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Zactyl

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A member registered Mar 24, 2017 · View creator page →

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I see. Could you elaborate a bit about why you found it to be bad? I wanted it to be hard, seeing as it's the final level, but it's definitely possible that I went a bit too far, or tried to cram too many ideas in one level.

I'll look into the stuck ending as well.

Well, I don't think it's inherently bad, just could use some improvements. If I were to say what I'd change in your position, I'd do the following:

  • Remove the input delay from selecting tiles (this is probably the most important one in my opinion).
  • Quick transition animation between the two slots (nothing super complicated, tween-ing between the two points would probably be fine)
  • Some sort of effect when completing a match-3 set - getting a cool effect hits the dopamine receptors (or something like that).
  • If for the fields part you just mean how many of the gems there are, using less would definitely help, but I don't think it solves the issue people are having.
  • I think the match-3 gameplay is fine - it's a classic for a reason. You could consider using some power-ups from some of the well-known ones, but it might ruin the counts for each color.
  • I haven't done the math or anything to prove it's possible, but something you should consider is that a player could create an unwinnable game state by isolating a few gems with no way to match-3 them.

Unfortunately, I'm going to be a bit too busy to commit to being anything like an official playtester, but I would be willing to check out future updates as they come available.

Good luck!

Very nice graphics and style, everything had a very nice atmosphere and fit together to make a great combination. The music and sound effects were really great choices too and really helped sell the feel of the game. Shooting and everything felt really good. The game itself got a little repetitive after a while, though. I think it would help the game to feel a little more dynamic. Since the goal was to stand within the circle, I never really felt inclined to leave there, so I never really felt like it was a good idea to use the dash, either. The story was pretty cute too, and I think that hug was extremely precious.

This was pretty fun! The gameplay was pretty straightforward, so it was really easy to get into it right off the bat, but there were a lot of options to choose from to add a bit of depth. I do wish some of the choices felt more impactful though - for example, healing 2 HP didn't feel super meaningful when each character was hitting for ~30 each round (though I may just be thinking that cause I got a pretty strong opening early on). I think I also would have appreciated some indicator for the different buffs and debuffs I would be applying, and I wasn't exactly sure which way the turn counter was supposed to be moving. Really liked the feedback on the buttons! I actually spent more time than I'd like to admit just playing around with the buttons on the main menu screen.

I don't think I have an issue with the intent behind the game, but I definitely think that it would benefit from different execution. While the puzzle itself is pretty tedious, I think there's room for games to have a bit of intentional tediousness - those "Sort the Museum/Library/Store/etc." type games have been fairly popular recently, so it's not like that in and of itself is bad. However, I absolutely think that it's in your best interest to make the tedium not tedious, as counter-productive that might sound. Like, I think if the selection and moving stuff was a lot snappier, I could see myself sitting through and moving all the pieces around, even if it took a while. But as it stands now, where I'm also staring down the prospect of going through this process hundreds more times, while there's also time where I just can't do anything for no apparent reason - I just saw the writing on the wall and backed out after about 5 minutes. It's a bit of a shame, too, because the story aspect seemed pretty neat, it sort of reminded me of Yu-Gi-Oh's Millenium Puzzle, and I think exploring that could be very interesting. 

For what it's worth, I thought the music was quite nice as well.

This was pretty fun! I liked that each of the levels had their own different mission that wasn't just beating up all the enemies. Was thrown a bit off by the movement at the end, but it was mostly something that just took some getting used to. I do wish the combat was a little more interesting, but I think it was made up for by the content in some of the other levels. The story of the game was pretty fun too. Even just jumping into this game, it seems like these characters already have quite the interesting dynamic going on that was enjoyable to watch.

Pretty cute! I like the designs of the characters, and I think that the system was a pretty interesting twist on how rhythm games can be presented. I think the inputs might need to stick out a bit more though, at certain camera zooms, the point might be outside of the camera's vision, and the plus that also shows the direction ends up blending in with the character portraits. Also, it might just be me, but in two-hand mode, I would keep getting which character would be for which hands, especially if the directions made them cross over each other, so the right-hand character was on the left-most side of the screen. Both of the songs were pretty nice too, and I liked the effects that you used for the background, which helped keep things visible even when the camera was a stretched a lot more.

