itch.io

This game is going to make bank off the art style alone, you’re gonna be rich.

• Running the game on Linux with Umu/Proton, as far as I can tell it works fine.
• I was a little confused at the main menu, space being the only button that does anything? I didn’t see any button prompts anywhere. If the other buttons are only there for show I’d just skip them entirely until they do and just have a “Press Space” prompt to kick off the demo.
• There’s a lot of typos in there, things like “an” instead of “and” or “excentric” instead of “eccentric”
• The first big dialogue I didn’t get any portrait or sounds for Rowan which was a weird.
• There’s a character missing from the fonts when I’m running it, looks like it’s meant to be a dash or something based on where it’s used. Looks to be UTF+2014. It’s not just the pixely dialogue font that gets this either.
• Some other anons have said this already, but the pixel font for dialogue stands out as not matching the rest of the game. I think the combat log font would be a much better choice.
• Interesting how the entire combat system is centered around Lily’s point of view. It’s certainly different, and I know at some point playing Bard’s Tale I just end up doing the same shit every round so maybe it will work. It sounds like the kind of gimmick I probably wouldn’t like but I’d need to play a lot more to know for sure.
• I’ll say one thing about it that was already annoying: I set the party to target weaknesses when fighting some Burnouts and Yew just kept on slinging Fireballs which should have been an obvious bad choice. I’m not going to say it should be an option to fully control every character, but people are going to be constantly bitching about it if you can’t get the decision-making perfect at critical moments.
• Not being able to use the mouse in the UI is a serious pain.
• Killer music selection, I love how high effort it is having so many tracks in what is just a single big story section.
• I don’t play a lot of VNs but I do love a good dungeon crawler and this is definitely activating my neurons. When people were complaining about it being story heavy I thought there was going to be a whole lot more of the talking first, lol.
• Considering you don’t use it anywhere else, it was actually annoying finally having mouselook in the dungeon because I couldn’t tab over to my notes. I’d rather it just be something that happens while you click and drag. Especially considering it kept doing it once I was in the Tab menu.
• I gave Antang this advice before, you’ll want to instantly process all grid movement and just have the camera constantly playing catchup. From the moment I started walking it was swallowing inputs because I was tapping too fast. One of the best things about this genre is that you can take it at your own speed but that’s meant to mean fast as well as slow.
• Would be good for Escape to exit out of the tab menu too
• Really annoying that Space is used to confirm everywhere but the dungeon where it’s suddenly Enter instead.
• I ended up stopping after a few combats once Yew was down to low health. The items weren’t working from the Tab menu and I couldn’t see a way to cast spells from there either.

It’s early days of course but you’ve already got a solid foundation. I am hesitant about the lack of direct control for the party, but I’m looking forward to seeing how this shapes up.

DD69 is supposed to be for lewds but I didn’t want to age up any of your characters, and I had stars in my eyes when I saw Cammy carrying around a god-damned Arming Sword! So have this much lower-effort fanart that I hope you enjoy all the same.

I know you guys crunched to get into DD69 but this was quite disappointing. The first demo was a really solid stealth game and pretty much everything that made it work has vanished. The other posts already aired a lot of my grievances but I also have some more:

• Really have to do something about that shader stutter, it gets brutal right after that first chat with Nife. If they’re unavoidable, you should at least cap your deltatime so the mouselook doesn’t freak out on the following frame.
• The inventory is still really scuffed. While this one is a little better designed than the previous one the implementation is significantly worse. I can’t tell if right or left click is supposed to unequip because every garment seems to have its own unique interpretation of what either means. You really ought to keep it consistent by having left click always open a context menu with no change unless you make a selection, and right click should be the quick-unequip option.
• When I loaded a previous save to get some drawing reference most of my inventory was missing except for a small selection of eight items. I was also locked in Vebber’s place with no way to get out.
• It’s pretty annoying that ESC also pauses on top of closing the inventory, it really should do one or the other.
• I don’t know if I like the new movement. Like it is more intuitive but the old system was just complex enough in the right places to make it really satisfying to move around once you mastered it. The slower running speed before also meant that guards chasing you were a serious risk without having to move super fast.
• Ratalie’s arm flailing kicks in way too fast when you’re jumping. I would think it should start only after a second or so otherwise every jump looks like she nearly tripped over something.
• I’m running on Linux through proton, and while a lot of stuff is really obviously placeholder, but the outside of the well area stood out as looking wrong, like the material was missing for all this grass
• Speaking of the well, it’s actually a little weird that the gang’s hideout isn’t somewhere in the middle of town. Like why bother with the excavation if they’re out in the country? Even the intro of her getting caught stealing is in this big sewer that doesn’t make a lot of sense now.

