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A jam submission

Afterlife GladiatorView game page

A fantasy turn based RPG about dead people fighting each other.
Submitted by Bakar (@Bakar_Zu) — 2 days, 8 hours before the deadline
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Afterlife Gladiator's itch.io page

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Hey Bakar, you know the drill by now.

Video of me playing your game can be found at https://mega.nz/folder/WQ91HBxL#X4-j8Mj7H30Ai3aevWFEmA

Developer(+2)

Neat. 

Submitted(+1)

SAVED!

(+1)

stellar work

(+1)

Had to give this game another go.

Edit: I needed to copy paste all this feedback from a google doc and now it's perma-italicized.

Edit: I took screenshots of some of the stuff I saw but the post isn't posting with the pictures. I'll post all this as text and then try the screenshots in a separate post.

If there are no added effects, I personally would omit the "Added effects:" header and only include it if there are effects to show. When I first saw this I thought it was telling me there were effects but I needed to look at my character to see them.

The music gets repetitive, so I turned it off. After turning the music off, I started thinking you may want to up the sfx in battles. Footsteps, snazzier attack sounds, etc. In general I think you could add more sfx for the UI like when a button is hovered over. Also when I go from the home to fight in the arena that wipe should have a sfx.

When I click Skills or Items, it's not clear how to go back so I can choose the other one.

I keep thinking the X that's part of the border at the top right is an X to close the screen I'm on and go back. It would be nice to have a dedicated "back" button somewhere.

The combat log shows amount of damage done, but not the amount of healing done if a healing spell was used.

Are there gamepad or keyboard controls? I'm getting a little tired of clicking in the bottom right and then moving my mouse up to choose my target on the battlefield, then back down again for next turn.

I'm liking the battlefield character animations, there's cool personality in them.

On the map that doesn't fit on the screen, it would be nice to be able to scroll and see everything.

The Mysterious Bug at the end says "EHopefully" instead of "Hopefully".

I put in the secret word but now I can't respec my perks?

Potential bug: one of those dino things that can make themself immune for a turn did that move (they were the last enemy alive). I hit them to clear the immunity and they died anyways and I won.

Also with that dino thing, I'm fighting it and one of the tree things, and the tree thing is trying to buff it. But I think the buff isn't working because the dino is immune right now. Not sure if bug.

I think the status effect display is bugged. Finnigan was slowed, so I sped him up with a spell, but it still shows him slowed even though the text says sped up and he's moving faster.

The flashing effect on the bestiary cards is a bit much, I think it should stop after like 3 flashes.

Not sure if bug, I just waited with Mosca while having the perk that I should regen upon wait. But I didn't get a regen. Her HP was at 2 if that factors in.

Whenever I play jrpgs I wonder what it would be like if I fought a party that healed themself all the time like the player party does. Now I know what that's like with the Sannoval fight.

"really" is misspelled.

uuuhhhhhhh dunno if this is a bug but I can't target anyone.

IT KEEPS HAPPENING. I was able to beat them because I was able to target 2 of the 9 enemies so I hit them with spells that did damage to all 9.

I tried out the "auto" feature in dialogue. For dialogue that is long and spans 4 lines it's impossible to read it in time. The auto timer needs to adjust for text amount.

I left my pc for a bit with the game running. The pc went to sleep. When I came back the screen was frozen but I could hear the sound effects so I think it was still running but with a frozen screen. (edit: it happened again after my pc sleeping but this time the whole screen was black) (edit: the screen going black after the pc sleeps is reproducible every time so far)

Another potential bug with slowing. An enemy slowed Finnegin, so I had Haydn cast Motivate but it wouldn't ever take effect.

I think the cursor should be more pixelated to match the rest of the art.

Missing space between "evil" and "and".

Once you get to higher levels there's a lot more shit that goes on. Like recoil or counters or healing as a result of spells/attacks. But these aren't captured in the log. I'm finding it hard to understand how some stuff is happening at this level of complexity. I'd like more entries in the combat log or more visual indication of when side effects happen. I've started using the slow button so I can understand side effects. It might be nice to have an option where every time something happens I can read it and then click to advance.

In the angels flashback, Mosca seems to have the perks that she has in the in-game present day. Wouldn't she not have these yet?

There needs to be feedback when I try to purchase an item but don't have enough scrip. I was confused until I looked down at my scrip amount.

In the angel flashback, if I read dialogue at the main entrance, then shop at the store and continue, I'm presented with the same dialogue again.

Man this story is good. So cool reading through the angel flashback and remembering what happened earlier and understanding why characters said things earlier.

