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Battle of the Five Man Bands's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Innovation | #50 | 3.611 | 3.611 |
| Audio | #97 | 3.444 | 3.444 |
| Overall | #143 | 3.278 | 3.278 |
| Graphics | #144 | 3.389 | 3.389 |
| Theme interpretation | #177 | 3.167 | 3.167 |
| Gameplay | #219 | 2.778 | 2.778 |
Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository
https://github.com/snuffysam/FiveManBand
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Comments
Hallo,
Thank you for sharing your game. I’ve already saved its RATING;
1. verified: GAME due to observed you wrote a review for “A Little Bird Told Me”; adds: GAME playable via web browser
2. observed: noticeable use of 2D and 3D drawing techniques; adds: text dialogue where each letter is displayed, instead of immediately the whole text
3. observed: game to have noticeable background music and sound effects
4. verified: GAMEPLAY to be of reading STORY text and doing BATTLES with among others: own rockband as training, a rival school’s rockband;
5. observed: noticeable time used to read the STORY text, which at the start reminded self of deltarune (PC, SteamPowered); remembers: the previous year (Year 2022), re-verifying reading fantasy fiction, e.g. Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth Book#1 (paperback) @20minutes per 4pages (approx); observed: self to opt now to use such TIME for another ACTION; remembers: Bryan Lee O'Malley’s SCOTT PILGRIM manga/comics, with noticeable drawing technique, albeit STORY text after re-verification appears now to be less of self’s focus;
6. admits: self to have NOT yet identified the correct technique to WIN via the BATTLE system (clean-mode); remembers: however, SUIKODEN #1 (PS1), with the Empire vs Revolutionary Army battles classified to use the ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS technique, albeit with additional ACTIONS, e.g. verify opponent’s NEXT ACTION;
Thank you. Health!
Thank you, I think!
And yeah, a major component of winning the battles is recognizing what the opponents want to do. Your rival is a little upset at you at the start of battle, so he may be choosing some actions more often than others - you can use this to prepare for his attacks & counter-attack!
Hallo, snuffysam, OK! Yes, I may need to re-verify the BATTLES again. It appears that the STORY text caused me to opt to use noticeably less TIME verifying the technique to WIN in the BATTLES. Thank you, too, for the strategy guide! I am now reminded of another GAME OFF 2022 Entry, Bottom of the Barrel (PC), and Final Fantasy 6 (SuperFamilyComputer), which cause me to wonder why such GAMES do not yet have PLAYER vs PLAYER multiplayer battles, only PLAYER vs CPU.
In general? Because people often don't have a second player with them to help test while rating games lol. By definition, 100% of players are able to play single player (most people I know are one person), and only a fraction of players are able to play multiplayer.
So, with limited development time, it's best to focus on single player in a jam. But, adding in multiplayer as a bonus mode is definitely something I'd want to do down the line!
Thank you for the response! I was going for games published even outside a JAM. I remember Pocket Monsters#1 (GameBoy) to have multiplayer, albeit the battles appeared to be a bonus to the main single player game. The previous year, I wrote as answer to a question that I was verifying using javascript for GAME OFF 2021; however, the sample outputs that I observed appeared to not yet reach GAMES executed on the Super Family Computer. A few months before GAME OFF 2022, I learned of another ITCH.IO JAM, the GAMEBOY SHOWDOWN, where the outputs of using javascript caused me to verify it and use the know-how in our team’s entry. Perhaps, we shall soon find a JAM with multiplayer, e.g. make a FIGHTING GAME in one month.
https://itch.io/jam/fight-jam-001
Thanks! Here is the link to the GAMEBOY SHOWDOWN: https://itch.io/jam/game-boy-showdown
I loved the mechanics! Nice balance, multiple ways to win each battle, nice job!
Thank you!!!
Nice concept, the blending of mechanics fits well with the rest. I thought the battles were really difficult though.
Thank you! Yeah, in the next version I'm definitely adding a minigame difficulty slider lol
Brilliant concept. I played the clean version which made it absolutely hilarious.
Thank you! Yeah, that was added last minute bc I couldn't think of anything for the fifth menu option, and I think it turned out great!
Hey! You got a really nice concept here!
It is definitely a unique game that blends together two things i love that being RPGs and music! The art is very good on that and i like the fact that you present all of this with a storyline behind it!
Good job overall!
Thank you so much! Special shout outs to my friend RK, who did the band battle music!
Nice game. Did main hero take shoes to walk a mile in enemy shoes :)?
I think they were just nice shoes XD
Good game, maybe the introduction is a bit too long
It's a visual novel, it's all intro lol.
I'm glad you liked it!!!
Story and characters were great, then I got my ass kicked by the first band repeatedly, so I couldn't progress. From what I saw, the game was very polished and well put together. I loved the artwork and the premise.
