Play game
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.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
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.