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Nightmare of The Gazer's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #80 | 2.842 | 2.842 |
Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
We focused on cosmic horror primarily throughout the theme and enemy design as well as ancient ruins. Enemies also have an element of procedural generation and there are abilities, spells, classes, and races that should make the game endless.
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Comments
"The Beholder has been defeated!"
Overall this was great fun. Everything made me feel like I was roamming through Undermountain, from the Tabletop D&D minimap, which I love, to the sahuagins and beholder, the layout with verticality and the environment made of rooms with forbidden yet imposing, beautiful and magically frozen in time architecture with old corridor in-between and caves below. Environment is very detailed with fairly recognizable and distinguishable rooms and I really like the overall layout of the dungeon, compact with multiple connexions between rooms and parts of rooms only accessible by finding a way upwards somewhere else, that's pretty cool. I really like the characters' portraits. I love that you've got complete party creation, the races are cool and the texts describing the races and classes as well as the dialogs with the NPCs in the hub are atmospheric. Finally The field of view is perfect and the game controls perfectly, movement feels great, I love the instant combat which advances as fast as you press the buttons and gaining levels and new abilities is fun.
Combat was too easy, which would be my only real lament. Sometimes there's a second fight in a place which prevents you from advancing, like there would be an invisible wall, so you have to walk back and ahead again to trigger the fight then it's also a fight where the protagonists from both sides keep missing a lot (eventually you still manage to hit the enemies). Picking and/or Placement of keys, I'm not sure, is weird. I don't think I ever manage to pick the first one you can see and the last one I am not sure how I picked as it seemed to be on a floor above me when I picked it. Finally not all visual elements mesh perfectly well together, the "worst" (it's no big deal) part to me is probably the font and dialog UI, while the font and background of the descriptions and lines of the NPCs are pretty adequate.
That's a solid entry, thanks for sharing.
I think I cleared out the dungeon, but I could not find the exit or final encounter. The game feels snappy to move around in. There is a bit to frequent of encounters, but they are rather fast to complete which makes it more barable.
Sometimes there is a collider left for the enemies after you kill them, which makes it impossible to move to that tile.
Music, sound and graphics look nice as well, good job!
Very nice locations and feel. I particularly liked all the different places.
I wasn't sure how the mini map worked, it seemed a bit blobby and showing more or less that what you think it should - maybe it was an overview?
Movement was nice and snappy, as was combat.
My only negative was it 'didn't grab me'. Did I want to play on - not really. there didn't seem like there was a quest or story to engage with.
But I did like the attention to the environments.
Thank you so much for checking out the game! I wanted to ask, did you interact with the NPCs at the beginning of the game? I was worried that based on the interface a lot of people probably skipped them. Either way, what would have made the story "grab you"?
I've been working on an update that I'll release after the pause but one of the things I updated is giving NPCs an exclamation mark above their heads if they have anything new to say.
I don't want to spoil to much but I'm also working on expanding that side of things a lot and I would appreciate any feedback.
Had to go back and check the NPCs as I didn't think I came across them.
On replaying, just took the pre-made group, gave me 2 options rest, leave and sat there, so I left and it took me to the raised start area. I didn't encounter any NPC until the first encounter. So no I didn't meet any NPC to talk to.
Unless you are not meant to attack them? <- if this is the case then I would suggest not allowing you to attack NPC until after you have chatted to them?
What would grab me - a difficult question.... ?
I really like the art style. And the game start screen. What would be cool, would be to fade the screen into the empty location (no people or stuff, just the grey wall with the gap into the 'tower'?. I would have no music. Go into a corridor with a door at the end. In front of the door is the last member of your party.
"hey you made it, Blah said you would come and help. Nasty has taken the (thing). I'm here to help. Help me obiwan, you're the only hope' etc"
You have 2 options: join - and xx opens the door, the music starts and you go in
leave/ dont join. xx is not happy and fights you - you die.
That would set the scene, give you a reason to be there, give you an option, etc.
The other suggestion would be to plan and have set pieces with enemies and rewards. some you will need to fight, some you could go around. fight/reward balance.
I liked that you could see a key and wanted it - unfortunately when I got to the key I could pick it up or get it.
my sage advice is this:
you are not making a game for you - you are making it for others to play and enjoy. Always have that in the back of your mind.
Thanks for checking again. You start the game in the hub area able to talk to the 4 npcs who explain the situation but its not required and you can just leave if you choose to. I came up with another idea, when you click to leave if you haven't talked to anybody yet I'll pop up a confirmation dialogue that you want to leave without talking to anyone. I hope that confirmation combined with the exclamation for new dialogue will be enough when I can patch it.
