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Shiori's Novella: Forbidden Ink's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Ambience | #5 | 4.492 | 4.571 |
| Theme | #16 | 3.685 | 3.750 |
| References | #21 | 3.825 | 3.893 |
| Overall | #21 | 3.615 | 3.679 |
| Innovation | #40 | 3.123 | 3.179 |
| Gameplay | #43 | 2.948 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
The art and animations are nice.
UI is pretty good too! Shiori's yapping animation in the corner is so funny.
The backgrounds are great. Not sure if they're sketches on purpose of just because there was not enough time to render them, but they fit the narrative nicely as is.
I couldn't figure out what the items I picked up along the way were for. Do they give some kind of buffs?
Pretty straightforward platformer with enemies to slay, items to pick up and a fun boss fight.
Some improvement suggestions:
- Make sure your game canvas scales to the window instead of making it a fixed size, so it works on different window/monitor sizes.
- The foreground and background blend too much sometimes and it's hard to know what's an obstacle. The particles help to identify platforms but it should be clearer. Using brighter colors for foreground elements helps.
- ERB's walk cycle doesn't fit well with her movement speed. Looks a bit floaty.
- I'd love to see ERB fully animated when jumping, falling, taking damage, etc.
- I suggest changing the camera behavior from "lag behind" to "move ahead" of the player.
- The attack sfx felt a bit weird. I was expecting a higher pitched sword slash.
Bugs:
- Flying enemies try to attack even if I'm vertically far from them.
- The camera movement is jittery. It probably has something to do with the timing for updating the camera position.
- Shiori's narration box has a vertical slider but I could not interact with it, so the last line was partially hidden.
- The game seemed to keep going in the back after I got the end screen.
Overall, good job the game!
Got softlocked by a bunch of branches. Game looks nice which is a huge contrast to the Liz Sprite
That darn archivist, I'm going to catch her!! Joking aside, a pleasant action platforming game with quite the charming art style, I love it!
If I have to suggest something I think the game could use a bit more of distinction between the platform and the background, the aura is a good start! just need to be more clear!
Also, an addition of a platform that can jump through from below would be nice!
Overall, a very neat game!
This was quite nice. I think your environments look really good. Shiori's narration of it all is a cool touch, but I found it a touch distracting at times. There are also places where it's hard to read, especially in the final boss area where you need to deal with the boss while trying to read what she's saying.
The platforming itself is really nice. It's fun to jump around and fight with all the little inky creatures.
This may just be me, but I think the sound you picked for swinging the sword is a little out of place.
Overall, I quite liked it. Nicely done.
Edit: I forgot to mention that your options button didn't work for me.
Love the hand-drawn style sprites in this game, fits the whole story-telling mood really well!
Also loving the effort that went into drawing the entire stage. It feels very seamless and natural, and doesn't have the "tiled" look that most platformers usually have.
Downside to that maybe, is that points of collision are not quite obvious to me, the particles are really good touch of indication, but I still found myself getting disoriented on what is considered solid vs background elements at times. Try to use contrasting colors or brightness to allow players to differentiate between solids or backdrop.
Some areas (the sewers), needs better indication of death drops. There are quite a few blind drops that I cannot really tell if there is a ground below until I drop down to find out. (Maybe either make the water higher so it is visible enough, or draw some stains on the wall so that I can tell that there is goop underneath or something.)
Beautiful work, thanks for making this!
Really cool! The art style is very good. I liked the particles indicating where you can stand, but even with that it was still kind of hard sometimes. I really wish falling in the goop didn't instakill you.
This game is really cute, and I think is the first game with ERB (Unless I missed one), the stylized artstyle is simply astounding, and I'm very fan of it and the atmosphere. My suggestions would be to try to add a web version, at least I saw the Godot Logo, so it'd technically possible (Unless it was made on the Mono Version), but maybe you ran out of time or found some unexpected bug.
I also felt that sometimes is a bit hard to separate the background / foreground elements, so it could potentially be an improvement in Accesibility, Ender Lilies could be of help to use as a reference for the contrast.
Overall, Congratulations to the team for the project , and hopefully that you continue working in this game! I see potential in what you already have.
Hiya, thanks for the unique feedback about web version! We actually tried to intergate it into our itch page, but it was loading for ages when we did. I guess it must be thanks to high assets resolution (our artists didn't want to give up on art quality). We'll try to make more optimised web version in the future! Thanks you for playing and liking the game~
I really liked the art style, it really fit Shiori's style, and brought the world to life. I also had the same bug as some others with Shiori's sprite being just a black square in the boss fight. I also had some issues with the resolution. I have a 1440p monitor, so that messed up some things like the main menu position, but nothing with the level.
