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Soul Break's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Magical Girl Concept | #3 | 4.188 | 4.188 |
| Polish | #5 | 3.375 | 3.375 |
| Overall | #5 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Engagement/Fun | #6 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Audio | #6 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Theme Interpretation | #7 | 3.313 | 3.313 |
| Originality/Creativity | #10 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Graphics | #11 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 16 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?
It's about magical girls
Which theme(s) did you pick?
Diamond is Unbreakable
How does your game fit the theme(s)?
There are unbreakable diamond blocks
Were the graphics/audio assets for your game made during the jam?
Graphics yes, one song was made during the project and the rest of the audio (including sfx) was from open sources.
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Comments
Great work! Nice soundtrack and sound effect choices (my highlight was the tinkle of the hit sound). The art was pretty inconsistent, but it made it pretty funny so it's fine. A fun twist on brickbreaker, with solid level designs. It was engaging to decide which spell to use by carefully counting how many powerups to collect. I'm also super into battle pong/brickbreak, so I personally would like to see that part expanded if you continue working on this. Solid story, too! Surprised by how grimdark it got, but I'm into that sort of thing anyways. Great work!
This one is very decent submission. Definitely a good reuse of an old genre of game -- kinda gave me nostalgia. In general I had fun with this game.
My biggest critic is perhaps the artstyle inconsistency. Next time try to keep the artstyle of your game consistent; you seem to be working on a team, and I think you should make sure everyone is on the same page as to what artstyle everyone is aiming for.
Lastly, I would like to request you to fill the submission questionnaire more... properly. In particular, for "How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?" you just answered "It's about magical girls". The purpose of this questionnaire is to quickly weed out games that definitely do not fit the jam, and I swear if I did not know you, and I saw the answer of the questionnaire were just like this, I would get a little bit suspicious. This is just to make my job easier but next time please at least say sth like "Dani is a girl given magical power" or something along that line.
The question wasn't very clear to me. It seemed pretty straightforward to me that the game is about magical girls, so that's how it fits the genre.
I would have better understood the question if it was worded "What makes your magical girls a magical girl?". It is my fault for not understanding but I think this could help in future jams. Thanks for playing the game by the way!
I will consider your feedback.
It is of course straightforward, and simply by looking and playing a little it is very obvious that the game fits the Magical Girl genre.
But well... before playing the game one of the first things I see, to determine whether the game fits the jam or not, is the answer to the questionnaire. What I wanted to say was simply how the answer doesn't actually answer the question, and only repeats it. I think the description of the question when you first answered it does describe that Magical Girl is defined as "Girls Using Magical Power"; probably I should elaborate next time that you should answer based on that definition but well...
Let's see to illustrate what I mean... Suppose I ask you "How is cat a mammal?", the expected answer is something along the line of "Cats feed their young with milk", but your answer is like "Cat is obviously a mammal". Yeah to make my job of removing games that are put in bad faith easier please actually answer the question next time.
In any case, thank you for participating! I hope you had fun.
(EDITs are grammatical error fixings)
There was a lot more game here than I was expecting. At its heart it is Breakout, although it has extensive powerups and mechanics-justifying plot so maybe Arkanoid is a better comparison. It's a competent take on that genre of games, and brings a few really interesting twists to the table. At one point, it literally becomes Pong, and that is so, so much better than it sounds.
That being said, I wish some of the mechanics were better explained. That we have abilities was explained, but not what they were. I still don't see where Ice would be useful, I still don't know what Bubbles or the red cross power do, and I'm still not sure what happens when I'm hit by an enemy attack. At first I wasn't sure if I was supposed to catch or avoid those, either.
Despite that, the game played very well, and I appreciated the twists it threw my way. The mechanics I could figure out worked well with the basic formula.
There were a few times where it took forever to get the one last block, but I think that's honestly something that comes with the genre.
The art is all quite well done, but the wildly varying styles mar the presentation a bit. There's animesque, cartoon with thick outlines, painted with no outlines, and I think a bit of pixel art as well? It feels very mishmash and the game does not have a consistent design language.
As an aside, I'm not sure why Dani starts off in a magical girl outfit before she's a magical girl. It feels like she was meant to have another but it was never drawn.
I got what was maybe the bad ending, I'm not sure. I won't spoil it for those who haven't played. The story was darker than I expected, and also a lot better than expected. The story is absurd, yes, and at first it feels like it's just there to contextualize the mechanics, but it grew on me a lot as it unfolded.
A minor complaint on the story side is that it's really short considering the magnitude of events that unfold within.
One technical issue is that the game is only playable either in fullscreen or a tiny window. It's possible to make the window bigger by zooming the browser, but that makes everything pixelated and ugly.
Thanks for playing and the great feedback!
If a brick breaker fits the next theme, I plan to fix a lot of these problems with a massive overhaul. Never considered someone trying to zoom in on a browser build, not too sure if I will be able to fix it or not, as I was using pixel perfect with Unity, and I have no idea if it can work with scaling a browser.