I don’t know what to tell you guys, the new assets all look fine, and I get there was a ton of work done code-wise to make the systems more robust and configurable. But it really hasn’t come together and the game has definitely regressed. If you want a fresh pair of eyes on your code send me a DM on discord. I don’t know Unity very deeply but I did teach C# at a university for many years so I could offer a different perspective.

Best of luck with what you’re doing, Ratalie is still a cutie.

Yes

I already drew something for you last DD but Skeleton-kun was a nice quick one I could do so he’s going on the page this time.

I get frustrated super easily at platformers in general. I’m too used to just using WASD for everything that I need to adjust for any game that doesn’t use it. So instead I just restarted the game over and over to see all the cameos, lol. Assuming the variants for Bonka and AGDG-tan count as separate characters I think I saw them all.

💖💖💖💖💖💖

On account of me now being super-biased, I had to draw Yesdev-tan

He hath returned, it is the legend…

I like the design of the menu widgets, though some of the buttons in the pause menu don’t work, and getting a game over is essentially a soft-lock that requires me to kill the game. The level select looks fucking sick though, good job on that one.

A couple of things I think would add a lot to the main menu:

• Try a lower camera angle, maybe waist or knee height looking up at Claire and the mech.
• The specular highlighting don’t do Claire’s model a lot of favors, her texturing is very flat. Adding some strategic creases to her suit would probably help a lot, especially paired with a normal map to make the light pick them up better.

The Tab menu is really buggy, there seems to be a big disconnect between the buttons on the sides and the loadout in the middle. Like you can toggle the shotgun off but selection is based on whichever in that slot was last clicked. Or how the menu indicates you start with the railgun when actually you start with the nailgun

The laser is pretty disappointing, it’s just another railgun but with a trail. It also seems to always shoot to the bottom left of the reticle and only seems to reach out about as far as the flamethrower. I was thinking it would be more like Quake 3’s lightning gun.

Really not a fan of the new arcade level. The buildings look better but the layout of the last one was much better. Now it just sort of looks like a block in New York or something while the last one felt closer to a Hawken map. Not to mention you can totally cheese the whole map by jumping onto any building and suddenly you’re in waaaay less danger.

I don’t know if it’s a lack of directional damage indicators or some other feedback but those crab bot things are by far the most dangerous enemy in arcade mode. They just nibble on your shins and you don’t even know they’re there.

I bitch a lot but I’m glad to see you’re still working on this, I’ve now had a chance to draw you some fanart. And in traditional media too!

The core of the game I think is still solid, but the feel still needs serious polish. Movement and turning aren’t as smooth as they could be, lots of things happen in the game without giving effective feedback, animations are often very stiff without a lot of continuity between actions. I think you can still capture a lot of people’s imagination even without it, but really locking on JUICE would make this game so good.

Edit: The game runs fine for me on Linux. The file size is gigantic but I don’t think I had any problems specific to Linux.

Really cute board-game vibes in the exploration section now. I like the way you’ve done the “danger mode” thing, I don’t know if I’ve seen a dungeon crawler do something like that. It gives a tiny bit of unique gameplay in how you move your piece around the board to try and get the drop on the monsters.

Is it the plan later to decorate the background instead of having a black void? I think some dungeon flair would go a long way to tying it in with the combat.

