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Eternal Moon's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Engagement/Fun | #8 | 3.550 | 4.200 |
| Graphics, Audio, and Polish | #11 | 3.212 | 3.800 |
| Overall | #12 | 3.381 | 4.000 |
| Overall | #14 | 3.144 | 3.720 |
| Originality/Creativity | #15 | 3.043 | 3.600 |
| Magical Girl Design | #16 | 2.535 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the Magical Girl genre?
two of the protagonints have magical powers and they fight and evil witch
Which theme(s) do you pick?
[unperishable] [night] [star][four seasons]
How does your game fit the themes above?
the villain is trying to make the moon(or night) eternal(unperishable), one of the characters is called Hoshi(wich means star in japanese), and you have to collect four gems that represent the four seasons
Are all your graphics assets made by yourself during the duration of the jam?
all of it were made during the jam period
Are all your audio assets made by yourself during the duration of the jam?
they were created from before the jam or purchased
Comments/Suggestions about the jam
first game and first jam, it was fun
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Comments
This is a cool Zelda-style game! I liked the graphics, and the music was excellent. Gave it all a nice retro feel! I wish there were in-game instructions or tutorial, but for a game jam that's can be a lot to add.
I mainly used the ranged attacker in combat. I found the melee character would get killed trying to get close enough to hit. The puzzles were fun, though I did eventually get stuck. The shop initially confused me, but I figured it out. (Max of 3 potions)
Anyway, for a first game, this is amazing work! Keep it up! :)
Very solid Zelda-like! Graphics were sparse but functional, and the music was catchy. Combat was pretty fiddly and not particularly deep, but I enjoyed it well enough. No invincibility on taking damage was pretty annoying, especially since enemies had it. Puzzles were quite satisfying to solve and my personal highlight. I liked the map design, there was really only one path but it was a very smooth feeling one (aside from having to backtrack from chests - would definitely have liked a teleport back to the main branch). I wasn't a fan of the final boss, was hoping for more of a final exam that utilized all 3 characters but ended up using one character and two meatshields. It was pretty frustrating to land hits with no indicator of where she would move next and with the fireball so slow, I literally had to fire and pray it would land. Still, solid work over all!
So I wasn't going to write much about this game but once I started going through my notes and turning it into a proper writeup this comment kind of ballooned.
Let's start with the good: the graphics and the sound. The graphics are simple and retro, but visually pleasing and it's usually clear what everything is supposed to be. Retro and minimalist isn't my personal favourite style, but it usually works and a lot of people like it, for good reason. The music doesn't quite loop which is too bad because it's quite pleasing to the ear. Often I find this type of chiptune gets tiring but that never happened during my fairly long play session.
I really do wish there was more of an intro explaining what's happening and how to play. I generally prefer games with story- in this case, it works fine without heavy story content and some will prefer it that way. Still I think most players would appreciate a small introduction. The how to play thing I'll get to at the end.
I found switching characters very awkward and unintuitive at first. I did get used to it somewhat but it could be improved. It's not clear which character maps to which button or which character is currently active. The order of the keys seems to correspond to the order of the names, but the names mean nothing to me- portraits or even just colors would be better. Leaving one character in place and moving the others can also be tricky.
Combat is also a mixed bag. I found that sometimes I took a whole ton of damage for no apparent reason. Some characters are definitely better than others- the black character is powerful but dies too easily, the blue character is completely useless unless I'm missing something, the red character is the best. The worst thing is getting suddenly switched to a much less useful character after the active one is downed. It was sometimes hard to hit enemies and I found that stunlocking was an effective if degenerate strategy.
The shop only seems to work once. Is this a bug or intentional?
The first time I played this game I got stuck on the first puzzle, the one with four buttons. To be honest, if your composer hadn't clued me in in the Discord, I would never have figured out that puzzle. I assumed that the special abilities were all attacks and had no idea one of them could duplicate. I kept trying combinations of two and three buttons to no avail.
Stuff just happening with no indication what has happened or that anything has happened at all is a recurring issue. There's a reason a lot of games have a click, and Zelda has that little jingle. If solving a puzzle opens a door offscreen I won't notice that it's open.
