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A Simple Quest's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Black and White | #50 | 4.750 | 4.750 |
| Gameplay | #55 | 3.542 | 3.542 |
| Music | #87 | 3.417 | 3.417 |
| Overall | #106 | 3.563 | 3.563 |
| Art | #120 | 3.458 | 3.458 |
| Originality | #125 | 3.542 | 3.542 |
| Theme | #212 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Kinda enjoyed the experience. Really hated how the interaction system is somewhat unconventional, but I got the hang of things. The movement also seems really slow. Im fine with tile based movement, but the little animation between each tile is a bit sluggish imo. I had fun with the combat system and short story though, even though I dont see how it fits with the games theme.
Good job! I hope you had as much fun as I did when doing this game jam! ;)
I'm sorry that you didn't enjoy the game as I hoped others would, but like they say - to each their own.
I do have some friendly advice for you to keep in mind when providing feedback to others. Try not to use words like "hated." Game jams are supposed to fun and a way to improve your own skills. You may discourage others who put in a lot of effort into their game by using negative terms. Personally, I try to structure my feedback into two parts: 1) What I liked and 2) Suggestions/Improvements/Questions. I'll translate your feedback into how I usually provide feedback:
What I Liked
Suggestions/Improvements/Questions
You don't have to follow this format, but I personally find it helpful in providing feedback as a player in a constructive way that doesn't come off as demeaning. We're all here to have fun, challenge ourselves, and help each other think about their player's experience as developers.
After translating your feedback, here's my response:
I'm a huge fan of RPG's ever since I played Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior on the NES. One of my goals has been to create the bare minimum to see if I could replicate that. It's very limited and there are plenty of systems that were left out like selling items and including a system to buy equipment like weapons and armor, but I did accomplish much of what I set out to do. I will definitely use this experience in the future and keep everyone's feedback in mind.
That was a very good experience for me ! This is a simple and classic adventure but with humour and unexpected twists (like no boss fight, i really liked this touch). Being able to interact with NPCs is also very cool, it adds some depth to your game. Also the final textline to explain how the game is in the theme of loop is cool, because during the game i was not able to figure this out.
I would only recommand to speed up a bit the player movement and reducing the chance to fail an attack (for both player and enemies) and to encounter an enemy (for me this was a bit frustrating to enter a fight while i was exploring the map, but i assume this is very subjective).
Overall it's a very good game i had a very good time :)
Thanks! Yeah, I think my favorite part of the whole project was working on the NPCs dialogue. Having a handmaiden gossiping about the king and queen always leaving their doors unlocked, which leads the player to a chest of gold. The fortune teller who gives a little foreshadowing about your quest. I like those little things.
I think the hardest part of the game was balancing. It was originally much more difficult, the encounter rate was every 10 steps instead of 20, etc. I tried to make it a bit easier when I started thinking about keeping the player's attention long enough to play through. I tried to remedy that by making the run command always a success. You can play the game without fighting a single battle. I think if this had been a longer jam, I could have avoided some of these issues, but I'm pretty proud of what I managed to accomplish. I'm glad you liked it and thankful that you managed to play through to the end!
Actually the encounters were not always a big deal, and were even often cool because we could gain exp thanks to them and level up to defeat other enemies even faster which was very satisfying.
I repeat myself but this is a very good game that just needs a little bit of tweaking, and actually this is quite normal because it's hard to get a lot of reviews before sharing your work for a game jam. I figured out the run mechanic but actually i didn't use it very much because i liked the battle system after all, so to me you are definitely able to keep players interested !
You can be proud of what you did ;)
Holy moly, this is a lot of content and a quite polished game. Lovely done, really enjoyed playing!
Thank a lot for playing my game! For a week of work, I'm still kind of reeling from how insane it was to even attempt this for a jam. I tried making something like this once or twice on my own time, but would never make very far. I'm pleased for the polish comment. One of the things I need to continue improving in jams is polish. This is definitely the game jam entry that I put the most polish in. Personally, I think I got a lot of enjoyment implementing dialogue for NPC's. Trying to make them feel more alive than the generic "hello."
Nicely done! You can tell a tonne of love and work went into making this!