Did you end up using the grid movement trick I told you about? It feels very similar, lol. Good job.

I’m not a fan of the little three-letter buttons like PTY and STG, they shrink down even more to two on hover. If you give them a little breathing room and add a tooltip explaining what they actually are I think they’ll be much more approachable. As it is, not knowing advance, why would I click a button labelled DIE while there’s a monster chasing me!?

I’m not sure what Momentum means, it’s mentioned in the ability descriptions but I don’t see anything on screen indicating how much I’ve built up so I can’t really reason about it.

But yeah, I think you’re on to something with this little board-game grid thingo and from here I think you’re all set to start grinding out game content.

Thanks for trying it out. Very odd that Resting wasn’t recovering SP, it’s definitely supposed to and Exhaustion isn’t meant to be a factor. That’s just the condition you get for being on zero stamina.

I should also add a warning to the page that there is no automap, you’re supposed to play with some graph paper at hand. The actual 7DRL submission had a muuuuch larger map and way higher XP requirements which made it sadistically difficult.

I tried playing this on Arch Linux but you’re dependent on a bunch of additional libraries. SPIR-V Cross and libcimgui_sdlgpu in particular, possibly more. I’d recommend static-linking CImgui and just shipping already compiled SPIR-V shaders instead of compiling them on the fly, so long as you’re not procedurally generating those too of course.

I got it use SPIR-V Cross installed from the package manager but I gave up when I saw CImgui was also missing, I don’t think the version in the AUR will be what SDL is looking for. Also for some reason it won’t pick up libdxcompiler.so in the working directory without setting manually with LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Hopefully somebody else has more luck, this looks very interesting.

I only just heard about the original Oubliette yesterday watching an Ultima retrospective so I didn’t even know! Most of the art was just old public domain works and I fit the theme to what I could find in the week before the jam.

I’m considering an automap, though probably only as a non-default difficulty setting, I really like using graph paper for these. I ran out of time to put anything more interesting in the chambers. This was my first time trying out any kind of procedural generation and I got really carried away with the map size. ONE room will have a stone casket you need to walk over in order to be allowed to exit but that’s it.

Thanks for trying it! I had a great time with this and will probably do something similar next year.

Oh there wasn’t anything to figure out. I wanted a prompt for opening the casket but ran out of time so all you have to do is walk over it and then you can exit.

Really neat game, was a little skeptical about not having combat but wandering around and decoding the songs is quite fun and I ended up playing it through to the end!

One thing I’d recommend is hiding the mouse cursor when it’s over the screen, or at least having an option for that. I’m sure Raylib has a simple function you can call for that. It would also be nice to be able to rebind keys without restarting, although I’m a longtime vim user I haven’t played a lot of roguelikes and about halfway through I was really regretting not setting the movement keys to the numpad

Super neat that the fireflies actually cast light. The song effects are also really clever and it was really cool noticing what all of them were for. I did have to guess one of the songs (the Pilgrim’s one) by trial and error though, I was missing the first note.

I like this one a lot, good job!

I’m not a good judge for this sort of thing because I really don’t like a game opening with crafting, but the lore is really compelling so I gave it a shot.

After wandering around the island for about twenty minutes picking up rocks and punching trees I gave up when I couldn’t figure out how to make a spear or axe I could take with me down into the next level.

Would be really good if at least the first few craftable items at least displayed what was necessary to make them. I tried making an obsidian spear or axe but having a few pieces of obsidian, a couple of logs, and a couple of sticks in my inventory wasn’t enough.

Pretty neat, I’m only passingly familiar with the original Rogue but this looks very similar. Definitely had to dock a few points for my first shot with the pistol causing NaN damage, making the approaching Orc invincible on NaN HP.

The resting was originally intended as a last resort but I didn’t end up adding any other way to heal.

I also specifically avoided visible enemies in the dungeon to save on scope, as well as that being exactly how it works in The Bard’s Tale which I treat as the standard for blobbers.

