I also played this for the finals, here are my thoughts as well:

This was a nice short game. I did find it a little tough to get used to the battles as there is no tutorial and you got 1 HP so any hit kills you. I died a few times as I came to grips with the system. Some way to train the player would be a nice addition (though make it optional too for the veterans).

I do wish though that when you died you got just kicked back to the start of the map. Having 1 HP early on it feels a lot like a puzzle game instead and having the game return you to start of map instead would I think be a nice addition to this game. Also would reduce the whole let's go load my save, and so on.

The final battle did feel RNG dependent, as I had 2 HP then and it needed 3 hits to KO and I do 1 HP per hit. So I had to hope it missed one attack to survive the battle. It did miss though on my 2nd try so I did pull it off. Still removing the RNG dependency would go a long way there at the end. 

Overall though it was a good well made game, I just have minor quibbles with a couple things. Hope you do continue to work on this and good luck on getting to the finals of the IGMC!

I was one of the official judges this year, and now that the results have been made public, and I'm free to do so, here is my score and thoughts on this title:

Overall score: 9.5

I honestly don't know what to say about this game that could be a hard critique. It was really well put together, and I enjoyed almost every aspect of it. I do wish that the main mechanic of the fighting had been more thoroughly explained (before nearly arriving at Sar-Dhakka the first time) or that there was some more strategy than just Nagging the demons and then hitting them. I also felt planting more and more seeds might lead to something, but grinding them was a bit of a chore. Still, this was very, VERY well done and I enjoyed it. Even if Ben was kind of a dick.

Hey there Alice Gristle, I got your game for judging so here are some of my thoughts. The art, music, and story intro told me all I needed to know about this game: it was gonna be tough so I best save often. And save often I did, which was good because I saw the game over screen over, and over, and over. RNG is rarely my friend, and this game definitely reminded me of that fact. But because battles were so short, I didn't mind having to retry them repeatedly. I do wish you had found a way to send me back to the save menu right away when I got a game over instead of back to the title screen though. While the title screen was pretty, it was tiring seeing it so often.

Combat was great, having to do something like sob or nag to make it easier to hit the demons was a good choice. Though I wasn't positive which option to use on each demon, since for the most part it seemed like they responded the same no matter what they looked like.

The writing was good, and I was looking forward to the yells about me making flowers all over the place. I actually ended up fighting more battles than I originally planned just so I could plant more flowers. I'm not sure if there was a real reward to doing that or not though, since I had to stop and finish the game in the time limit.

Overall, great job creating a unique experience. The RNG killed some of my enthusiasm, but if you adjusted it or made jumping back into the game easier then I think this game would be amazing.

Bloom Underworld

by Alice Gristle

Hey there Alice, thanks for submitting a project to the 2022 IGMC. I'm Drifty and I was asked to judge your game in round three of the IGMC 2022 game jam. Here's some feedback about your project.

The writing is clever and witty.

The music is like an 8-bit rendition of a classical piano concerto.

The graphics and art style are cohesive and interesting.

The sounds have been selected appropriately.

The combat system is wildly based on RNG and while I don't hate it, I find it to be lacking mechanically. I do enjoy the combat animations, sound effects and BGM though.

I like the skills and how the descriptions are worded, in fact I like how just about everything is worded in this game.

The font is familiar, clear and easy to read.

You should consider adding a stop-movement plugin. When talking to Ghalla (and any other event for that matter) it doesn't actually stop the other creatures from moving around. Not a game breaking issue of course, just a thought.

I liked the whole part where you actually lose the game at the end but become resurrected. 

This was an interesting take on things. I would've redesigned the combat system personally, with these things in mind:

*Make it much less RNG based. 

*Give the player 10 HP to start with instead of 1. 

*Up the accuracy on many abilities.

*Make some abilities deal more damage than others to balance the difficulty curve.

*Add a hint as to which type of creature is weak to which state.

(These are just suggestions as to what I would have preferred.)

Overall I loved this entry and I think it's great. You've done a fantastic job, congratulations on making it to round three of the 2022 IGMC. I look forward to what you work on in the future.

-Drifty

+ I really liked the fact that we were so "fragile". It is not difficult but you need to be cautious, maybe I would have added some more equipment slots, so I can add up their effects, but basically I appreciated;

+ Very believable and well done setting (too bad for System, bars and menu windows that have too many nuances to blend properly with the 8 bit style), I would have appreciated some more graphically varied tiles on maps, the battlers are sooo sweet!

+ Beautiful characterization of the secondary characters and dialogues, not monotonous and they do their work!

+ Nice that enemies also have actions such as fleeing and being intrigued or other emotional states, instead of making enemies who only attack, nice job!

+ The npcs with preset movements are functional, if you observe the pattern you can avoid them or predict the movements, with a little dexterity you can do that minimum of "stealth" useful that helps to make the sections less boring;

+ Maybe I'm exaggerating but the idea of flowers is brilliant in its simplicity IMHO: it's so silly that I'm amazed no one (including me!) has ever used such a gimmick – I think, I'm not omniscient, but I'd never seen it done. It makes you think the right, without weighing down the game, how to consume as few resources as possible just to reach certain places. It is expensive and makes even moving a pinch an action to pay a pinch of attention to;

+ Beautiful and rightly limited the possibility of throwing objects in battle, although I think it should be said because for a long time I believed they were collectible and not battle tools. Same as the "skulk" command that is not explained and being precisely fragile trying to use it is a risk that not everyone is willing to take: I believed it was the equivalent of the defense command and that therefore, in such a game it was useless!

