was) and found out Unity is being stinky and giving you four visually distinct colors, but with multiple different versions of each color. It reduces to about 30-ish colors in a palette, even though it visually looks like four. Even from one color variant to the next, it looks the same, but they have slightly different hex values. It seems these slight color variations are mostly on the edges of objects and such.
(TBH I'm noticing a pattern where Unity keeps tripping up people trying to adhere to the color and screen size requirements. This is relatively minor, since it still looks like 4 colors, but something to tweak if you move forward with developing this.)

The atmosphere is spooky and unsettling, tho. Really nails that feel that something is off (aside from the corpses and rambling of who I can only assume was their killer). The minimal background music adds to the mood. The visuals look good, too. The slow drip of information as you progress though the same hallway again and again is perfect for the mood this sets.

It seems dubious this would run at any usable framerate on a GameBoy, though, even with better optimized code.