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Umbra Arise MMO's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Cleverness | #282 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Artistic Style | #385 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Theme | #652 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Playability | #803 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
Ranked from 5 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.
- Congrats on making an MMO. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately there may or may not have been 3 Zafaroth's at the same time. Which one was the real one? No one will know. Clicking diagonal squares was very difficult. If there's a mechanic to regain health, it should have been easier to find.
- The amount of Zafaroths in this game makes you wonder why Zafaroth didn't believe in this game. The shadow theme is a bit less noticable but the alchemy theme is quite well implemented. The gameplay, while clunky (controls), is very promising and could keep people playing for a while to unlock things. Artistically the game looks and sounds nice. The rate limit, while taking away from some playabiltiy, adds a new layer of gameplay, making it feel like a rythm based dungeon crawler. The music could be fitted to this a bit better and idle animations.
- Pretty good, saw a lot of Zaf's which was kinda weird. Other then that, it would be neat to see this developed further, with more elements.
- It is really impressive seeing actual mmo in place done in two weeks. The game is definitely meant to be played with friends. The tick limitation on the game, made it a bit difficult to play. The alchemy aspect of the game seems to be missing. Over all even while playing there were concerning amount of Zafaroths playing at the same time... Game could be developed into some fun payers party game. Good luck in development.
- How dare you. Impressive feat but i think the game suffered for the technical work done to make it an MMO. the controls are very clunky and hard to get used to. mixing the orbs together is nice and on theme, but the shadows part is more or less cosmetic only. Very hard to regain health leading to monsters eventually chipping you to death.
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!
MMO, One server, Everyone connects.
Turn/Tick based combat/movement.
Kill npcs & players and consume their shadow souls to gain stats.
Sacrifice stats to unlock special skills (35 of them).
Don't get greedy, corruption will destroy you... or maybe help you?
Win.
Extra Notes
Seeing new developers doing game jams inspired us to also push our limits. Lot of times was helpless and stressful but was very fun. Hopefully we inspire others to also push their skills and while this is all for fun, we love some fun competition on who gets the most players talking about their game :D .
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Comments
Great job, great game! I am become death, destroyer of noobs. camped at the level 1 based and got way too strong...I apologize for the beat down I laid upon a few new players. It was neither pretty nor fair...Just imagine sitting down to try out a game jam game, getting ready to grind and then being smacked with 1k+ damage from an invisible enemy...I suspect they may have thought this was a bug, twas not. You have been smote by the Madpeas. One day, this game will be re-balanced to prevent this, today it is perfect.
Not really,this game encourages bullying
Unironically kept me engaged longer than the new Diablo IV season. There is something so pure about an MMO that just lets you grind mobs. Especially when this is an MMO game jam submission MMO made in 2 week MMO game MMO
Mom! They actually made an MMO! Are they allowed to do that?!
Crazy idea but well done! Gives some oldschool MMO vibes. This could be the next big thing, I feel it!
This is great, thought it was going to be a meme haha! Crazy how much you got done. I'll have to play it more. It's very polished--I don't see any issues really. Awesome job!
Yes.. they really did It. A MMO in a jam, and a fun one. I can see this going far! Well done.
Wow, I thought this was a meme game making fun of people who think making an MMO is easy. I was expecting meme-ish dialogue and undercooked gameplay featuring pretend MMO elements to try to trick some people into wondering if the game actually had MMO parts to it or not.
Well, uh, no. It's not that at all. It's actually fantastic??
I went mouse-only due to my cat napping on my chest and couldn't believe how well I could play the entire game with one hand (waifu update when?). The presentation was so clean and gameplay basically felt finished besides the many skills obviously needing balancing. Exploring deeper into the world felt scary and adventurous. Dividing my attention between moving, attacking, and figuring out the combination system felt so good. Seeing another player filled me with so many different chaotic emotions and thoughts until they ran away and I continued slaughtering the innocent(?) enemy creatures in cold blood for more power. The thought of what could have happened in that chance encounter still stimulates my neurons.
Absolutely well done to the team! Brilliant entry for the jam and good luck in the future with this masterpiece in your pocket.
haha :D Comments like this makes all of it worth it! appreciate you sharing your experience, we will keep working on the game after the jam join the discord (under the game in description) or https://discord.gg/G5tX57MQtP would love to have you try the game after the updates!
Also cat pic tax or? :D
purfect
This is a crazy project to make for a gamejam. I like the upgrade system, but the movement feels really slow. Like hitting things and moving. The 8 directions don't always feel that intuitive, but that's something you could get used too. When I played it, it was only me and one other person online, so maybe that's why it felt empty, with more players the combat and movement would probably feel better!
