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Surfacing's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #2 | 4.196 | 4.300 |
| Overall | #2 | 4.060 | 4.160 |
| Overall Fun | #3 | 4.099 | 4.200 |
| Original Graphics | #3 | 4.196 | 4.300 |
| Most Creative Use of Theme | #5 | 4.099 | 4.200 |
| Original Audio | #6 | 3.708 | 3.800 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Really liked it! Interesting characters and a lot of variety!
I've discovered a problem that I never had in testing. On my Windows XP laptop, and for my playtester on Windows 10, the Buff and Debuff animations don't play the custom sound effects associated with them, but rather some default sound. I cannot replicate it on Windows 7, and everything looks right in the engine. Did anybody else run into any audio weirdness?
this is really fun! the art style and story are very endearing. I did find the frequency of random encounters, especially in the seaweed meadow, to be a bit high, but also I'm not all that great at RPGs so that should be taken with a grain of salt. great job!
Thank you! The encounter rate is a hard thing to balance due to the fact that the counter resets every time you change screens. Since I insisted on designing maps so that there's never any camera scroll, a lower encounter rate may well have led to several consecutive screens without encounters, not getting to see all the enemy types, and/or not getting enough levels to take down the bosses without grinding. All of which were issues my playtester ran into pre-submission.
I figured with the old-school graphics, chiptune music and outdated engine, I could get away with a slightly more old-school encounter rate :)
For what it's worth, the rate does get lowered in the bigger puzzlier rooms, and in my experience the escape command works quite reliably.
I made some very minor text improvements for the NPCs. No need to replay the game just for that if you already have. https://allonbachuth.itch.io/surfacing/devlog/193304/version-101
Unfortunately, I can't seem to get this to run. It just starts putting up dozens of "OLE Error 8878001E" error message boxes and eventually crashes.
Using EasyRPG (drop-in replacement for the RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine) might help. That's what I'm using to run the game on Linux...
Thanks, that seems to be working well!
From the aesthetic I wasn't expecting the difficulty of an old-school RPG, but that was definitely a bonus - most games in this vein just let you mash attack to get through, actually using skills and items is always nice. The music can be a little grating sometimes, but the town theme and boss battle theme were A+!
Graphically, I LOVE it, the 4-color Game Boy-esque theme, the cute faces and sprites were super charming.
Overall, what can I say? It's a cute game with a cute story!
Such a cute game!! There's some tiling errors on the early buttons, the first dungeon's tileset is a bit clashy and hard on the eyes, and generally I feel like the difficulty curve is a bit grindy, but overall it's so charming and sweet that my minor issues with it all melted away by the end! The bosses are all really fun challenges, the story is endearing, and even though I'm in this game jam, you totally deserve to be the winner! Good luck!
Thank you for the kind words! If by tiling errors you mean the buttons in the warehouse were on white tiles, that was on purpose as I wanted them to stand out more when they were being introduced as a mechanic.