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A jam submission

Wyatt and the Blood GemsView game page

A true far-west adventure
Submitted by Jonqs — 12 hours, 11 minutes before the deadline
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Wyatt and the Blood Gems's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Sensory#93.9233.923
Enjoyment#153.3083.308
Overall#153.4153.415
Execution#183.1543.154
Metroidvania#193.1543.154
Relevance to the theme picked#223.5383.538

Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Theme Chosen
Revival and You're not alone (intepretation is on the game page)

Engine
Godot 4.1

Team/Developer
Jonqs

External assets
Holizna for the music and some kenney assets (detailed on my game page)

Reference info
https://twitter.com/JonqsGames

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Comments

Submitted

Pros:

  • Aesthetics are nifty! This goes for music as well as sound
  • Good combat potential with the roll and the rolling reload feels pretty good
  • Ledge-grab a plus for a game like this.
  • Theme and genre are basically on-point IMO, if a little basic

Cons:

  • I feel like I can't see the main character very well
  • Depth perception is hard
  • I kept respawning in this really high up area and couldn't seem to go any further up or left. I finally got up to the area with the trees and the end for now, but it didn't feel intuitive. I eventually got up to the trees by jumping left and doing what felt like a slightly glitchy climb up from there.
  • Without falling to your death I might not have seen the end of the game. Split on whether I think removing it would be prudent. Overall, not dying from falling, at least at that last part, might have ultimately not been an improvement.

Opinion:

  • Most of what this game is doing aesthetically could and possibly should have been paired with player action itself restricted to a 2D plane.
  • Wall jump is a mite confusing
Submitted

I really considered doing a western themed metroidvania myself, so its cool to see someone else make one.

  • Good choice of music and sfx. Gunshot sound was great. I laughed the first time I heard it because it felt geniune to the nature of westerns.
  • 2.5d was a really interesting choice, but I think it also requires a little more attention as a developer to make it feel/play natural. Risky choice, but it does give me a chance to provide feedback that may help if you try something like this again.
    • The depth aspect felt off, and it affected a lot of elements from aiming and shooting where you intend to be aiming to jumps. It may have been harder for me too because I'm colorblind which made the levels harder to read.
  • Theme-wise, if I hadn't looked at the game page, I wouldn't have been able to tell which themes you used and how they were interpreted. I can easily see this as just a time issue due to being a jam. From your page, it sounds like you knew what you wanted, but there just wasn't enough time.
  • I really liked the gun ui, but if you decide to move forward with this entry for SMVM, I would definitely make the these changes to the gun:
    • One click reload. I can tell you wanted the player to experience, but as a player I felt spamming the reload button was a little much.
    • If you do the above, the UI would look even cooler if it added the bullets and give it an extra couple spins. 
  • In regards to giving players feedback, you covered your bases well. I knew when actions were occuring automatically. I really think its easy to not think about that and also make assumptions, but it is a very important aspect and one of the best pieces of advice I received when I first started. Its also important not to overwhelm the player with feedback. You didn't do this, but when you start considering giving feedback to a player, I think its easy to fall into this pit-trap.
  • I love that you added gamepad support (as a Godot dev, this is a no-brainer due to how simple it is), but its important to remember that not all the gamepads are going to have the same button and labels. So during prompts for a specific button, the buttons weren't exactly the same for me. My entry is the first time I took that into consideration. I think it worked well and also helped keep me from adding "text-walls" that overwhelm the player.
  • Due to how easy it is to export to different platforms in Godot and how people tend to play web-builds over downloading, I recommend making that a priority. With your game, I can see where it would be preferred to be downloaded, but its something to consider. And you might as well export for winows, linux, and OSX (i have issue with OSX so I haven't been exporting for it lately).

I feel like I'm forgetting an item or two, and most my feedback is aimed looking foward, but I enjoyed what you were able to submit. As a dev, I think I can tell what you really wanted to create and the experience you want the player to have, even in its current state, which is really good. Overall, I enjoyed your entry and since you're new to Godot and even went with Godot 4, I think you should be really proud of what you accomplished. Congrats!

Submitted(+1)

This is dope! Really great entry.

