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The Marvelous Monsters of Oz's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Story | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Characters | #2 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Visuals | #2 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Gameplay | #2 | 4.667 | 4.667 |
| Audio | #2 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Overall | #2 | 4.067 | 4.067 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
words cannot describe how good this submission is
bro really cooked with this one
lol
now with all seriousness good job, the gameboy asthetic is really good and the gameplay is also extraordinary, I aspire to get that good someday, max score in all categories
Thank you, it really means a lot to hear you say that! I'm really happy with how this entry turned out, but it was built on top of previous work. First I made a janky Pokemon clone in two weeks, and then I made enough improvements during RPG Mania IV to have a functional Pokemon clone game engine available for this jam. So I guess the first step to making a polished entry is having a rough one you can improve upon later.
I really, really like the concept and the setting here. I only encountered a few minor bugs in the web build, nothing too crazy. I liked the opening cutscene and there was still an impressive amount of content.
I think the only thing I didn't like was the system that hides tiles beyond the player's line of sight. I'm not against this kind of system in principle, but I really only noticed it when it made walking through some of the grassy stretches take a while because I got turned around due to the poor visibility.
I also really liked your Hokum-Mon designs, I think Crowvial was my favorite. Great work all around.
Thanks for playing my entry and giving feedback! The dynamic line of sight is something I've included in several of my game jam entries mostly just to demonstrate what can be done using with a custom engine. I think it makes sense to use line of sight in this game to make the world seem bigger and to show off the palette fade effects when a map tile transitions between the visible and hidden states, but I have no idea if I'm overdoing it because I can't get lost in the maps I designed myself. So that's really helpful feedback and I'll probably add more paths and clearings to the grassy areas, and eventually I'd like to add a minimap or some other navigational aid.
The effect definitely looks good, just a little bit more baseline visibility would be appreciated. I think this could just be the friction that is inherent to the oldschool Pokemon games, like encountering Zubats every 1-3 steps in a cave before you have Flash.
I only played the web build, at least what I could play of it, but I was pretty impressed what was on offer here. The web build definitely suffers from load times and hitches here and there, as stated, but was playable... for the most part. I definitely had to reload the page and restart the game at least twice though. Other than that though, everything here on offer is very well done, the sprite work is great, the Wizard of Oz theme is pretty fun, and I think the overall gameplay experience is spot on for bein' a Pokemon clone.
I'm pretty sure you already know, but in terms of 'bugs' I've found they were really only related to the selection of options during battle. Specifically the greyed out options don't lead anywhere (Items and Switch when you have nothing in the bag or extra Hokum-mons) and you can't esc back to selecting anything else causing the game to just 'freeze' and needing a restart.
The only other bug I was able to find was that all the moves (probably only Toto's Scratch, since that was the one I noticed) don't get restocked when going to the clinic, maybe there's another place to go or need an item, but the same thing happens when selecting Scratch when it had 0 left causing the game to 'freeze'.
In conclusion, a pretty great game that offers pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a Pokemon clone with a wizard-y twist... even with the Web build problems stated.
Thank you for the feedback and the bug reports, I hadn't considered the potential crash on the web build during battles when the Item and Switch buttons are disabled. The greyed out button crashes are all fixed now, but additional work remains to fix the load times, fullscreen mode, and save/load functionality for the web build.