| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #1 | 4.471 | 4.471 |
Ranked from 34 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
Mechanics: Endless stream of party members to replace those who die.
Setting/story: Cosmic Horror monsters and surreal setting
Setting: Ancient ruins of a derelict spacecraft (which, spoilers, also contains some more traditional ancient ruins on a later floor)
Thematically/story: Recover your sanity in the solitude away from the crazy ship and monsters.
Blimey that was outstanding. The combat, art, sound and level design are all incredible.
I wasn't aware of the secret passages until the 3rd level and seem to have missed a bunch on my run. That's completely on me though and didn't prevent completion.
This really shows what is possible in one of these jams. Thank you so much for putting this together.
Great as usual! This time you decided to go for more obvious secret passages, eh? This made finding them way easier and less time consuming, though I also loved how you needed to infer where they’re from the map in your dc23 game.
Battle was quite interesting choice of how to spread aggro and whom to take down first, though poison and AoE were still quite overpowered :)
Movement was a bit too slow for my liking, but it was not a big issue with chosen “dungeon” size.
Thanks for playing, and glad you liked it!
Heh, I thought that the visually shifting effect on illusionary walls in my '23 entry were pretty obvious to see (but I was completely wrong, I've got 0 evidence anyone ever noticed the effect =). This year I decided to make them much more visually different. And in my first 2 playtests no one noticed a single one even with strong hinting, so I threw subtlety out the window and just drew a big crack over them ^_^.
As for movement, a bit too slow for me too, I probably need to do a re-write/re-factor of how that works (at least for non-realtime-combat games like this one) in my engine before the next jam =). Hopefully you figured out the click-to-move on the map to alleviate that a bit.
For completion sake it’s good to have obvious illusionary walls, so more people will find them, but for feeling clever sake it’s actually great when you need to think where they are. Especially when you have an automap which hints you at their potential location as a place where you unexplored tiles.
Oh, there was a click to move. Nope, I haven’t tried that one :)
Bravo. It's hard to find anything bad about this one. The graphics are great (A++ crt effect), the movement is perfect, the party dialogue is great while passing the time, the combat system while a bit on the easy side is extremely unique and adds a lot of flavor to fighting enemies. Overall, one of the best entries I've played yet.
Excellent game! Loved the aggro mechanics, the autopathing, and lots of other things. Dice could sometimes screw you over, but the bamf mechanic was a great solution to that :D
Shields + poison seems to be the way to go, especially in the lategame. Some minor things I disliked were your crewmembers randomly leaving once they reach a certain skill level, as there's a chance you don't get nice skills back, and near the end it happened to three of my crewmates at the same time just after I leveled up everything, so that felt a bit "meh" :D, and I think the sanity restoration mechanic feels unnecessary. I understand the hardcap, but the drain/restore system feels a bit pointless to me as it's just a matter of a sanctuary pitstop.
Game looks great, audio is nice, gameplay is smooth, the random flavor and banter was neat, and there's not much else to comment on really. Awesome entry, good job :D
Thanks for playing! Yeah, I had a _lot_ more planned to do with the sanity, that didn't make the cut. A couple people's runs did get ended by it (though, mostly due to not paying attention, not due to anything else -_-). I'd also originally planned on all of the monsters coming back when you went back to Solitude, so that you'd have to manage sanity on a run between each rest point, but then it became clear that the balancing had to be really tight to work at all, and that'd be nearly impossible if I couldn't control how much XP people got, so that feature got cut too (luckily, before spending any time coding it ^_^).
Out of curiosity, when you leveled up your characters and then lost them, did you notice that the replacements had their tier increased (had more HP / shield), or did you think they were just getting replaced randomly?
Tasty. Nuff said.
lol, but no, really, great job. I liked almost everything about this. I could see some areas that could use more polish, but I believe you likely already know those exist and would have knocked them out with more time. My favorite part was probably the combat system. You added enough depth there that the choices felt interesting and impactful for the player. I always love the random characters and perma-death gimmick, too; I get so upset when whatever version of Rose I have dies for the tenth time. :D-Could have used more variety in damage types or something to spice up the combat a bit
-Effects would have been a nice addition to make things more interesting
-An inventory/loot system and the ability to equip your party members seemed like an easy and fun win here
-A cleaner dialog system for party members that wasn't set up with trigger volumes
I must say, though, that you prioritized way better than I did for my team. We ended up leaning in the other direction; we got many of those systems working and focused on features and polish that we failed to utilize fully to create a great experience. Excellent work. This is a master course on what to prioritize for game jams!
Thanks for playing, glad you liked it! And, yeah, lots of things that could have been added =). My initial thought (before working in the Endless theme) was for 1 character, with 6 equipment slots for the 6 die faces, and do purely inventory-based upgrades (albeit with no clue how I'd do aggro or something similar to keep it interesting ^_^). Adding equipment to this would definitely be fun, but was quickly out of the scope of what I could pull off and balance in the jam =).
