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Uncharted Wanders's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game? | #1 | 4.625 | 4.625 |
| Overall | #4 | 4.156 | 4.156 |
| Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music? | #7 | 4.219 | 4.219 |
| Gameplay - How fun is it to play? | #9 | 4.031 | 4.031 |
| Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing? | #14 | 4.375 | 4.375 |
| Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme? | #37 | 3.531 | 3.531 |
Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Cool ending sequence, it's always fun when you're not denied control during an ending sequence.
The game is fun. It's smooth, the presentation is good, combat is fast (which is important since it's automatic) and the game is well balanced, you've got some freedom on how you approach the game (where you explore, what type of merchant and what mercenaries you take with you) and going forward is always superior to grinding money. The dungeon is fun to explore, it's open, the monster placement is good and I like the good amount of illusionary walls. The scope of the game is also the right one.
Good one, thanks for sharing.
Thanks, and congrats for beating it! I wasn't quite sure about the ending, it seemed cool in my head, but thought it might just be weird in-game, so I'm glad to hear you liked it! Also glad to hear it was a "good amount" of illusionary walls instead of "way too many" ^_^.
I really got into this! Very well made game. Definetly the complete experience!
Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
This is my favorite entry so far. Even if it's hard and you can kind of lose all your money (which is frustrating), it's still super fun to play.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! I tried a bunch of things to mitigate the possibility of losing all of your money, but there's a couple edge cases (like buying a new covenant and then not affording goods) still, though hopefully people just reload from their last save or autosave if they realize it and don't lose too much time ^_^. Since you can get between any towns without fighting, it's usually possible to recover as long as you've got a few coins left, but would still be pretty frustrating.
This entry is bananas. Looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, all the sprite work is magical. I can't get over the level of detail you've added like the sparkling ceiling in the spirit towns, the dithering in void above the divide and the town sky, the door transitions, the lighting/los, even the minimap is gorgeous. I'm really amazed what you've achieved in 7 days.
In terms of game-play, I find the concept interesting, hiring mercenaries, gaining knowledge of especially profitable trade runs, etc. Even unlock-able shortcuts to make the return trips easier. There is a lot of game here.
Really fantastic entry, well done.
Thanks, I love bananas! To be fair, a lot of the sprites were from one asset pack, although the animated spirit town environment was all original - that was made when the artists abandoned the team, and I was left sitting here thinking "trading between the spiritual and physical worlds sounds great on paper, but how the heck do you draw that?" =). Kind of ended up feeling like a disco parlor, but I guess that's close enough, glad you liked it =).
Fun fact with the line of sight on the minimap, that's just a biproduct of the rendering algorithm showing which tiles are drawn on the given frame ;).
Unfortunately, on the Windows download, I get this strange error on Windows when the game first starts and it doesn’t go away:
It doesn’t seem to affect game play but is just a bit annoying to have on the screen. Seems to be related to the audio? Switched to the WebGL build and was fine!
Gorgeous retro graphics on a lovely scanlined CRT.
Controls are snappy and the game is FULL of tons of content.
I played this game for over an hour and will likely come back to it in the future. Lovely game! Great job!
Hmm, what do you mean by "Windows download"? There is no Windows download, only a web-based version...
Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed it though!
Super solid crawler engine with all the stuff you'd expect from a dungeon crawler. Great mechanics all around, with excellent graphics and sound. The presentation with CRT lines and curved display really sells it well.
Interesting concept with being a defenseless trader and having to enlist henchmen to protect yourself. I totally can see this as a full game and it doesn't seem very far from being that.
I found the difficulty being a bit on the hard side. I kept dying a lot but that's probably because I didn't play it very well :)
The transition when you walk through a door is brilliant.
The controls works well and you nailed the perspective view.
Best implemented automapper I've seen in a while.
