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A jam submission

Cardinal-Investigator: Hemmelths incident. Level 1View game page

metroidvania-month-23-entry
Submitted by saurterrs — 18 hours, 38 minutes before the deadline
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Cardinal-Investigator: Hemmelths incident. Level 1's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Metroidvania#323.3533.353
Overall#452.8382.838
Execution#472.7062.706
Sensory#512.8242.824
Enjoyment#562.4712.471

Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Engine
unity

Team/Developer
Alexander Fedorov

External assets
SoundFX by various authors bought in a bundle. Alagard font made by Hewett Tsoi.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

I think the leaning was super cool, but the game all around needs a bit more feedback to make interactions more clear. It could probably be introduced better too because right after you do it, you need to start killing enemies. The game is pretty punishing with health, especially with the fall damage. I think the dialogue pop-ups telling you where you can and can't go hurt the Metroidvania-ness of it. Really cool vibe though, love the graphics and theming. Great project!

Developer

Thanks!

Submitted(+1)

Cool idea with the leaning against a wall to dodge enemies. Those jumps were hard and the slipperiness didn't help. Some of the backgrounds blended into the level geometry and made it hard to distinguish what was walkable and what wasn't.

Developer

Thanks!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

I managed to play through it all, but boy was this game hard.

Adding fall damage to a metroidvania was a brave decision! It was waaay too punishing though, like even falling from the shortest height would damage you. The character was a bit too slow and made jumping even more cumbersome. Fortunately, the gravity boots eased much of the early game frustration, so I kept pushing through.

I liked the enemies, but those flying monkeys gave me some real PTSD (and my dumb ass thought they were crazed pidgeons before the dialogue clarified it for me). The boss fight was very interesting, but the fact his projectiles could block my own made me die a LOT to my fireballs. Finally, as others have said, the control scheme could use some serious work.

On the upside, I loved the aestethics! Your art style paired with that background music (did you compose it?) made it somewhat unsettling, which I absolutely liked.

With more work on the character controller and nerfed fall damage, this could be pretty great! Despite all the issues, I love challenging games and had my fair share of fun.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and glad you liked it!
Yeah, gravity boots and their correct usage were supposed to mitigate fall damage and fall damage are the reason to use them. But I was using velocity val to calculate the damage and it somehow had a very narrow range. Need to rework the whole system.
My wife keeps calling them pidgeons as well :) An blocking fireball - I intended to even have it as boss behaviour to through something quick to the player as soon as it sees fireball, but did not have enough time to implement. By the way, did find the Tome of Power?
Music composed by me, thank you for kind words on it ^^

Submitted

I didn’t find the Tome, unfortunately. Perhaps I was supposed to backtrack towards one of the starting areas after opening up the shortcut using a fireball? But I chose to continue towards the boss instead. My bad for not exploring more! I guess I could’ve had an easier time with that item.

Developer

Yeah, no worries. I wonder how many people would actually go looking for it :)

Submitted(+1)

Art is awesome! Gameplay is little bit clunky but overtime you get used to it and it becomes kind of feature/ Unfortunately, I got stuck several times with no means to continue playing. Once I fell into the crack and was stuck in falling animation without actually falling. Second (and third) I died, but after checkpoint reset was still in dead state, rotating in place and shooting, but in form of immobile meat pile.

Overall there is mtroidvania vibe in it, and I had (not fun, but) exictment playing and exploring.

PS. Any chance you understand russian (your surname looks slavic)? I could write more coherent opinion, if you would understand it.

Developer

Thanks!
Yeah, I tried to remove all crack situation, maybe something left. Actually there is a menu on esc button, from where you can load last save point. Dead state lock after reset is a new bug, thanks for reporting. Usually if it happens - the game should reload you again.

Да, я говорю по-русски :)

Submitted(+1)

Во-первых, игра правда выглядит классно, стилистика очень приятно подобрана, очень олдскульно.

Во-вторых,, я не смог пройти ее целиком.