If you've got an ideas on how the dice could be "behind the scenes", I'd love to hear them =). I'm having difficultly thinking of a game that just randomly says "surprise! you've gotta choose only between these two characters this turn", or anything like that, unless the randomness is clearly from a die roll or equivalent... I do also like video games that feel like board games, and that helps sell that, though =).
So, I still think they would be okay, not hidden, if you emphasized them a bit more. As I said before, make them bigger while doing a roll animation and let the player understand the significance of that and anticipate the outcome. I think that would be better; right now, they just felt like an afterthought to me.
In terms of things you could do to ease them into the background, my first thought would be some system tied to the theme on the surface. You could call it something like the "Bravery" system and explain it away as something like "Only 2-3 characters per turn will be able to summon the willpower to take action against the cosmic horrors they face per turn; make your choices wisely." You could probably come up with a more creative name and reasoning, but it would be easy to put it in as a hidden system at that point if you wanted to go that route. But of course, you would need a new name then, just spitballing design ideas. :)
An absolutely solid entry! A very large game for a jam makes it hard to complete when there are so many other games to try.
Combat was solid, relatively easy to learn, and required me to be strategic while also allowing for mistakes. Hard to make something like this during a jam. It is impressive.
Thanks for sharing it on my stream! It was a pleasure to play.
Here is the VoD if you want to rewatch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2109694847?t=03h32m45s
This was FANTASTIC! It's now sharing a spot with my other favorite game so far in the jam. Quite addictive, played it to the end although I was falling asleep last night. Very witty and endearing party banter, very nice combat mechanic, great exploration, what can I say? Got no negatives to complain about.
One balance issue: Not sure if possible, but there could be scenarios where you can't complete an encounter due to not having anyone with high enough damage to overcome armor. When fighting the Alien Explorer, I had just one character that could do 1 damage to him on a single roll. Not sure if you account for that when randomizing mobs so that it's always possible to defeat them, but just something to be aware of.
Thanks for playing and the feedback! And, yeah, I think it's maybe theoretically possible to get stuck, although probably really unlikely to be permanently stuck (you might fail, reload, and have to level up some different skills), you'd have to have just the right set of classes, and spent all of your xp leveling up things other than your damage skills, and just saved before the boss. I did tweak a couple armor rates down to where they are now in hopes that if someone had no poison dealers they could at least chink away at them with a front-line class), but it'll be interesting to hear if anyone does get stuck ^_^.
Oh, hah, actually, I totally forgot, I put in something to, in theory, deal with a different situation that might help here. I think the only way to be would be if you spent all your XP in your shield abilities and such. And, I've got an internal timer where after 10 rounds (or 20, on a boss), every round everyone starts doing 1 more damage with everything, so as long as you survive for 20 rounds, you'd start doing enough damage to get through the shield ^_^. The actual situation this is for is when you've got no damage dealers alive at all, and lots of shield, so that the monsters eventually just kill you, but in theory it can be used the other way around =).
Holy crap… wow. That was amazing!
I loved everything about it – the art, the combat, and especially the humor. You got me with the “Spencer’s next to a Cinnabon” line.
The dice combat was excellent and I absolutely loved the the automove. The special events in Solitude surprised me in a good way.
Speaking of Solitude, that was an excellent twist on the theme, and I loved it.
Great job, this was fantastic!
That's fantastic.
The art style, the polish, the crew chatting with each other!
The combat system is very cool, the enemy turn is a bit difficult to read tho, maybe it's too fast.
This doesn't even seem made in 1 week, really a Good Job!
One of the greatest I played so far.
Thanks for playing and glad you liked it! It's "made in a week", but under really heavy crunch on my part, but I loved every minute of it =).
There's a combat log for what happened on the enemy's turn if it helps ^_^. I wanted combat to be snappy, and once you know the mechanics you should already know exactly what's going to happen on the enemy's turn (although, of course, I don't always take the time to figure that out myself and end up with someone dead instead =), so I thought it best if it showed things about as quick as possible. Maybe should have started slower (like 5x slower) in the first few fights and then sped up once people had a chance to figure things out...
"Verdant leaves blend together like a bad photoshop brush" - funniest thing I've read in a long time!
Here are things I love:
This is an awesome game. One thing that wasn't super clear - the insanity meter is just a timer right? So I should race the timer on my next run? I probably blew past the explanation of that.
I responded in DM, but duplicating here in case anyone else is wondering about the Sanity meter - it only goes down when you take damage (a bunch if someone dies, only 1 point for a little hit), so no need to rush, and don't forget you can restore (current, not max) sanity back in Solitude.
Thanks for the feedback and glad you liked it!
alright so this is easily the most polished game I've tried so far. Even the little detail that you bounce forward when moving against a wall (rather than simply not moving) is great and something I'm adding to my dungeon crawler now.
I absolutely love the combat mechanics of this. Overall great presentation as well. Nice!
Nice job! great presentation and atmosphere! theres a lot of content inhere!
This is just incredible, you crammed so much stuff in there. The banter, the minimap, the stylish graphics, an actually working combat system. Thumbs up!
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