Remnants of Calandria

by TerminusEst13

Hey there TerminusEst13, thanks for submitting a project to the 2022 IGMC. I'm Drifty and I was asked to judge your game in round four of the IGMC 2022 game jam. Here's some feedback about your project.

I respect the decision to go with black and white only.

The music selection and the way that you've displayed the intro legit gave me Crystalis vibes. Well done!

I'm a fan of only showing two lines of text on the screen at one time and I appreciate the big read-able font.

The opening area feels too big. Too many events, too many things. I got my weapon and I want to head out to use it. I would focus on stream-lining the player straight to the action.

I'm not a big fan of puzzle games and I think that it may have been a misstep to require a puzzle to proceed right out the gate. You're leading the player on with thoughts of Crystalis and GameBoy Zelda but then hamstring them with an annoying toggle the lights puzzle.

I like the art style and the music selection is probably the best in the whole competition, full of 8-bit bangers. 

There's a lack of rewarding exploration, you just get called a jackass for trying to take chests in other NPC's houses, etc.

I went back to the elder and reported what Saki and I found and the game just was like "and you never saw her again, the end." WTF? Lol. Obviously I loaded and told him that I have nothing to report and then went to look for Saki. This is where the game should start. Summarize all the stuff that happens up until this point in a quick auto-run event.

I would suggest that next time you start the player right in the first dungeon map to look for Saki, after a quick auto-run intro event. It felt less exciting walking around in the beginning while trying to get into the actual gameplay. It doesn't make for a good first impressions the way it is now in my opinion. I think hooking your players right at the beginning with some action gameplay (when you market your game as an action-exploration game) is a much better option here.

While I do feel it was a little tropey with the whole twist dialog at the boss fight. I liked that you were given the option to agree or disagree with her. The writing is good even if a little tropey at times.

I think that this has all the makings of something really cool, but it felt a little fluffed at the beginning. Overall this is a very neat entry that had some ups and downs. You've put together something unique and I appreciate your efforts with this project, good job. Thanks for submitting a project to the IGMC 2022 and I look forward to the next thing you put out there.

-Drifty

I got this game as part of round 3 for the IGMC. First, congrats on getting this far in the contest! Here are my thoughts on the game.

Overall it is a neat idea for a game and a neat premise. I've played a few games about society down below ground but it is an idea that is not commonly used. I did lose the person I was supposed to follow a couple of times, maybe have them walk just a little slower so I have enough time to register which way they went? Running through that dungeon once when it is safe was a neat way to show off what kind of puzzles they will have. 

However then I hit a critical problem. You see, the game never told me how to save ever. X didn't work for a menu as you have it assigned to throwing knives. So when things got dangerous, I died, and got kicked back to title. You really need to be sure to tell the player how to save in the game, or consider a system like the first Zelda where on death you can restart at start of dungeon or something. Unfortunately since I never knew how to save in this game I never got past the boss in the hour I had as I had to spend most of my time replaying the same segments over and over. 

With a fix to the save issue, or some kind of autosave though this game would be a really good game I feel. Hopefully you can consider adding that later on.

Ahh, I'm so glad I was able to finish Remnants of Calandria before the voting deadline ended! This. Was. Awesome! It took me a liiittle bit to realize what the setting was, but after it clicked for me what the pillar was and I read the notes leading to the generator, I was SO impressed! I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say I'm a history nut and thoroughly enjoyed the setting/message of this game. Wow!

Among other things I liked:

-Love Hiro and Saki, both very well written characters

-The music! You did a great job of setting the tone right away with your song choices. I especially loved the music that plays when you first enter the cave behind the graveyard. 

- Lol at the other characters' awareness of players' tendency to snoop around

-Beautiful presentation, art is GameBoy-reminiscent and looks amazing

-Level design was very, very good. I like how everything in the dungeon -- the puzzles, rocks, orbs -- were  interconnected even across rooms. This had to be tough to do, especially for a pretty sizable dungeon, so nice job!

I did run into the bug where the room resets after Saki hits the orb, but it wasn't hard to get back to that point. Really great job with making a complete, thought-provoking experience for the jam!

I LOVE this kind of games! The aesthetic is simple but charming, the 8-bit music are amazing and I really enjoyed the pacing and the gameplay of the entire adventure. Bug can happens but these have not affected the experience and fun that your game has given me. I'll probably create a game with this style one day too, incredible work!

I've already taken a glance through the comments and everything that I would've mentioned that I encountered bug-wise has already been mentioned, so I won't repeat things you already know -- I will say that regardless of those things, I still really enjoyed the game and look forward to seeing the patch / updates post-jam (and hoping you do get to expand maps for more interaction and exploration)! 

Nice work! :D

Terrific game, really amazing how much you got finished within the time limit of the game jam. Of course there were some bugs, including a never-ending supply of keys. I also think that door you need the floppy disk for is not very obvious at all. I didn't even realize it was a door or that you could use something there. And of course wandered around all over the place forever. The fighting was a little wonky but not too bad, and the lack of items in the pots was a bit disappointing (I think I found like four or five things total), but overall no big deal since I never got to a point where I was injured enough to really need healing. The story was pretty good, reminded me of Gurran Lagan at first, tho I thought it was kind of obvious what had happened. Also, the timeline was a little confusing. Sometimes it seemed like they went underground a few days ago and other times like it was centuries or something. But it's really impressive the amount of writing including apparently several different endings. Great job!

Neat! I still think it's cool that RPG Maker can be used for action game-type battles, and I also just like the top-down Zelda inspiration. Monochrome also makes this a visually striking game, and instances of color become even more notable [altho I think in just 2 endings and the game-over screen].

