Play game
Moongrail's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| CONTROLS | #156 | 2.821 | 2.821 |
| BOSS DESIGN | #164 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
| FUN | #167 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
| Overall | #178 | 2.708 | 2.708 |
| USE OF THEME | #184 | 2.536 | 2.536 |
| ART / VISUALS | #184 | 3.036 | 3.036 |
| SOUNDS / MUSIC | #227 | 2.357 | 2.357 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game's take on the theme
You cannot attack, only ever counter. So exchange attacks really. And you exchange bosses souls for powerups.
Did your team create the vast majority of art and music during the game jam?
Yes.
Did your game use PlusMusic?
No.
Did your game use Playroom?
No.
Did your game use generative AI art?
No.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
All that Block, no treble.... 2.5/5 good job for what it is!
Best of luck to you!
Hey there, I am trying to get other to re-submit their reviews for my game if possible...it was deleted and removed from the Jam on accident based on a technicality which was solved between the Jam Host and a particular asset used in the game...please if you have time, energy, and/or generosity to re-saved your ratings/reviews for the game. I am going through and re-saving yours given my browser kept your rating saved data on my end...but it looks like I lost all 73 reviews and ratings from my end.... :( best of luck to you in the Jam
Sorry for the inconvenience if you have a chance to rate/re-rate
I Play It And I Don't Understand The Concept of The Game, All The Game Block And I Don't know How To Fight, You Must Explain That, And The Controls It's Difficult,But I Love The Art Style, I Love The Sword Block Sound, Continue.
The gameplay is fun! I struggled with the menu though.
Oh did you have an aspect ratio different than 16:9? That completely messes it up, I didnāt have time to track that bug down.
Better feedback is needed for the player to react, the music is very annoying and the user interface is very confusing.
A bit of a harsh way to put it, but noted for future projects!
Interesting idea, nice visuals. I don't understand the purpose of static noise in the background, it's an artistic choice i guess. I find the concept of damaging the player only with counter-attacks a bit constrictive. But the real problem for me is, i don't feel that i hit the opponent, there's no feedback. There's no counter-attacking animation after parrying the attack. One more thing is that its extremely difficult. It was almost impossible for me to parry the attacks three times in a row. There definitely needs to be some sort of telegraphing system to warn the player.
I also made a similar sword fighting game btw and it's pretty broken in it's current state. I have a parrying and blocking system in that game too. Creating an engaging fun combat system is a very challenging task. So i can understand the difficulties you faced during the development of your game.
In any case this is a valuable project for you to gain further experience in game development and for others to analyze, study compare with their own game. I appreciate the hardwork and creativity behind this game. Good luck on your future projects
The difficulty being overkill is definitely something Iāve caught by now. I forgot the age old saying āif itās difficult for the developer, itās impossible for a playerā. So more telegraphing and a bit slower attacks would have improved things.
And absolutely there is a lack of feedback for getting a counter. I think the audio saves it a bit but itās still not super satisfying. Something I was aware of, but time simply ran out. I wrote a whole post mortem about this.
Thank you for trying it out!
The noise was really bothersome , and thought the audio was broken.
Gameplay was a neat concept, but felt like it could've been approached differently
Static noise in the background was really irritating, hope it's some kind of bug. The use of theme is nice but building gameplay only on parrys is kinda boring and unnasecary limiting... Also, the parry's come out with a little delay, except for me maybe.
More polish and new way to damage the boss will and it will be great!
Noise is intentional, but I didnāt realize it might irritate some players. Iāll try to add some volume controls in the future.
More specifically for the parries, what is it that youāre missing? Would you like a button you can mash to constantly deal damage, or something more sophisticated? Or is it that the parry is not super satisfying currently?
Also yes parries are delayed with 0.05 seconds from when the enemy strikes, Iām impressed you can hear that.
Yeah, i was thinking about some sort of strike attack, because if player committed to just parry - any mistake will drag gameplay even more and really slow it down. For me such limitations sucking all the fun out...
Ah so it's really about the bossfights feeling a bit too slow?
