I love it so much. For me it is a possible winner.
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Hit Harder's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #16 | 4.286 | 4.286 |
| Graphics | #20 | 4.429 | 4.429 |
| Gameplay | #21 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Audio | #24 | 4.048 | 4.048 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution) | #33 | 4.667 | 4.667 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Fantastic special effects. Fluid fighting. Great audio. Great job :-)
My twitch reflexes aren’t what they used to be. Having a “slower” option would have been a nice addition.
Submitted
A Girl Has No NameThis game is really well done. I love the art style and the effects. The movement speed around the level feels super fast and natural. Excellent job!
Submitted
Jack and The Dark (Jam Version)Damn, died at the GOAT phase 2.
This was awesome. My first playthrough I definitely went way too fast and didn’t spend enough time actually appreciating the enemy attack patterns. My second time around I played much more patiently and wow I was really happy with how well-designed the bosses were once I slowed down. I appreciated how rewarding it was to actually learn the purple and gold enemy’s attack patterns and actually dodge attacks properly.
I only have a few feedback-related thoughts:
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It felt a bit unsatisfying to perfectly dodge an attack (i.e the gold guy’s rapid punch combo) and try to counter-attack only to watch him insta-dodge 70% of my attacks. Once you break an enemy’s posture it’s open season, but until then it felt like I was just whiffing everything despite being on-point with dodges. From a pure gamefeel perspective, it might be worth making enemies dodge less-often (but buff their health to compensate) just to make counter-attacking feel a bit better. This would also incentivize little ‘micro-combos’, as opposed to what I did, which was dodge until they stopped attacking, kick a couple times, and then repeat. It’s also 100% possible that I just missed a key mechanic here though.
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I love the VFX, but sometimes it was genuinely hard to tell who was getting hit without staring at my posture bar or health.
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I’d have appreciated a few more iframes coming out of a death. It felt like there were quite a few fights where I’d die, resurrect, and immediately get combo’d into a posture-break into death again.
Outside of that this game is incredible, like a low-rez Sifu-like. Definitely one of my favorites of the jam. The music slaps and the combat is awesome. I’ll probably come back later to learn the GOAT fight properly. Amazing job!
Submitted
Cannons and CrashesFinally someone who learns the patterns and dodges!
yeah i think a big mistake i made when creating this game was making the reward for dodging attacks too low. I might give the enemies way more vunerability or some kind of "critical strike" system for dodging an entire combo
I'm honestly not too sure how to approach fixing the vfx, i might try to make all the hit effects smaller but then again making the game widescreen could also fix that issue.
Really good game overall, I enjoyed the gameplay and the art/music is amazing too.
As for the issues:
-Confusing telegraphing. There's lots of bright flashing lights and dinging sounds for basic actions. This, on top of every move being so fast and the dodge being so short, makes the dodge ability feel like it's just "there", and I get by much easier by mashing my strongest attacks.
-Explosive teleport ability is a win button and you can mash it to infinitely juggle everyone, even The Goat.
-Too much reading. There are a lot of options to choose from, they all have long descriptions, and they branch off of each other which further complicates things. The font was also hard to read when you get the boss reward.
-I know I already mentioned the attacks being too fast, but I think it's really important. If the attacks were slower, you could have a lot more room for diversity (with some quicker attacks here and there), and it would be at least a little more reasonable to react and dodge.
-I kept randomly teleporting to the edges of the arena with no animations or effects indicating why that was happening. Not sure why.
-It's hard to tell why enemies are or aren't being stunned. If the enemies have armor, I think it's important to have obvious visual ques to indicate it. If certain attacks do or don't stun, I think it should be explained to the player in some way or another.
-There didn't seem to be any way to escape combos, and when I respawned I didn't get teleported or give invincibility or anything like that, so sometimes I would lose 2 lives from 1 combo, lol.
If you do decide to make a post-jam version of the game, I'd definitely be interested! :)
Submitted
ShelldonOverall, has some potential. Playing this game on a keyboard was rough, but you get used to it quickly. Quick note: Web wersion on itch.io has weird windown scaling, if you try to FullScreen, you can't see half of the screen (the same goes for windowed mode). Windows version seems to be working just fine. Cool game!
Submitted
RainCatcher-LRJ2023 editionHi, I worked on Hit Harder! I can't rate it per se but I want to talk a little about my experiences.
The dev was really nice! Yollie had reached out to me for a previous jam but then had to cancel. This time I was a little busy and then became inundated with life problems. I didn't start writing any music until well into the jam and worked until close to the deadline but he was very patient with me. I also wanted to create sound effects for the excellent animations but I didn't have the time, so Yollie did that too. So, great dev overall. Not to mention the fact that I kept forgetting he was experienced and kept explaining relatively simple stuff about game audio, which was probably obnoxious.
Anyway, even though I'm not good at fighting games, the fighting game style controls really impressed me, and I had a lot of fun flying around like Goku. I didn't get very far into my own game though! I didn't even hear my boss music, but I hope the rest of you get to enjoy it :3
Damn. Great game
I don't remember the exact wave I reached ( I know it was above 10 ), but I reached the blue enemy with the black aura. And was he tea-bagging me ? lol
I have a few issues though. In the chaos of things, I felt like it was a little too hard to tell whether I was doing posture damage to an enemy, or if they were outright blocking me, or if they were doing damage to me. Basically, I felt like there was too much visual stimuli at a time, so some things kinda felt lost to me to the point that I ended up button mashing quite a lot lol.
The audio is amazing though. The music is great. I know I said there was too much visual stimuli, but DAYUM, the game feel is on point here. All the hits are impactful AF both visually and audio wise. I love how distinguishable the audio clip for posture breaking is.
I also feel like you unlock too many moves tbh. Probably just a skill issue from me, but I felt like if you unlocked moves at a slower pace it would be easier to learn them. Maybe instead of unlocking moves every time you die, you get minor stat buffs or something sometimes. I mostly just learnt how to do some of the initial moves and wolf's spinning head kick move or whatever it was because it was cool AF. If I did any other move, it was either cus I button mashed or got lucky kek. But again, this is probably just a skill issue from me. I can imagine other people pulling off some crazy stuff with the fighting engine you made here. oof
And as a suggestion, since the combat is primarily offense based, maybe you could have it such that performing successful combos on enemies allows you to regain structure or something like that.
None the less, this is an absolutely amazing game, especially for this resolution. Big fan of the wave that chucked 10 of those red guys at me lol.
Submitted
Punch TowerIm thinking about it, and if i were to make a post jam update, the things ill probably do are
1) Style meter (I CANT BELIEVE I FORGOT TO ADD A STYLE METER)
2) Some kind of combo system rework to make spamming less viable
3) Increasing player health and decreasing lives
4) Somehow making dodge more viable (maybe it regains structure or something idk)
Great game! Choreography was solid and I quickly got an intuitive hang of moves.
The stop-motion with explanation of the moves was great too, though I think at that particular instance the game gets done dirty by the resolution constraint/font, which makes the explanations hard to read.
Not criticism for the game itself: I would have preferred if the browser window dimensions were a little smaller so that the whole window fit in my screen (you can adjust them by editing the game page I think).
Submitted
Un-Glitch
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