Really nice polished game! Other than the boss fight, I didn't find defeating the enemies to be too challenging - perhaps making some traps stationary and you have to lure enemies into them, or if you had to remain unseen, may have made these stages more interesting. Overall though I enjoyed it!
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Solid Dungeon Crawler's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Design | #135 | 3.854 | 3.854 |
Ranked from 48 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Glad to hear that you enjoyed it! I think it would've been interesting to make it so that some traps were stationary and require luring of the enemies but I think it was a combination of two reasons that we decided not to do it:
1. More advanced enemy AI which would've needed more time to perfect. The enemies in the game currently only patrol a set path and only stop to shoot the player when they have line of sight. Once they lose sight of the player, they resume their typical path.
2. It would've required a very clear distinction as to which traps could or couldn't be removed which I felt could become really confusing, especially for such a short game.
I definitely do think that there is potentially a lot of stuff to be done if we had the time to flesh the game out. Again, glad to hear that you enjoyed it!
This game feels super well made for 48 hours. The art is really nice, everything feels stylized and cohesive. As for improvements, it'd be nice if the dialogue could get fast-forwarded, perhaps by pressing the "interact" key, and it may be nicer if the combat was streamlined a bit (perhaps allowing "overriding" the lasers, and remote execution?). Overall, though, fantastic work! :D
Submitted
ElfinI really love the concept, art, and execution of this. It excels on almost every front. The only issues I had were:
A) The tutorial stopping your movement is pretty annoying. The voice acting is great, but it shouldn't make you sit still to listen to it.
B) The boss feels like he takes way too much damage and it feels a little tedious.
Submitted
Metal MouthThank you for the feedback! The tutorial stopping your movement was a result of the tutorial being hastily put together in the final hours of the jam. Since the tutorials triggers are trigger area based, we had discovered that if the player runs too quickly they could potentially trigger multiples of them too quickly and have all of the tutorial skipped over as the old one overlapped the new one. Stopping the movement wasn't an elegant solution, but given the time constraint it was the best we had when compared to the alternative of the player accidentally skipping over the whole tutorial and not knowing what to do.
And yes I agree that the boss's combat may have ended up too tedious and it is personally one of my bigger regrets of the game. Unfortunately like many other aspects of the game we had no time to re-balance and tweak it to a better state.
Production value wise it's pretty solid! Good music, voices and it's pretty stellar to view. Nicely done on that front.
Gameplay wise I think the concept could work with less tedium of the combat. Having to switch the traps on and off felt really slow and clunky which meant the enemies had to be really slow in order to compensate. I think having the ability to turn traps on and off would've made it more satisfying so you can see the enemies dying on screen as opposed to turning it on and hoping they died. Either that or a different trap that could be used up close. Something like trap doors, rolling balls, or anything closer that would make dodging and fighting more satisfying.
Overall I think it's a great idea but it's slowed down by the lack of satisfying traps. But with the time you were given, this is produced quite well and could be enhanced quite well in the future if you chose to keep going. Nice work!
Submitted
Devil's Day at the RacesThank you for the detailed comment! The separation of on and off switches was a conscious design decision because we thought that it would be too overpowered and/or uninteresting if the player was able to set up the traps and then easily sit next to a switch which had both on and off abilities. I think this is definitely something that could could circumvented with trap and level design that wouldn't have made such tactics too strong.
And yes I agree about more trap variety! I think that if we had time that adding more varied traps would've boosted up the game a ton and added a ton of depth to the game. But alas a 48 hour time limit was very limiting and it was already a miracle that we released what we have now in such a complete state before the deadline.
Thank you again for the feedback!
very smart game with very great graphics i think there was a ton of hardworking spent to have such a beautiful result.
you can checkout my game if you pleased it will be nice if you rated and left a feedback.
Submitted
Zombie RushThis is some real nice production quality! The game is very complete and has lot's of juice like voice acting and transitions. I like the idea of shooting not being an option, so you have to outsmart the enemies rather than just turn into an action hero when they spot you. Nice work!
Submitted
BlinkHA. HA HOUH HA. HA. HA.
This is a very charming and fun game! I've played it several times since my recordings keep getting fried. I think I did myself a disservice by forcing the game to run under linux via wine, because that's probably what led to the game not displaying all of the graphics on my computer.
You probably already know that I love the final boss in this game. The stern look he has when you're shooting the lasers at him is really funny for some reason, and his laugh is great too!
This is a fantastic entry to the jam, and I hope you do well! :)
Submitted
No More AdventuresThis is quite nice! The tutorial is pretty obnoxious, but apart from that, I can't find any other significant problems. Good job!
Submitted
Flippin' Out!Nice game, it has all the elements to make it a real game. Just polish it a little more and ship it!
Submitted
GMTK18 - Enter the spaceshipI enjoyed the polish of having voice acting and a game that explains how to play it. I don't really feel like it fit the theme of the Jam "what mechanic was missing?" and the crawl mechanic added didn't feel unique, and placing lasers as primary combat felt more like the main mechanic than crawling. Still fun to play and that was worth something.