Oh no! The "chests" were just a super quick hack to have an enemy with 1 hp, 0 def, 0 atk and dropped loot, without having to actually add chests/containers/looting ^_^. I actually at the last minute put in something so that if you had no mercs you'd auto-win against a chest, but I guess there's a bug that if you have all dead mercs, that doesn't get triggered, LOL! Oh, or possibly there's the rather unlikely chance that the enemy attacks first, can could kill a 1-hp merc as well, maybe you got really unlucky...
Thanks for playing!
Wow, your game looks absolutely gorgeous! I really love how smooth everything is, from the transitions to dialogue to the player rotation... and that CRT effect gives it even more charm. It's a bit hard on the first try but I'll definitely go back to this.
Thanks for playing and glad you liked it! Yeah, the beginning difficulty is a bit rough, I added some hints to the Itch project page that might help get started, and will push a version with slightly decreased initial difficulty post-jam =).
This was an excellently made entry, in my opinion. The graphics were simple and had a very cool retro esthetic and shader! I loved the idea that you don’t fight directly, but, rather, hire mercs! I thought that was a very original idea! While trading is not exactly my style of gameplay, I appreciated the thought that went into setting up the Covenant, trade, merc mechanics and felt they were executed very well!
I think my only real sticking point in this game was being a little confused in the beginning. It really is told to you in the beginning, but missing that one bit of dialog regarding already having a tradable item on my person, I completely missed how to get started for an embarrassingly longer time than I would have liked. Still, though, that’s me. Others most likely caught on just fine.
Over all, wonderful game and great entry into the jam! Here’s the link to me playing the game on my stream :D
Thanks for playing, and thanks again for streaming! And, no, it's probably not just you who got confused by that =). What I thought was a fun bootstrapping/introduction to commerce, as well as fitting into a vague theme of being in the afterlife or something along those lines, turned out to be just another bit of information overload.
Finally found some time to finish this! I had a great time with it. The visuals, while ostensibly simple, established a great atmosphere, and the gameplay had a great draw that hooked me all the way through. Excellent job!
Great, glad you enjoyed it, and finished it! I'm constantly surprised by how many people actually played it all the way through =). A lot of the visual work is thanks to finding some good asset packs to use after the artists abandoned the project mid-jam... but I'm happy with how they turned out in the end too, glad it sets the atmosphere well for ya!
Looks really nice, but i don't want to sell the photo of my beloved so i'll propably never play this game lol
PS: I'm propably going too but selling the photo of my beloved hurts.
Don't worry, you can buy it back!
Loved your game. Great art, style and nice music. Merchant part of the gameplay really reminds me of some old and unknown RPG from early 2000s.
I gotta say that this amount of illusionary walls would definitely call for a name change for "Shortcuts explorer" or a "Wall basher" :) Once you get the idea where they usually are you start to discover those shorter paths, or less dangerous ones. Loved your level design for that part. Underground seemed too chaotic though.
Would love to see continuation of this game with probably a harder travel routes, more covenants, mercenaries and maybe some tactical choices for combat, so you can have a certain combat builds.
Thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, I shoulda made the secret passages even more visible - they've got an animation on the wall texture to try to call them out, but apparently it's too subtle ^_^. I did try to mostly just put them in consistent spots, but unfortunately they were probably just varied enough that everyone feels they gotta bump all the walls -_-. Merchant part was inspired a bit by Uncharted Waters (SNES one came out in 1993, but there's been a ton of them), and more recently Horizon's Gate which is like that crossed with Final Fantasy Tactics ^_^.
Underground was mostly just an excuse to have some variety and big open spaces, and started from a randomly generated dungeon that I hacked up to make the topology I needed. Great that you made it far enough to see that though, and congrats on beating the game!
Hey, I played your game :)
Overall, a great game with lots of replayability! Definitely going to return to this, it has all the nice ideas and great execution.
Hey vlzvl, thanks for playing, I've got your game on my short list to check out soon ^_^. Glad that you liked the CRT effect, I always worry things like that might be a bit much, but it really helps soften the chunky pixels =). Great feedback! I didn't intend for the first merc to be unable to survive one fight with a patrolling monster, but I added those just near the end, and depending on the rolls apparently you can die in the first combat (though, if it taught you to avoid patrolling monsters, perhaps it served its purpose ^_^), glad you enjoyed the challenge!