The red bar display of the Xanadu Knight's health is bugged, he has full health from regen but the red bar isn't full.

The special move of the ??? big boss aren't being recorded in the combat log.

In the big boss fight I used blessings of life and the game hard crashed. This was after I used blessings of life to revive teammates once or twice but this time I wanted the full party heal.

I think the healing amount displayed when Sannoval uses Alpha Blessing can show too low of a number sometimes.

After beating the additional hidden levels the Mysterious Bug says the same thing again where I can go play them again.

Anyways yeah this game is fucking awesome. Combat stayed interesting as new elements were introduced and I could build up my team to a certain strategy. Maybe it could be a little harder? Although I should be careful what I wish for. Story is great as I said. Keep it up!

(+1)


unnecessary "Added effects:" header

misspelling

Additional waves bug


Additional waves bug


misspelling
Developer

Thanks for the feedback. The bug with the multiple waves has hopefully been solved by now. The rest I think mostly revolves around player feedback and tutorializing, a constant trend at this point. I'll definitely take your advice regarding the journal and maybe I'll have a setting for the auto mode and text speed in general since it's currently a one size fits all situation and there's a lot of text to read.

Also, there are indeed button shortcuts, it's only that I never tell anyone. It's S for Skills, I for items, A for attack and W for wait. Also, Q and E to control the speed and 1-3 to target specific enemies or allies. I seriously need some kind of tutorial. 

(+1)

Really good, hooked me in so much I ended up playing through the demo in one sitting. The music is nice, even if the battle theme can get repetative at times, and the various flashback battles change up the pace and keep things interesting. The writing's good, only found one typo at the last dev message, though punctuation could use a re-work at some places (extra commas where it feels like they shouldn't be or missing commas in place where they feel like should be, missing periods at the end of sentences etc.). Slow is really powerful once I notuce that it's cumulative, Mosca's AOE slow spell can halt enemies to a literal crawl. Her Rock-Paper-Scizzor skill didn't seem to do much either, at least not what I noticed, and Finnegan's cleave skills seemed mostly useless since 90% of the time that move is used as a finisher (as by the time you have enough MP to use it the enemy's health is down as well). Other than that, skills seem fairly balanced and with the stats can build around different strategies. I've only encountered 3 bugs: In the house, the boundary of Haydn partially blocks when you try to click on Finnegan (most noticeable on the chest area) One time after being defeated on a split path, instead of redoing the node I was on the game only allowed me to select the other node instead, then after defeating it the available node switched back to the original path (screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/EztnOtu, you can see the helmet is at the top, then jumps back and the ! is back on the top) During Mosca's dream sequence, I did the first 3 teleports from the top, but the path was lighting up white for nodes 1 2 and 4 instead of 1 2 and 3.

Still, really good game so far, looking forward to see where it'll go!

Developer

Problems on the arena map are getting out of control. Thanks for playing!

Balancing is really difficult, but I think that R-P-S skill just needs a little bit more juice.

(1 edit) (+1)

as i posted it the thread, i replayed it from start to finish. it took me about 6 hours to do it, and it was a blast. by this point you know i love the game, so i wont repeat myself and instead i'll focus on the few negatives i found. i think the review will be too long to go chronologically, so i'll go by orders of importance.

Obvious Bugs and Crashes:

in previous versions, you had the fullscreen toggle on the main screen. this helped me tremendously since my old and oudated pc/gfx card doesn't like a lot of indie games. i have two monitors so it is unsure on which to put it, causing flickering and the game switching between monitors. this is fixed by making the game windowed. this isn't an issue of the game, but more of my outdated build, but this change hindered me specifically. if possible, include an options menu or the fullscreen toggle in the main menu again.

in 2nd fight with goon god, his basic attacks do no damage? description says it should, but HP is the same.
bug on loading save on the first "Arena" level, the one where you start in the middle and have branching paths leading East. died in the middle of the level (between the first and second hallowed ground) and reloaded, but the game places me on the first tile and doesn't let me move. resigning fixes it, but causes unintended EXP issue i'll cover later

major bug
Inost's face says it all. in the 2nd wave, killing a pariah and spawning an egg triggers a "New enemies approach" popup, which spanws a wave. this is already the 2nd wave, so there shouldnt be more. this softlocked me once since i couldn't target enemies, but I was able to cheese in on a second attempt by targetting all enemies with Ernmine and Peter. The bug happened again on that run, for a total of 3 waves worth of enemies on screen.

another big bug:
dying on the first fight and loading puts you in the first tile (the one you lost the fight and reloaded from) but the menu appears and is cropped. this isn't me not screencapping the full thing - this is how it looks. resigning fixes it.

