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The Monstrous Maw and the Veiled Cube's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #28 | 3.409 | 3.409 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
The first area is a story that introduces and heavily leans on the cosmic horror theme. You'll know it when you see it.
Once in the dungeon, it will endlessly generate levels. You could also argue solitude matches as you're all alone.
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Comments
Really cool! Amazing monster design and great texture work, especially in town and the transition. The blob of screaming faces was my favorite.
The quadrant-locked mouselook worked pretty well and was great for spatial awareness while moving in larger areas (the town).
The map that gives you partial information is a neat idea, made it still fun to explore after getting the map, and it was cool it then tracked my exploration progress on it.
Thank you! When I made the sound effects for the screaming faces and heard it in-game for the first time, I wondered if I went too far :D
I'm glad you liked it!
I've reached level 8 with 28 kills and 1295 points on my last run. I'm happy with that and will switch to other games for now but I might get back to it later and try to do better.
The game is very fun. The intro is cool. Both the walls and enemies look good, so does the weapon shadow on the walls and I like the music . Movement feels good, attacking with each of the 3 weapons does too. The gun is the reliant one, crossbow is useless in a middle of a close fight as you can't walk while reloading so reloading will simply kill you yet on many occasions it's useful, it's better than the spear to always wield when exploring and the ammo will be of good use when fighting an enemy which can use a shield. Then the spear uses no ammo.
Now for the best part, I probably have not even faced all the enemies but from what I've seen the bestiary is already amazing. The enemies not only all look different (but with a consistent style), they also work quite differently and are all great, between one with one million hit points which also screams, two or three which rush at you and are the most frightening ones, one which shoots including not in a straight line and can activate a shield, and the not that strong but most stylish one which pushes you with ... I think it's a door? I love this one. Some can be and are better avoided, some you can't really avoid, which includes some that when you stumble upon you'd better own some bullets.
The level design is not punishing, and it's fine this way as the enemies are strong, as you only need to find one of two levers and either directly the exit or the map. From what I think I figured out we actually always play with the same dungeon here? Yet either way it's meant to be procedural so I don't want to map it (and then because I did not map the dungeon I'm not sure they're the same maps each time), it's not how it's intended, which is why I love the map which indirectly is a second exit.
Finally the game is very appropriate for a jam in my opinion, as you made it in one week yet it feels like a complete game you can spend quite some time on.
The pixel style of the life bars clashes a bit with the consistent style of everything else.
This is a super fun entry, thanks for sharing.
Impressive! Very happy to hear that you've enjoyed it a lot! :D I'll release a post-jam version with some fixes and tweaks, so I'd advise you to wait for that if you want to jump in again.
Judging from your monster descriptions, I think you've seen most of them. Maybe there's one or two more that you're missing as they show up past level 7. But I'm happy to see that you like the variety :D wallbro is my favourite as well.
Yeah you always play the same dungeon. You can configure the seed in the advanced settings, but due to a sleepdeprivation bug, the RNG always uses the default seed when generating dungeons, so it's always the same. I intended for everyone to have the same experience unless they change the seed, but alas there's currently no way to play different dungeons until I fix it in the post-jam version. You are correct that all you need to do is find a lever to open one of the two exit doors. There generally are two corridors leading to the exit room, and most rooms have two or three connections to other rooms, so there are multiple ways to complete a dungeon level.
Agreed about UI, I hate working on it and this time I reused it from last year's jam because I had other priorities :D
Thanks for playing!
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Fortunately, I played it on stream, and my viewers insisted that I not skip the intro.
FISHY FISH!
All the stars.
Haha, your viewers were right :D thanks for playing through it!
I first expected it to be a simple shitpost, but it was a real crawler. I really like the work you did on textures, and the voices and the fact they would stop if you change a line. The music that change in function of your health bar was really cool as well. The controls didn't feel as snappy as I wanted to be, and having the mouse look plus rotating plus strafing on the grid felt a bit weird at time. Allowed me to attack in diagonals tho, so that was interesting.