I did really like the puzzles themselves, especially the light balls/reflectors puzzles. The statue puzzle wasn't half bad either, though I prefer the other type. I'm kind of glad that the push blocks didn't really become a puzzle because I don't like those.
The pacing and length seemed about right. It's long enough to be satisfying but not so long that it becomes tedious. Importantly, no mechanic overstayed its welcome. New types of puzzles and gameplay were introduced before the last ones got too stale. I kind of wish the game had a map, but the world was small and straightforward enough for it to not be a problem.
I think I almost finished the game, but lost all three characters and had a game over on the way to collect the last gem. The lack of a continue option here is a little cruel- I'd already sunk a lot of time into the game and wasn't willing to replay everything again. To be honest I was kind of surprised by the sudden game over considering how forgiving the respawn logic was.
I'd like to see more quality of life features in general- this game is on the edge of needing a save feature- but in a jam it's not uncommon to see those fall by the wayside.
With all that being said, for a first game it's pretty damn good. It has a lot of what I would consider beginner mistakes, but it has reasonable gameplay, visually pleasing graphics, and audio, and it seems to be completely functional. It's not my favourite game in the jam, nor do I think it is the best game in the jam, but it's on the same level as a lot of them, and if you hadn't mentioned it was your first game I never would have figured it.
I think the biggest piece of advice I'd give is to consider that your audience is coming from a place of zero knowledge. Your game may be easy, its systems and plot completely straightforward to you, but things that are obvious to you may not be to the people who play your game. It's essentially a black box, and they don't know a lot more than what you tell them. Of course determining what to tell and how to tell it is the big challenge. You do want to make your players feel smart after all.
Going back to the puzzle I nearly got stuck on, this is a dead easy puzzle if you already know how to solve it. Even if you only know the mechanics, it's still pretty easy. But I had no idea one of the characters could duplicate- actually, for the first few minutes I didn't even realize I could switch characters. I looked at the layout of the pots and thought that was a clue to which three switches I needed to hit- no dice. I think that introducing this mechanic early on was a good decision, but you need to actually introduce the mechanic in some way rather than assuming the player already knows it.
This game definitely has its flaws, but it's pretty good taken as a whole, especially for a first game.
First of all thank you for your feedback and for playing the game.
I tried to implement a saving system, but for some reason i though i would be easy and leave it to the end, the result was that it broke the game, it was the last day of the jam so i took that out, i should try to implement that in the future.
I was thinking of adding a sign in the cell, that told you the controls, and having like a puzzle where you must have use the duplication ability to get out of the cell, but i leaved it at the end and ended up having no time to do it.
About the combat, in retrospective, the switching characters mechanic was a mistake, but i realized that too late, and scrap that mean rethink everything i had done at that point, that was a week ago, i though of adding to the duplication the ability to explote so when you only have that character you could still defend yourself and maybe even block bullets, but that would make the combat more awkward.
I also though about adding a bar in the ui that changed the the position depending of what character you are controlling, but i was terrified to mess up the ui beacuse i wasted 7 days making it work properly, so i leave that at the end and ended up not doing it.
About the store you can only purchase 3 potions, you have to use at least one to be able to buy again, i should have added a way of making the player know that.
But well at the end i'm glad i was able to make something, even if it's not perfect, i'll try to make an update to add the things you mentioned and really apreciate your final advice, i'll have that in mind when i design any game that i do in the future.
Making a game save is hard. Leaving it until the end was definitely a mistake but I could understand ending up in that situation if you've never done it before.
Some kind of interactive tutorial would be great, but again, I understand why you don't often see such things in jam games.
Switching characters was your core mechanic and trying to rip that out that late into the jam would have been unreasonable. I actually liked the idea and I think with some changes to the implementation it could make a really interesting game.
I have no idea what Godot's UI system is like so there's not much I can say there. Unity's UI system is intuitive if limited, I've heard Unreal's is a nightmare.
The store thing ties into what I said near the end- the player has absolutely no idea that's a thing.
Absolutely take what you learned here and build upon it. You've already made a very strong start and I think you've learned some lessons the hard way about what to do and what not to do.