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Verdant Fang's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Sound | #3 | 4.030 | 4.030 |
| Stealth | #7 | 3.970 | 3.970 |
| Play | #7 | 4.182 | 4.182 |
| Overall | #8 | 3.521 | 3.521 |
| Ambition | #9 | 3.788 | 3.788 |
| Aesthetic | #12 | 4.182 | 4.182 |
| Kink | #24 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Novelty | #24 | 3.455 | 3.455 |
| Narrative | #27 | 2.818 | 2.818 |
| Harmony | #31 | 3.212 | 3.212 |
| Horny | #53 | 2.242 | 2.242 |
Ranked from 33 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
i started early
I used some libraries I've been writing for a year or so, but all game content (art, music, sounds, game logic, game-specific rendering) was produced in the month of February.
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Comments
The gameplay is super fun! Its super satisfying to defeat enemies with a single stab. The music was also really nice.
Quite the fun game. I really love the puzzles and challenges as you progressed from room to room. The pixel are was really cool and the animations were a nice simple style. The music and sound effect brough a smile to my face. They were pretty cool. I felt the movement was a bit difficult at times when it came to some of the more platformer parts, like as though it were a little slippery. But outside of that it all really plays well. It was really well developed and pulled me in for a lot of fun. ~
The game reminds me of an older generation of action-platformers that were about maximizing their short playtime through intricate enemy behaviours and numerous traps. You don’t see these designs very often because players are not used to interacting with a shorter, more difficult game, compared to newer games which are always longer and more forgiving. I was frustrated initially, but it was manageable when I changed my strategy, and enabled checkpoints on every screen.
I felt the physics work against the game. The high acceleration and low traction combine to make scenarios where you end up overshooting your jump and fall into an enemy’s attack. The physics model can be fun, but it should be tweaked a bit to prevent the feeling of losing control of your character, perhaps by slightly reducing the acceleration and increasing friction.
While the attacks were fast and responsive, their frame-perfect nature is frustrating because of the difficulty of registering if the enemy had died, or how close you were to killing them. Increasing the active time by a frame or two would provide a buffer against the necessary precision and the inability to react immediately to whether you had missed or not.
It’s good for how short it is. The continued dismemberment is not my fetish, but I can emphasize with its thrill.
Thanks for the detailed feedback about the physics and stuff, that's the kind of feedback that's really valuable to me. I grew up playing NES Mario, so slidey careening characters feel normal to me, but I agree the balance between acceleration and deceleration should be tweaked, and maybe max speed reduced. Also, if you feel like you lose control when attacking, that's intentional. I adopted an "either move or attack" restriction, so if you start an attack you're committed to the same trajectory until it finishes. And you also have less deceleration when attacking on the ground, so that you don't lose too much speed from attacking. The attack hitbox only being active for one frame is due to the detailed stab animations, but I could probably fudge it for a couple frames without it looking too weird.
i always love to see SDL2 games or similar. i feel like they often feel snappy and responsive in a way that big game engine games just don't quite match, and this game is no exception. it feels lightweight and fast.
the pixel art is absolutely beautiful. the animations seem crazy detailed to me. like, how are there different death animations based on where the enemies hit you?!?! it's great.
there is one aspect of the game i greatly dislike, which is the mandated "r to restart." imo the restarts should just happen automatically, and should ideally take less than a second. but requiring to press r is especially bad. this is because i have to basically lift up my entire hand from where it is comfortably resting on x and z (or, at least, awkwardly stretch it from its comfortable position), and move it to press the r key, and then of course move it back to x and z. this feels like a gigantic interruption in the otherwise smooth control scheme, and it makes dying feel much more punishing than it actually should be. i don't want to sound like i'm over-exaggerating but i truly do believe this single feature basically broke the flow of the game completely, just because of how much of a physical interruption it is.
i suppose i should have considered rebinding the controls but i think i kinda forgot about that possibility.
anyways. there is a lot of great stuff here despite my gripes with the restarting. the gameplay itself is difficult but rewarding, although i definitely went on the easy mode with the checkpoints. i did grind out the boss fight though, which was fun if a little grueling. i think the spear is a very tricky weapon to learn how to use, especially due to the fact that tapping the attack key as fast as possible is kinda what you want to do to minimize downtime. but, this makes it all the more rewarding when you eventually figure it out.