I wish I had the patience to check out what 35 souls give me, maybe i'll come back someday with some friends!
Still impressive game from a technical standpoint!
The ambition! The audacity!
I picked this up too late, so I only saw one other player (who fled from me!). All I could really do was kill mobs, and I eventually started losing health every couple of seconds, which I didn't expect? I assumed the thing in the bottom right was a mini map, but it didn't show anything useful (like the way back to the portal).
BUT I was on the internet!
Reaching higher corruption than the level you are in causes passive damage.
You can collect the orbs that drop after killing monsters using skill 4.
Once you do that they will appear in the box bottom right 😄
That's not a map but the orbs you collected, you can click 3 of them then sacrifice them.
This will give you skills depending on the combination you do 😄
I collected many orbs, but the circles never filled in :/
You gotta click the orbs with the mouse :D that will fill the circles
That was impressive for a 2 week jam project. The game's pace could be a offputtingly slow, but for a free MMO made in 2 weeks? Dang, son, it ain't nothin!
Combining the souls to unlock and upgrade skills was neat, and played into the combat choices well (what you eat is what you grow into, with some swing depending on your upgrade choices).
It brought me back to the feeling of late-stage MUDs and early MMOs.
Alrighty, finally took a look at this game!
From the get-go, the first thing I noticed was the music! The music is nice and went in a different direction than what I expected, which was pleasant. The second thing that caught my eye was the UI! I thought the animations on the UI look really clean! Same goes for the icons in general.
I also dig the sort of neon look the characters and enemies have.
One thing I wish there was was some sort of log or place to record the combinations that we discovered and what they make. There's a pretty surprising amount of combinations and they all possess multiple different effects. I must have spent a good 20 to 30 minutes trying to figure out a very specific combination I did by accident, so during that time I was just whacking monsters in the head, grabbing their souls and hoping I'd come across the right combination again, so it would've been nice to have a place to refer to regarding these discovered combinations (I did eventually figure out the combination).
I was also surprised that there's sort of a "stealth mode". I didn't use it because the character I made was more of a "me strong, me destroy" kinda guy, but I might revisit at some point and try to focus on building more towards a stealthier side to have a proper taste of it.
Another point I like as well is that the combat isn't necessarily forced, even if it's the point of this demo. The character has tools to dash away from any monster fights and could only probably be caught by another player. Speaking of which, I also liked that there's an upgrade for a player to deal more damage especifically against stronger players. Sadly I didn't get to see it in action, but it's cool to have stuff like that that can still level the playing field!
A suggestion I have for the UX is to have a small description show up when hovering with the mouse over the different ability buttons. I wasn't sure what each button made my character do and had to play around with it. I'm fine with doing that, but there's definitely people who might not be patient enough to explore options, which is unfortunate, but it does occur. Putting some sort of description as the mouse hovers could mitigate possible annoyance from those players.
At first, I wasn't sure if I was vibing with the gameplay controls, but after some time tinkering with everything, I started to get pretty used to them. I didn't quite figure out how to dodge properly yet. I'm not sure if dashing away as an enemy tries to attack counts as a dodge, but if it does, I don't recall seeing a signal that I did it successfully. There were mechanics focused on dodging, so at some point I'd like to try and understand the dodge mechanic a bit better.
I do definitely see the base of an MMO here and it does give me some of the vibes of some other MMOs I've played in the past. I'd be curious to see some sort of event more PvE-ish in the future against a boss, for example.
During my time with it, I encountered no glitches at all. I did encounter two players. The first one killed me in my first minute on the game, and the second one I killed with one hit, so I had fun with that.
If you guys were capable of doing this in two weeks, I can see you being able to scale this up for sure. As many others have said, this is really impressive. I could stay here saying things I'd like to see and all, but I'm sure you guys have a lot planned and a lot you wish to do already. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves. Very stellar work!
Thank you for your lovely comment 😄 we will be working on improving the introduction of the game, we do want to add a skill book, and many other features 😄
TBH I had a lot of fun writing down all the spell combos in Notepad++ rather than just having them told to me, but having in-game UI for it would prob be a better way of doing it for the casuls
As ambitious as an MMO in a two week jam is (and it is really ambitious), I actually am more impressed that it's turn based, because I love turn based games and implementing such mechanics into an MMO seems very difficult to do right. On top of that, the visuals look really polished, and I love the glowy characters a lot. It's a genuinely pretty game, great job!
As a turn based games lover, I loved this games! The combinations are a very fun mechanic as well as the progression. For the Game Jam the game is perfect, buit if you are thinking in expand, I would put more difference between the levels, as well as more things in the scene, not just walls, to give it more richness. Congrats, a very fun game!
