Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Artistically, this game stands out nicely to me. I was a fan of the structure of the characters, enemies and world you got to traverse. The music was a nice touch as well. Though, I felt that the interpretation of the themes were implemented in a more simplistic manner; where alchemy was just a collection of items the player used in order to craft things you needed for combat, and shadow; felt like this was about the world and story put in place--more of the darker aspects, where the character has to defeat an evil entity. I don't think this is bad, I just didn't find this to be something overly unique during my experience playing. Along with that, I found, that while (after reading the GDD), you took inspiration from older games, the controls felt stiff in regards to the movement. When attacking enemies, while it made sense what controls to use to accomplish this, due to how you had to face said enemy, I struggled to be more accurate in defeating a few of them in the overworld and one of the dungeon-like areas. Overall, I believe the work done for this game was put together quite nicely, and would like to see more of it if the controls were easier for me to handle. All the same, keep up the hard work.
• Hey! I enjoyed my time with your little game here, i found the graphics very nostalgic, but an awful lot of polish will be needed here to bring this game up to snuff after the jam. A few things i noticed in my time playing: the characters hitbox is their entire body, but the camera is isometric, this leads to the player getting stuck on pillars or walls that are visually very far away from the character. This can be fixed by just making the hitbox for colliding with walls around the feet. The style of game you went for here requires a lot of artwork to feel good, and because the time in the jam was so fast, there probably wasn't a lot of time to do much in terms of animation for many things around the game, get those done and the visuals will improve! Purely by the metrics we measure as judges, this game is rather rough, but its absolutely got a sort of nostalgic charm to me that reminds me of neo pets and other early flash games. Some blurbs to the player explaining a few things in game would certainly help, like running out of power instantly leading to a game over, I assumed power was more like ammunition and let it run out, prematurely ending my time with the game. A quick look over your GDD, and its pretty basic in terms of detail for us judges to overlook, but I did enjoy Generic Serf Bootyjams being the name of the OST, got a laugh out of me.