Дальше без нумерации, но попробую структурированно.

В первый раз я поиграл 20 минут и бросил. Потому что за эти 20 минут не ушел с первого экрана. Закончилось все тем, что я пропрыгал по пунктирной линии островков наверху, а оказавшись на твердой земле сразу провалился в дырку и застрял :D

Вторая попытка была более удачной, скорее всего из-за твоих правок прыжков, но все еще остались "моментики".

- Сообщения закрываются на Enter. 1. приходится двигать руку по клавиатуре. 2. интуитивно непонятно. 3. Остальные кнопки продолжают (относительно) работать, напрмимер, выстрел

- Первого врага рекомендовано не убивать. Но он двигается в таком узком пространстве, что вместо прижатия к стене проще его перепрыгнуть или убить. Более того, тот же враг далее встречается на совсем узких платформах, что делает бесполезным навык прятаться от него у стены. Это немного путает, ххоть и не критично.

- К разговору о врагах - так и не понял, как правильно бороться с синими стрелками. Уворот от их выстрела сделать сложно из-за тайминга "пряток"/желания стрелять в ответ

- Подбор первой руны здоровья (или как-то так). Руна на возвышенности, а в игре есть урон от падения. Всплывающее сообщение отбирает управление, из-за чего ты автоматически падаешь мимо платформы и теряешь здоровье. А если там еще и остался живой враг...

- Вообще про урон от падения. Это очень странно. Раздражает непонятность механики: с какой высоты можно спрыгивать?, сколько здоровья это будет стоить? и, главное, а стоит ли вообще рисковать? Наверное, так и было задумано, но желание проводить исследование мира это все же немного отбивает. Так же раздражает, что некоторые этапы приходится проходить заново из-за маленькой ошибки и рокового падения с высоты в 10см. Дополнительно, в некоторых играх падение может опустить тебя до 1хп (или убить, если уже 1хп), это сохраняет урон от падения, но делает его менее бесячим.

- Карта в целом сделана неплохо с точки зрения изучения и исследования, визуально понятно, где можно пройти, где надо проплозти, а куда соваться не надо. Это большой плюс

- Управление стало получше в последних версиях, как мне кажется.

- Текст. Шрифт полдобран красивый, но не самый читаемый, к сожалению. Из-за этого в веб версии хочется развернуть игру на весь экран, но тогдаа нельзя нажимать Esc. Кстати про...

- Управление. Не все возможные действия игрока понятны, поскольку нет никакого обучения. И если как ходить и прыгать игрок знает из других игр, то стрелять и закрывать сообщения на странные кнопки может и не уметь. Для джемовых игр то же касается паузы: не всегда в джемах она есть, вот мне и в голову не пришло, что можно нажать Esc (хотя это может быть только моей проблемой).

- В целом в проекте есть душа, это чувствуется. Значит ли название "Уровень 1", что планируется продолжение)?

Developer(+1)

К сожалению поздно было переделывать работу с UI, там всю систему надо было дописывать с отключением активных кнопок при появлении интерфейса (в юнити оно как бы есть, но ни разу не заработало из коробки на моей памяти). Синие стрелки довольно слабые на самом деле, даже если не прятаться, то они снимают щит с тебя медленнее, чем ты с них. А потом ваншотаются после взятия арбалета. Обучения согласен, всегда не хватает (на самом деле справа на рамке нацарапано управление :D )

Спасибо за подробный фидбек, а про продолжение, считай это как с песней Dream Theater - Metropolis, Pt. 1: The Miracle and the Sleeper :)

Submitted(+1)

This is quite a challenging one, I did get the boots but they were very hard to use. It was very easy to die from fall damage since you are allowed to fall for a very small distance without taking it and how the boots should have been used wasn't very clear. If used too early, you could jump too high and die because of that and if used too late you might not make the required distance at all. So yeah, the controls leave a lot to be desired. The graphics remind me of some old flash games which I really enjoy lol.