I'm glad that Hiro uses a spear, I don't see them too often in games. I'm also glad that the lantern puzzle is bypassable and not required to be manually solved for any ending, I couldn't figure it out. The dungeon's block puzzles were fine, though.

I didn't think much about exploring the rest of the settlement until after I got my first ending, but I still think it's neat seeing another depiction of low-tech underground life.

I liked it!

Nice zelda-esque dungeon! Loved the pixel art and aesthetics. I managed to fumble through and progress past the bugs the others have mentioned and got to the end. My one suggestion is to differentiate floors and walls better in some areas. There were a few block pushing rooms where the floor and walls are both light colored and hard to tell apart. Otherwise, nice work!

Hey there TerminusEst13, I got your game for judging so here are some of my thoughts. The art style is a great choice and fits the story and gameplay well, and I do love how it reminds me of childhood games without being an exact copy of any of them. I ended up getting three endings (one by accident after I talked to the adults when Saki disappeared, which was a surprise but made sense), and was happy to see that there were major differences in each ending. The dungeon puzzles were interesting without being too challenging, and the dungeon itself felt huge while still having different enough rooms that I never got truly lost.

You're already aware of the major bugs in your game, so I won't dwell on those. It's unfortunate that those bugs make it hard to progress in certain spots, but with some more time and polish most of them seem like they can be taken care of. The graveyard puzzle being marked as solved when I still had two unlit was disappointing, but it was probably for the best since I was stuck on it for a little while. I do want to share a funny moment early in the game, when the enemies first appeared I didn't realize I was taking damage since the HP bar didn't decrease, so I went "haha, spiders can't kill me!" and trapped a spider between a wall and my body... So you can imagine my surprise when I heard the warning beeps and realized my mistake too late to avoid dying. I had saved before that so I wasn't upset, and actually laughed because of course enemies can hurt me.

Overall, it's clear you had issues finishing before the deadline. But even with those issues, you still released a game with a lot of backstory and interesting ideas. I hope you stick with this game for a little longer to take care of the bugs and to expand on it, since I could see this becoming a great game.

Hello! I think the game needs a lot more polish as I ran into some bugs that preventing me from progressing but... I absolutely love the aesthetic, as I'm a huge sucker for the Game Boy era. The pixel art is cute & wonderful, and the music fits in nicely. The flavour text is great, even just simple things like when a door is locked. With a bit more time in the oven, this could be something special! Will you continue development?

Hi! I finally managed to play this one! I overall enjoyed it: the music and the pixel art is amazing. The character is FAST (YES!) so you can go in and out between the dungeon's maps really quickly, and I absolutely love this. The presentation is nice and the gameplay, even if it's a bit simplistic, it's light and smooth. I didn't find any game breaking bugs, I guess, but I had some troubles activating the "stuff in the room locked by the... strange key" (to not spoil). I know there are many endings, I got the one that you unlock by speaking with your "receptionists" XD

Maybe next days I'll try to unlock the other endings! I had a good time with this! Well done ^^

Howdy!

I really liked the game, the openness, the Gameboy feel (will you partecipate to the GBJam in the future?), dialogue, items, puzzles…it feels really complete. Keep up the great work!

Heya Termy! You were at the stream, but leaving this for posterity and all:

• + Pixel art is adorable.
• + Music is great.
• + Dungeon design, once the "tutorial" is over, is cool, bugs aside.
• + Presentation overall is very cute and fits the style it’s going for.
• + The light puzzle is too mean XD Every other puzzle mechanic was fine.
• - Found multiple bugs that weren't pleasant.
• - The text needs work in polish and formatting
• - I felt like the "vibes" are all at the start, it would maybe be good to spread out the npcs you can interact with a bit more.
• - No "reason" to explore hurts it a tiny bit, especially outside the dungeon.
• - Bad spread of food vs knives in pots (gimme chikin dangit).

I beat the game once, got the Accord ending, but the game was too rough for me to want to get more as it is now.

It definitely needs polish and fixing, but considering the tight timeframe and bad mojo you had during the deadline, it's a great effort, especially on resources of graphics and music, which I think you mentioned were custom? Great job.

Hi there, I just wanted to say that I seriously enjoyed playing through your game! The retro style is something I'm not used to, but it was a nice change of pace and such a unique experience. Personally, I've never been too good at puzzle games, hence why I've failed to beat games like Link's Awakening (I got some terrible flashbacks to me trying to play that game lol) but I'm glad you put in ways to bypass certain puzzles for people like me.

I got about 30 minutes in and so far I love the storytelling, style, and just overall presentation of the game. I'll try to progress more in the future once I'm done reviewing a few other games :)

UPDATE: As I was typing this, I reloaded the game, and the girl opened up the path that I couldn't get past by shooting her bow. I'm not sure if that was supposed to happen initially but I guess I broke it somehow. I thought that I wasn't understanding something so I just want to alter my review a bit.

I think the difficulty is fine, but the only thing was that I broke every pot on my initial entrance into the dungeon, and because of that had no health items available to me afterwards until I got to the boss, and I was really afraid I locked myself in a bad spot and I didn't get to check if returning to town would heal me :') Thankfully got past it, but now stuck on the part after I open the key card door.  I'll have to give it another go in the future, but really solid game so far!

Fantastic work!

It suffers A LOT from a lack of polish and testing and assuming players will always do what you do - but I like the art style and world building. I might have to play this myself in my own time to see the other endings after you iron out some of the blips.

Only managed to get one ending regardless of dialogue options I picked, if there is more to it than that I'd appriciate some pointers.