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Earhart of Darkness's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Best 3D Art | #1 | n/a | n/a |
| Community Choice | #6 | 4.429 | 4.429 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
Earhart of Darkness is a sequel to a previous jam entry, that really pushed what can be created in a short time span. It's ambitious and manages to hit almost everything it sets out to do. It is fun and replayable and I hope to see the game further developed.
Liked
+ Game mechanics were very solid
+ Fantastic art style
+ Sounds fit excellentlyNeeds Work
+ Balancing
+ Hard to determine what's going on sometimes
+ Could use more variety of art assetsThis was one of my favorite projects of the jam. It really accomplishes a lot, and I could see it being a project that I would absolutely purchase. The game has some early game balance issues, where it can be very difficult to gain a foothold before you are shot down. The core of the game actually reminds me a little of the original Master of Orion. Where you could sit down on a small map and complete (or fail miserably) in a quick round. Adding some procedural elements that would allow you to have new experiences would go a long way. Instead of having multiple hand crafted maps, a supply of randomized maps could fill that gap. Balancing would definitely be important though as a player can learn how to take advantage of the map to solve tricky situations, but in random maps that may not exist, and if maps reset upon death then players would be unable to learn those advantages as easily.
The art and style are fantastic, it definitely is screaming for a bit more content, different looks for different areas. Perhaps as a way to indicate the difficulty of enemies in the area. Having a bit more character could be nice, where different areas might have different tribes. Then liberating all the airfields in the area would turn them from hostile to friendly units that spawn (albeit far less frequently). Having ground bases that spawn tanks, that you can liberate might be nice. With a lesser difficulty enemy that spawns from the forests.
You already have a pretty complex set of systems so I think that you could expand it with little miniquests, or ways to acquire special gear. Basically this game was just a ton of fun, and the act of exploring and discovering its intricacies was great and I'd love to have more of that.
-James Rossi
Elevator pitch
Turn-based plane-fighting action with a dumb story.
Describe how your game adheres to the theme
It is a totally unnecessary sequel to 1937, named after a dumb joke in that games win screen
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Comments
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The best I've managed so far is to handily beat the green variants. Some starts to runs go south real quick and others don't, depending heavily on the drops and enemy spawns in the middle of taking an airfield. I got to a point where I was easily dispatching greens and then the first reddish tank I saw utterly ruined me, freaking my gourd 10 ways from Sunday. I did get frustrated sometimes especially when the CPU got some crucial critical hits while I flailed away in hopes of surviving their attack, but this is genuinely the most engaging game I've played this jam. The sound is great, the UI is intuitive and nice, and it says things like 3+2D4 which I have a soft spot for. I'm really into it and I'm looking forward to progressing quite a bit. Really the only issues are small quality-of-life things so I'd say you ought to be proud of this, it's pretty great!
Good game! Art and sound are great. I love the turn based game play and general feel. Nice work.
For how complicated this game felt the interface was smooth as butter. I had pretty much no issues interacting with the game,
The graphics style is great, the game plays a bit more like a roguelike than I would have expected.
My main issue unfortunately is the balance and progression doesn't feel terribly good beyond the green enemies... I felt I ended up having to grind for way longer than I wanted to before I'd started to get some significant gear upgrades, only for it to still not nearly be enough to tackle any red enemies reliably. That combined with the excessive punishment for death ultimately ended my play session, heh.
Some kind of radar might be needed to give the player some sense of where to go.
I found that mob spawns can occasionally be completely overwhelming. You'd go in to attack one enemy only have 4 spawn up your arse and murder you out of nowhere. Perhaps enemies should not spawn on-screen?
But what is is so far is really good. Some numbers tweaking and balancing is desperately needed but it otherwise plays real nice.
This game seems hard as butts. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing if that's what you're going for. Conceptually, I like it. A sort of turn-based airplane RPG. I had some issues, though.
I felt pretty lost early on. The terrain all looks kind of similar. It could be cool if you had a map with a bunch of fog of war which slowly revealed as you explored around. It could even mark things like enemy airfields, captured airfields, all that good stuff. Because I would go through situations where I might feel equiped to take on the next "tier" of airfields and not really remember where to go. Especially since it seems like the progression is wide (explore a little here, go around, explore a little there), I feel like this would be a good feature.
On the topic of exploration, I almost felt like fuel was your answer to hunger in roguelikes, but I think it might have detracted more than it added. Functionally, HP and repair kits tie you to airfields just as much as fuel, so fuel almost feels like this redundant thing you have to babysit. Was there some degenerate player strategy that required you to put fuel in? I wasn't seeing it.
Seems like the jump from "green tier" to "red tier" is really large. I could smash green enemies to a pulp, but red enemies absolutely wrecked me. I had to carefully fight them one on one. And I had a pretty upgraded plane! I could kill a red anti-air if I was really careful... But then one killed me from full health with (I think?) some lucky crits. But it was a real bummer to be kicked back to the beginning of the game after that! I gave up at that point. It would be cool if friendly airfields acted like "checkpoints" where you could respawn after you died.
Ultimate, really solid game that I liked quite a lot but it had some issues in my eyes.
Yeah, the terrain system was one that really needed some hero pieces and variation for signposting. A mini or full map would have been a good plan too, unfortunately I really ran out of time having just cobbled together the bare minimum.
The fuel was originally going to be used as mana for special attacks, and would have tied into a special attack called "piercing" which would cause a status condition with you leaking fuel until fully repaired, and also made you super vulnerable to fire damage. As it stands, I agree that fuel doesn't add that much to moment to moment gameplay.
The lack of saving was because the game was originally going to be a roguelike, with procedural generation of terrain and enemy placement. Also I didn't have a clue how to properly serialize and deserialize all the data in to save files...again I wish I'd had more time to implement this.
The enemy balance was due to my combat code being wrong for most of the dev time, since I was working on other systems and thought it was producing the correct results. The last two days was a ton of going to and fro between too hard and too easy, and I erred on the too hard side, since earlier on one of the testers felt that there had been very little challenge in the game.
Aye, it needs a lot of work, thanks for your feedback!
I don't want to give the wrong impression; I quite liked your game. I only criticize because I care. <3
That makes sense for fuel. I like that idea for a status effect.
I sort of got roguelike vibes. That would have been a really cool direction, sorry you couldn't get to it. Saving is for suckers, I don't personally think I've ever save/loaded a jam game. Not where I spend my time, personally. But maybe the way to do it for a (someday) roguelike like this is to just save the seed you use to generate the level? And then stuff about the player itself. Remind me, was this Unity? I have some experience with serializing/deserializing json in Unity if you want some code.
Balancing jam games is the bane of my existence. I can relate....
Love the concept, graphics and polish but the balance is out of whack. Enemies can suddenly spawn on top of you, there's no way to escape and you have to start over from the beginning.
Hi Ludvig, as you go on and upgrade your propellor, it becomes possible to outrun and outmanoeuvre every enemy, even the scary Tier V stuff.
Was it the red tanks that got you?