I do intend to make this fast resolution an option and for the default to show when new rounds start and to resolve actions one at a time while scrolling up the log like how it works in The Bard’s Tale. I do agree it’s a bit too quick if you don’t know what exactly you’re looking for. What’s in there now is still mostly just what I threw together during the week of the jam.

Woah, no kidding, lol. I’ll figure out why it’s doing that and put out a patch this week.

Heh yeah I put in some effort to organize properly on standard and ultrawide aspects but not for High DPI.

I have some small plans still for the log for next demo day if not sooner. I’ll add a way to scroll it properly and add some particles and sound effects to slow combat down and show each action in turn. What probably doesn’t help is that I skip messages of enemy attacks that either miss or get absorbed by armor, so it makes it look like enemies aren’t attacking every turn even though they are. I might just put in an option to turn those on.

If it’s not showing anything, maybe you need DirectX Redist re/installed?

Fighting feels a lot more deliberate than before, though I think I’d prefer FFX’s turn list thing instead of just showing current and next under the party. That way it would be easier to tell when the enemy is actually going to go, and you could even show previews of what effect each attack/skill might do to affect the turn order.

Is there a way to set a default marching order? Because it definitely seems like the Knight should be out in front all the time, the fighter doesn’t seem to last as long up front.

Seconding needing some way to show max HP, particularly for the player characters. I think I saw you experimenting with this on discord already though.

Didn’t have the patience to draw another skeleton, I’m sticking to an hour each for these fanarts, so I drew what I guess could be an ogre instead, enjoy:

Cool stuff, always nice to see somebody engine-devving. I’d know DearImgui anywhere. You’ve got a lot of fancy post-processing in your graphics pipeline too, kinda makes it look like warframe.

Not a fan of instant death on contact with the squids. I would put in three hearts and have the player bounce away on taking damage. I’m really not a fan of gimicky movement systems though and maybe it’s just not for me.

I tried playing the game with umu/proton on Linux but Unreal is an unstable piece of shit even under ideal conditions. The screenshots do look pretty cool, comes across a bit like Blood Omen 2.

I don’t know if I ever looked in the options before but I appreciate having a 144 FPS limit option. The only problem is that you and the enemies are still moving on the physics step without interpolation which looks very jank. I think that’s fine for physics objects but it makes gameplay harder. And reiterating what I said last time, adding some momentum to all character movement would go a long way.

I’m no expert on Godot but in my boomshoot I did character collision detection and slide move on render frames, and I hear a popular way is to keep it on physics frames but render them one frame behind and interpolate. I know Overwatch does that fine but you’ve got really snappy movement with enemies that are quite small on screen so that tiny bit of lag might not be worth it.

I really like this new Gorge map, you’ve done a good job with all of the foliage and it even makes many of the enemies scarier that they can see through it. I don’t think you’re trying to do any stealth so it should be fine to keep it like that.

I don’t know if it’s just my mouse ghosting but I would sometimes click once and get two shots out of the coach gun.

Man, I really felt that sound of getting hit by a javelin at one point. Good job. Do the javelin guys need multiple headshots to kill them though? I feel the extra oomph sound is kind of wasted because it gives you the impression you can one-shot them in the head but that doesn’t seem to be the case with the pistol.

I’m going to need you to give me a way to reverse weapon scrolling. “Down” is “Next” and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.

This one guy was hard to spot against the environment and I don’t think it seemed quite intentional. I don’t think that’s a particularly big deal though, I mean camouflage is legitimately something I the mutants would use against you to full effect.

I think you can get away with making these mountains just textured planes like the trees and like the mountains on the other side of the skybox.

I don’t think this is the intended way to this secret, I got there with a shotgun jump from down below, but it looks as if you should be able to crouch to get in except I don’t think there is a crouch.

I didn’t finish the first mission, died trying to shotgun-jump to the mutagen near the lighthouse and the checkpoint set me back further than I wanted. I didn’t check if there was quick-saving but I’d appreciate if there was.