I love the sword theme, but the pace is very good, the basic mechanics are well done. A defense-based game is very interesting
The best offense is a good defense. The MoonGrail must forbid attacking, only using the enemies own attacks against them, and the creed of the MoonGrail must be followed. MoonGrail!
It took me a bit to get into the rhythm of this game, but overall I liked it! My one complaint would be that some of the telegraphs are kinda hard for me to tell apart. Aside from that the game was great :)
Ye I'm aiming to improve telegraphing in future games, it could have been a lot better. Thanks for trying it!
Interesting premise, great visuals and fun to play. Honestly would love a full game with these mechanics.
It's called sekiro: shadows die twice. No but honestly, might happen! I'm currently aiming to create a lot of small game jammy style games for a bit to build skill and audience, but I think this could be interesting to remake at some point. Thanks for trying it!
I've played sekiro and it's one of my favourite games of all time, Your game provides the most fun part of sekiro's combat without the not so fun stuff plus it's 2D, I really hope you develop this game further, Good luck if you do!
It was very satisfying to learn the attack patterns and land the counters! The game feel is very nice well done!
Great job on the game, I like the visuals and sounds effects! Similar to other feedback below, I found the game quite difficult as attacks were quite difficult to predict!
The mechanics and visuals are TOP-NOTCH! Really nicely doneee! :D
Thanks!
Wow I loved this. Sekiro left a sekiro-shaped hole in my heart and this game briefly filled it. I loved every single boss, even though they all shared the same base set of animations, you really did an amazing job giving each attack pattern from each boss its own identity (like that one bastard move where that one boss does a jump-attack 3 times in a row whiel tracking you. I was always on the lookout for that one).
Learning the bosses was so damn rewarding. Differentiating between the subtle sprite change of āsword backā vs āsword forwardā for the second boss, which led to two different attack patterns (i think one had a jump attack in it) was really cool. I appreciated the little upgrades after the bosses too. Once I had the double-combo upgrade, it felt like the bosses went a lot more smoothly. To that end, I think the first boss felt a little long (āfirstā for me is the āmountain symbolā (?) boss).
One of my favorite things about phase 2 of each fight was how it necessitated a slight un-learning of what you memorize in phase 1. It made it so each attempt felt fresh, like after dying to a long phase 2 fight, Iād have to almost re-learn phase 1.
One really cool thing about this game is how you utilize especially dangerous patterns interspersed with more simple patterns. Like the aforementioned triple white jump attack: Even though that attack was infrequent for the 2nd boss, I still dreaded it, which made me jumpy any time the boss looked at me funny.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this game. Felt like a little distillation/shot of sekiro.
Also, look at you, another Defold game! Seems like youāre liking it? Thought you were on a pico 8 bender but looks like youāre just a lua fiend (same)
Thanks for trying it! It is pretty much a demake of sekiro (inspired by jacob gellers video on it), taking just parry / counter / deflect with some super simple movements. So really happy to hear it fit that slot!
Interesting that you thought the first one was too long, Iād really thought that would be the last one. I did test everything without any upgrades though, that might be the reason. But Iāll try to actually run a playtest for next game, this one was just thrown together by me without any exterior feedback.
In the start the attacks were less telegraphed and more complicated. At some point even I struggled with getting them all. So thatās when I started with the āsimple simple complexishā thinking for each boss phase. That made it so you were always a bit on edge, but could also actually counter a lot of attacks, even on the first try. Nice to see it worked out!
And yea another defold game it is! With firefrost I really realized the amount of pain pico8 can cause due to its inflexibility (the steam build is currently 300MB because I ship it with electron to be able to do achievements and stuff, since pico canāt send web requests), and defold kinda fills the minimalism of pico while being a lot more flexible. I actually would rather write in typescript, my memory is not fantastic, especially three hours before submission deadline, and the way that typescript lets me āread my own documentationā as I type is really awesome. But defold is implementing the language server protocol, so better autocomplete might be on its way (have yet to try it). I think what I really like with defold and pico is the combo of minimalism / doesnāt get in your way and exports. Unity doesnāt cut it in minimalism, love2d in exports. Defold just gets best of both worlds for me.