Very nice touch allowing everything to be personalized! I was more invested in the story as a result.
Thank you for playing! I'm glad you liked the customization!
Hah, these battles are hard. Or maybe I'm missing something?
There are basically two ways to lose, right? By losing the tug-of-war bar at the top, and by losing all your hearts? This part seemed pretty clear, though it felt like the battles generally boiled down to hearts in the end.
The stars were a bit less clear—they're supposed to add power to your actions, right? Does the effect of stars vary per person? (I feel like I stuffed a bunch of stars into the blonde lady, but realized too late that all of her actions still just showed one star of impact). It took a few rounds before I properly noticed that different people had different stats, and were taking turns—at first it just seemed like the impact of the stars was fluctuating unpredictably. (In retrospect, I think maybe the initial tutorial tried to say something about this, but I lost that battle and the game just moved on so maybe all the data there didn't make it into longer-term memory.)
After starting to understand the rules (I think), I had some trouble following everything—things happen pretty fast and in different sections of the screen, while at the same time I as a new player was trying to look at and learn all the pieces enough to figure out some strategy without getting distracted by how my band is getting pummeled. Some extra animation and redundant visual cues might help here, e.g. by shining a spotlight on the currently-active member, by tinting the screen (or just overlay a low opacity-color) a bit when getting hit/blocking, or by making the band's bar glow their color (e.g. have a color with an alpha gradient scale out) when hyping the crowd.
On the whole, though, the battles also just seem hard—the odds start stacked against the player (with the opponents having more health), clicking each individual star has to be done quickly so the opponent doesn't get multiple actions off in the meantime, and battles start after reading / clicking around for a few minutes (with the mental mode-shift feeling like it starts me off on the wrong foot, and making it hard to get into a flow state). If you'd like to make the VN the focus over the battles, I would definitely suggest toning the difficulty down by default, if only by reducing the rate that opponents act.
Sorry, I hope this doesn't come off too critical—from the description it sounded like you're looking for all feedback, particularly on the battles, and I definitely struggled with those.
On to the good stuff:
I like the animations during the battles and found the plot pretty engaging.
The text-changing was a nice touch—I customized every name, but the ex-boyfriend's text still worked out perfectly, as far as I noticed. I'm curious to look at the code there and see how that was done.
I'm impressed by all the work put in here. Wish the difficulty ramped up more gradually so I could see more.
Good luck developing this further!
Thank you so much! I love all those ideas you have for visual cues - I'll definitely try to get that into the next version!
I will let you know on the "see more" aspect - you're pretty much at the end of the game, you just need to beat that one final boss battle to see the rest lol.
This is incredibly well polished! So many cool touches, like being able to name your band and even draw a little logo!
I do wish there was a bit more of the gameplay itself though, it felt like the exposition took center stage and the gameplay wasn't as big a part of the game as I was expecting. Maybe that's why it felt like such a jump in difficulty between the two fights - because you're basically going from the tutorial to the final boss? But holy crap, this was really good!
Also, incredible detail that you steal his shoes at the end, that part got me good! :D
Well, it is primarily a visual novel - the antics of the characters are meant to be the main draw, the band battling gameplay is more meant to be a minigame that you occasionally go through to break up the story. Which admittedly makes it extra weird that the boss battle is so difficult lol.
Ahh, that makes sense. In that case, I'd love to see more of that mini-game, as the game as a whole seemed to hype up a tournament, yet we only got to play twice. Some cool characters though, still loved the game as it is!
Yeah, this was basically just the first chapter to a larger story that I hope to return to. Though, I suppose you can pretend the ending is that they killed the rival and then never participated in the tournament again LMAO
Hah, that's my headcanon now! I could totally see this being a much longer game with several arcs, but please, if you do keep working on it, make sure you leave in the part where you steal the guy's shoes!
Duly noted!!!
Hey! I find the theme interpretation quite good ngl haha (even if in my country such college bands don't really exist to this extent i understand the cliché xD)
i got very lost on the combat though, i find the mechanics interesting but needing to click on all stars manually made me lose a lot of time so I didn't even succeed to win the first concert :/ maybe i am just bad lol but the concept is cool! I'd gladly replay with a bit more tutorialization and balancing :)
Hello! Thank you so much for playing! To be honest, I don't think there are college bands to this extent in ANY country ha ha... it's a bit exaggerated.
I would have made the stars all used automatically, but the issue is that you can save stars for future turns - you don't have to use them all immediately. If they were clicked on automatically, you wouldn't be able to save stars for later.
However, in future versions I'll make sure to give more time for the player to make their decision, that way there's less of a rush to click through the menus!
I do really like the game. Still struggling to be good at it and I like the mechanics and the look. This is fun!
Thank you so much! Yeah, that boss battle can definitely take a few tries to beat. As a tip - try not to let the enemy band spend too much time building up boosts!