Metroidvania Month 16

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A jam submission

Lucent (MVM 16)View game page

Short Metroidvania produced for the Metroidvania Month 16 gamejam.

Submitted by jeff@redopticgames — 43 minutes, 48 seconds before the deadline

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Lucent (MVM 16)'s itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Enjoyment	#12	3.455	3.455
Design	#12	3.545	3.545
Overall	#16	3.455	3.455
Presentation	#19	3.545	3.545
Metroidvania	#22	3.273	3.273

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Engine
Unity

Team/Developer
StudioGenGen

External assets
Music: at_the_end_of_hope_loop - Copyright/Attribution Notice: This song is public domain as of January 2017. No attribution necessary. https://opengameart.org/content/at-the-end-of-hope, magical_theme - https://opengameart.org/content/magical-theme

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Comments

DivFordSubmitted2 years ago

Good:

The shortcuts are really nice. I had a really nice moment with the first one, where I had a choice of two paths, and was able to guess that going right would let me open a shortcut. It's a really good feeling, and I think it speaks to good level design.
The atmosphere is good. Strange, unsettling colours, and oddly disturbing animations on the enemies. I think it comes together nicely.
The combat works well. Getting a hit in, then dashing away feels satisfying.

Bad:

Some guidance on the controls would be good. It wasn't too hard to work out on a gamepad (and thank you so much for supporting those!), but on keyboard, I had no idea. Eventually I triggered an attack by clicking on a menu, but I still have no idea how to dash.
Speaking of controls, pressing enter caused the game to quit to the menu with no warning and, as far as I can tell, no save.
Obviously, you ran out of time, but if you plan to continue this project, I'd like to see more juice. Combat is good, but it could be so much more satisfying with some screenshake, freeze-frames, and sound effects. I want to really feel the impact, especially from the big sword guys.

Overall, I like this game. It controls really nicely and it has a good atmosphere. Hope you find time to finish it!

Submitted

Seeds of Rebirth

jeff@redopticgamesDeveloper2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

- I very much like the strange animation on the enemies, mostly because it was an accident that came about because I was too lazy to add more keyframes but they ended up suiting their weird spandex vibe anyway.

- Someone else told me about that crash out on enter bug, but I was never able to reproduce it on my end, so I'm not sure what's causing it. =/

- One of these days I'm going to learn how to do key remapping (cause let's be honest, all keyboard controls are generally awkward and hard to intuit), but this was not that day haha.

- Yes, I very much wanted to add screen shake and freeze frames to some of the hits but it fell through the cracks. Next time I'm going to be less ambitious with the art and animations so that I can focus on the little things.

Thanks for playing!

Prameet AglaveSubmitted2 years ago

except for the audio everything was just amazing 👏

good job!!!!

Submitted

Deleted accountSubmitted2 years ago

Deleted post

jeff@redopticgamesDeveloper2 years ago

Yup, it's true. I was basing the combat system mostly on Dead Cells, but I never implemented a reward system for killing enemies so right now there's no real point. Were I to continue this, adding some sort of currency / xp system to reward players for killing enemies would be on the list of things to do.

jlothamerSubmitted2 years ago

Wow! This is very well done! I like the art and animation. Sound effects are good (though there could be more), and the music isn’t too bad, though could be brought down in volume a tad IMO (or just add volume controls).

At first I was annoyed that there wasn’t a way to heal other than going to the save point. But as I played it seemed that the effect was that I had to actually master the enemies, particular the big-sword-guy. By the end I had it down pat. Even got past the really big one as it’s behavior was similar. So, enemies are good for the most part! I did find it odd that there was no contact damage and a lot of the time I could just run pass the leap-frog-dudes.

The range attack enemies felt a bit unfair. I don’t know if it happened all the time, but it seemed they would activate and stay active when they were off screen and really far away in the level. I’d switch those enemies out of attack mode whenever the player got out of the activation range.

The controls could be tighter too. Jumping away from the big-sword-guys was dicey and felt sluggish.

It’s unfortunate that no ability gating was present in the jam version.

All in all, like I said, very well done! Hopefully you’ll continue to flesh the game out.

My team is always eager for feedback and would love it if you would play our game, rate it and leave a comment letting us know what you think! Compliments are great, but constructive criticisms are worth a ton! So, don’t be afraid to let us know about those too! Thanks!