I had intended to do a fanart for your game last demo day but had no time due to my daily drawing challenge at the time. So I did this one earlier before I even tried the new build.

I am thinking of adding an automap as a difficulty option. I do want to encourage people using graph paper, but especially the 1.0 version has maps that are way too big for that.

That’s pretty much it, I just also want to add some loot and other stuff you can find.

Graph paper is kind of the intent, but I got really carried away when I got the random generator working and made the maps way, way too big, lol.

That’s not a bad idea, I want to have some random features or theming for the chambers and it would be cool to have some flavor text pop up when you enter them as well.

Yeah I like how it turned out. I want to add some scrolling to the log that will give the battles some more juice by staggering out particles and flashes and stuff but I’ll have an option to keep it instant like it is now.

Thanks, yeah I consider this a big success. I have a whole slew of little ideas that would make for neat little blobbers like this one. I’m a bit miffed that so many people had the hole-in-the-floor bug because I spent much of the last day trying to prevent those but there’s apparently still an edge case that causes them.

Yeah I got plenty of ideas though the game won’t get much bigger in scope, I’m just going to polish out what’s already there and add a few things I intended to do but didn’t have time for. I’m definitely going to use this as a template for other small games though.

I was allowed to plan ahead for the jam so I used the week before to find plenty of assets I could use and it paid off great.

To some extent the player is intended to figure out stuff for themselves. But I do want to add tooltips for all the different buttons and actions, as well as an intro that explains that you’re looking for this big stone sarcophagus. The map is waaay too big right now though and it makes it really hard to find, especially without an automap.

Yeah I wanted to add a reviving item alongside some other consumables but ran out of time for the jam.

I plan to keep the random stats but if I wanted to add some limited customization in a new game screen, at least letting you pick classes. The hole is a bug unfortunately, you’re looking for a big stone casket.

I have a rebalance in mind for next demo day. There’s three encounter lists with the second one kicking in based on distance from the entrance ladder. I’m just going to remove that middle list and keep the third one kicking in once you’ve found the objective because you then have to backtrack.

I want to add some juice to the fighting, but didn’t have time during the jam.

Unless they’re surprised every enemy does attack every round, but the log doesn’t show when the enemies miss, only when you do. Also Warriors and Thieves have some damage reduction and if damage is reduced to zero it also doesn’t get reported.

I don’t have particularly big plans for this game in particular, it was more like a proof-of-concept. But want to do a revised version for next demo day.

No you didn’t miss much, I decided not to add an automap because I regretted playing with one when I tried The Bard’s Tale Trilogy with it turned on. The goal is hard to find just because I got really carried away when I saw how well the random generator worked and made the maps way too huge. For next demo day I’ll be making it much, much smaller.

I did intend to add items, spells, and safe places to retreat to so you don’t just end up resting all the time but ran out of time to do it during the jam.

I was going to add some popup menus for setting actions instead of the cycling, that was just a stopgap. I also wanted a way to select which party member has “focus” for certain encounter ideas and stuff like lockpicking so your hotkey suggestion is a natural extension of that.

A crash during an encounter doesn’t sound very good, I’ve yet to have a crash on my end but I’ll keep an eye out for it.

I’ll make an update for DD68 but this game is more like a proof-of-concept and a template I can reuse for a whole bunch of smaller game ideas that would work as blobbers.

The micromanagement is a pain point but it’s also messed up by not having spells, items, or a town to retreat to. You basically have to just use Rest for recovering everything which is supposed to be a trade-off as it passes time which means more chances for random encounters. Juice is also greatly lacking, I do want the log to roll out with particles and SFX like how The Bard’s Tale Trilogy works.

I don’t know about that idea, creepypasta stuff like haunted screensavers doesn’t appeal to me, somebody else can do that. I do have a lot of ideas for small games that suit this format though.

Ach, I never added a button for it in-game but you can toggle borderless fullscreen with Alt+Enter. The window should also be resizable.

