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Tenebris Colosseum's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #233 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Cleverness | #282 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Artistic Style | #401 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Playability | #804 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- The game was fun to play, but took me a hot minute to figure out how to play (even after thumbing through the tutorial). Thankfully I was able to get it together. I like that the game is multiplayer. I think the premise of the game is really neat. I think you should put more time into this idea after the game jam is done, because I think it has a lot of potential. Thank you for the submission!
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!
Tenebris Colosseum is an action based autobattler-like game set in an arena where the player plays as alchemist trying to score the most points by creating monsters from items that he collects to fight other alchemists monsters.
Collect items that are thrown into the arena, summon monsters by combining the items in a sigil (there are over 30 unique monsters with different stats and abilities and over 20 different items with various rarities and stats).
Controls
Keyboard (Player 1)
Movement - AWSD
Picking up items - F
Dropping items - G
Next Item - E
Previous Item - Q
Adding items to sigil - V
Clearing items from sigil - C
Spectating the battleground - Tab
Summoning monsters / combat - Space
Keyboard (Player 2)
Arrow Keys - Movement
Num 0 - Pick up item and Add item to sigil
Num 5 - Drop Item
Num 1 - Previous Item
Num 3 - Next Item
Num Period - Spectate monster combat
Num 2 - Clear items from Sigil
Enter - Combat and Sigil Activation (monster summon)
Controller (Xbox, Any Player)
Left Stick - Movement
X - Pick up item and Add item to sigil
Y - Drop Item
Dpad Left - Previous Item
Dpad Right - Next item
Left Stick button (push/click) - Spectate monster combat
B - Clear items from sigil and Combat
A - Sigil Activation (monster summon)
(Note: We technically support any controllers, but our team only had Xbox controllers to test with)
Extra Notes
The game is designed to be online multiplayer for up to 4 players but for the scope of this Game Jam (and for security reasons) we decided to create a demo with AI Alchemists. That's why there is combat like pushing, stunning and different kind of sabotaging implemented. It is already possible to play with up to 4 players locally (couch multiplayer) with full controller support.
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Comments
This is really fun! Took me a moment to get the hang of the controls - But once I did it was great looking for +5 items and trying to figure out what kind of monster I could build to have a good shot at the middle.
The visuals and music are incredibly impressive - I love the character art, the tile art, the UI style - my favorite is probably the summoning progress bar; whether through animation or shader or anything else I’d love to know how you did that! Gameplay too - the inventory system is really robust; the tooltips, main menu options, spectate key, and pausing are nice touches, and the work you’ve done on control systems (and couch multiplayer!) is impressive.
I did find the game froze a couple times - the music continued, but no inputs functioned and the timer didn’t tick down for about 10s - and at one point I went over to check on my opponents and they knocked me out of the map entirely, and I couldn’t get back in! And I would argue your controls could be simplified to make adding an object to the ritual into the same key-press as picking something up - those two contexts shouldn’t conflict and there’s less finger movement that way. But other than that, a very smooth experience!
You’ve mentioned developing it further in other comments; best of luck with working on it after the jam! Let me know when you do so I can try it again :)
Thank you so much for these kind words 😊
The random crash/freeze is something we've experienced during development. We couldn't track it down because Godot hard crashed. We thought we fixed it for a long time, but it came back for the final builds.
Same thing with the AI pushing you hard, it was fixed, but somehow came back in the final builds 😅
Super stoked you liked our game, we'll let you know when we update it!
Very unique concept! Reminded me of some Warcraft 3 custom maps where you had to create monsters to send to other players while they built towers to defend.
I felt like I was doing pretty well, managed to find a lot of +4 and +5 items very fast and quickly create a lot of monsters .... but still ended up dead last in FFA xD. With 35 points while best AI had around 130.
Was I supposed to go fight with my monsters (never tried fighting myself) ? Or are the AI just insane? :P
Title screen looks amazing.
We never could agree on balancing. I was honestly against the current version, but at any rate, it's a great learning experience for my teammate who's never really released any games.