Resigning and item/shop bug (?):
Resigning and restarting keeps your EXP, Money and Items. this is bad, since after resigning once my EXP messed up. i no longer level up before a rest zone, instead doing so at random intervals, throwing off the intended balance. i also ended up getting major upgrades (mosca aoe slow) before the intended times, making some fights trivial. same with the shop - reloading should return the money i had and return the inventory to the state it was at that time. the main issue with this would be attempting a fight with good items, using the items and losing the fight. loading now puts you at a disadvantage - your items are gone!

Other bugs: 
last level, the paths in the teleporters aren't highlighted, making it confusing from which direction you came from. picking the wrong direction then messes up the level completely, since you now can't access some portals for some reason. resigning and remembering the path fixed it.

there is a crash on the final level if you use Brunner's heal on Mosca if Mosca previously died but is currently alive (and just needs a heal)>

dying in the final fight also softlocks the game (yes, dying twice on both non-mosca angels since mosca doesn't have that park). if everyone really dies, the game halts and the enemies are on their turn, but they have no targets. the game therefore halts and nothing can be done. closing and winning the fight fixed this.

dying in the final fight and resuming sometimes would prevent the cutscene music from playing. might be caused due to alt-tabbing since i was taking notes.

Minor annoyances:

Enemy death sound plays with a 1 second delay compared to the animation, seems a bit weird.
level up sound is much louder than other sounds, but only in combat (post combat, i guess). the one in the stats page is fine volume wise.
the new warhound sprite is too nice looking. some players (read: normies) might not want to hurt a normal looking dog. if i thought of this, i am sure many more will do so, since i generally don't care about this sort of thing.
should be able to mouse-over your own inventory items in the shop screen
Desert description might be unclear for ESLs. for swamp + the poor man's iron levels, it's clear who benefits/is hindered. saying "attackers" in the desert level does make sense, but i can see how it might be misinterpreted. this also might just be my own ESLism speaking.
loading the game resizes the window. sort of annoying.
on poison ground, if you click attack while the poison info is still being processed (i have a fast Haydn), the health bar will disappear for the target enemy. this is fixed by just reissuing the command
Peter's checkered background (someone else also had it but i forgot) reminds me of the missing-texture background from Source games. i'd change it in some way (maybe make the checkers more visible towards the center or away from it) so it doesn't make people think of errors or transparency in image editors.
type in the end of demo screen ("EHopefully it was...."). end of demo screen is also identical for both ends until you input the password (nice password checker, by the way :^)  )
for the guessing game in the forest level, if you get a few directions correct, the second line will overwrite the first one but you can easily get lost/confused due to no indication of the current input position. to clarify. typing in the first input as ENWS, with NW correct, E is blue, S red.
second input is NNWE, with the first N correct. typing NW again (or just N) has no visual change, so then somebody could get confused as to their current input position ("do I put in W or E now?"). a simple underline or square frame fixes this.
sometimes in the forest level (with multiple waves, before Enkidu) enemies would have no death sounds.
the level coated in darkness with goons only has one fight type (2 demi goon jellies and a hybrid). it's a bit repetitive.
in combat, clicking the skills button should block clicks on the attack/wait button. i accidentally would click Wait when meaning to target the enemy in the bottom row right above the button.

Misc. Notes:

hard to tell the result of Mosca's slow's gamble effect. should be more apparent when you deal more damage and when you deal less. maybe a sound effect? a pitch change?
portraits have different expressions in dialog, but some are very minor and hard to tell. Mosca has one that's "sad", which is obvious, but the rest are hard to notice. Finn has only eye changes, and i wouldn't have noticed it if i wasn't familiar with the game.
the Brunner cutscene/mutation effect is downright excellent. it's only missing sound, but it's really great.
targets with long names like the Pachycephalosaurus have their names split in the text window. it's ugly - perhaps send it to a new line or add a dash
enemy AI improvements are obvious - i also like their priorities. Gaz 90% of the time starts off her final fight by slapping Mosca - it's excellent and hilarious. sometimes enemies do the dreaded "double wait", which makes their fights trivial. perhaps prevent that move unless i do a mana drain ability (i never did). only one fight was i think decided by luck (compared to many in the last playthrough, so this is a massive improvement). it was against enkidu, who did a double wait (instead of blowing up mosca like he did on a previous attempt), which allowed me time to motivate + slow, which trivialized the fight.

the list of complaints might be long, but rest assured i am a massive fan of the game and i am only trying to point out every minor issue i stumble across in hopes of improving the game further. excellent work, and i hope to see more in the future or on release.