I really like the sprite in 3d environment style, so this was pretty cool to see. Think there are some cool things you can also do with the world you've set up, so I'll be interested to see what kind of things the other missions might hold. As it stands now, I think there might need to be a little more assistance with navigating the world. Firstly, it was a bit annoying having to jump up the stairs instead of being able to walk up them. Also, I didn't learn that you could rotate the camera until I read some other comments - since I was using the mouse to navigate the starting menus, I defaulted to using WASD and mouse, so I hadn't bothered to check the arrow keys. It made it really confusing to tell where I was supposed to go if there was a pathway that was behind the default camera position, and I felt kind of stuck wandering around looking for where I was supposed to go. Character designs were quite nice, and I liked that you have a functioning save system, too, it's always nice to see stuff like that working properly in game jams.

I think there are some interesting ideas here, that help you stick out from similar types of games that I think are pretty cool. I personally haven't seen many of the Survivor-types focus on protecting NPCs, so I think that's a pretty interesting angle to explore. Unfortunately, I would prefer you leaned into it a bit more. As it stands now, you can complete the game both without firing a single time and without even seeing any of the NPCs you're supposed to be protecting by just rushing each of the book spawn locations. As much as people dislike escort missions, I think it'd be really interesting if the NPCs were in actual danger that we'd have to handle (it doesn't have to be getting attacked specifically, but something that makes us need to interact with them). Also, the collision with the rocks was kind of annoying. I didn't have an issue with obstacles on the map, but they were pretty small, so when things got hectic it was hard to tell when I was about to run into one.

Saw that this was your first completed game, so congratulations on that! Looking forward to your next work!

Super interesting style, I think there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with this combat system. Took me a while to get the hang of it, but I do think that once the basics were handled it was okay. The only thing was that I couldn't tell what any of the effects of the cards did. I could tell they were doing something since I could see the numbers changing or the massive hits into the enemy, but it was mostly guesswork. I could have sworn that I saw a pop-up trigger at some point, but I couldn't get it to show up again, so I may have just been seeing things. The art was super nice, and I think it was pretty easy to tell each of the cards apart even at a glance, which was pretty nice considering how many cards there were available.

This had a really cool battle system! I think there's a lot of design space you could explore with this sort of style, and I'd be interested in seeing more different options that you could do with them. I think you did a good job turning the time constraint into some fun humor, too, all the sprite work was very charming. Would really love to see it come to life with some more effects. I was definitely missing some quality of life features, like being able to see which tiles were in my draw or discard piles so I could plan around certain tiles I might draw. For the fights as well, I think it might need some tuning or weighting for certain abilities, because on the final fight I would keep getting the attack that scales off Reds played on the first slot, so it would basically just be 0 damage. On that note, I think there's some room to simplify some of the effect text. Most of them were pretty fine, but the X scaling attack took me a couple reads to felt like I got it (even if in retrospect it was a pretty simple equation). The world was pretty interesting as well - the snippets from hovering over the characters felt like they said a lot.

Pretty fun, liked the music and the main menu screen looked really nice. I liked having the ability to knock enemies back, too, felt like it really came in handy in a lot of situations, especially if you need to hover around a certain area. Definitely think there needed to be more feedback on what you're getting from each game though. Since enemies are always coming at you, there isn't much time to experiment and see what's different. I also think I would have appreciated a bit more space? It felt like the camera was really close in, and it wasn't keeping up well with how fast the player and all the slimes moved. The games were a pretty neat idea, and I like that they come up at the bottom so that they aren't in the way of all the fighting, but you can still see the results.

Designs and atmosphere were amazing! I really liked the variety of styles each of the magical girls had and felt they had a pretty solid variety of abilities and party compositions you could go for. I think having a main character that could go for different classes was a good way to keep the build options open while still having a POV character. I think there was an issue with the support version though, since the second support ability and the first persistent ability have basically the same text description. For that matter, it was kind of difficult to feel the effects of the different buffs and effects in combat, and not being able to track them after they've been used made some parts difficult to accurately plan around. This was most common with enemy Guarding effects, but there were also several times enemies hit someone with a debuff that I have no idea what it did. Really liked the camp scenes and would be interested to see more of them.