Thanks a lot! Final Fantasy 1 and Dragon Warrior 1 were what introduced me to the JRPG genre. Despite it being simple graphic-wise, it captured my imagination. It was a fun game to make and I learned a lot from it! Also, you have a great entry as well!
Wow! So much work done in the span of a week! Congratulations!!!
I got stuck for some time in the start room, until I figure out that you had to keep pressing the direction you wanted to interact. I think the movement speed is too slow if you compare to today standards, but I remember that Diablo 1 was painfully slow too, and I did enjoyed that game xP
I'm still really amazed that you could do so much features in so little time.
Good job!
Thanks so much! Yeah, it was a bit of a wild jam haha. Yeah, I think I should have made the interaction a little more obvious. And yeah, the general consensus is that movement is a bit slow for their liking, which is fair. And yeah, Diablo's movement felt awfully slow.
Nicely done! Lots of interesting components here including the dialogue and battle systems! Would love to see this expanded :)
Thanks! I don't think I'll continue tweaking this game in particular, but I do plan to use it as a reference in future projects. There are some components that I need rethink. The dialogue system is, for the most part, pretty modular, but there's some coupling with the status of the main quest which happened as I rushed to complete it. This resulted in a weird bug that doesn't always happen, but when it does it can be quite confusing to the player. The player should turn in the quest and complete the game by going down the stairs. However, there have been instances where you have to go back up the stairs and talk to the king again to trigger it.
But yeah, thanks again for playing!
The gameplay was good. It was nice to have different classes. The characteristics of the characters increase with the level: D. It was nice to interact with the characters. There could be animation in the wars.
Thanks! Yeah, I thought about doing a palette switch when close to death and enemy sprite shakes when they attacked, but I decided to just focus on getting the combat working haha.
Wow, you're game is pretty well done, it seems a totally finished game.
As other mentioned, the movements are a bit slow, but its ok!
Nice done!
Thanks a lot for playing! And thanks for participating in the Q&A on stream. I hope I answered all of your questions, and if not, feel free to ask!
The movement was a bit slow, but the rpg idea alone it's kind of impressive. The ending was fun and the music gave everything a very strong sense of atmosphere and place.
Thanks a lot for playing my entry! Also, thanks for mentioning the music. I'm working on learning music theory and trying to apply it in practice. The only piece that wasn't good was the battle theme because I quickly put it together. The rest of the music were made as exercises over time, so I had those lying around to use.
I might be the worst warior ever! I almost died from a spider! Also I very much dislike fortune telleres "A great succes but a failure" like... what?
Now... the music for different biomes is pretty neat. It has the retro feel passed. However I wish the player was a bit faster.
Thanks for playing my game! Stat and Combat balancing for a jam was kind of hard. Originally they were scaled a bit differently, with the goal of a longer playthrough in mind. But jam games, should be small enough for players to play through so I had to make some changes.
The player movement feels slow because of the combination of there being only one frame and I'm tweening the movement between tiles. I tested with my own crappy sprites as well as subbed in the Dragon Warrior 1 sprite player frames. It looks and feels exactly like Dragon Warrior 1 or FF1 did. If I had even a 2 frame animation, that slow feeling disappears. I was really aiming for recreating my childhood experience with those games.
How could you not like the fortune teller? She knows...
heyy!
it was being entertaining, unfortunatelly I couldnt finish it cause it stopped responding in one part where a bear attacked me and I lost (cause I didn't know I had limited attacks until it was late haha)
Very nice to play with a controller
Good game :D
That's unfortunate :( Yeah the bear and the ghosts are the hard monsters. I did my best to tweak things in the end so that they weren't as intense as they originally were. Also, I left running as an automatic success for those who get tired of fighting and just want to run through the game.
Really good use of these assets! This was a joy to play, and the ending gave me a genuine chuckle.
Thank you for playing my game! I'm glad you enjoyed it and got a chuckle. I put a bit of foreshadowing about the ending in pieces of the game such as the title screen and the fortune teller on the west side of town. There was going to be an ending scene with the graveyard in town growing with an extra tombstone for you, but I didn't have time to implement it.
The scope is seriously impressive: classes, turn by turn combat system, etc... It's pretty crazy how much you managed to do in only a week. The game also looks good, which is even better!
My only little complaint is that the movement being tile-based feels a bit weird, but that's mostly a nitpick and it's probably just me.