- I really enjoyed the camera work - the 3D environment with billboarded sprites is well executed and I love the colors you used for everything. That purpley shadow color is delicious

- wall kick a tad difficult to pull off, but I managed to collect some secrets with it! I also jumped into a void with it - oops lol

- love the UI for the ammo indicator, it was clean and made a lot of sense and was a fun design

Godot gang let's gooo! Very brave of you to use the latest version. I really enjoyed my time with your game, congrats on submitting!

Submitted(+2)

This is such a unique concept and perspective for a metroidvania game. The 2.5D perspective and flat character art style reminds me of the Paper Mario games. The old west is a really creative choice of setting and you added so many little details that reinforce this atmosphere and aesthetic, like the revolver ammo counter and the hawk double jump. As others have pointed out, though, it was really tough to control. Shooting is difficult to lineup correctly, movement and jumping is a little awkward, and ledge detection is very inconsistent. The camera's slight perspective shift when moving left or right can also be really disorienting when you are strafing a lot. But if you work on polishing up these bugs and game feel issues, I think you will have an incredibly unique and inventive game on your hands!

Submitted (2 edits)

The concept is really cool, I absolutely loved how the cowboy vibe was conveyed in the game, both in the art and sound design (the music in special fit very well for that atmosphere). I think it just needs a lot more polishing on the gameplay itself.

The controllers felt decent at first but quite janky or inconsistent with some upgrades and sometimes when grabbing edges. Took me a long time to figure out how to do the wall jumping, which is definitely not obvious as you have to face away from the wall before jumping again (from my understanding).

The 2.5D visuals are great but being able to move in depth instead of just left and right felt a bit weird at times, mainly accounting for the fact you are limited to left and right when grabbing edges, shooting, rolling, etc. The bear in special was kind of annoying only because of that.

I like the idea of the bird's attack, but I think the reaction time is a little too tight. I feel it should be a bit slower and/or have some kind of visible warning on the bird to communicate it's about to happen, this way relying more on the player's timing rather than purely reaction time.
(also, because of that, one of the last birds in those platforms just feels REALLY merciless imo as it attacks as you're about to reach a very small platform, easily taking you down and killing you from fall damage).

For the map itself, there were some areas where collision was just very inconsistent. Worth to mention the secret place on that river on the beginning, which got me falling down below the ground infinitely to the limbo with no way of coming back but restarting the game.

Overall, I did have some fun and I do think there's a lot of potential in this. I'm also interested in checking it out again later in case you keep working on it post-jam. Nice entry!

Submitted(+1)

Pretty cool game. Perspective is neat but made it hard to tell where I was at times. The wall jump was really inconsistent (the game would usually prefer using my double jump instead) and because of this I wasn't able to finish the game since I got stuck at one of the wall jumping sections. Some platforms had hitboxes bigger than their models which also contributed to a lot of platforming jank. Aside from that my only issue is with the vulture enemy, which felt impossible to defeat due to the inability to shoot upwards or in the air and its swoop being too fast to react to.

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Yes i made a playtest and i agree that wall jump is clunky, i was use to it when developing but for player it's not easy. 

The hitboxes issue was due to a bug, i found near the end of the jam, with godot collision using trimesh so i had to simplify collider quickly resulting in some area not being tight. 

Thanks for the feedback !

Submitted(+1)

Like others have said, the 2.5D look  is pretty good. The art itself is good. The controls are janky (I'm on keyboard) and the game feels a little unstable. 

Nice job. 

Developer

Thanks for the feedback ! I didn't test much the keyboard controls, I'll add a message to recommend the controller.

Submitted(+1)

The 2.5D look was pretty cool. It got a bit wanky with the camera when I needed to move more than just left and right. Shooting was cool too, I like the animation. Felt slightly weird when strafing around the dogs because I'd have to awkwardly realign us so I could hit them.

Unfortunately, the game kept crashing half the time when I killed a dog so I was unable to progress very far. I tried a few times but eventually gave up.

The control scheme for keyboard and mouse is very jank and I paused the game to go get a controller instead.

The pixel art looks really cool and it fits pretty well in the pixelated 3D environment. I like the overall look of the game. 

I enjoyed what I was able to play.

Developer

Thanks a lot for your feedback and the bug report. I had a nasty bug that indeed crashed the game on certain condition when killing a dog. Just uploaded a new version with a fix.

I agree on the 2.5D perspective issue. I tried several things but i think their is a reason if i didn't saw much of this type of game. I may continue to Super but doing a "demake" version going full 2D.