Developer

Thanks for playing and feedback!

Submitted(+1)

Hey! I'm a creature of habit so the controls were a little tough on me so I didn't get very far sadly, but I'll give what feedback I can . I like the crouch mechanic, not a lot of games seem to have incorporated it.  I liked the realistic feel in the gameplay such as fall dmg, went well with the overall ambiance. The old school art gives a rustic feel, felt like I was transported in a good way. There were some bugs upon dying mainly is when it would glitch but nothing major. I would suggest maybe introducing difficulty a little more gradually, for example just having an initial area for tutorial/getting used to how jumps feels, then adding the real danger. 

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing my game!

Submitted(+1)

There's quite a few interesting aspects to this game! The art is very interesting and unique. It has a very cool retro , simplified aesthetic I really enjoyed. The health bar idea is cool too. Gameplay wise, I hit a few stumbling blocks, especially with the instant-death pitfalls. I got a bit frustrated from missing the tiny platforms and having to start over :(

I really dig the vibe of this game but it was a bit too punishing for me to progress very far

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing! Sorry about not smooth jumping and platforming ^^"

Jam Judge (1 edit) (+1)

Interesting game, but I didn't have the patience to play for too long sadly.

Aesthetics are pretty viby, they give me the feeling of "old PC disk" games, despite me never actually living that era. Not sure if that was the intention, but it surely work for that lol. I also always appreciate me some lore :)

Fall damage on platformers are always a surprise, but they can definitelly work. Altought, the way you implemented it here is a little too much, since you can literally die by jumping out of a small hill instead of walking out of it (Granted, this way it generated some hylarious looking deaths, so that's a plus on my book). The collision with the floor also fely slippy, the player ends up sliding down from the platforms if they hit it on a corner, and I assume that happens because the player hitbox is a circle. In this case I'd say it's important to add a failsafe where the player would always be put on top of the platforms when hitting them from a corner, specially so for a game with fall damage, since most of the times I fell to my death didn't actually feel like my fault.

The control scheme is just really weird tho. I already don't like jumping with the spacebar, but that I understand it's personal preference, so I can live with it, but now using G and H on a game that moves with the arrow keys is just wrong honestly, not to mention having to make your hands travel all the way to Enter for every dialogue that pops up is also quite the chore. Ideally, you should be able to close the pop us with either the shooting or jumping button, and the gravity boots and healing runes should be somewhere near X like C and V, or even change the gravity boots to be activated if pressing up while on the air, anything is better than a key that is on the middle of the keyboard that you need to either take your hands out of the other inputs or stretch your fingers on really weird ways.

Also missed some more feedback for receiving damage, but in this case it didn't feel like as big as an issue as it did on other entries tbh. Either way, I only played up until getting the gravity boots, since everytime I died after that I would respawn with a buggy pop up message that I needed to keep spamming Enter to get rid of, plus being poop sniped by the big sparrow that lives there while saved with what was essentially 1 hp. And of course, to get out of there I would have to use the item that is triggered with G.

Anyway, here's a gameplay vid if you wanna see it, it was actually fun enought to play that little beggining btw, I just stopped because I really couldn't dig the control scheme

(Also, I actually played this game a few hours ago, but my laptop's battery died before I could finish writing my comment, so those toughts aren't super fresh on my mind anymore, so I might have forgotten to mention something else)

Edit: I just opened the game up again to confirm the controls, and I think I discovered a secret forbidden move by pressing V x)

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and making such full feedback!

"the feeling of "old PC disk" games" - yes, that's exactly what I was aiming for (and many issues might be connected to how I remember that era). Sadly my experience with making platformer like games are quite limited, particular to this one, but that's why I wanted to try and make it :)
For control scheme, it sound logical in my head, G for gravity boots, H for healing, P for tome of power. I understand it's too stretched over the keyboard, though was not something unbearable during playtests. Enter for dialogue - I regret about it all the time, should have put it on spacebar or anykey =\

"forbidden move by pressing V" - oh no, I did not have time to implement melee attack but forgot to remove the binding :(

Developer

Added coyote-time, and A/S/D bindings to the items. Making UI go on another button - too much messing with current input system sadly =\

Jam Judge(+1)

Yoi!! Just replayed the game, and yes, it's a huge lot more enjoyable now!