Really nice work overall!
Thanks for giving my weird experiment a try :D
The intro before reaching the cube was a fun addition.
I got a bit disoriented by moving to much with the free look, so I tried to keep it centered and only use WASD to move instead. The layout and looks of the dungeon was great, and the maze like structure of it made it an interesting task to ascend. However the floors were a bit to similar and the combat was a bit hard to master because of the long reload time and movement not queuing up. Over all it is a solid and enjoyable submission!
Thank you! Glad you liked it :D I can't do anything about the lack of queueing, but perhaps the fixed camera mode is more to your liking instead of the free look. You can toggle it with P, then you use the mouse to aim the crosshair instead of the camera
Thanks for playing!
The intro is fabulous!
The free look option kind of reminded me on the movement in Operencia (which I am not a fan off) but I noticed that you put options in the menu to make it less disorientating (good!).
I like the mouse aim in general (like in the original Xenomorph by Pandora 1990) and I am also using mouse aim in another crawler project but instead of a fixed center aim just a regular moveable mouse cursor. I found this to be much better aligned to the needs of a DC and way less disorienting. You may want to try this too.
Nick picking aside, I liked what I saw and would not mind seeing a post jam version.
Good job!
Thank you!
The fixed cam mode was hacked into the game a few hours before the deadline, so it still has some issues. Agreed that a regular movable mouse is probably better, but webGL is finicky with cursor locking and unlocking... So I didn't want to touch any of my code affecting that just before the deadline, because of the risk of breaking everything :D
I will release a post-jam version but it'll mostly be fixes, QoL and some balancing tweaks. No new content is planned for now as I've only got 2MB of space left in the data zip...
Thanks for playing!
I liked this one. The world building and characters outside of the cube. The monster design being balloons and their sounds. My favorites where the simple roller, the screaming blob and the wall shield one.
The dialog in the beginning set a nice tone, but it would have been nicer still if a bit more of that had carried over into the cube somehow. The UI while speaking would have been a bit clearer if it showed which option I had just selected and waited until relevant to show me my next option when the conversation went deeper. Now it instantly let me read my next line before I had any chance to hear the answer and since my eyes where in my part because I had just selected an option, it got a little confusing.
The movement was a bit awkward at first, bit after minutes playing I didn’t think too much about it. It would probably help a lot if when pressing and holding forward, the character didn’t do stops in each cycle.
Combat was fun, but felt a bit unfair that I only got to use the crossbow once per level, it never reloaded arrows. And I had a lot of them towards the end.
I also think that if I had known (or read the description just above here before playing) how many levels there were I might have wanted to stick with it. Now even though there was some progress in the levels, they were a bit too same for me to want and really attempt to get much deeper. There was some progression in the monsters and that was fun. But It would probably help if every something level was starkly different, like a boss fight or a level that is just health potions enough to get back to full health and then steps up to next floor.
I get the reasoning behind the mapping mechanic to some degree, but it felt a bit odd in world explanation why I wouldn’t at least have been able to map out where I had been before receiving the map. And then let the map fill in the map areas that I had yet to visit. But use different coloring so it’s easy to see where I’ve been and not.
Another thing I thought about was that there was a lot of levers, but most of them, the gate was somewhere else, so it was very hard to know where to go when pulling them. It was very neat though, on some levels where I got next to the exit, but there was a gate I hadn’t open and I didn’t have the map and I could see an open way into the room and then backtrack to find the way in. That was really nice. But otherwise I think the levers ought to be close to the gates. Player doesn’t have to see them but has to at least hear them and preferably have seen them before. But it might also be enough if the gates are more clear that they are open gates after opening so the player can see them and think “Ah it must have been this gate that I opened”.
All in all, I think it was a solid game!