You know, you actually are right and it fits the theme of the Jam better than expected. But the title of "solid dungeon crawler" and the description "literally crawl through the dungeon" just really frame it to be about the crouching, not the laser traps. It misdirected my focus away from your cool take on the genre, to a small supporting mechanic, if that makes sense.
Yeah I would've liked to put more into the title catchphrase but it's meant to be a really short sentence and explaining the game any longer would result in the sentence being cut off on the submissions page. I may go rethink it a small bit though.
A more detailed breakdown is on the game page itself!
Really cool art and voice acting! I'm not sure if it's just my crappy computer but it feels kinda unresponsive. Really cool otherwise!
Submitted
No Paddle PongThank you for the response! Don't worry, you're not the only one who has reported performance issues. It might be potentially more demanding on lower end machines and we were unable to even realize that it would cause a problem since all members of our team were on medium to high range computer hardware.
This one has gorgeous artwork!
The mechanics are entertaining too. My first problem is that if you fail in the first level, you have to sit through all the dialog again.
The biggest problem - this game doesn't really adhere to the theme. It's still extremely well done, congratulations!
Submitted
Rogue I Don't LikeHi, thank you very much for the praise! Our artist is incredibly happy that so many people love his artwork so much!. Skippable dialogue as many others have brought up (With we ourselves also agreeing that it would be great) is definitely something we realized in hindsight would be a very welcome addition to the game but unfortunately did not have the time to implement or realize its benefit.
As for the theme, our thought process was that we wanted to create a dungeon crawler game that didn't have the usual combat which originated from the player and instead needed to use environmental traps to do the killing instead.
Nice work guys.
I really liked how polished this game is. Played till the end of it. Having in mind that you raised the bar high, here are a couple of good hearted comments for what could have been even better:
- skippable dialogue is always preferable no matter how good the VA is
- enemies were a little on the easy side. didn't have to stealth even for a second. if they have a little more punishing AI (like following you if they see you) and even harder enemies on the next levels (with faster bullets) "crawling" might become more crucial than to just go into shafts and duck below beams. You could actually use it for more stealthy tactics when enemies are hard to outrun.
- boss battle was cool. but some how the boss stopped attacking me at one point and I just had to wait for the beam for 2 mins to kill him. Probably a bug.
Besides that I'm amazed by the polish made for 48 hours. For that you get a five!
Submitted
Mistreat FighterThe amount of polish and attention to detail is stellar. This is absolutely incredible, and I hope to see you in the video!
Submitted
Bunbun Saves The WorldVery impressive game. This team clearly but a lot of time and effort into this; probably the most polished game I've seen in this jam. You should know that the viewers watching this during our stream were amazed by it. I mean, come on! Voice acting?! The genre, art, and sound design all work really well together.
I don't really have any complaints (though I am really terrible at this type of game so I didn't get far) - my only nitpick is that I wish the dialogue was skippable. As I said, I'm terrible and thus had to repeat the beginning several times.
Submitted
Float OnThank you for trying out our game! We worked really hard on this game and it's awesome to hear that you were impressed so much by it!
I also did go back to watch the VOD of your playthrough of the game on Twitch. I was regrettably unable to join in during the stream itself since mobile Twitch was acting up, but it was still great to see you try it out with such high praise to go along with it!
And yeah, in hindsight the ability to skip dialogue would've definitely been a welcome bonus addition to have in the game. It was mostly not in there due to a combination of time and it actually never crossing our minds that someone would replay it enough times for it to be a significant quality-of-life feature haha.
> Solid gameplay
> Solid enemy AI
> Solid voice acting
> Soiled my pants at the boss in laughter (Ha ha ha.. ha)
Was a pretty good game - simplistic yet intuitive gameplay, a tutorial system which stated everything clear and simple, topped up with some great pixel art graphics. All in all, a very enjoyable, basic "pick up and play" game. Levels are short and sweet, have an easy to navigate layout, and the boxes aren't too well hidden but that's a good thing since they are easily accessible.
Kicked the bucket 4 times, but it was a great experience all up. For a 48 hour time constraint, the team produced a remarkable piece of art and I would easily recommend it to anyone interested in trying out something quick.
(edit): I was was wrong. Didn't pay enough attention in my first play-through. Pretty good game. Thanks for making it!
I like the game, but I feel like the game's design isn't really focused on it's core mechanic.
The core mechanic being setting up traps and activating them. That's the main unique mechanic, it's in every level, and that's what the boss fight is testing you on. However, your score in the levels is judged by how many treasure chests you find, a task that can be completed without killing anything. Also, until the final boss, you only ever have to kill the game's first enemy with traps. In every other scenario, you can just sprint to the chests, then run to the exit avoiding everyone. The safest, fastest, and generally most effective approach is one that completely avoids using the game's main system.
Sneaking past everyone is the main goal in Metal Gear, and the game is built around it. In your game, it's the main goal, but the core mechanic is centered around dispatching enemies.
I like your game; it was fun and very well put together. It's just that your inspiration (MGS) and your unique ideas (Laser traps) didn't really line up with each other.
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