Just the remapping of the keys was really all this game desperately needed imo. I personally don't think A S D is perfect either, but oh boi, it's a million times better than what was before! Now the control scheme is more just a matter of getting used to, since (almost) everything important is comfly reachable witouth having to do crazy acrobacies across keyboard everytime (Altought, now that I managed to get the extra guns, I have to say the problem of poor input choice is on them now, since the numbers are a also little far away from the rest of the inputs, but oh well, I wasn't feeling the need to swap weapons nowhere near as frequent as I did to use the gravity boots, so it's way less bothersome here.). Also, sad that you couldn't get rid of Enter, but oh well, it is what it is.

I myself didn't feel much difference on platforming with the coyote time tbh, but that's mostly because I didn't actually miss it when it wasn't there either. Altought it probably saved me from a few slips witouth I realizing, so it's still always nice to have.

I managed to play it to the end now, so here's a definitive gaemplai vid!!

Also, I thinking I didn't made it clear on my last comment, but I did find this game pretty fun overall. It's very different from what we're used to see on those jams, and I think you pulled it off really well here, it's a really refreshing change of pace. And of course, I'm glad the fall deaths are still as hylarious as ever xD

As I said, the only thing keeping me from playing to the end last time were the weird input scheme, with that out of the way, it was a joy.

Developer

Thanks for giving it another shot, really appreciated! I am very happy you liked it ^^

Submitted(+1)

Hey was able reach the magic boots part, the main issue to me seems to be the lack of coyote-time it would probably make the player 100% better to control(I think theres nothing wrong with the jump), the art style is unique and reminds me of mosaic paintings lol, and I have never seen an health bar done that way.

Developer(+1)

Thanks!
Didn't think about coyote-time, it surely could have helped on some areas.

Developer(+1)

Updated and added a bit of coyote-time :)

Submitted(+1)

Just played it and was able to get much further this time, until the first snake type enemy, for your future project I would advice trying to help out as much as you can the players that are failing, for example in this game the health bar could be restores when you respawn making it easier but only for those who are struggling/dying.

Developer(+1)

Thanks! Good point, I will keep it in mind.

Submitted(+1)

Very cool game! I was able to get the crossbow, and loved getting through the enemies you had set up in the area. The art design of this is really great, and gives serious Another World/Heart of Darkness vibes. There were some accessibility issues - taking such radical fall damage prevented me from getting much further than the crossbow, and the lack of health regen (other than the sparse healing spells) made it extra punishing.

Seeing more of the world would be excellent! It was so easy to get sucked in, despite the challenge. Thanks so much for putting this together!

Developer

Thanks for kind words!
I agree that jumping could have been better, so I will keep it in mind for next times :)

Submitted(+1)

The game makes me think a lot to metroid, and in regard of the theme it's pretty normal. The art is good and i loved the detail that even butterfly are hostile, but i confess that game with slow character are not my thing. I didn't finish the game because the mages are too powerful for m :,[

Submitted(+1)

ouch they are not butterfly but flying monkey, i don't how to feel about these information...

Never in my life i thought that i would be beat by flying monkeys.

Developer

:D

My bad on drawing them like it. My wife keeps calling them sparrows instead of monkeys ))

Thank you for playing! Wizards are quite simple to deal with once you got a better weapon and all their range attacks could be evaded :)

Submitted(+1)

Good game! I like the art style because it reminds me a bit of Another World. There are some interesting mechanics such as hiding against a wall to avoid enemies. I struggled with the platforming & suggest tuning the jump physics.

Developer

Thanks!