Happens to the best of us. Heck, happened to me this very jam too!

Good luck!

Super fun to play! The last baking day really had a lot of pressure - messed up one order and it was like everything else started falling apart lol. Only thing I think felt off was after picking up the duplication upgrade, I'm not sure if I was supposed to hold down the ingredients to make more. Like I would drag the milk over the pan, and some would go in, but the milk would still be lit up like I hadn't done that part yet. The music was super nice, and I enjoyed getting to read your comments on them from the main menu, as well. The transitions between everything were also really nice. Really well done overall!

Pretty nice game! It had a really nice humor to it, and the art style was extremely charming. I did find it to be more on the difficult side though. On one of the last platforming jumps, I think it detects me as "standing" on it too early as I'm going up to it, so by the time I'm coming down to land on it, it's already flipped down. I had to restructure the jumping method for that one specific jump after it had killed me. The boss fight was eventually manageable on Normal Mode, but especially the "Let's Circle Back" attack on Hard Mode felt pretty difficult to handle at all. Also felt really rough to start the whole fight from the beginning on top of having the fist slam become an insta-kill. I couldn't tell for sure, but I think he swiped longer too? In any case, I don't think I was ever able to get past half health on the Hard Mode version. The ending was pretty nice, I don't know how the rest of the points are calculated, but it'd be interesting to see what happens if you actually don't get placed.

The main character was pretty cute! Seems like the double jump wasn't working though, so I didn't get much of a chance to explore around a bit more. The pit also just kept me stuck there, so even after falling out of the world I had to manually restart it. I thought the attacking wasn't working, but it looked like it did damage to the final boss at least, so I think it just needs some sort of tell to show that it's working. The dashing was fun, it seems like if you time it right you can keep your momentum and move super fast, though it was hard to get a hang of it. I actually ran into the final boss at a high speed at one point and I think I slid into a different plane so I couldn't attack it - though it jumped towards me into the same plane so it kind of solved itself.

This was pretty interesting! There were quite a few different options to choose from, so it looks like there are lots of different ways that you could build a run. For my playthrough, I basically just Might maxxed, but I played around a bit with some other options like the Shield + Tidal Waves stuff just to see how it might work. A lot of the enemies had some pretty cool mechanics, too. Though, I wonder if there was a way you could have the first level enemies do something more interesting than just basic attacks while keeping them simple and straight-forward for the player to get a handle on the mechanics. Since everything is strictly beneficial, the "Skip" option doesn't really seem to mean much - seems like it only would come into play if all your options are at the cap already. As always, the game was very humorous and got quite a few laughs from me. Also, nice job being able to fit so many of the themes in there as well. Would be interesting to see what kind of unique mechanics the other theme's bosses could have.

Shame you ran out of time, the core of this felt like it had a pretty good shell. Controls feel like they are kind of at the right level of difficulty for this dogfighting sort of style, and cutting through the buildings was super cool.

Super cute game, and I love the idea behind the combat system. Feels really good to be able to pull off one of the big attacks and get a lot of hits with it. It felt like it was kind of difficult to do anything beyond the first level attacks though, it didn't feel like I had a lot of room to maneuver or time to build up charge before I was about to get attacked again. The effect when you get hit kind of threw me off as well. Returning to the spawn point makes sense for when you fall off, but if I got hit, sometimes it would just send me straight into another pile of enemies when I was already positioned more like I wanted to (mostly only had an issue with the long level with this).

The style of the game was also super nice! I really liked the way the sprites were mixed in with the environments, made it feel like a pretty unique vibe. The game was pretty funny too, and the music was quite nice to listen to.

Really nice job! The presentation of everything and the feel of the controls were pretty great, and the level design felt like it had a lot of interesting platforming puzzles to work out. Some of the obstacles were pretty tough to overcome, though, it felt like. I think I had the most struggle with finding the right timing for the geyser for quite a while. In regard to the life system, I thought it was pretty clever to use the red overlay to signify you're on the last life. At first, I really liked the look, too, but as I got to the later levels it would sometimes make it pretty difficult to tell how I would need to navigate on the upcoming obstacles. It also being sort of an all or nothing system meant that if I died once or twice early on, I would just do a full reset because I wouldn't think I would make it without all my lives.