Raw playthrough without commentary: https://youtu.be/IgoK0GaLZ00
Thank you for the extensive review :D
Agreed on the dialogue UI being very basic. Good point about the next lines being instantly visible, though. I didn't want to force the player to wait for dialogue to finish but I'll need to come up with something better in the future.
Glad to hear that you got used to the movement! I wasn't sure if completely fluid continuous movement would make it feel even less dungeon crawlery, so I opted for the brief delay just to be safe. As for the crossbow, you have to manually reload it every time (and the gun after 6 shots), but in hindsight I should have added UI hints and other feedback like a sound cue to make that clear.
Agreed about the same-ness of the levels. I've got tile and room variety built into my game system, but I went overboard with the basic textures of the current theme before learning there's a 200MB limit for webGL files within a zip file published to itch, so I already had to remove a bunch and downscale the remaining ones just to stay underneath that limit. It's definitely a lesson learned for next time! I should just finally embrace pixel art :')
I was hoping that the current variety of enemies was interesting enough that I didn't need bossfights, as some of them were already quite tough and tricky (and a pain to develop :D ) so I kept that as-is. I do like the idea of more variations in loot and stuff like that, would indeed make things a lot more interesting. Right now, every level has the same amount of random rooms and the same loot and levers, with only the layout and the monster spawns being truly different. I did that to make the expectations for the player more consistent, but agreed that it suffers from a severe lack of variety.
Regarding the map, my reasoning was that if the map also shows the corridors you've been in, it would be harder to determine if a room had been fully visited yet, or if there were other corridors still left unexplored. I thought just showing the rooms would be helpful enough. I do very much like the idea of using a two-color system, that's a brilliant solution :D
Every level has 2 levers, which each open one of the gates at the end room (unless the gates overlap, then you need to pull both). I intentionally try to have them placed in rooms that are relatively far from the end, and if possible far from the beginning as well, to force the player to explore a little more. Because in theory, once you pull a lever, you can reach the exit through one of the gates. I wanted the player to travel through a few more rooms with enemies before that happens, to force a bit more exploration. If you immediately find the exit, you can't get there yet until you've explored further and found a lever. At least, that was the idea.
Also, amazing video, well played and it was fun to see you get pretty far :D
Oh it felt like it was more than 2 levers per level to be honest. I think one solution might have been to have a souls-like prompt then that said “Something happened somewhere else on the level”. Or such. And perhaps the character if reaching the gate first (which is probably best if it’s most probable to see it first), they could say something to the effect of “I need to find something that opens this”.
I like the combat system you implemented! The freelook-aiming felt unique and it felt fun to run into enemies! I do think that the map was very large and did not have a lot of enemies to encounter, at least in the first set of rooms I explored. I love the intro town; it was a great introduction and very charming!
Thanks for playing! Yeah the first few levels don't have many enemies, as it introduces new ones every time. But it will ramp up waaaay too much at around level 10 :D
I applaud you for experimenting with that sort of bounded free look, but ultimately I wasn't liking it, it just felt like the camera was fighting against the grid-based nature of the game. Hitting P was a much more pleasant experience, so I wished that was the default.
Thanks for playing! Yeah, you're right that it was an experiment. I don't think I'll do it again in future jams, but it was fun to try and make the combat revolve around this system :D
Wow what a creepy intro. Honestly from the cover image and when I first started playing I didn't expect it to be as creepy. Very cool concept. The combat feels a little floaty, but otherwise works well. I had a bug where I couldn't interact with the potion on the first floor and the difficulty is fairly high, so I died pretty quick. Second playthrough I got a little further, but still very hard especially the ranged enemies.
Great job overall, no real complaints except the difficult could be tuned down.
Thanks for playing! Glad you liked it :D
The collision for items is only on the pedestal they're on, not the item itself, so you just have to aim a little lower in order to interact with them. It annoys me as well so it's something I'll resolve for the post-jam version.