I always wanted to be rank 1 in something, and now I am it in this dungeon crawler jam game. :P
I had quite a lot of fun with this game. Trading goods is quite relaxing.
The beginning was a bit rough. I started two times over, because I went to the left at the start, at the other "normal" town. Then I tried to "trade", only to find out, that goods cost the same in both towns. Then I had no money left to go anywhere because the mercenary was dead too. I felt a bit like an idiot after my 2nd restart. :D However, after finding out how this game actually works, everything went very smooth. I traded back and forth, got an overpowered party, and then cleared the rest of the game. Becoming a mighty merchant felt very rewarding. I never found a "dingleberry" for the last quest though.
Soundtrack was relaxing and nice, visuals worked well too, lots of nice sprites. Nice game, i had fun (obviously :D).
Great score, and congrats on being first (at least for now ;)! For the Dinglehopper quest, that was an 80s reference that not everyone would have got, I guess, see here, and you can probably guess what item she actually wanted ;).
Sorry about the rough start, I really wish I had gated that path upon getting to Spiriton first (though Mags tells you a bunch of times to go that way, I guess no one reads ^_^). And I'm one of those "hug the right wall" kind of people, anyone who's a "hug the left wall" kind of person I guess just starts down the wrong path -_-.
Haha, well i know that movie, but its probably a different word in the translated version for my language. xD
People *never* read the instructions, I guess. :D Besides, I generally think if there is a right/left path as alternative to a "straight path", quite some people will always try to go to the left/right alternative first. Even if told otherwise. Simply because "what if there is a secret?". Its a bit of video game conditioning I guess. Because in plenty of games its actually indeed better to go right/left first. :P
Such a fantastic and imaginative entry. The best so far for me. I am utterly impressed!
Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed it!
A bit grindy; but everything looks, feels, and sounds smooth and consistent. Combat is so difficult to give depth and balance to in a week it's a big relief having mercs auto attack for me.
Thanks! I do like my games on the grindy side =). I'm really happy with how the combat turned out - the original plan was a basically non-combat dungeon crawler, but thought there should be a bit more risk (and a different track to spend resources on), so the auto-combat was the simplest thing there, and I really liked it.
Awesomesauce
Great job on this game, visuals, music, gameplay, it's all great, I love it!
Thanks for playing, and for the kind words!
Easily the best game in the competition, original idea, efficient and still great visuals, feels very good and entertaining to play. Yet, the balancing of the battles seems a bit harsh in the beginning to me, as the focus of the game is the trading. Will revisit it after my vaccation for sure, a shame, I was able to spent so few time on it yet.
Thanks! Yeah, the combat is hard at the beginning, I spent lots of time balancing the trading but usually avoiding combat myself. One cheap guy can (usually) get you through a fight (or two, if you run away), but if you're not careful it's easy to hit 3 fights on the first path -_-.
Great game. I totally messed up by buying too many spoons. I'll try another run.
Love the smooth movement and the expressive characters. Great attention to game feel! Very polished.
Thanks for playing! If you do do another run, you can make it to Spiriton to the south without fighting anything (might need to save and reload a few times to get the timing down...), so buying too many spoons should never be a problem ;). Also, you can sell them back at cost.
Sadly I can't take credit for the characters though, those were mostly part of an existing, pretty great, asset pack (details linked on the game page), all I did was some palette swaps there ^_^.
I loved everything about this game! And thank you for adding controller support :) Great work!
Thanks for playing! Yeah, controller support is generally a must for me (and also nicely simplifies many UX design decisions), I've got some repetitive stress injuries so the mouse is a no-go most of the time ^_^.
This is fantastic! The art, music, SFX and UI are spot on. I have absolutely no complaints. It's fun and cool. Well done.
Thanks for playing, and glad you liked it so much (and I'm glad it all came together in the end ^_^).