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Stealen Cloak's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Engagement | #360 | 2.907 | 3.250 |
| Creative use of art assets | #440 | 2.683 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #452 | 2.609 | 2.917 |
| Overall polish | #519 | 2.236 | 2.500 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
that's a very ambitious game for a jam! Equipment upgrades, stealth, combat, procedurally generated dungeons, dynamic field of view, etc.
The dynamic field of view was really cool and I got a good sense of progression when I managed to purchase upgrades. Dodging felt good when I managed to get the hang of it.
The main issue seemed to be the balance of the dungeons. The game was at its best when I encountered a dungeon with a reasonable amount of enemies, then I could strategize, choose my approach, adapt, and so forth. But sometimes I got a series small rooms clogged with guards and it was very frustrating.
With a few tweaks (ie balance and a more varied level design that really enables a stealth approach) I think you can really emphasive the good parts and diminish the frustrating ones.
This game actually really grew on me as I figured out how to do the stealth correctly. I did run into an issue or two, one where on one run the rooms had 3 times the enemies as normal, although if the number is chosen randomly it could just have been really bad luck. Sometimes when entering a room I couldn't see where the cone of vision was and was immediately targeted without the chance for stealth. I really enjoyed the stealth aspect despite the minor issues, and think you've come up with a solid jam entry.
The number of enemies per room is chosen somewhat randomly, yes. We have a "difficulty" rating as well that increases the possible number of enemies based on how many items you have bought from the store, to make the game more difficult as you progress. This was rushed out at the end of the jam, however, and probably needs to be re-balanced.
The problem where the vision cone is not visible is probably because the enemy is outside of the camera view, so the game object is culled. This was a bug I noticed too late to fix, because I didn't playtest the enemies enough :/
Glad you liked it :)
Not exactly challenging. The feeling is more of a battle of attrition. The length of the dungeon and only one enemy type makes the journey feel like a slog, and impatience makes me try to kill the enemy faster, which gives them the chance to get into their attack animation, which often dodges my attack for unclear reasons. Similarly, impatience makes me feel like trying to actually sneak through, but it's literally impossible to do so in most generated rooms. And since the enemy patterns are so precisely tuned to the initial weapon lengths, the game is essentially over with the purchase of the King's hammer, which gives the reach necessary to ignore their attacks (maybe the spear does it too, I skipped over that upgrade after the hammer was a disappointing sidegrade). Until then, the most viable strategy is to very slowly pull each enemy one by one. At least their behavior was predictable (outside of some fringe cases where they bounce off each other and so can start their next attack animation sooner than expected). I would have liked a somewhat more even spread of enemies and possibly larger rooms, to make sneaking a more viable tactic (right now a "stealth" playthrough is scrambling to the end with 90% of the dungeon guards trailing behind you). I think this game could at the very least add a risk reward element in which the player is allowed to bail out of the dungeon at each floor to keep what they've earned, but each floor provides better money.
Thank you for the thorough feedback! I agree with mostly everything you said.
The weapons were tweaked to give some semblance of progression, but everything except the sword and hammer is pretty much OP. The rooms are also supposed to scale in accordance with your gear (bigger/more enemies) but this was just thrown together and not play-tested and adjusted.
Again, thank you for playing through a good chunk of the game :-) . Your feedback is really valuable!
Great, a good strategy is to dodge te first dungeon!
Doesn't start in firefox for some reason. But works good in chrome.
The UI could use some work. Gameplaywise you should add health pickups in the dungeon. I am a casual I need hearts to survive. Also don't throw the player out so unceremoniously. Give them one second to understand that they died.
Couldn't beat the first dungeon, so can't talk about the upgrades. Stealth mechanic works good tho.
Thanks for the feedback! Health drops are a great suggestion, as it stands the difficulty could probably use a bit of tweaking. Death mechanic was kind of thrown together near the end.
Oh, sorry to hear that it did not start in Firefox for you, I just tried it on my own install of firefox and it worked fine there.
Health pickups could be an option, yes, and it would work well. However, I think we wanted more of a challenging experience where the goal wasn't really to kill all enemies, but rather try to fight more one-on-one. The game could really do with quite a bit more polish, but we ran short on time.
I think we might have made a mistake with how punishing death is in the game, as you lose all your money. This makes it harder for the player to steadily progress.
There are many areas I feel where we could have improved it, and it was sorely in need of more playtesting :)
I love stealth games so I instantly clicked on yours. Even though the menu is a bit unappealing the gameplay is actually really good and the enemies are well balanced. For some reason it didn't save the money I collected when I died so I couldn't get any upgrades, but a fun experience nonetheless.
Thanks for the feedback! The idea with the death mechanic was that you'd lose your gold on death, adding pressure on the player to survive to the end. Unfortunately we ran out of time to improve presentation, but that's absolutely something I'll keep in mind for next time.
Yeah, we might've been a bit too harsh when it comes to death. You probably shouldn't lose all your coin.