I LOVED this. I love dungeon crawlers, and I love RPGs. I especially loved the experimental nature of trying out each rune and figuring out what it does. And the game's look and feel are right up my alley.
Awesome game!
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Monastic Inversion's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #256 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Presentation | #325 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Overall | #331 | 3.271 | 3.271 |
| Gameplay | #428 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Original idea, had a few bugs unfortunately, got caught in a fight as I approached the door and couldnt target the enemy. Really liked the depth in the systems though, presentation and navigation were fun, good job!
What do you like about your game?
Eithe skeumorphic interfaces or writing a combat system.
Comments
281 days ago(+1)
You made that system for cutscenes/dialogues, a unique movement system with random, a turn based battle system with 5 very different working spells and logs and a pause menu?
Thanks! The cheat I had with the cutscene is that I build the dialog with a dialog_finished callback, so anything can create a dialog and wait on it while itās rolling. I copied the trick over from how the battle animations work where theyāre mostly tweens that can be waited on.
281 days ago (+1)
this game absolutely oozes style I consider this high praise coming for you and your game, thank you very much! I plan on doing a lot more experimentation stylistically with 3D sprites, since currently the particles are still in screen space cause I was strapped for time. š¤£
as for this:
perhaps some way to combine orbs would be awesome,
soonā¢ļø
I am The Spiked's #1 Fan.
As a long time enjoyer of the Megaten franchise, especially the oldest of the bunch, Monastic Inversion was right up my alley. I've been following your excellent posts in the Acerola Discord since the beginning of the jam and it has been rather insightful to see the complete thought process of another dev so clearly laid out. Truthfully I wish that I were to have created such design documents before jumping headlong into my game, I imagine the experience would be a little more focused as yours.
The combat system is interesting in that I desire to see how you might develop it from here on, ultimately it's a card game, something I don't think I've seen in this specific context so to me it's a novel idea. I rather enjoy the potential concept of modifying your 'deck' of spell sigils as you traverse the game, stumbling upon new and interesting things to incant behind hidden walls or through other interesting interactions.
Ultimately as it stands in its current form, I found myself near exclusively using flare and not considering any particular strategic implications of the other sigils I had, though I very much imagine that with greater enemy variety, new spells, and other mechanics you might implement into what I see as the potential of a 'Deckbuilding RPG' of sorts, this could be alleviated.
I do have to echo your own thoughts from Discord, the movement is a small bit on the sluggish side, I do rather enjoy grid movement in first-person dungeon crawlers so to speak so I'd hope you stick with it, though I realize I have some niche tastes haha.
All in all, I like Monastic Inversion, more for what I am certain you can (and will) make it into than anything else. It's promising conceptually, and I think your solid structuring of thoughts in your design documents will really pay off. Thanks for the experience!
281 days ago (+1)
Spiked was the winner in the enemy design department. šHappy to make a fellow Megaten fan happy!
Ultimately as it stands in its current form, I found myself near exclusively using flare and not considering any particular strategic implications of the other sigils I had
Definitely an issue. I had to refactor the encounter system late because of an oversight and a last minute rebalance killed some ideas. Originally the big candle man would hit hard and have a lot of health, so you just hitting him with the red sigil would kill you and you had to stun him for two turns with yellow so you can buy time to heal with green, wait till your garbage was full and hit him with the blue sigil, or get him alone and use the orange sigil, which kills single enemies outright.
Truthfully I wish that I were to have created such design documents before jumping headlong into my game, I imagine the experience would be a little more focused as yours.
The trick to that was I made a card game in the past which was pretty janky, so I knew about a lot of the pitfalls going in and I didnāt try to plan everything out all at once, but did it in steps, so I was reasoning less about a grand design and more about individual āchangesā to the current system. Also, good whiteboarding takes experimentation so itās all about stacking projects I think.
Thanks!
Thereās definitely either a different form factor I need to switch to(free look, top-down, etc.) or improvements that need to be made to the movement. Iām thinking about making the grid square smaller so the player feels less constrained(also would open level design possibilities) and adding diagonal movement for faster traversal(or perhaps let the player face in eight directions instead), itās a running thing with me that I despise the difference games draw between orthogonal movement and diagonal movements since the squares are still āadjacentā, so Iām suprised this slipped my notice.
281 days ago (+1)
Great minds think alike, cause I actually gave hexes a shot for Ludum Dare awhile ago: https://soulreviews.net/blog/Cave-Game-Dev-Log-1
Itās always amazing for isometric games, although in the first-person perspective Iām not sure itāll work since people are kind of married to cardinal directions?š¤ Gonna have to try this out at some point, I feel like thereās a 5D Chess-like idea hereā¦
I liked the narrative and the explanations of the sigils, once they were used. However, the gameplay is a bit too simple for my taste, although it seems that you still got some plans to improve on this aspect. I have a few notes that I hope may help you:
- In Godot, you can merge the .pck into the .exe (just tick the "Embed PCK" option in the export settings).
- I would like a little less text in combat (you could use more colors and symbols).
- Seems like this is incomplete.
- At the end, 3 enemies appeared that I couldn't see (I suppose it's because they're being rendered behind the wall).
In any case, great job and I wish you the best š¤
281 days ago(+1)
Thanks for the feedback! I have to spend some time scripting exports in the future so the .pck advisory is well-appreciated! Many of the animations are unfortunately placeholder(meaning: absolutely permeant and shipping in the final game!) Usually I have this rule of āno placeholdersā, but I need to be more strict in this regard. Proof-reading is also not my strong suite š¤£. I plan on writing a .csv document or the like thatās change tracked/grammar checked/linted to catch these issues in the future.
As for behind the wall bug, Iād thought I had fixed that issue, but need to return to it. I use the same raycasts as for movement collisions for checking if enemy encounters are triggered, but there appears to still be an edge case. Iām betting itās because I buffer move inputs so the encounter is triggered, but you still do an extra move and the enemies are relative to the player transform so they appear behind the wall.
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