This was made in under 168 hours while working full time so I left a lot of polish, juice, and balancing on the cutting room floor. I’ll get to responding to feedback tomorrow, I’ve got a busy day today.

I’ll note, the core grid movement was repurposed from a prototype I made last year. But the map generation and all of the actual game mechanics were done over the last week.

Good stuff replacing those placeholders! Loving the first-person arms and animations. I think if you can maintain the level of details you’ve got on your current models your game will already be pretty great. Are you planning on sticking to this level of fidelity or do you intend to eventually replace all of the models as well? Because I think the only really crucial thing to replace now would maybe be the GUI as a lot of it still looks very WIP.

I think I’ve said before, but the setting is super-reminiscent of Brigand: Oaxaca. Especially with the mutants and the wrecked buildings. Those flying poison-spitter things are new to me, kinda freaked me out the first time they attacked me as I didn’t think to look up.

I like how the boat movement is tuned now, though keeping it so simple people will probably just want to hold the buttons instead of toggling them. As for the player and the enemies, you could use some momentum. I know a lot of people prefer the accuracy of instantly going full speed and then instantly stopping but having momentum goes a very long way to making a game not feel janky.

Pretty cool how the enemies now come after you in boats too. Without tracers I don’t think I’d ever be able to hit the dudes through while trying to circle-strafe.

Do pickups retain whatever you don’t need? That’s a good idea and it looks like that’s what’s going on.

That dark shaman should really make some sort of noise when he teleports, he hitscans like an archvile except that he can also blink all over the place constantly and summon in adds and it causes the performance to get a bit spotty on my old rig. Also having his attacks be both hitscan and AOE that hits you through walls is especially annoying, especially when you can’t even move fast enough to circle-strafe him.

I really don’t like how it doesn’t remember which weapon variant you were last using when you hit the number keys, the trenchgun is way more situationally useful than the coachgun and it’s a pain having to switch a second time.

Ended up stopping after the first level, the increasing enemy count and the fast-acting boss really bring out the worst in the movement system, I doubly think you should look into having movement have some momentum. Especially as you’ve got actual projectiles and not just hitscans.

Reposting because the line over her upper lip made it look like she has a moustache, lol.

I won’t be playing this time around, but I had it down on my daily drawing prompts for today to do a Luis Royo study, and Priestess-chan makes an ideal subject. Thank you for submitting again!

All of Jens Vide’s music from the game is available right here on itch!

System ST91’s contributions were commissions and I don’t think he’s made them available for sale but he’s got a lot of stuff on his bandcamp page. I especially recommend MindHacker, his Ghost in the Shell tribute as it was why I commissioned him in the first place.

I got Riot Revolution off of Wimus’ soundcloud many years ago but I don’t think it’s available anymore.

I haven’t talked to all the artists about putting together a soundtrack release. It is something I can look into though, one of the songs was made by me personally so that would be a no-brainer.

From the main menu if you go Settings and Controls just scroll down and you should have a list of rebindable keys. If it’s not there it’s definitely a bug I’ll have to fix. The scrollbar can be easy to miss too, it’s on the left.

I don’t normally respond quite this fast but I just refreshed as I was about to turn in for bed, haha

Glad you enjoyed it!

I’m not planning on adding steam achievements but if I ever change my mind that’s a pretty good one.

Thanks for the control binding suggestions, controls have come up during Steam review so I can fix some of these now.

Collision problems have been a huge thorn in my side the whole time. For future games I intend to ditch Bullet physics and just write my own because there’s endless dumb problems like this that Bullet makes really difficult to work around while also needlessly consuming tons of CPU cycles. At some point I may backport these changes to Ctesiphon but for now this is just going to have to be a quirk that comes up sometimes.

I had somebody else also find their way up into that OoB area. I do want to encourage exploration so I’m redesigning that corner of the map to make this look a little more intentional and to remove the opportunity for soft-locking.

Thanks for trying it out, release won’t be long now.

I’m really keen to participate but I don’t have the time this year.