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Thanks!

There’s an indicator on the side with you and the prince, showing how far you are from them. Catching up to them takes about 30 seconds of straight diving (if I remember correctly), and time spent not at top speed slowly adds more distance between you and him.

Neat idea, though there didn’t seem to be much variety to the game in terms of the maze? It could be neat to start from different parts of the maze, each one successfully harder than the last.

I’m having similar issues here. You should be able to edit the viewport dimensions (those aren’t locked during the rating period) to help address that

Fun game, it’s a neat study in how mixing up enemy types can lead to gameplay variety. And its funny to see cursors flying all over the screen :D

That they are, heh. I’ve got some plans to build a cleaned up version of this game, but if I’m making a game on a short timeline, easy is better than hard.

I believe you can right click to destroy a piece (or more than one, though doing that seems to make things more difficult)

Thanks for the detailed feedback on the game!

The control scheme was tricky to implement, and, to be honest, I think I stuck too closely trying to emulate numpad on the regular keyboard, and to regular RL keyboard driven gameplay in general, at least for a 7DRL entry written in Godot.

I plan on filling this game out more later, though I don’t know how soon. I do plan on putting up a post 7DRL version once I get clear of some personal obligations.

So, I realize this almost a full year later, but I came back and fixed that part, thanks for the feedback on that.

(I’ve busy, which is part of why I didn’t do it sooner).

Yeah, I had had plans on trying to have it so you could pay in decayed tiles for different boosts, but didn’t have time for that in the end.

Given what time I did have, I was more focused on making sure the proc gen didn’t make things unwinnable.

We’ll see if I have a proper amount of time to come back to it (I’ve got other jams and ideas scheduled, especially 7DRL), but I do think the idea has legs.

Yeah, I wanted to add more to be doing on the floors, but I ran out of time

As soon as you can secure the Amulet in a dungeon of your own

Yeah, I let the Faustian Bargin card distract me a bit ideas-wise, and this is my first go at a classic Roguelike, so I was figuring a lot of it out for the first time, heh.

I think I might try to build out a fuller experience with the Kenney 1-bit tileset at some point.

Yeah, going for a fixed “only inside the rooms” camera did make it so that things were smaller than they’d be with a following camera. There should be a fullscreen button to help there, but if it’s still too small, that’s useful to know, heh.

So, the art and music are really good, but the deceleration of the character controller is way too loose, which makes a lot of the platforming harder than it should be, IMO.

Also, the camera feels a little too close to the screen, IMO, leading to a bit of screen crunch.

Still, very impressive to pull off within a week!

Neat little Egyptian dungeon crawl! The music gets a little repetitive after a bit, but the art is a nice little C64/Atari 2600++ style.

Nah, he’s the king from the Kenney 1-bit pack. Maybe there’s not enough detail for all of the bouncy to make it obvious, but it is there

Yeah, that was definitely a wrong warp, heh. This game was made for MVM 18, in a month, and I’ve not had time to go back and polish a lot fo the edges off. Thanks for recording a playthrough!

I mean, I’ve been writing longer essays in Jam feedback comments, lol

I mean, decent earbuds make it possible to hear a lot of little things, lol

So, easily one of the best entries of this jam, and it has a few things that I quite like:

• The wall climb ability helps make a lot of the room transitions a lot smoother than they’d be with only a jump.
• I had a bit of a “metroid moment” finding the 6th cat, heh

The mapping was quite good, I never really got lost, and it was nice to have generous checkpointing.

It’s quite neat to see all of the ways the art style pulls from Hollow Knight, while still being very much it’s own thing.

The main thing I’d say is that the music compression seems a bit high, at least in the web build? It’s not super noticeable when you’re playing, but I’ve had the game paused for various reasons, and I can hear a bit of a low hissing noise in the music then.

So, came back to this a second time, and I think I have some more concrete feedback now.

The first thing that I’d say is that the music being about 25 seconds long and written with a dominant style started to get a little old? There’s good stuff there, but it’s all Main Theme Song, and repeats a lot, which gets a bit old to listen to.

The other thing I’d say is that it feels like this game is always forcing the player to play at the edge of the ability of the character controller. Over half of of the jumps in the game require you to bounce off a wall, at least up to the second teleporter, and having to go back to the start on death got a bit old. I think having a bit more variety in the jumps would be nice, IMO.

The art style is executed well, though!

Thanks for the feedback!

I definitely agree that save stations should fill up your health.

The environmental cues are an appreciated callout. I spent so much time building out stuff that was cool in my head, but I didn’t put nearly enough time into communicating it, heh. Obviously it came through enough in the end, but definitely could use another pass.

I think building wires that show connect power cells to the things they activate would be a solid start, and, as far the bomb targets go…. Those honestly could use another full pass, with something less abstract (though causal lines would also be a good start for them as well).