At the moment, creating better monsters (and spamming mid/weak ones) is better than creating the perfect OP monster. It was designed this way, but some very bad last minute calls thrown off the balancing a bit.
It doesn't help that a performance fix actually made AI item selection insanely fast. Throughout development, it was "alright", but now it's super fast, thus spammy in the final build..
Thanks for playing, and glad you enjoyed our game! We plan on working on the game post jam, at least fix some of these balancing and spectating issues we have 😅
This is an amazing concept! I hope you keep working on it, and I'd love a tournament mode with ai opponents, also keeping the controls on screen and gamepad support!
The arena feels a bit too large, and the character art feels more developed than the arena. But the art itself has plenty of character, great job!
Hi! I thought we already have gamepad support because of split screen, but I'll double check it, just to be safe.
Glad you enjoyed our game!
This is incredibly cool as a concept and has such good potential.
Summoning items by combing randomly placed pickups is a fantastic mechanic and then having them duke it out in the middle, amazing.
The only problem is I can't see the fight going down in the middle, would it be possible to have a "big screen" in the arena that your player can always see, you could easily add a second camera that just shows what is going on in the middle. It'd make the game so much more thrilling.
The scoring system (I'm presuming that's what it is) in the middle doesn't really make sense and there is no clear way to know how I should be improving my summons.
The basics are here for a truly amazing game which can be played alone or in multiplayer. With some polish this could be a crazy good release.
Thank you for your kind words!
We are aware spectating the battles is important. We do have a keybind (tab) that centers the camera on the battlefield, but we would love to further refine this mechanic (or just give better spectator tools) post jam!
We'd love more feedback on the scoring system. The display was finished, but the actual scoring system was never finalized 😅
Glad you enjoyed our game!
Wow just being immediately hit with such a cool title screen and music was awesome.
The tutorial was great and really explained the mechanics of the game. Creating monsters is really cool but I had no idea how to select different items to add to my sigil and eventually just figured out it was mousewheel which isn't listed on the gamepage. (Also the spectator button is wrong too)
Creating monsters feels awesome and wandering around to grab items to summon them is a great premise. I just wish the screen was more zoomed out or I had little a little mini-map or battle tracker to show how things were going off-screen without having to move the entire camera by pressing tab.
I couldn't beat a single fight, tried the 4 player FFA and 1v1 and the AI just seems to constantly throw enemies out and they sit on the centre in a group and just nuke anything you send over.
Maybe I just suck? Haha.
I was super impressed you managed to create a 2 player split screen, doing that in a jam game is kinda insane.
I loved the pixel art characters and monsters but the environment was really samey and found it easy to get lost in a sea of repeating tiles. I also kept losing my sigil and it being so small / dark didn't help it stand out.
Overall it's a fantastic concept and works really well. I'm not sure if it's just me being bad at the game or the mechanics just needing a fine tune but it felt really difficult to balance and I just threw whatever I could find into the sigil and hoped for the best.
Would absolutely love to revisit this if it gets updated in the future!
Hi! Thank you for the review!
I didn't notice it was missing, but Q-E keys are the intended ways to scroll the inventory, while 1-2-3-4-5 and the mouse wheel are alternatives. I included Q-E in our description, thank you!
We might've ran into the good old developer bias, where we got experienced with the game, and set the AI a tad bit too high. Not to worry, there's a mechanic that periodically deals damage to a dominant player's monsters, although I did notice that some monsters can tank these hits :D
Glad you enjoyed our creation! We'll make some adjustments after the scoring is finished for sure!
Thanks for the detailed and in-depth review!
We edited the game description to have up to date controls now. Minimap is a great idea, something we will definitely consider implementing. Yeah I agree the game is little bit way too hard as of right now, we unfortunately didn't have much time to do monsters/items/ai balancing so the alchemist ai seems overpowered. The game is supposed to be online multiplayer so I hope once we implement that (and make a proper balancing) you will revisit and play with us <3
Thanks again for your review, really appreciate it.