Good work! I really respect the amount of effort here.
I agree with most of the feedback you have gotten already.
One thing in particular that got me, though, was the character creation. I felt like this was a big barrier to entry for the average player. If I were playing this outside of a jam, I probably wouldn't have made it through to even see the game. So this is definitely something that I would create a more user-friendly UI for in the future. :)
There was also an option to use premade characters in the event that a player doesn't want to create characters. What about the character creation UI do you feel would be a barrier for an average player?
I did notice that, but I wanted to mess around with the custom options. I believe if you were to get more of it on one screen (per character) like you see character creation in so many other games, that would make things a lot easier. Either that or create a flow UI with review pages like Larian handles for the Divinity series or BG3. Granted it doesn't need to be that high quality, of course, just the most common example I can think of.
Thanks for the feedback! I've been reworking abilities to be more fun and impactful and I'll update the character creation as well. I was called a little nuts for even including the functionality in a jam game but my favorite part about dungeon crawlers is building out a character or party of adventurers and being able to customize them and build them into something unique and personal such as in The Quest, Legends of Amberland, the Wizardry series and way to many other games to name.
I have 9 more character classes I wrote and designed and would like to get into the game but I'm focusing first on making everything feel a lot more unique before just adding more indistinguishable options. We also have 30 passive talents in the game already but because they are auto selected and combat was very easy combined with not having a stat screen they are nearly non-noticeable.
Thanks again for the feedback, I'll definitely be building something more similar to what you've suggested for character creation, though I only wish I could get Larian polish level. One of the team members had suggested having a multiple character creation on the same screen but I think you're right in having 1 screen or a flow for each character but classes, races, stats all need to be in the same place so its easier to review without having to go back and to see the impact of your choices.
Beholder defeated, nice.
Super nice lighting and textures here, the space itself is very varied and has easy to recognize shapes and landmarks so I found it pretty easy to kind of figure out when I'd been somewhere and kind of familiarize myself with the dungeon. Verticality was awesome, there have only been a few games so far that I've seen really implement that well and this is a great one. The different height levels broke up the space really nicely and provided enticing glimpses of areas I wanted to get to and had to figure out how. I also appreciated that the paths to the higher areas was logically consistent and I didn't have to like do a massive loop of the dungen just to get to a high place in the same room.
Combat was pretty straight forward, though for some reason I found it super easy on the run that I actually finished the game. Prior to that I got wrecked pretty badly by some of the first enemies I came across, so I'm not sure if maybe there was a bug? There was also a minor bug where I couldn't walk forward after a fight, but that was easy to work around (I thought it might be like overlapping battle triggers or something?) In any case, I liked the tatical party based approach to the combat though it could use a bit of polish and juice if you make a post-jam version.
The fact that you can create your own party and there is a bunch of lore was a really nice touch that is over and above what I would usually expect for a jam game! (Though I ended up winning using a premade party).
Really well put together entry, nice work!
This one felt the most like a classic blobber, in both a good and bad sense. Like, enemies that randomly appear out of thin air is a classic RPG conceit that, I dunno, I could do without.
Very well done, you made a solid engine and a lot of variety in the map. I had also a bug with one run where I couldn't lose any HP.
Movement and such is really good. The combat was too easy but realized the enemies stopped attacking after a while. With some polish and filling in this could be great!
That was very fun to lurk around, music and sfx is nice, graphics is pretty.
But combat is too easy, i literally can just spam Attack to win every interaction
Really nice, snappy movement mechanics with good SFX to match. All of the basic dungeon crawlers were there, though combat was a little too easy. Was nice seeing some verticality though. Good job!
Honestly the sound is great, visuals are great, controls are snappy and responsive. I had fun with it!
A solid entry! Movement is snappy and combat is simple!
I love the pixel art textures applied to full 3D structures on a grid along with the use of lighting to keep the mood.
Some of the UI elements are a bit rough, but that is the charm of jam games!
Nice job! great presentation and atmosphere!
Really well done 3d graphics. I liked, that there was so much variety and even verticality. The UI stuff was not fitting to well into the rest and I had some problems, where I could not walk forward after a battle. Oh, and I never received damage from the enemies. The music was nice and you even have a minimap!
if you go back one step and go forward again, you can bypass that strange behavior, and will put you back into another battle and pass that zone. Thank You for comment and testing
Cool game, the music fits well with the game. There's a lot of detail in the character creation and some nice lore to the races too. Graphics were really nice too. Nice work!