Thanks for playing! Yeah I don't know what the big engine games are even doing during their loading screens. I'm parsing a bunch of text files and even doing some image analysis to find sprite boundaries, but the program still starts instantly even in debug builds.
I've gotten a number of requests for auto-restart, so I'll have to consider if I can fit that in as an option. I do want dying to break the flow at least a little bit, because I want the player to stop and consider changing their strategy, rather than just rushing through and hoping they don't die next time. Also particular to this game is that the game over screen is important for story reasons, because it reminds the player that their spear is their snake companion and builds attachment because it seems to be magically reviving you, both of which are essential to make later cutscenes understandable. I'll think if there are ways I can still satisfy these requirements with auto-revive.
(FWIW you can actually press R the moment you get hit, you don't have to wait for the "press R to restart" message to appear. That doesn't fix having to move your hand, but you can rebind it).
Yep, I’m a sucker for pixel art… and this definitely scratched that itch. Loved the designs of not only the characters, but the environment as well. I’ve always wanted to try and capture a “cave-like” aesthetic using a classic 8bit style, but never felt like I pulled it off as well as here. Simple, yet very effective.
As for the gameplay, it is a bit more on the challenging side. But I guess it makes sense given the length of the game (kinda reminds me of how Contra for the NES is only eight stages, but each stage is fairly difficult to get through. One of my favorite childhood games of all time XD).
Anywho, great game overall!
Am I missing something? The door in the very first room doesn't open. Tried grabbing the blue thing in the corner, I pass right through it. Playing the windows version, is it bugged?
You have to hit the switch with your weapon.
Quite an awesome entry! It feels super polished and well executed. Graphics feel quite unique despite the amount of pixelart entries to the jam, music was great and the sound effects were awesome, really creative use of a more in-your-face use of self-made foley.
It was quite challenging but I got the hang of it in due time, after that it was short and sweet which I can appreciate. I'm sad to say that a good deal of the challenge was from wrangling the control scheme alone, it felt frankly unwieldy and ill concieved, specially since both action buttons were so far from the movement ones, so close to one another, and just far enough away from the all too common to press respawn button to be a bit of a pain.
Control scheme aside though, the game was fun to play, and super well made for a jam. There was a lot of attention to detail (i loved that the spear got stained with the blood of enemies you stabbed, amazing detail there) and offered a good challenge which kept me engaged and wishing to get better to beat each new screen! Great project!
Thanks for playing! Arrow keys with Z+X and R to respawn is standard for this genre, so I can't really go against that. Were you trying to play with one hand, by any chance? I am planning to have in-game control customization eventually, so that you don't have to edit the config file to change the controls.
Really fun platformer, and outstanding music and foley!
I was expecting it to get hornier when the witch caught the player, overall the game doesn't feel as sexy as some of the other entries. However, it still stands on its on legs as a game, which is great!
UNMATCHED foley skills.
Absolutely loved the sounds. The music was a delight as well!
The gameplay was smooth and challenging, but not so much that I felt I needed to put it down for a while. I agree with a couple of the other comments that an upwards or multi-directional attack would have been useful for the boss battle - but it was still manageable!
This was a really cool game. Difficult, but not overly so. Loved the ending too. The sound effects made me chuckle, but they do the job surprisingly well.
There were some inconsistencies with the hit boxes, or perhaps I was just timing my attacks badly, but otherwise I didn't find anything to really complain about.
It's a great little game.
The inconsistencies you were sensing are probably due to one of A: you can't stab enemies in the feet (and they can't stab you in the feet), or B: the spear hitbox is only active for one frame (for enemies; it's active longer for switches and the boss's projectiles). Both of these are due to the difficulty of animating what would happen if you hit an enemy. I could probably fudge the animations a little bit without it looking too weird though. Thanks for the feedback!
Really enjoyed the combat. Felt responsive and was surprisingly punishing, and the all or nothing nature of the combat made the relatively straight-forward encounters feel tense and impactful. Loved the various ambushes and traps sprinkled in as well, felt almost reminescent of 1001 Spikes in a way.
Also, big fan of the sound effects.