Submitted

Glowstar Empire

TeePeeDeeSubmitted2 years ago

lovely game.... so much fun to control the character. Especially love the stab wall slide (or what evr it's officially called) really nice!

Submitted

Somethings on moon colony 6

Night Shift TeamSubmitted2 years ago

Your game is cool, I like your lights it's good, your enemies is good too, the game difficult seem balance, it make me combat more tactical, but I think we need some HP regen :( , your move skill is good, but I think we should remap keys (maybe dash with Right mouse and Jump with W or all-keyboard mode we should place Jump near Dash and Attack, but it just my opinion XD ), I love your game, GG!

Submitted

Shinigami nightshift

TeePeeDeeSubmitted2 years ago

love some of your animation flourishes on this one :) really nice entry I felt I was entering a Zen state whilst playing :)

Submitted

Somethings on moon colony 6

RedwoodEntSubmitted2 years ago

Good game. I gave you a solid rating. Thanks for adding controller support. One of the better games I've played. It's a good-looking game. Character control is basic but polished. I didn't encounter any game breaking bugs or obvious oversite or something. I'm not sure why you implemented a pickup that I can't pickup yet, (Attack+ not implemented.) For me it's not motivating, but hey, everyone is different. Overall you have a game to be proud of here. Contrats.

Submitted

Gigabit vs The Cyberaptors

jeff@redopticgamesDeveloper2 years ago

Thanks for playing, I really appreciate the feedback! I sort of waffled on the attack pickup, I dunno if you wall jumped your way up there or not (wall jumping is currently a bug but still possible), but I wanted to let the player see that there was a reason (or will be a reason in a future update) to come back to this room from another direction.

jeff@redopticgamesDeveloper2 years ago(+1)

I spent some time and implemented the attack power-up. Hooray for grace periods!

Cormorant42Submitted2 years ago

I think--and I may be guilty of this as well--that you spend too much time polishing the graphics, and not enough time on the actual gameplay...oh well! Still a beautiful game

Submitted

Reverie of Strange Blood

jeff@redopticgamesDeveloper2 years ago

Thanks for playing, and that's fair. To tell the truth I spent a lot of this gamejam refactoring my original character controller and building a reusable enemy state machine (and also learning how to use Photoshop, something I've been dragging my feet on). So I guess once I was done with the setting up and learning process, I didn't really have enough time to explore the concepts I was building. But now that I have functioning enemy state machines and am more comfortable with Photoshop, I can go back to focusing on gameplay for the next jam. :D

Cormorant42Submitted2 years ago

Ahhhhh--that makes so much sense! (Good for you, btw)

dan.collins.devSubmitted2 years ago

Man, it's finally good to play this after watching the progress.

What I liked

The knockback distance feels hilariously fun. I sometimes expected to hit a wall and get a bounce effect.
The wall sliding and edge climbing looked and felt fun.
I really liked how the music fit with the visuals.
Difficulty felt pretty balanced.
I'm always a fan of being able to play with my controller.

Improvements/Suggestions/General Feedback

We've talked about player feedback before so, one thing that comes to mind is enemy deaths. I gave it some experimentation, and it looks likes there's supposed to be a death effect on enemies, but it looks like it will only play if they die in a specific state. If that were fixed, I wouldn't feel like enemy deaths sounds need to implemented, at least for your standard enemies. I do think there needs to be a death sounds for the big boys though. As a player, if I take down something huge, I want to feel the success.
Also player feedback related - dashing. I feel you could go two ways with it. Either implement a dashing sound or add an air distortion effect around the player and be ok without a sound. I think the effect would help the player infer that there are iframes, instead of having to list it on your game page.

I definitely enjoyed what you have so far, and happy to finally play it after seeing progress reports.

Submitted

Shapeshift Shatter

jeff@redopticgamesDeveloper2 years ago(+1)

Awesome, thanks for the feedback! I do want to add death effects to both the enemies and the player, but I've been worried to do add it this late because the way it has to be implemented currently is pretty easy to cause null reference object crashes.

In terms of the dash, one of the things I'm planning on finalizing during the grace period is an after-image effect on the player. We'll see if I actually do it.

Ironically, I think the wall sliding itself feels pretty bad and I'm very strongly considering removing it from the current build since there's literally no situation in which it comes in handy. Ledge climbing will stay, of course, but it's something I want to clean up in the future in terms of some of the logic behind it.

Glad you got to finally play it, it's been a long time coming!