The miniboss room definitely needs a lot more lead-up to it, mixing in more mechanics, that sort of thing.

I definitely plan on a) Polishing up the game after the jam is over, and b) building out a fuller version of this game, provided my teammates are on board for that. Though, if I do build a fuller version, this one will stay up as it ends up after the polish.

There are other boss ideas I had, and ways to expand the plot, and more time obviously gives more space to increase the visual variety.

A few thoughts come to mind re enemy challenge without having to make them tanky:

Adding minimal assets

• Have the drone enemy dash between a set of checkpoints, and only fire from a checkpoint (maybe use a particle effect to indicate a dash jet/rocket?). Makes it harder for the player to hit them.

• Give turrets a windup sound and period, Then place them tucked behind door corners, like Symmetra tends to place her turrets in Overwatch. That’ll catch players off guard, but give them a chance to react

More effort, needing more assets

• Have a drone variant the flies at a high altitude and drops bombs. Use it to harras players in rooms that have a lot of turrets (after having introduced them)

• Add some enemies that don’t shoot, but move quickly and get intnehnway Metroid Prime has bats that fly circuits that get in the way of some platforming you need to do, but don’t attack you directly, for example.

• Add enemies that do suicide attacks.

Misc

I also think giving the player shots a faster travel time (and a quicker reload time, I think) would help make the increased movement and angles more, though that takes it away from Doom and moves it towards Metroid Prime some.

Aiming and movement are parts of the challenge of an FPS as well, and are more interesting to interact with than just shooting something 5 times.

Granted, these are ideas in retrospect, and I don’t know what sort of time you’d have had to implement them during the jam, heh. Like I said before, getting 3D done during the jam at all is impressive.

As of yet, I don’t have anything coded in to use them.

Welp, got this as a high score, heh.

Tbh, I think it’d be neat to show the high score over the planets, so we can see what the arrangement of planets looked like

The unclarity of the eye boss is more an artifact of it being a late addition to the game than you missing anything. It could use more feedback in general, and another pass to tune the difficulty.

The escape sequence not having it’s own music was more an artifact of not having enough time between the conception and implementation for the musician to have time to pull something together.

Spikes having more feedback, better checkpointing, and/or switching out red spikes for lava or acid would definitely help.

As far as bomb ammo goes, I think I’d make it something that spawns from enemies in the future (as well as health that is separate from vials) and/or make the damage output from bombs closer to the pipe (and make most enemies less tanky to match).

The thing I wanted to avoid was players only using bombs, though, as you pointed out, there’s enough ammo about that they can almost get there.

I like keeping melee at least a bit relevant, though how the pipe interacts with enemies needs work (especially having knockback).

Thanks for giving the game a close look!

Learning how to make art work well with animation is a process, heh. My early pixel art often had too much detail that would get lost when animating it.

Well, if you want to block the player in, you can always have more ways that doors lock, so there’s doors that need a lever vs doors that expect a torch to be lit, that sort of thing.

The attacking jump interrupt was an on-purpose/intentional thing, though I think I’d cut interrupt time in half going forward.

I didn’t get many opportunities for feedback on the final boss, thanks for writing up some feedback on it!

The music not playing in the upper section is definitely a bug. I think I might need to switch out the music manager I used, I’ve had a lot of reports of music problems with this one, and enemies being able to hurt you while dying was definitely something I should have addressed.

Would you believe that I had 2 more bosses and at least one more biome and 2-3 other mechanics that I wanted to do at one point? In a way, I got lucky that I landed on a good subset of ideas out of it all.

I’m heavily considering taking this game and expanding it out at some point next year, but I am taking a gamedev break first, I’ve been doing a lot of it since GMTK 2022. (Over half my Itch page is from the past 6 months). We’ll also have to see what the rest of the team thinks about the possibility.

Softlock

So, the softlock was in a room where you’re supposed to use the web-boot thingies to jump up, the backwards momentum on them got me accidentally stuck under the corners you’re supposed to use.

I was stuck under one corner, then I’d use the backwards momentum to try to get out, and then get stuck under the other corner. It was kinda funny, in a way.

I never did figure out how to get those boots to work on the first time, it was always a bit of a fiddly thing.

Thinking over the early game a bit

So, using enemies to block off paths is totally valid, it’s mostly the dodging difficulty that makes it harder to parse which enemies are meant as blocks, and which are just there to add some challenge. I think the jump height is fine enough for dodging the floor enemies, it mostly becomes an issue when the ceiling is so low that you can’t take advantage of it, and are bonking into the ceiling. Then the jump is a lot more precise, in the sort of way I’d use as more in a secret-hiding troll area, more than the main path. This is probably where the large character against a low resolution probably hurts the most.