- The descriptions of the teams are too vague, there are no terms of measure, numbers, percentages, which help to understand which are worth it and which are not, and since having very low stats it is not possible to try, except by doing dozens of game overs that in any case do not give a certain result due to randomness. I did not understand the sense of initial equip, it is useless, perhaps it is not worth it just to read the description;

- There is a specific tile that seems walkable while instead it is an obstacle: the one in the shape of a mound of earth, I would have played with lights and shadows so that it was understood that it is in relief, while instead it seems low enough to be able to walk on it;

- What are TP used for?

- I did not understand if the command "struggle" can always fail (randomly) even if i used a status move before;

- I did not understand how to distinguish the demons but I seemed to see that against each one (or almost) works the same:

SPOILER

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(... That is a random status move before hitting, I could not understand if they depend on the graphics / appearance or other factors because sometimes they seemed to work, sometimes not).

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END SPOILER

Ben the bone is quite blue at the start. After all, he is literally in a sh** pit. It’s rather difficult to remain jolly in such circumstances. On the bright side, things can only get rosier from here.

This battle within the colon of big snake Sar-Dakka does present quite a challenge. First, the random battles here are analogous to when one gets indigestion: you never know when you’re gonna blow it. Fortunately, after wiping out a few (I lost count) times, one eventually figures out a good rhythm of appeasing the demons before whacking them.

I must say planting flowers is a nice touch. Not only is it creative, it brings a cozy feeling of spring and pleasantness. If you think about it, despite the circumstances, this game does have cuddly aesthetics and cute dialogues. This might even be a PG rated ga…OMG what? Eyes and tongue?!!! OK, forget everything I just said. Yup, Ben’s in hell alright.

At the end of the day, I did rather enjoy the game and had some good laughs. I don’t think I got the best ending because I didn’t take care of big bad on the first try? Or maybe that’s an unwinnable battle? Anyway, thanks for the good fun and good luck!

Bloom Underworld has some of the wittiest writing I've read in a video game! I thought the characters' dialogue was hilarious, especially the skulls and Borbul (even though I miight be a little mad at him for what happens to my favorite character in the ending I got T - T ) Still, I'm a sucker for overzealous, zany characters, so he gets a pass lol. Taking a dark and dank situation and putting a funny twist on it was a great idea. Even in their non-alive states, everyone was lively!  

Even though the location might be kinda smelly, the pixel art is gorgeous! I loved the character designs, my favorites being Shimge and Ghalla. I also appreciated that Bloom's battles were quick, straightforward, and different from standard RPG battles because the highlight of the game for me was exploring that lovely "green water" and talking to everyone I could find. I just wish the ending I got was a little tiny bit longer because I really wanted to see what happened to Ben after his battle with Sar-Dhakka!

The graphics kinda fun, however the battle system has high luck factor. One wrong move then bam you're done. 

Nice game overall.

I streamed this and had a lot of fun! It wasn't perfect, but I would not have expected it to be anyone's first project, that's for sure.

• +I really liked the pixel aesthetic. If custom (I think it was?) it was a great achievement. There was a  good amount of little touches here and there for everything to be cohesive and nice, despite the apparent simplicity. The combat sprites were fun and the little flowers on the very simple environments were lovely.
• +The text had its ups and downs, but overall it was fine with it. Had it run longer it might have gotten on my nerves, but it did the job. 
• +I enjoyed the concept of planting flowers being key to the experience. It's a lovely sentiment and even better, it makes the environment interesting. In a perfect, longer game with more time I would have loved to see access to a lot more content via flower planting, even silly stuff like different flower types as tools or making shapes having an effect.
• -The combat feels a bit strange, and it was not until much later that the NPC who EXPLAINS how it works appears. Even then, whether a demon would kill you, even with a state applied, was a bit of a crapshoot and up to luck. Once you got a single extra heart, the game was a steamroll (which is completely fine by me! I was not here for complicated combat).
• -The game would have probably benefited from trimming down encounters in general. For how simplistic they are in practice, there were too many demons. You could trim 15-30 minutes of trying to sneak past encounters/fighting easily, and I feel the game would have been smoother. Since there's no leveling or anything fighting doesn't have a solid reward, and if it's for the seeds, I would have happily explored instead for more.
• -The one single issue I had with environments (whose simplicity I enjoyed just fine) was how south exits were handled. They were a bit hard to see, and I think some sort of indentation to the north side of the same wall would have helped locate them.
• -I found two endings, and both were very abrupt. I will take wild guess this was more from time constraints than the intention, but it was a pity it did not end with a bit more flair.

Overall: great job, especially for a first completed game!

You say this is your first completed game, it's very well done for that!

I watched a friend play it and found it very charming. The art was well made and there were some nice gameplay aspects. You also kept it simple and snappy, which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of first games I've seen. The endings were a little abrupt and a let down from the build up though.

Great work, and best of luck in the contest and any future projects!

Not to my personal taste with the tone of the game and I don’t particularly jive with the battle system using such low numbers, but the game plays decently and fits the theme well enough. I can see lots of people really enjoying this one! Nice work!

Really neat aesthetic and tone compared to a lot of entries.