Ranged enemies are indeed tricky. Crossbowing them from around the corner then ducking back into cover is a viable tactic, and you can also try to lure them towards you that way for the poke. Or, if you have room for it, it's possible to get up close and dodge their projectiles at point blank range if you time it just right. And running away is also a viable strategy :D
The intro is absolutely fabulous! Thanks for creating it.
Only real criticism about this one is that the difficulty grows too quickly which makes it essentially impossible for anyone to win (which is a requirement of this jam).
My other criticisms were all very nit picky. That said, I definitely enjoyed this one!
If you want to watch the VoD, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2109694847?04h:38m:10s
Thanks for streaming, It was fun to see you play it!
Hard agree on the difficulty, but that's mostly because of 3 enemy types that show up past level 7-8. All the others before that can be killed without taking damage, once you figure out their strategy and don't get caught in a bad location. But then at around level 10 there's just too many of them to handle properly, which is definitely a balancing problem and my biggest regret :D
The dialogue is absolutely mint, and I came back for second helpings of the wicked witch of big bobsville.
The combat is really cool, but I'm absolutely terrible at it apparently. Timing the spear just right has a nice feel to it. I really love the art and texturing in the village in it's second form, it looks sooo good.
I'm probably not going to survive much longer rating this games with the number of jump scares I'm having, but this was really fun, thank you.
I'm glad that you appreciate boba yaga :D Thanks for playing
Nice graphics and the start overview.
It would have been nice to have more dungeon crawler stuff like the onscreen ui, etc.
where I felt it didn't work was the mouse look. It felt like a hobbled fps rather than a dungeon crawler - which is unfortunate. restricting the mouse look would have imporved things and allowed you to focus on getting the feel and mechanics really polished.
Thank you! Yeah, I took a risk by trying to blend those two genres together so I can understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea. However, just so you're aware, there is an option in the advanced settings (or by pressing P while crawling) which locks the camera forward and lets the mouse control your crosshair. I'd be interested to see if that "solves" the issue you're having. I haven't tested it extensively as it was an addition I made in the last few hours before the deadline, but it may feel better for you to play that way.
I appreciate the feedback, and thank you for playing! :D
Hey! This game has a lot to offer!
Theme:
I think the strongest theme hit is Endless and then followed by the cosmic horror with a big emphasis on the horror.
What I liked:
What I would wish for:
Thank you for participating and uploading this entry!
Thank you for the extensive feedback! Very happy to read your comments. It sounds like you've seen most of the enemies, as the screamer is one of the lategame enemies that you can encounter. I was a bit worried that I may have overtuned some of the enemies and/or difficulty so I'm happy to see that it's doable to reach the nastiest enemies in there. Also happy to see that the gameplay was enjoyable, as it was a bit of a gamble to see if it plays well.
Agreed that the introduction could use some more work and interactions... But hey, it's a jam and I knew I needed some gameplay as well :D
Thanks for playing!
Satisfying combat and nice atmosphere, with the graphics and music. It feel so good to spear the enemies to death :)
Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you liked killing my creations :D
Strong and Spooky atmosphere.
I played intro and the transition once you gain the sight is really cool :) I also found the dialog funny.
Game-play wise I really enjoyed the crossbow for sure. It's a very satisfying weapon because the bolt feels like it's got a lot of HEFT. I also thought the movement felt responsive, there was a small adjustment period while I got used to the aiming, but after that it felt natural to move around and turn the character while also aiming manually.
Great entry!
Very glad to see that you liked the intro, I spent way more time on it than I should have :D
Also happy to see that you enjoy the gameplay! It was a bit of a gamble about whether it works, but I'm glad that it did
Thanks for playing!
Nice job! great presentation and atmosphere! a lot of work here for a week!
Thanks! And I wish I still had a day or two extra, to polish and tweak things further :D
thats always the way!
Well polished and nice procedural level generation. Smooth grid-based movement and nice touch on the camera movement. One of my favourites so far, great stuff!
Thank you! Glad to see that you liked it :D