As far as having a hard time guessing where the pole is, there’s 5-6 doors between you and the pole, many of which involve likely taking damage the first time you go through them. And the intended path still has enemies and a death pit (because the likelihood that players reach it with more than 2 HP is slim). Like, it’s almost as blocked off as many of the other paths when it comes to “Danger == Dead End”. It’s almost less risky to go to the Blue Realm (and I went there before I got the pole at least once), even though you can’t make much progress once you get there. And then, after all of that, you have to do a dance of tricking an enemy to destroy blocks to let you at a pole, which also risks health. Like, damn, you’ve got yourself a whole mini-dungeon before the player even has a sword.

It’s a lot to expect out of players up front. The sequence could work, if the mechanics and level design were opened up a bit and tuned to be a bit more generous. Like, maybe get rid of the damaging water, and only have one or two spike enemies on the walls? I think with that, and adjustments to low ceilings, having to clear a miniboss without a weapon would be a cool encounter.

In fact, having things be a lot more generous up front gives you a lot of room to tighten them up to ramp up the difficulty later. Early areas staying easy and becoming easier isn’t a bad thing to have in a Metroidvania.

The Legend of Zelda NES starts you off without a sword, but puts it in the first cave you, so that you have to go out of your way to avoid it.

Miscellaneous other thoughts

And, at first, it’s not clear that your door-opening move doesn’t also do at least something damage-wise, I did try to use it to attack enemies a couple of times. (Especially with a player character that looks a bit of a magical girl, what with the crown and such). It’d be kinda cool if you could stun enemies with that move.

Another thing that seems like it’d be handy is to have a bit of a lower hitbox with the pole to make it easier to hit the fishy/spiky enemies? It still felt a bit hard to hit them.

I also think that it’d be awesome to have a variable jump height, so that once the player lets go of the jump button, they go into the fall state, rather than always going as high as possible.

Health pools being red, and danger water also being red felt a bit of a troll, though it did mean that I didn’t die in a place I expected to, so there’s that.

Alternative starting sequence that came to mind, but could be used elsewhere

1. Put the pole at a dead end
2. Have a bunch of enemies spawn after you pick it up
3. Make the first checkpoint only available using the pole after you clear enemy room

I mean, even if the ending was felt a little kitbashed, it was also a neat final exam of the skills that had been built up over the game, which is a great thing for a final encounter to be.

(And the music was fun to listen to)

Thanks for giving the game a play!

A teleport from the Bulkhead area to the low exit area would definitely have been unintentional, and a lot of game’s puzzles would benefit from a second feedback pass, IMO. I am glad that I was able to get as much done as I did with holidays and life events happening during this MVM though.

So, there’s something here, but I think the enemies need more feedback (even a flashing red would help). Granted, I’d love to see the main weapon involve me being able to spam shots really fast, but that’s definitely more of a Metroid Prime thing than a doom thing.

I also think that the enemies are a bit on the tanky side. Having to land 5-6 shots on a moving enemy with a gun that fires slow projectiles felt a bit tedious

Oh, and the textures seemed a bit on on the noisy side, which made it hard to follow the 3D shape of some of the tighter passages?

Still, cool project, and I look forward to seeing where it goes!

(Also, the arms out in front of you before you pick up a gun I though were helmet spikes at first, heh)

I like the depth of field in the platforming, but there’s a lot of animation work and the like that is missing.

To be honest, for a game with this level of time/effort allowed for it, I think it’d make more sense to go low-poly and build something like Rayman, with disconnected hands? That’d fit in with the rest a lot more than the the current player model. With that, I don’t hate the aesthetic here.

Congrats on getting Godot 3D to work for you, and on having a demo with a marked end!

I think this is the first full Metroidvania I’ve finished this jam!

I enjoyed it quite a bit. There are some small niggles here and there that other folks have mentioned, but it’s quite a fun little experience.

I was also very impressed with the helicopter controls, that were very well implemented into the game, IMO.

So, I have a few thoughts w/r/t the early parts, since I’m not clear of them yet (and am struggling to clear them):

1. If I’m going to be asked to jump over an enemy please don’t make that pixel perfect by putting a ceiling right above them. You have a nice big jump arc, I’d love to be able to use it in the early parts. I never got better than a 50/50 there.

2. If I’m going to be kept from having a weapon early on (which I also did did in my game), please make it so that I can get to a weapon without having to play a big guessing game as to where it is, with enemies I can barely escape.

3. When you’re designing moving platform sections (I’m thinking of the first room with the red water), I’d love to not have to wait for an enemy to move up for 5 seconds? I think the second platform jump tends to have an enemy right where I need to jump?

4. Having a fixed jump height really makes it hard to do some of the more precise jumps in that red water room.

Overall, at least the first part of this game feels like progress is measured in Game Overs.

So, I got past the first part, I still think what I wrote above applies. The staff is an interesting set of added abilities and such, especially being able to pogo off of parts of the stage. I did hit a softlock, though. I may come back to this later.

Where is the first weapon? That’s the struggle I’m hitting most right now.