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The Catacombs of Venice's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #10 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Mood | #11 | 3.813 | 3.813 |
| Overall | #12 | 3.682 | 3.682 |
| Audio | #15 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Visuals | #18 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
Ranked from 48 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Unity
URL
https://github.com/christh/catacombs-of-venice
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Comments
One of the best games here!
Two questions:
1. what is the goal of the game?
2. how does it relates to the jam?
Thank you!
Basically I lost the day where I planned to build out a more Shakespearean experience (3rd June), from my log:
01/06: Added cool light, UI for health / coins, scene linking (1 hour light, 4 hours UI)
So the 4th was a scramble to wrap things up - frankly the game almost didn't get released, I got it all in somehow, but unfortunately not the dialogue which I planned to add to tie the theme up :)02/06: Game loop - exit to next level, gameplay fixes (4 hours)
03/06: [plan] Audio / UI / Dialogue, Levels
04/06: [plan] Launch!
Graphics are very nice, the colour scheme works well and the illumination effects are cool. I miss some animations for the sprites, specially for the main character because it’s hard to tell if you’ve been hit or not unless you look at the health meter. Feedback from the enemies is good though.
The UI is very basic but functional. The font choice could be better, but this is me nitpicking.
Controls are a bit floaty, there’s some inertia but it’s not bad at all, and makes you be more careful with your movements.
Music and sfx are nice.
This is one of the games in this jam I’ve enjoyed the most so far. Excellent work!
I can report an Xbox One controller works perfectly fine with this game, but I ended up using the mouse to aim and shoot for accuracy.
This is wonderful! The movement and the combat is fluid. Visuals are great! Those mini extra things like auto-coin collection, the moving lights etc makes it to stand out. Very well done! :)
Beautiful game!! Good work!
This is a fabulous game with a very relaxing feeling with the music. The music and lighting fits so perfectly. I am highly impressed with this. I played it tonight on my livestream and you can see my reaction and impression if you like at
Thank you! I watched your video yesterday and it was really nice to see the game being played. And also slightly embarrassing to see a few bugs. So I've pushed an update today resolving:
Cheers!
Awesome, The visuals on it are so good. Great job.
This is an excellent submission. Loved the bow mechanics, easy to use and fun to duck and dive while shooting. music sometimes felt a bit dull for the game, fits the intro and menu perfect though.
Thanks Petraefa!
I agree the music could have used a bit more variety. I've got an absolute boatload of great music I'm planning to use once the gamejam rules on paid assets are out of the way :)
Awesome game :) I like the visual part, especially the light effects.
Would be nice to have limited arrows (makes it more survival like, but that you need a melee attack) And it would be nice to spend the gold (shop system, like buying new arrows or upgrades)
Thank you, NK!
I agree entirely on all your points. I was very close to adding melee (player originally wielded a sword), but didn't think I could pull it off in the time I had. I also very nearly made it so you had to retrieve your arrows. In fact I think that feature will go in, in future.
Gonna get shop and upgrades in on the next big release post gamejam (still need to do the GDTV shop course lol)
Awesome game!
I killed a lot of enemies because it feels good. lol
Found a lot of money, and ran away of that catacombs.
Only thing is that I felt the movement a little slipery.
Thanks II! I agree, slotting those bats is so satisfying! Especially since I reduced their hitbox a lot so you really have to bullseye them.
I'll get the movement sorted out soon.
Had a good play through, managed to rush the exit at the end to escape :P, didn't fancy trying to shoot down ALL of them :).
The lighting and the tile mapping looked great, nice scene layouts as well. Simple controls for ease of player getting into it straight away. The light on the target/mouse was a nice touch to help you navigate your way through, checking out the dark corners and such.
Personally not as a fan of the music so much, but i seem in the minority on that :P.
Great job on creating all this in 2 weeks, well done!
Thanks for the feedback, Peter! I agree, since I re-balanced the human enemy aggro range (in their favour) I'm pretty sure that last room has swung from 'too easy' to 'forget that!'. Especially as gold doesn't have much use at the present time...
Re: the music, I had slots for every level and intended the first level to be a relaxing entrance (with according music) - with the music ramping up as everything got darker and more theatening - alas time ran out :) That last level really wanted another music track as it's definitely not such a relaxing jaunt.
Fantastic entry - really love the art, the gameplay is solid. I wish the players controls would be a little less 'drifty' (if your in Unity maybe apply some dampening on the physics would probably solve it) but still played very smoothly and was able to maneuver very effectively.
Really enjoyed the light on the ducats and the way they would go towards you like gravity when close (made looting easier) which is a super friendly touch for a gamejam game.