Pretty neat seeing a breakout style game for this jam. Gameplay can feel a little slow at times, often you're just waiting for the ball to hit the last brick. It would help if the bricks were bigger. Many of the spells don't seem to do much, so it's best to just save up for the 4 blue and 2 red spells. The story is also weird as hell, with aliens and guinea pigs and magical girls battling it out in some school. But hey, it's story! The dialogue isn't the best but as a whole it's interesting and has lots of character.
Thanks! Yeah I had to rush the story in like a day so it wasn't terrific. Next time I do a game of this style, I have a better plan for powerups. I also plan to change some parts of the core gameplay so that having 1 brick remaining won't be a problem.
Wow, this game caught me a off guard! At first, I thought "Breakout + Magical Girls," nice! But by the time the first boss appeared, things got intense quick! I had a really good time playing this. The story was good (I see below you've already mentioned it might have been inspired by a certain MG show, hehe) and kept me invested as I battled through levels! The defensive enemy was pretty hard, but not as hard as one level where I just couldn't get that last block for minutes on end. (A breakout problem in general). The power were all fun to use. I didn't understand bubbles while playing, but you explained it below.
My main critique would probably be that the graphics were a mixed bag. The game sprites and characters looked nice, but some of the BGs and enemies were a bit rough. The text was hard to read in fullscreen too, but not so hard as to make me want to play in a small window hehe.
Anyway, great entry and great game! Awesome work.
Thanks for the feedback! I do have a few solutions to the "breakout problem" for the next magical girl game jam. I'm thinking of doing the abilities quite a bit different (and adding different playable characters). For example, I was thinking of adding a temporary block-seeking powerup, or a powerup that pulls the ball to the x position of the paddle (this one is a bit problematic in practice though).
Next time I will test more in full-screen, I pretty much only tested in the editor which was at the intended resolution, but the text looks awful at full screen. I'll probably also not force the low resolution, it was a bit of an experimentation.
The backgrounds don't seem to be getting much love. I'm curious if that's due to the pixellation the game enforces along with the small screen size or if there's a more fundamental issue with the pictures. Here's the original picture of the "outside school" area; what do you think?
I went back and played a bit again to remind myself of what gave me mixed feelings about the art. I played fullscreen the first time... this time I went back and forth a bit, and I do think it works better on the small screen... though I prefer playing in fullscreen. Fullscreen really causes the BG images to break down unfortunately.
Beyond that, I think the BG art itself looks solid and has a distinct style going for it. However, it doesn't quite match the cleaner character art and in-level clean sprites. Since I posted my comment, XCVG played and commented, and I think they nailed the problem on the head. The art is all good individually, but there's a big mish-mash of styles that make it seem a little off.
Thanks for the additional feedback!
This was fun, but I had issues trying to get the diamond to move where I wanted, but maybe that is the challenge. Very well made.
I had a pretty good time with this one, though I didn't make it past the defensive enemy before throwing in the towel. The chill vibes of the soundtrack are super well suited to the block-breaking and really put me in a zen zone.
The text was pretty hard to read, especially at fullscreen, though it was kind of irreverent and jokey anyway.
Gameplay-wise the addition of various spells powered up by various levels of collectibles was a good idea (though I never quite figured out what the ultimate level heart spell did - I feel like I launched missiles whenever there was a new ball?) and let the magical girl-ness of it really come to the fore in the gameplay as well as in the story. The character portrait art for the non-hamsters was also very nice.
The only thing with breakout/pong is that often aiming for that last brick or whatever is a huge pain in the ass. Also there was the occasional strange physics quirk with the ball that wouldn't bounce quite the way I was hoping...
Overall I would say everything came together really well here and I might honestly come back again. That defensive one is kind of rough though.
I built the game to play in small resolution, so I find the text is easier to read that way haha. The final 2 heart spells are lasers. It's not described very well but you hold space to shoot them. This makes clearing the bricks a million times easier. I had planned (and had created) a powerup originally that allowed you to direct the ball with the paddle, but was having a hard time balancing it so I scrapped it before the final version, but I think it would improve the flow quite a bit if it were re-introduced.
There are 2 bosses right after that breakout.
Thanks for playing!
The addition of Pong to Breakout caught me offguard (in a good way). Overall this was a pretty darn good blockbreaker game.
thanks! The gameplay was heavily inspired by Arkanoid because it was one of the first games I got on snes as a kid
Your spin on the classic Breakout game is very creative and fun. The power-up system letting you choose your power is also good, though I still don't know what bubbles actually does besides leaving a trail of bubbles.
Audio is great and one of the only games with female voice acting that I've played so far, but your graphics are wildly mismatched between the high quality characters and the not so high quality background images.
I liked the story and the the two endings as they are very reminiscent of a certain mahou shoujo anime I've watched.
it may have been heavily inspired by a certain mahou shoujo anime lol. I should have given bubbles a bit more because it's honestly a lame power up, all it does is make you do double damage. Really only useful for heart blocks and the final bosses.