For the environmental obstacles, it kind of felt like I had way too much time to dodge the lasers and not nearly enough time to dodge the boulders. They seemed to only trigger once though, so it meant that in most cases I didn't really have to factor them into my pathing at all after the initial shock.

On a second playthrough to improve my time, I noticed the layouts were different, too, and thought that was pretty cool. Gives it a little replicability by seeing what kind of level it might generate next time, and I see in other comments mentioning it's generated via chunks. One thing that might be good to look into in that case was there was a few times I would die and get sent to what I would imagine is the next chunk's checkpoint, so there might be some kind of trigger bug for that part.

There's a nice basis here that I think you could expand a lot. Shame that you ran out of time though. I think exploring those first two rooms had a nice vibe to it. Took me a minute to realize that the bookshelves with dialog had some extra books on them, so it was nice that I wouldn't have to click on every individual bookshelf to check if there were dialog. The final witch fight was a little rough, though I don't know if I was misunderstanding some of the abilities. It felt like the strong attack's damage wasn't lowered by my defense ability or counterattack, when I figured it would be. The designs for the enemies were pretty cool too, and I think adding some of those stories right before the boss fight is a good way to give them some hype before the fight.

This had a very strong impact! The introduction was super strong, voice acting was well done and the effects on it really enhanced the vibe. The arena and character designs were super cool and the music really fit well. I think with a bit more work on the fight itself it would be really good! I think adding some feedback to the other moves would help a lot, too. I tried them out a couple of times and couldn't tell what they were supposed to do, though after I would get hit it would look like I didn't lose HP, so I assume they did do something. There was also a moment during the mid-combat cutscene where I got attacked in the middle of the dialog (since I assume it recognized it as her turn while it was playing still). I didn't lose any HP from it, so it wasn't the biggest deal, but it did throw me off from the scene. Also, it looked like if you hover over the buttons during cutscenes, you can see the tooltip for the attack hotkeys.

Looking forward to seeing where you take this!

There was a nice eerie vibe going on that was pretty nice. It was a little hard to tell what I was getting from each of the blue books though. It's probably a bit difficult to do so with the setting being a school, but some of the pathway would feel a little samey. It was mostly fine, but there were a couple times at four-way intersections that I would get a little confused about which way I came from and where I haven't explored yet. I did like that it looped you back around to the locked door after getting the key - when I first saw it, I had thought it was more like it was limiting the play area, so I hadn't thought of it by the time I picked up the key. Dropping us off back there was a very good way to remind us about that roadblock.

Pretty fun game! Took me a while to get used to the response timer, felt like if I had to react to something unexpected (which wasn't uncommon due to some of the camera angle changes), it would already be too late. It went more smoothly as I played more though - more of a change of mindset than what I was anticipating going into it. I found it pretty difficult to tell which rail I would be jumping to once they started overlapping each other, especially on the levels with 5 rails. Sometimes I would go left seeing a clear blue right there but then jump halfway across the map to a corrupted green - that kind of scenario. Getting the combo inputs down was very satisfying, and the progression into the last level's mechanic was very nice! I especially liked the move names, they kind of felt like they really complimented the inputs.

A very interesting concept! Caught me pretty off guard when reading the description but was fun to see in action. The games themselves were pretty simple, but I imagine they were basically just vehicles with which to show off the tech. I did try loading in one of the other sprites as a level to see what would happen, and it mostly functioned correctly, so that was interesting to see (I put in tennis-gal, and the tennis game ran mostly normally, but would have some visual errors occasionally, and the score counted into the negatives instead).

Music was pretty nice, but it would get a little maddening after it layers on top of itself whenever you go back to the start screen.

Thanks for playing! Honestly, I'm not too good with horror myself, so hopefully it wasn't too painful! Thanks for pointing out that bug too, thought I had fixed it but maybe got lost in some of the changes.