Display resolution scaling is among our top priority fixes rn. As for the Shiori black sprite, hopefully it will be fixed once we update boss' spritesheet with new animations. Thank you for appreciating the artstyle and playing our game!
Quick and fun game to play as ERB! A lot of the drawbacks of the game have already been laid out by the other jammers so I won't repeat them. The additions of the black & white particles definitely helped with navigation and I could only imagine how earlier playthroughs would have went, especially with the last fight. If development were to continue with this game, I do want to try the mechanic where 'ink could be used?' per level!
You guys did great!
I assure you - If we manage to deliver on the Ink Usage system, the game will feel sooooo much better to play and to replay! Thank you for feedback and I'm glad you liked our submission
The art in this game is really nice. Great work nailing the atmosphere. I think you accidentally forgot to include shiori's sprite in the boss battle (she appears as a big black square to me), but otherwise it was really amazing. Like someone else said, the collision gets in the way a little but. I found it unclear what walls and ceilings had collision a lot of the time, which would make it so I ended up bonking my head into some ceilings. The black sparkles for floors are a great idea, but I feel like they blend in a bit too much to the dark backgrounds you have. I'd probably change the color to white, red, or blue to match ERB's color scheme, and then for both the platform markers and hidden treasure markers, increase the number of sparkles so they stand out.
The underground stage also has some segments where you can fall into ink, but the camera doesn't show it, and since you end up going down a lot in that stage, I ended up dying a few times because I missed platforms that I couldn't see.
For combat, I think maybe something simple like having enemies flash red or white when they get hit would be huge. Some knockback on the big enemies that take 2 swings would also be nice, but that's not super necessary.
Again, this game was very good and I was really impressed with the level of art you have here and the atmosphere you guys created. Great job!
Thank you for amazing feedback! About Shiori's boss sprite - we don't really know what causes this problem, but it doesn't appear like that every time, only sometimes. We had some problems with her spritesheet during development but in our final rounds of testing everything was fine about her. You are only third person to encounter this issue and I assure you that we're currently looking for a way to resolve that.
In terms of platforming, we already have a solution for the headbumping on platforms issue (in next update you'll be able to pass trough them from below) and we are commited to make game easier to navigate trough. Particles will be replaced with floating ink bubbles of various colorations and platforms will be marked by animated dripping ink to distinguish them from static background sprites.
Undeground stage will undergo some changes too. Your observation about ink pool is correct and we also find it frustrating so we'll find a way to make it more fair. Asides from that we'll also space out pipes better since currently they require difficult jumps or are too close to wall and easy to get stuck between.
Your feedback on combat is spot on and will be completely implemented in future build. Glad you liked the game and I hope you give it a try once we polish it 100%!
I accidentally hit the esc key a few times and finding out that it closes the game and resets all progress.
The art style is nice but the collision gets in the way of the platforming since they are placed too close together, causing ERB to hit her head. It would be great if some of the platforms allow the player to jump through them from below.
We DEFFINITELY want to make platforms pass-trough, but we didn't have time to implement it during the Jam. In future updates ESC will lead to pause menu. Thanks for playing the game and for valuable feedback!
The color and atmosphere were great but it did make it hard to differentiate some of the platforms in the town area. Overall, a very fun and interesting idea.
We'll try to work on visual indicators by making better markings on platforms soon. Thanks for playing!
Great game overall, the visuals and the music fit well together!
I liked the attack pattern of the boss but I wish it had some sort of damage indicator or health bar
I find a weird decision to make the attack input on X and jump on Space but that's not really a big deal.
Nice job to everyone involved!
Great to hear you liked the game! We're working on making bossfight more visually responsive and once options menu gets added you'll be able to change controlls~
The game has a great atmosphere with it's visuals, music and sounds!
I had some issues with the game scaling. It starts in window mode and scale up to the screen size. But the backgrounds kept the prior window size. The options also didn't work. (running on 4k monitor) [Edit: Just read it in the patch notes that you are aware of that :)]
The platforming was fun and I like that the areas are highlighted. The combat needs some feedback, for when you get hit or hit enemies. And a hp bar for the boss would be nice 🙂
Thank you for the feedback! We are going to add more visual clarity to the combat - boss hp bar, damage animation for boss and color flash on boss' model. We'll also rework player model to align with overall theme of the game (as cute as chibi ERB is, we need something more cohesive with the artstyle), and with that add more responsive animations to player character. Thanks for playing and stay tuned for future updates!
Skop of Pyshney Productions