Thanks doommetal! You can probably imagine the amount of tuning I did as the Unity physics engine is a constant puzzle. I had to stop myself after tinkering with arrow physics, gold physics and the rest for much too long :) I had the gold much more 'explodey' at one point, which was a lot of fun, but the gold liked to blow through the walls which is pretty upsetting for the player.
I'll get the player movement locked in my next release, because I agree - a bit more damping and a bit more speed would definitely improve the movement feel.
I came back to this game and tried it using a ps4 controller and i LOVE it.
feels great, looks, and sounds really unique.
i am a big fan of this game
Glad it worked!! I used my old PS3 (six-axis) controller for testing :) Thanks so much for the nice feedback.
I thought this game was charming. :) It felt good to play and I really like the music. I think it could be more obvious how it ties in with the game jam theme though.
Thanks for the comment! There's more where this came from :) Yes, I was a bit frustrated that I didn't have time to flex my creative writing muscles and add in more thematic aspects.
In terms of gameplay it was pretty enjoyable and the audio I felt was really good (Especially the coin pickup sound), although I struggle to find the connection with the theme, "All that glitters is not gold", if possible would you be able to provide a little bit of context?
Thanks ShoCo! It's a fair cop - the context is all around the Merchant of Venice background 'story' and not part of the gameplay itself. I had a day booked to explore the theme, but it got eaten by the Unity WebGL deployment monster...
At the start I wa worried by the lack on animation on the characters, but I didn't take too much to decide it was a cool and riskuf decision, It feels quite good white the way the characters "slide" through the scenario.
I loved the glowing system (it is really cool) and the "old english".
It is a very fun game. Very well done.
Thank you so much! I spent the best part of the first weekend on the lighting and hoped that would make the retro non-animated sprites sufficiently easy on the eyes.
Really glad you liked the game.
Good job with that game! I completed it with 1001 coins. I like the music, the gameplay is solid, well balanced, fun to play, challenging! Well done for completing all this with only 2 weeks!
Thanks for the feedback, jonatlas. There's randomness on the coin drops but 1001 looks like an excellent score! I'm going to add more features after the gamejam is done so please stay tuned :)
Great game, music was rather relaxing and made the experience more enjoyable.
Thank you! I went for a more relaxing mood as there's so many frantic top down shooters out there already, and well I'm using roguelike tiles so might as well make the pace more chilled (but still engaging when it's combat time)
Nice game, I found the movement felt slow and "floaty". Overall not a bad game for the time, I feel it needs a little work on the movement and maybe some animation?
Good job!
Thanks, Dmented - I do agree on the movement. I'm a big fan of Doomguy and his ability to run at 57mph so I think I did have one scenario where the player did that, which was a heap of fun, but it just made things much too easy. With some larger scenes and the action zoomed out a bit I think it would work a bit better.
Very nice visuals!
Thank you neurobio, I'd experimented with 2D lights in Godot and the performance was disastrous, so I was really happy to see that they didn't choke the system in Unity (at least on my dedidated GPU-less potato)
I loved the way you told the story, text was amazing and kind of funny too in the ending lol and i got 992 ducats yaaayyy.
Music was very chilling and relaxing so I loved that a lot too. and I must say I can feel that you had a bunch more stuff planned for this game and because of the time limit didn't go through with it. and I'm sure they would have been amazing. are you planning to expand after the gamejam ends?
Thank you! Yes, had lots more planned - really really really wanted Shylock to sell you upgrades / heals or just gate you, trash talk you, and take all your money, Tom Nook style lol. Also wanted to add in character selection with different attributes so you could play as the Prince of Morocco for example. Then I'd definitely have been at least a little more on-theme.
As it stood with just a couple of hours in the evenings to work on the game I had to rein it all in or I'd have failed on the deadline (and very nearly did lol). So with my limited palette of enemies and features, I thought four levels was quite enough otherwise I'm being a bit rude to the player.
And thank you for asking! I am definitely looking to expand this; I've plenty of Unity packages I couldn't use due to the (absolutely fair) gamejam restrictions on paid assets. I'm either going to go in a roguelike direction or gauntlet direction, not sure yet! I love Diablo and the loot pinata (as you may have guessed from my 'coin sprayers' lol), and I love dual stick shooters so I'm sure these things can marry up!
I really dig the simple 2D lighting and ambience! movement is a bit clunky to me, especially the bouncing against the wall when you move towards it. Great basic idea, and nice effects!
Thanks for your review! I've removed the bounciness now, so it should play a bit more smoothly now.