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Shadowleaf Grove's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #196 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Playability | #258 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Cleverness | #278 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Artistic Style | #328 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- Very clean, nice movement. The art is very pretty. Would like levels to have a little bit more length but the small puzzles were very enjoyable.
- The controls for this game are excellent, especially when played with a controller. The theme is well-executed, and I enjoyed scavenging for potion ingredients. The puzzles offered a decent challenge. The art style effectively creates a dark atmosphere while still clearly depicting everything.
Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes
Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
YES
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
A short 2D platformer-puzzle game with Metroidvania elements. The story is about a witch who discovers that evil shadows have been invading the Shadowleaf Grove, so she takes it upon herself to save her home.
Extra Notes
There's currently a bug where if you go back from a certain room in the temple area (the one with a lot of traps everywhere) the main character gets stuck and the player is forced to restart the game. I'll fix this issue as soon as the rating period ends.
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Comments
An incredible game overall! Very polished very enjoyable! i could stop playing to defeat the boss but it was really hard cause there is also some movement bug for example when i press W and A simultaneously to shoot that way, then jumping doesn't work.
Even with that though personally i think this is the best game in the jam from those i have tried out
An absolutely beautiful game that has an insane amount of polish and content for a 2 week dev period.
So first of all let me get get the bad out of the way. The boss is unnecessarily hard. I didn't finish the game because of it, which up until that point was fantastic.
The reasons why the boss are too hard and irritating are that up until that point there isn't much difficulty in the game at all pretty much every other enemy is easy to deal with then suddenly the boss is insane! The left hand hits me 75% of the time and I can't get out of the way and the right hand sweeps waaaay too high if it starts while your character is jumping. Which are you 90% of the time of the fight to hit the boss. So it's only if you are sitting on the ground waiting on the attack does it actually go low enough for you to safely jump over it. Finally the fact that there's no checkpoint immediately before the boss and you have to do that big climb again from 3 rooms away was just too much for me.
Also the character moves too slow and without a dash or something it really drags things down.
Now that all that is out of the way let me just say that this game is absolutely beautiful, the pixel art, the character design, the tilemaps, the parallax backgrounds. It's all so well designed and crafted that I can't believe this was done in 2 weeks. What an insane level of polish.
Not to mention the UI and items. The potions were super cool too, although I think the particles need to be turned down a bit as they made it kinda hard to see sometimes, even if they are cool.
The audio is fantastic from start to finish. The character SFX are varied and great as are the rest of the SFX through the game. The music is non-stop bangers.
With the exception of the slow movement speed and lack of dash the gameplay is great. Using the different potions to remove barriers and traverse the environment was great. By the end with the combination of the explosive potion and slime potion I felt like I was back in portal 2 jumping around and bouncing from place to place. I was super confused about the introduction of the explosion potion though cos it comes out of a thing on the ceiling and anyone would dodge that normally as it's an explosion right? Only after feeling stuck did I jump into it and realised it was safe and the intended way forward.
I played on keyboard and it was a bit iffy at times but nothing that stopped me playing or got in the way. I didn't realise for quite some time though I could aim my potions with the directions though so at first I was trying to line up my shots from a distance to throw them. Thankfully I figured it out.
I would have loved to finish the game but with the boss mechanics seeming really unfair and the lack of nearby checkpoint it just wore me down after several attempts.
Overall this game is fantastic is almost all regards with a few light tweaks I could see this being a full game on Steam in the future and It wouldn't surprise me at all.
Beautifully made, incredibly polished. You all did a phenomenal job!
As far as constructive criticism goes, there is precious little I can give:
Overall, incredible job. This was honestly super inspiring to play!
First off, loved it. It showed all of the knowledge of a proper Metroidvania.
Started on a controller. Once I reached the first pot and brewed the first potion, I was no longer able to play on controller. Beyond that, selecting option on the menu screen with a controller was far too unweildy.
I loved the character animations for the main character and the monsters.
Some of the mechanics, like blowing yourself up for a boost, felt a bit fickle, but there didn't feel any true risk in experimenting. Overall a great game!
I loved the throwing explosions
It always amazes me when people make metroidvanias for jams, mini ones or otherwise, and this was damn good.
Phenomenal presentation as a whole. The character art and animation looked adorable and the audio was pleasant to listen to. The music went hard as well during combat lol. Who did the voice acting for the main character ? ( i.e her grunting ) The sfx for it felt perfect ngl.
The level design was great. I also loved the pace at which the environment art changed as well to provide some good visual variety. The pacing of the game in general felt perfect. Let it be the pace at which you got new potions, or the amount of combat arena sections and how well they were spaced out. However, I do feel like the square enemy type could've been introduced a little earlier. It felt like the bats were slightly overused in the middle portion of the game
Now, as others have said, the platforming didn't feel as tight as it really could have been. The jump and normal movement could've felt more snappy, but honestly, I think my main issue here was just how inconsistent the bomb felt. I wasn't sure if I was going to be YEET-ed towards the right, or diagonally towards the right. Probably just a skill issue from my end, but I feel like this is still worth noting.
Another thing I felt wasn't really too clear at first, was that the green slime lets you jump higher. When I saw it for the first time, my immediate thought was that it was a hazard or something ( i.e green = toxic waste or something ).
I think if it was blue or something like the bouncy goo in portal 2, it wouldn't give off this feeling. Or maybe if you had the player be forced to jump down onto a floor that was full of the slime, they'd find out then and there that it helps you jump or something ( Just an idea anyway lol ).
