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A jam submission

Harold: OriginsView game page

The story of how the MV heroes met and ended the eternal winter.
Submitted by Nova Kane LLC, KV_Kingdom — 3 days, 20 hours before the deadline
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Harold: Origins's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#24.2634.263
Fun#24.2114.211
Creativity#74.3164.316
Harold#94.2634.263

Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

Very polished entry with good art, voice acting and simple yet fun battles! Nice work!

Developer

Thanks man. We are trying to be you.

HostSubmitted(+1)

Well done! This just got it right on so many levels - perfect length, amazing art, voice acting, action sequences, and general polish. This was a spectacular team up, and a good example of how a team project should go. I felt like everyone's strengths were visible.

Since this was so good and was clearly a huge effort, I want to offer some tiny suggestions.

- I'd love a way to revive (boss killed Marsha).
- A little balancing on skills. e.g. Nuke can be used every other turn if you recharge MP, but doesn't do enough damage to be worth it. Other high TP skills felt less good than slightly lower ones.
- Impact animations on projectile hits, and differing sound effects (always sounded like a slap)
- Personal preference, but if an enemy gets knocked back, have them continue facing forward. If you got blasted away, you probably wouldn't turn the other direction, right? (just put "face target: forward" after the move back).
- Have action sequences with multiple projectiles have some timing overlap, e.g. fireballs raining from the sky shouldn't have to wait for the previous one to hit and show damage before appearing. Takes a little practice getting the waits right, but seeing multiple things appear and hit in rapid succession is satisfying.
- Figure out if you can change the pictures without closing the text window (I swear its possible in MV!)

Definitely a contender. Thanks so much for your Haroldic contribution, KNHK!

Developer

Thanks so much. There were a lot of jabs at my work there. LOL. But AS did get a back seat in that game, so it's cool.

HostSubmitted

Ahhh yeah I see they were often AS oriented, but hey, that's what I know. And combat really was awesome looking. Just providing detailed feedback (that I didn't with many other entries)  in case you develop the game more or do a sequel!

Submitted (1 edit)

Really loved this one! It was a wonderful way to demonstrate the Harold: Origin theme, especially during the ending. I especially loved the voice acting, especially dopey Harold and Scottish Therese.

Developer(+1)

I'm glad you like the game. Thanks for playing and thanks so much for the Voice Acting Shoutouts.

Submitted(+1)

This was fun, cute artwork.  Battles weren't too drawn out or difficult.  And nice starting in a frozen place instead of another forest (something I'm guilty of myself).  

It was a little weird when Harold used his Fire Dagger when I had let the mage character die once .

Developer

Thank you. I 'm glad you liked the game

Submitted(+1)

a wholesome game!

DeveloperSubmitted

Thanks, Ronald! Glad you enjoyed it.

Developer

What did you think of our interpretation of Harold? I'd be interested to hear.

Submitted

If Harold kills a Blue Yeti does that mean he dropped the Mic? I really enjoyed this, the battles reminded me of Final Fantasy games where I would have a heal bot and 3 attackers. The moves were fun, and the enemies had fun attack names. There was just enough rock puzzles that it didnt become boring or tedious, the art was cool too. Only improvement I could think of is the pop filter thing, also some lines did not start right away there may be silence on the recording or I got a weird slow loading thing from playing on web version. Voice recording is hard and I applaud you all for its inclusion. Great Game!

DeveloperSubmitted(+1)

Thanks for the feedback Wrath! I agree, we should get pop filters for our next voice acting session. As for the delay, I can assure you that that is due to how RM handles sounds (it downloads them only when they’re called in browser versions) because I went through them all and cut out any opening silence they may have had.

Glad you liked the art, too. We all put our hearts into making the game look great.

Thanks again for playing and leaving a review!

Submitted

Lots of good art!
-> Pixel art battlers
-> Hand drawn busts
-> Winter environments well made
-> Good music choice
-> Lots of action sequence
-> Voices are great, this way dialogues are never boring, your characters are 'alive' ( in my head )

Battles does not need strategy -> Made it a lot easier for me ( I'm really bad at strategy games)

The story is nice, I wanted to know what's going to happen next.

Puzzles are not hard -> Same as strategy, for people like me easy puzzle are the way to go hehe :)

Overall I enjoyed the game!

Really high-quality work!

Soundtrack: great selections, extremely well-suited to the story.

Voice-acting: well done, some lines do underscore the need for pop filters though.

Graphics: amazing custom tilesets, characters, busts, etc! And the action sequences for combat are just great.

Content: Puzzles are fun and concise. Good twist on the push block trope.

I'm torn on the battles, because there's not really as much strategy as it feels like there could have been. The enemies do tons of damage and it feels like you have to spam heals or just die, which kind of puts tension on the fact that the skills and skill progression are really neat.

Writing: solid. Harold is full of derpy humor and that definitely shines more than the generic-ness of the plot (which I think is intentionally so, to be fair). Characters have distinct personalities independent of the voice acting, which I feel is important.

Overall: I played this one first of all the Harold Jam games and am not disappointed in the slightest.

Developer(+1)

Thank you. We put a lot of work into the game. Glad to know it paid off.

Submitted(+1)

"I'm Harold the Hero!"

5 Stars on 'Harold' for the hilarious voiceacting alone. 

This one was tons of fun, nice job.

Developer

Thank you. Glad you enjoyed the game

I think there is a dialogue issue right when you meet the first character because it kept repeating and I couldn't get past it.

That said it looks lovely and the fact that it has voice acting makes me want to be able to play all the way through.
A word of advice for future audio recording: Make sure you either have a pop filter, or keep the microphone to the side of your mouth as there is a lot of harsh P and H 'pops' in the audio.

Submitted

Did you pick up the big branch on the upper right? 

(+1)

I didn't see it? I'll try playing it again later today and let you know how it goes.

As always *I* might be the most broken part of the game review process.  ^_^'

Developer

I'll try that.

Thanks for playing

AAAAAAND now that I have had enough sleep....
This game was fantastic. The graphics, the names of all the abilities and spells, the pacing. All of it was a lot of fun to play.

I think my favorite mechanic was the river slide. Once I got the hang of it it was a lot of fun to navigate. The pushing puzzles were ramped up nicely and integrated into the fights and story well.
Overall fantastic game.