I found myself wanting more while playing the game as it felt empty a bit. It's a great idea to do an MMO and u did well but It could of needed a few things and like others have pointed out most of the inputs can be pressed down simultaneously as the inputs are feeling like they are done on fixed frames rather then a constant on frame based update unsure if that is due to the MMO portion or just due to code but overall it was a good attempt and good prototype and be happy to see if the movement gets fixed in a future update and the game gets much needed content to feel purpose while playing.
Also glad u didn't go the Fullscreen mode like most people have done for the jam and have good optimization especially for an MMO and not complaining that I don't have good enough "Hardware" to run Webgl games.
Did you try pressing the orbs and sacrificing the orbs to get skills? there are 35 skills :D the main focus of the agme right now is kinda to be strongest and kill other players. So if you were playing alone it's not as fun!
We already built a roadmap for after the judging peroid, got some exciting updates coming
Sounds good. Look forward to it.
Impression amount of work, game is pretty polished and perfectly matches the gamejam theme. Well done!
Actions were not very obvious at the beginning maybe put more description (moving, attacking, shadow etc...) would help. And maybe prevent enemies to attack you right in front of the spawn xD
Other than that, gameplay loop is well done and matches your MMO spirit. Art and polish is really good. You can be proud of you :)
The game seems pretty polished! Obviously the mechanics work very smoothly, but I would like to offer some constructive criticisms
The fact that I had to hold 2 buttons to move in-line with the grid bothered me a lot. it was strange to move on diagonals of the grid when press ion just one of the WASD
It is not immediately obvious to me why this game needs to be an MMO. It is need that the multiplayer functionality works, but the core game loop seems to be timing and positioning of your character. Unless there are difficult bosses later on the justify multiple people teaming up on an enemy.
It is also not immediately obvious to me how the theme of shadows ties into the game exactly.
These are just minor criticisms on an otherwise very well-made game! Bravo!
You can click on the orbs and sacrifice them which gives you skills. Mmo because there is PvP, killing others is how you get stronger more than the monsters 😄 ofc much more content planned
Ok first of all that's insane for a 2 week jam, great art and very good implementation of the theme!
now some feedback:
1. I personally didn't like the turn base movement, I feel this could work better with regular movement, and I felt the the controlling system with the 8 directions is very annoying.
2. I feel that if you wanna keep it tile based maybe the use of mouse to select where to move or attack might be better.
3. you need to add feedback sfx and animations to the mob attacking asap, i know its probably because of the time constraints and because you made a FCKING MMO for a game jam, but you gotta fix that asap I feel like I'm attacking air
also what backend you use for the sever/s? everything feels real smooth!
well fcking done dude you're putting us all to shame :(
impressive achievement, that's a playable mmo, i even saw another real player!!
this is just ridiculous XD congrats!
With multiplayer… as an MMO… I can't even imagine the amount of work put into this. Obviously a very big flex on everyone here, but it's a really interesting and well-made game!
The controls do take a few minutes to adjust to, but it quickly grew on me. The gameplay is addictive: kill mobs and gain P O W E R. I liked having to time my keypress before the 1.5s action tick, but I do wish there was some visual indicator off to the side of how much time I had before the tick if i wanted to switch my actions last second.
I initially didn't know you could click on the orbs to sacrifice them, so I went a good 10 minutes without leveling any skills, just went around killing mobs without even picking up their souls.
Then I felt like things were just too slow. 25 mobs, then 50 mobs, 100 mobs to ascend? I realized I wasn't using the sacrifice system. Once I started using it, I was absolutely staggered when each combination led to something else, and I just kept wanting to explore more combos to see what skills there were, to the point that I had to start keeping track of the combos I went through already on a notepad. I don't think I was able to get through all the skills, but I'm crazy impressed with all the combos that were coded into the game. I like how the game funneled me to explore those things on my own, even though the beginning tutorial didn't explicitly say those thing.
I think everyone else has the same sentiment here, but damn fine work with this one.
Would love if you join our discord (it's in the game page description) we will likely host some event where we log in together same.time, would love to have you there.
Thank you for the comment, you are the kind of player we made this game for. The way you described your experience with the game makes us happy haha. And yes it's all about gaining power.
Our main inspiration is actually Solo leveling if you heard about it.
Fun fact: I did the skills in 7 hours straight, there is 35 total, and we didn't test them. I just coded them and we released without ever checking them 🤣most of them seem to work, some are a bit broken
The gameplay is strange, but I had fun. Very impressive results, and a smooth experience. Great work.