Same for the bombs as well tbh. It took me a good while to get how this worked at first. This is also probably just a skill issue on my part though lol.
Unfortunately, I couldn't beat the boss, and I didn't really try to beat it again, mostly because the platforming section before it was honestly the only part of the game I found annoying. And that's because like I said before, the bombs were kinda inconsistent, but also because the re-spawn point was way too far from the boss lol.
All that said, this game is still phenomenal for something made in 2 weeks. Props to your entire team. You peeps made something fantastic here.
Wow, there's a lot of good about this game!
The music and VFX stand out to me as really good, making the game feel much more polished.
The title art too is very eye-catching and well designed.
The enemy designs and pixel art are all very cute.
The world design is also very cool (nice touch with the parallax). I think it could use some lighting to create a greater feeling of discovery/intrigue that would work well with the music track in the beginning. It'd also be cool to see some secrets and hidden things but I know I know I'm asking too much for a game jam hahaha.
Also maybe just me, but it wasn't obvious to me that I would be able to freeze the tops of the waterfalls (which I assumed to be background assets).
The controls are alright, certainly of good quality for a game jam, but could use a few touchups:
-It feels a little difficult to control where the potions are aimed, especially when your target is something like a small bat flying around.
-Personally, the movement could do with being a little snappier, it currently feels a little bit too slippery for my taste.
-The ordering of the buttons feels a bit weird, and the change potions button wasn't taught in game I think? Using zxc plus arrow keys as my controls, c would feel natural for jump... I guess I'm being quite picky with this point lol.
Thanks for playing! There are, in fact, a couple of hidden rooms within the first area that just contain wood for bowls, but we might have to revise the sprite for the "hidden room wall" tiles, as it seems a lot of people keep missing them.
As for the waterfalls, I actually thought about that too, and we might make something like a blinking border in order to make it more obvious for the player that they are freezable.
As for the controls, we might actually add some kind of telegraph for where the potions are gonna go when you throw them, since you're not the first one to point that out, either that or we increase the bats' hurtbox. And about the button ordering thing... I honestly forgot I added bindings for zxc, which is probably why the distribution feels so weird haha. It is explained in game that the button to switch between potions is 'O', although I think I can see how it might be hard to miss.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback! I'll be noting some of these down in the "Known issues" section of the game's page :)
Game froze up my browser. It's not well optimized
I'm sorry, could you tell me which browser you were using and if you had hardware acceleration turned on?
Sadly, Godot 4 currently has plenty of performance issues when exporting to browsers, so I don't think there's much I can do about it, but I can try :/
Just out on a typical walk, firebombing the woods.
+ Crazy good execution. I doubt i can say much other comments haven't
+ Exploring feels great, potions are interesting
+ UI and controls behave exactly how you'd expect from an actual studio title, but this was made by 3(?) people
- For a combat system focused on projectiles, there are so many bats to kill.
- The keybinds on keyboard are kind of a mystery. Why K and I to attack and heal?
- Potions can be thrown at many angles, but choosing those angles with WASD is real difficult. Would've loved to use my mouse instead.
Thanks for playing the game! We might probably either increase's the bats' hurtbox size or reduce their number overall whenever the rating period ends, since they've been a recurring complaint.
As for the keyboard bindings part, what would you suggest would be a better distribution? The game was meant to be played with a controller, so choosing keyboard bindings that made sense was a bit of a challenge.
And about the potion angle thing, being able to use the mouse for aiming doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. The current system is heavily inspired by how games like Super Metroid and Hollow Knight handle aiming. I'll write this down and see what I can do after the rating period.
Thanks for your feedback and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
There's a number of good options to improve the bats, I think. Atm they hover at whatever position they approached from, which means they're never at the same angle twice. You could have them prefer remaining at one of the 8-way directions to the player perhaps, or exchange their projectile for a wide horizontal swoop attack so players have a chance to hit them as they approach. Future potion upgrades could also explode in midair to flak-cannon more agile flying enemies, perhaps.
As for the aiming/binds - Treating it like a twin-stick shooter (Binding of isaac and metal slug also come to mind) is probably best.
- Movement stays on WASD with other utility keys being proximal to the left hand (Q, E, Tab, R, F.) I'd personally put heal on Q, but that's subjective.
- The player aims toward the cursor's global position, allowing players to move and aim independently
- throwing a potion is on Mouse 1, and you can maybe have mouse2 for potion swapping?
Amazing level of polishing and content for two weeks, congrats! I feel that the movement could be a bit more fluid, as exploration could benefit from faster navigation. The music is beautiful. Great work!
Hi, thanks for the feedback! I'm a bit confused, could you be a bit more specific about what you would do to the movement in order to make it "more fluid"? Do you have any tips on how it could be improved?
One of my favorite things about metroidvanias like Hollow Knight or Ori is that I feel powerful just by moving around. Mechanics like dash, grappling hook, double jump, and simply making the character faster, are some of the things that make me enjoy moving around the map.
Great metroidvania! I loved the music, art and the overall atmosphere.
Amazing game! Beautiful music and art, I liked the gameplay too. Really creative! But the sudden slime difficulty part got me haha! :) Either way, good job, I'll be looking forward to seeing the progress of this.
This game is so cool. It's hard to believe you made this is two weeks, because it's just so much fun. You and your team really knows what their doing. The one thing I could probably hope for you to improve on is that the jumping feels a little off, it feels like it's really slow when coming down. Other than that though, I loved it. Great job!
Absolutely beautiful game! I can feel the care and effort put into this game. From the sound design to the art <3