Iām probably going to write a post mortem about this, but I think yet another reason I like pico8 so much is because itās difficult for me to make art that looks bad. Itās 128x128, like itās not enough space to be able to fuck it up. I absolutely underestimated the difficulty of creating three sets of high res ish animations in like 3 days. I think I make better games in pico because of its limitations. So Iām planning on putting together a template built for pixel art at the celeste resolution, and predefined inputs (makes it a lot easier to prepare for web portals that require mobile to work) to bring that style of limitations to a format that I can work more freely in. So thatās what Iām cooking up for the future me, after the launch of firefrost. Already set my sights on the 7 day roguelike challenge to battle test this idea.
Oh and Iāll make sure to check out battlesc4rs! You putting together a 3D game? Thatās something new. Iāve actually already read the post mortem, and Iām really looking forward to a break where I can try it.
Thanks for checking this out and for the feedback!
āanother reason I like pico8 so much is because itās difficult for me to make art that looks badā
I totally feel that. The tiny canvas and color restrictions of pico 8 both do so much to mask my lack of art ability. Itās to the point where Iāll sometimes itāll convince me that Iām actually good at art, and then Iāll immediately humble myself by trying to draw something higher-res and with more colors.
Goddamn I didnāt know that shipping Electron was the only way to get steam achievements to work in pico 8. Thatās super rough, but I guess it makes sense if youāre using the GPIO api to do JS stuff with pico 8.
The idea of replicating the pico 8 art restrictions in a separate engine is interesting. Honestly Iāve always wanted a Pico-Inf or something, basically Pico 8 with all of its API, art restrictions, export capabilities but without the code size restriction. Sounds like thatās basically what youāre building with your template.
Cool to hear youāre planning on doing the 7DRL jam, canāt wait to see what you make for that. I might drop into that jam too, though Iām feeling pretty burnt out from this one so TBD.
Gonna check out your devlog cause Iām curious about the web portals youāre looking into. Iām always on the prowl for new ones.
āSID MEIER: One of the responsibilities I think
we have as designers is to protect the player from themselvesā - from gmtk
I think we are doing something like that with out limitations. Lower resolutions, quite 8bitty / similar music and sfx. But I think we both want that unlimited code, to be able to barf out as much content as we want to. Because that is what we think is enjoyable. Pretty funny that the developers develop the development process to make it more difficult to do things that are unfun. Maybe we were just designers all along.
I donāt think I mentioned any of the platforms I was looking at in the devlog, but there they are;
There are also two others Iāve seen floating around:
This is a really neat concept, but it's a bit too difficult. The problem is that the bosses don't seem to telegraph what combos they're doing and it's a bit too fast to react (at least for me). I would suggest increasing the wind up and maybe adding some special animations at the beginning of the combo like with the one triple lane slash. But overall, cool concept and has a lot of potential.
Oh yea the telegraphing is kind of mid in the game. Each animation frame took very roughly 30 minutes to make, so when it came to that, time was simply running out. The telegraphing could actually be worse, currently each move for each phase has a different starting frame (within that phase) just to make it ever so slightly more possible. But yea, if I was to remake this, Iād do it with lower res pixel art and each pattern would get its own feel, just like you are asking for. That would probably make the game a lot more playable.
Super juicy sound effects!! The sword fighting mechanic is very fun, and very satisfying when you get a combo. A small nitpick I have is that the game is sometimes a little bit too difficult. Some things you could do to make the game a bit more forgiving is making the anticipation frames of the enemy animations longer, and maybe adding some kind of obvious indicator that an attack is impending. Other than the difficulty, great job, this was really fun!
Thanks for trying it! The sfx were really fun to make, just slamming together sounds from free sound to fill the spectrum. I actually have a lot more Iād like to have sfx for, but you know. Time.
I hear ya about the difficulty! I pushed it too far this time, Iāll aim for a better balance next time.
Very nice feedbacks, and very responsive gameplay !
I feel that the game is a bit unforgiving at times, couple mili seconds added to anticipation frames would make it top notch !
Thank you for trying it! I really went all in to make the game difficult, and it sounds like I went a bit overboard. Iāll aim to keep it more balanced in the future!
very good game!
I love the mechanics, and nice take on the theme. I felt good when I started getting better at blocking