Developer(+1)

Oh man, that's a big list. Thank you. I'll comment on some things that I think could be interesting but I'll probably like 40 items to my to-do list.

A lot of things that only show up once or twice tend to cause trouble. There are many other bugs you didn't find that I'm aware of but you hopefully didn't encounter. I just didn't have enough time for everything. At least that screenshot is kind of funny even if the problem is literally a 1 where there should be a 0 and I'm not even kidding.

The way resigning works is  basically the intended way to grind if someone is really seriously stuck. It's inspired by Shining Force where you even had a skill specifically designed to leave battles halfway through and keep the experience. You could even find a secret character in the process. I'm not sure it's the best, but I'd rather have the game be too easy than too hard. You also get extra money if you lose a fight but I can't fault people for not knowing that because I don't have a tutorial.

I'm impressed you managed to reach the second form of Brunner. It's incomplete at the moment because I didn't expect anyone to really find it yet. Reviving in general is kind of buggy at the moment, I probably broke something yesterday.

Finally, on the topic of AI. Gazia hates Rebel Angels so that's not a coincidence, Ermine isn't safe either. She also likes to pick Finnegan when she uses her "defend me" ability. There's another interaction with her that I won't disclose.

Thanks for playing!

(+1)

consider making the resigning a toggle.
sometimes i feel like i lost a fight  or a sequence due to a bad play - i don't want the game to lower it's difficulty when i believe i could've beaten it fairly. even a popup on multiple losses might be good ("hey i noticed you lost a bunch, want some EXP?"). 

keep up the great work either way

Developer(+1)

Just a little update, mostly to show that I care about the feedback I receive.

The settings menu is now available from the start screen.

Fixed the issue with infinite enemy waves on level 9. It only happened when the first kill of the second wave is a pariah.

There was a legitimate mistake in the state machine of the newest level. Its been corrected and should work as intended now.

Fixed issue with Brunner's heal crashing the game when targeting Mosca after revival. It only happened if Sannoval is also alive, but that's not unlikely.

Fixed softlock during the level 13 bossfight. Now the fail state should trigger properly.

Hopefully fixed delay with enemy death sfx, missing sfx and sounds in general playing louder than usual. These were oversights on my part.

You can now mouse over your inventory in the store to see what your items do just like you can do with the items on sale.

Fixed typo on demo end dialogue. Hardest fix by far. 

Added an additional visual indicator to the "Lost Woods" puzzle on level 7.

Sadly, I haven't been able to replicate the bug from level 11 with the messed up UI position. Other issues regarding resource management, encounter variety and balancing aren't as easily fixed.

(+1)

how easily can you send saves? i can try and replicate the UI bug since i sort-of know how i did it, i can retrace my steps


off the top of my head, the way i triggered it was to die on the first fight of that level with 1 enemy (giant sloth thing?) left alive. the end-screen plays, and you'll be returned to the menu. loading would send you to that position. the message-box UI would start opening up, but stop abruptly since you're in a fight-tile (or node, whatever term) instead of the first tile of the level. in general, i'd advise redoing the way you get teleported to tiles on loading saves. often times you'd get weird outcomes, such as your path (from the start tile to your current map position) not being highlighted. i think it might be the case that your level begins with the player on the start tile, but then you would get teleported to the saved position. it might be the case of "my machine is fast enough for this to happen", or something like that.

also, excellent job on addressing all these issues in such a short time! keep up the great work.

Submitted(+1)

Love it, I will keep playing this after the jam as well. I really like the animations and expression on the characters faces. The combat system is interesting, and it feels like a really streamlined and well put together experience. The music is good, classic videogame shit. 

I am going to keep playing and get back to you with what I think about the story, it seems interesting. 

Developer

Thank you for your kind comments. I need to add more expressions, or perhaps implement the ones I've already drawn.

Developer

What's new this time around:

- Most units have animated portraits now to help distinguish them better and general flair.

https://bakar.itch.io/afterlife-gladiator/devlog/564214/a-small-progress-report-...

- Hovering over units with the mouse displays a list of their current status effects in the journal to the left.

- There's a Steam page up for the game.

https://bakar.itch.io/afterlife-gladiator/devlog/571345/a-small-update-plus-stea...

- Lots of placeholder assets replaced, including items, slide cinematics, UI elements, etc.

- Item system developed further, including many new items.

- Encyclopedia is now prettier and hopefully easier to read.

- All of the levels from the DD 50 version are back plus a totally new one for a total of 13.

https://bakar.itch.io/afterlife-gladiator/devlog/583377/demo-day-52-is-here