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Hope for the Homeland's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Aesthetic (Art, Audio, Theme) | #1 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Overall | #4 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Likely to Release | #5 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Interesting Gameplay / Fun | #8 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Smooth, Polished & Bug Free | #9 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Solo Jammer
Solo
Made by a solo jammer
Prototype Jam Submission
https://itch.io/jam/greenlight-prototype-jam/rate/2132173
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Comments
I like the concept of rebuilding the community with items gathered from the areas. Its a pleasant gameplay loop where you become stronger by helping your fellow villagers, which in turn lets you help the villagers more quickly. There might be an issue for the player where you cannot gather any more of the right materials if you kept too much of an another material. For example, I got to the 4th upgrade from the cook which requires 15 of 2 types of material, but I wouldn't be able to gather anything more as I was already carrying the maximum amount of materials. Will there be an option to discard materials to avoid this?
The music is quite nice, and makes the sprite animation appear more springy and lively. The story is straightforward, and provides a decent motivation for the character and player.
The momentum based controls feel ok, but feels a little inconsistent when moving vertically:
The boss fight was straightforward due to the upgrades allowing me to tank the hits and survive long enough to keep striking it until it died. The boss' mercy invincibility length and damage rate wasn't enough to discourage this tactic. A potential method to discourage such a tactic could be to increase the boss' invincibility length, the damage per attack, move the boss on taking too much damage within a given amount of time, or introduce a move that immobilises or knocks the player away.
Overall, I enjoyed the general vibe of the game, and how the gameplay loop consistently leads to positive story outcomes as you progress through the areas.
I love the concept of rebuilding the village as you progress and putting your collected resources to use to do it. It looks like you've heard about this a lot already, but the momentum build up when you move is a little difficult to get used to, however after playing for a bit I did get used to it. I also used P for attack when I was playing and that felt really good to use along with WASD. I did notice a bug I think, I did one run in the forest and collected 25 things and then went to talk to the guy in the village and he needed a little more grass than I had collected, so I went back into the forest to get more and when I entered into the portal screen I couldn't take the amount of grass I needed to finish that quest since I was already full. I may have missed somewhere else to drop off stuff but it seemed like I couldn't continue.
It's a very cute game and I can't wait to play it next week!
thanks so much. I didn't have time to weave how to drop items into the tutorial in a narrative way. You can press 'esc' to pause and then click on the inventory option. Use the spin box to select the number of items you want to drop and click the check mark.
I like the gameplay loop and music. It's aesthetically pleasing as well. I'd like to see more diversity in the regular enemies. Right now there are spiders and bats but they behave pretty much the same way and the loot drop seem to be identical, too. The end screen calculation seems a bit buggy and I'm always asked to store more items than what seems necessary. When I start walking or change direction the character seems to always need time to speed up. it makes it a little bit uncomfortable in boss fights as I wouldn't be able to dodge very effectively. Is Anasi (or however it was supposed to be spelled) the only boss fight right now?
thanks. I didn't want it to be too punishing for now as I wanted my kids and my husband who aren't gamers to be able to enjoy it. I still need to add the small web shot to the spider; however I wasn't planning on adding that until after I made it so that you could destroy bullets. Getting the movement just right was definitely something I struggled with. In the next sprint I plan to implement a dash to help with movement. I just didn't have enough time.
Looking good! I really like the artstyle and theme. I think probably my biggest note is just with the character controls, for one thing I think that the attack key should be rebound, it's really awkward to hit X while also using WASD (and while this issue doesn't exist when using arrow keys, it's still not ideal). I'd suggest making attack either spacebar or shift, and rebinding interact to E if necessary. The other big issue I've got is that Kibwe feels very heavy and slippery to control, they're slow to accelerate and slow to change direction. This issue is worsened by a bug in the game, where whenever Kibwe changes their facing direction they lose all momentum
The only other note I've got is that it's really easy to get softlocked with the materials. On my first playthrough I got 12 grass and 12 meat on my first trip to the forest, but the cook needs 15 grass, and there's no way to discard materials you don't need (that I could find, at least). Honestly, the way I'd solve this is I'd remove the limit on how many materials you can store in the village and just make it so you can only hold 25 items while in the forest (it's weird to me that for some reason Kibwe has to carry all of the supplies in the entire village and can't just set the materials down when they get home)
Roguelites are always crazy hard to do in a game jam, and it's really impressive what you've got done -- see you at the end of Polish!
thanks so much.
Great work, love the aesthetic. The character controller is quite sluggish though, it feels maybe like there is too much mass / not enough force applied to get them moving. I think with that corrected a little bit, you'll have a banger. Really keen to see where this goes.
Thank. I spent quite a bit of time trying to tweak the movement. I had plans to add a dash to give you a bit of speed. I think I am going to get that in first before I make anymore changes to movement just to be sure it's balanced.