Wow I loved this way more than I thought and I usually don't have patience for the more difficult style precision games. But it got me hooked enough to get good to figure out how to beat it. And those sound effects made me laugh and look forward to every one. Even though I sucked at the boss I was eventually able to get past her love what you did with her in the bedroom and her trophy lol. Not the horniest game I've played in the jam but it was a great time. I'm sure it's intentional to not have one but I would have killed for some ability to attack above me or maybe a slash. And as a primarily SDL based developer myself well done really loved the transitions.
Yay someone mentioned the transitions! I'm especially proud of them, they're custom shader code. I'm gonna be honest 90% of the reason for not being able to attack upward was because it'd require drawing more animation frames, and I'm not an artist and anatomy is hard. :3 I don't think it'd break the game balance much, I already make the bugs dislike being directly above you. Maybe some day...
I know the feeling about animations and anatomy. It was mostly the bubbles that made me want the upwards attack. Oh speaking of the bubbles I forgot to mention but I love how they weren't totally predictable. Shader code is something I haven't dabbled in myself yet.
Really fun to play! The super slidey action platforming felt fast-paced and visceral. Loved all the level design. The sound effects were super cute. Just a great experience overall! It's a bit hard to rate because it's so stealth I can't quite tell what the exact kinks are, haha. But I could at least tell you really liked making it.
I don't really think in terms of discrete kinks, but I find caves, snakes, danger, and strong women to all be pretty sexy. I think I'd consider danger to be the main kink of this game. Thanks for playing!
Oh and also, I didn't really advertise it but there is a way to play the game without clothes if you look for it.
For note, beat it on normal. Good art and animations, controls felt good, noticed a small funny thing where if you held jump and spammed attack while a snake, you could kinda fly.
Gameplay felt fun and tense, felt like I had to actually outplay the enemies. The boss though, that was kinda rough. With how precise the spear hurtbox was and how some of those orbs curved, quickly got a bit frustrated. Can absolutely see a good system with this game if you decide to go further with it
Thanks for playing! Yeah the boss fight was implemented at kinda the last moment, so its difficulty might not be calibrated that well. And setting enemies to easy just skips the second phase, it doesn't make the first phase easier. That's definitely something to tweak after the jam.
Well getting past the first screen took me an embarrassingly long time because I didn't realize that your attack doesn't happen until you release the button, which made the jump-hit on the switch impossible because I was holding the button too long lol. After that it was super fun! The enemies and difficulty managed to be frustrating in a fun way, which is a pretty tough trick to pull off. The first time someone popped out from hiding behind a screen and stuck me in the back I was laughing as much as I was swearing. Really clever all around and great comic timing, especially on the ending. Also, the sound design was genius. Big whose line is it anyway vibes and I loved it. Nice choice going the extra mile with difficulty options, too, really smart for a jam game. Great work!
I wish I could rate your game fairly, but unfortunately it was way too hard for me. So I will leave it to people with more frustration tolerance than me.
Sorry for being such a scrub. I bet it gets hot somewhere after the 5th screen.
That's all right, thanks for trying. Did you try playing with the Checkpoints option set to "lots" and Enemies set to "easy"? The game may still be challenging, but it does make it easier. There are also cheat codes in the configuration files that let you use savestates if that would help.
Such great challenge. I hope to try to beat this sometime after the voting period ends. I enjoy the sound effects you used here. Visually the game looks wonderful too.
Perhaps you should be revived automatically, because pressing R gets tedious after a while. Or just let any key to revive you.
Oh I managed to beat it. And interesting ending there.
Thanks for playing! If it helps, you can actually press R from the moment you get hit. You don't have to wait for the "press R to restart" message to appear.
Holy smokes, was not expecting to find a Dark Souls in this jam! Really loved this one, every encounter felt like a tense make-one-mistake-and-you're-done affair, and the thing that happens at the end was such a surprise I think I literally had my jaw open the whole time.
I found it pretty hard… which made actually beating the boss very rewarding! The aesthetics are amazing, I loved both the soundtrack and makeshift sound effects. The AI for the orbs can sometimes make them stay away for too long, which is a bit frustrating, but I really like how the other enemies have so much personality from it and their unique attacks. A very fun experience with a lot of love in it! And snakes are great!
Thank you for playing! I was a little concerned about the orbs staying too high up for too long, but I didn't notice it happen very much during my own testing. I'll give it another look though, and add it to my list of planned improvements for after the jam.