Great submission!
Thanks so much! Yeah, I'm stunned that I managed to achieve what I did. Truthfully, the scope was a bit larger, but my game jam process is usually to make the scope bigger than it should be. I take the big picture, divide all the ideas/mechanics into three categories: "Must Haves", "Should haves", and "Would like to haves." As I work on core mechanics and "must haves", I track how much time it took compared to my estimates. By the end of a session I take a look at that, and cut from the "would like to haves". I repeat this process each day until I've cut all the "would like to haves" and some of the "should haves."
It may not be the best approach, but it practically guarantees that scope creep doesn't become an issue because I'm working on trimming scope as I move along.
The tile-based movement feels weird for a couple reasons. The issue is that I'm tweening between the tiles, but I'm using a single frame sprite. I tested it with my crappy art, and with a two frame cycle it looks and feel much better. So yeah, I agree with your point on the movement feeling off.
That's a really interesting way to make a game. I usually do the opposite (starting small and adding more stuff), but it feels like your idea is better when it comes to having a solid idea of what the game should be by the end.
My game for instance had a completely different concept than what it ended up being, mostly because I made a lot of changes to make it more fun during the development. Honestly I think both ways are good, but your way of making games is definitely more unique, and really interesting.
Man, I just played your game and was blown away. Your process definitely worked out for you! Definitely makes my list of favorite game jam games I've played so far.
I'm not an artist, but I think my process is somewhat analogous to sculpting something out of a block of marble. You have an idea of what you want it to look like and begin chiseling away. As the marble begins to take shape, you refine it more until you've made your sculpture. I'm sure there's more to it than that, but it seems close enough haha.
Thank you so much, just made my day!
I'm not an artist either, but from what I know it is pretty similar to sculpting yeah, in the way that you mix your original ideas with a "going with the flow" mentality. Might even give this technique a try in a future game jam.
No problem! Thanks for the follow as well! Part of my goal with game jams is connecting with other devs. I think it would be cool to get a close group of devs that just bounce ideas off each other, share things they've learned, etc. I think you get better and quicker this way.
Gotta agree with that, connecting with other game devs is one of the coolest things about game jams.
Lol, I felt completely ignored at first. Really cool game.
It would be nice if this game had animations.
Haha thanks. Yeah, Kenny's 1-bit pack is pretty amazing, and I've already seen someone in this jam use the same pack and make animations for the one frame sprites. I'm not an artist, so I couldn't pull that off during the jam. I plan on using this as a base for another game when I can actually make my own art lol.
I think I got stuck in the opening room in the web build. I chose mage.
Edit: Realized I needed to hold the direction of what and who I wanted to interact with.
Overall very nice! Pretty good length for a game jam game. I feel like running is way overpowered but then again, it's hand for when the ghost shows up. Only issue I found was the tumble down the stairs didn't trigger the first time so I had to go back up to check what to do then I tumbled.
Yeah, that's one of the assumptions I made. That the player would quickly figure out that you needed to press in their direction when starting interaction. I thought about changing it because I knew it would be an issue, but I chose to stick with it because I wanted to really get that classic FF1 / Dragon Warrior 1 feel.
I just caught your second edit! Thanks for playing my game! Yeah I left the ability to run away successfully every time, in case people got bored with fighting monsters and wanted to finish the game. Technically, you never have to fight a battle in the game. And yeah, I encountered that bug a few times and could never quite figure out what was causing that behavior. I thought I had it fixed a couple times, but it kept popping up.
Great game! I really enjoyed its aesthetics.
Thanks! I couldn't think of a cool game mechanic that fit the loop theme, so I chose to interpret loop as repetitive. What's repetitive? Grinding in RPGs haha. And I've always wanted to see if I could make the very basics of a FF1 or Dragon Warrior 1 clone, so I chose to go down that route. With what I managed to accomplish in the time we had, I pretty proud of it.
Very nice menus and battle setup. I couldn't kill the ghost after I leveled up :(
Thanks! I borrowed pretty heavily from Final Fantasy 1 and Dragon Warrior 1 on the NES. Using Dragon Warrior's battle system was easier to implement than a party of characters. And yeah, those ghosts are tough lol.
very nice well defined game. Loved it!
Thank you very much!