Thanks for playing! That's a good point, maybe it would have been better to hold back some of the abilities for later stages.

I think the approach for the visuals were very interesting! I liked checking in on the book and seeing the new updates as the game progressed, I think it really helped sell the atmosphere. I think I would have liked it if were a bit clearer when Gerome was talking and when it was narration, but it was pretty easy to tell from context still - just a bit of mental delay when reading. Was caught a bit off guard by the animation, it was really nice to see! I think I may be a bit unclear on the ending though - I have my ideas, so hopefully I'm understanding things correctly.

Thanks for playing! It was kind of a surprise for me as I was getting started on it, too! Thanks for mentioning the panel bug, the newest update should have a fix for that.

This was pretty fun! I like that all the weapons felt pretty different, and upgrading them felt nice and felt like they made an impact. It was fun getting to use the new stuff, and having them level up based on how much you use them really helps to encourage the player to try all of them out. Controller support was quite nice, in general it felt better to play on, but I think I may have had some issues using the tether once I started using the controller. I was able to manage without using it since I only started past the first level, but some of the jumps felt like it wasn't catching correctly. The little familiar also didn't seem like it'd attach until after I jumped from the ledge, which made me really apprehensive to do so since I didn't want to fall to my death.

Also, I think there was a bug on the first level at least - hitting the water while gliding seemed to just take me underneath the water instead of killing me, so I would just fall into the void until I returned to level select.

Liked the designs for the characters, and the enemies really gave off an alien feel, so I think you succeeded there. Also, the train was very nicely made, too. 

It was a nice little game. The little minigame with running around the map was pretty enjoyable, and having the marquee to help direct was pretty neat. Took me a while to get used to it, like I kinda went into patrol and got confused when I couldn't interact with any of the people on the map. I did figure it out eventually, though. Since you need to spread out which types of units you have, it gets a little rough when the issues keep favoring one person, though. And the choice of unit in the recruit scene feels a bit arbitrary if the high star ones are objectively better (ie: you just pick the highest star unit that you don't cover the type for). If you plan to expand on the game, I think widening the options you're weighing will help the strategic feel. 

Also, I really loved the effect on the transformation. Even couple of cycles I would just assign and unassign them from missions to get the effect to replay. It's a very nice tough.

Also also, I believe my game crashed near the end - I think it was a result of colliding with an NPC right as they were spawning in (it froze on them still fading in).

The presentation of this was really interesting. I like the plotline lined out in your game page. Unfortunately, I also cannot read anything, so I can mostly only give my impressions based off of visuals, convention, and what little I got through translation services. But please let me know when you're able to add in English support!

Thanks for playing! I was a bit worried about it being too difficult to remember the longer combinations, so I tried to make the surrounding systems a bit more forgiving. Hopefully it meant it wasn't too frustrating.

I'm glad you enjoyed the variety of the death scenes - I had a lot of fun coming up with them!

Thanks for giving it another shot! I'll look into some of these bugs - it's my first time using this dialog system, so I should have expected there to be some issues like this. Thanks for pointing them out. I'll look into some ways to make them easier to spot during development.

Thank you for playing! I definitely wanted her to leave an impression, so I think it was a nice way to accomplish that.

Additionally, I recently fixed a bug you may have ran into, so if you are interested, please feel free to try it again.

Thank you for playing! A bit embarrassing to find out that I also don't know how to spell. I fixed the issue, so if you're interested, please feel free to try it again.

Thank you for playing! I fixed the crashing issue and footstep issue (made the unfortunate mistake of playtesting muted near the end). Please feel free to try it out again if you're interested.

Thank you for playing! I fixed the issue, so if you are interested, please feel free to try it again!

Was a pretty fun time, there was a good balance of a variety of card effects with just some high stats ones that did make me think about which I wanted to play each turn, though that definitely was helped by the insane card advantage you get from Bertrand. It might need to be a bit clearer that you can attack the portrait since I hadn't thought to try it out until my second go around.

Ran into a bug when the enemy had a full board and I imagine a card it still wanted to play so it froze, which made me have to restart (although as you can see from the description, I was already in a pretty bad spot, lol).