Pretty complex, I like it!
Play game
Haunt the Vault's itch.io pageRate this game
In order to rate this submission you must be logged into itch.io and have submitted your own entry. Anyone with an account can leave a comment.
Stuff you did not do in February
I made a few concept illustrations before the Jam started.
Comments
I think this is a good start for a “handcrafted” puzzle game, but I don’t think these mechanics work as well for random generation. Randomly generated navigation/movement puzzles don’t tend to have an interesting “hook” like an intentionally-designed puzzle can. I think the core mechanics would work well for a game designed specifically around them, but like this it feels a lot like a randomly generated Sokoban relative where everything has tits for some reason.
I think that random maps will work better with a few additions and bug fixes. I also want to push the game a bit more into a tactical RPG area after the jam with more abilities and effects. A big change that I made from my intended course for the jam was to make the objectives mandatory. I envision the final state of the game to have timed maps with fully optional goals that give experience to upgrade your powers, and boss battles with mandatory goals as a final challenges that test how well you've done.
Fun game! The candle system is a really interesting take on the "card battler" genre, and one I haven't seen before. Moves can be re-used a limited number of times before they rotate out, so you can plan your turns, and that adds a lot. I always felt really smart when I was able to perform multiple actions in the same turn.
The puzzles (like how the heck do I break a vase?) were interesting and the solutions made sense once I thought of them, so excellent job on these. I initially found it odd that the ghost can't pass through occupied spaces, but once I got a better feeling for the gameplay, it made perfect sense. Blocking spaces is sort of the point, after all! I did struggle with the interface a little, and it initially took me a few tries to "hit" the UI elements, but it was intuitive enough once I figured it out. An indicator of when the cursor is over something interactive would've helped me personally, I think.
Really fun art style too. Just the right combination of silly and lewd. The candles really made me grin once I saw what they were. And, well, why not put a butt on a snake?
Thanks for including a Linux build. 🐧 I ended up playing the hotfixed Windows version, because it was submitted really close to the deadline and the jam allows fixes for game-breaking bugs anyway. Sorry to hear about the tech issues, but I'm glad to see you were able to get the game published anyway, it's really neat.
I'm very happy to hear that the candle system is already doing a bit of what I wanted! I was afraid that with all of the late cuts I was making it would feel like a weird mechanic to have. I wanted to make the skills more customizable, so you're right in calling it a card battler, it's very much what I was aiming for. Highlighting interactive elements is a good idea, I think there are a lot of small quality of life changes I can include to make things feel a bit faster and intuitive, I was just way too behind on the essential additions this time to get a proper sense of how the game feels.
Two hours before the deadline I suffered a really major Godot crash that broke a bunch of scenes. I was able to catch and fix most of the issues, but some got skipped because they were in really random places. The current Windows upload is a hotfix for those problems, but it was submitted slightly after the deadline, if you want to play the game in its correctly broken state for rating purposes, please use the Win32 one.
I used a new and rather unfortunate animation technique that took up way too much time, so none of the intended plot of the game has been added. All of the events and some of the map transitions were supposed to have a bit of dialogue to accompany them.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.