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Dedicated Healer's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Cohesiveness of game elements | #1 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Overall uniqueness of the game concept | #1 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| How well did the game follow the constraint | #2 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Overall | #2 | 4.267 | 4.267 |
| Unexpected or surprising elements in the game | #3 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| How well did the game visuals follow the SNES theme | #5 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Quality and fit of sounds and sound effects to the game | #7 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- This brings me back to the old zelda style dungeon crawler! Well done! This fits the SNES jam super well.
- This was of my top two favorite games in the game jam. Really well done and fun to play through. I really liked the pixel art and the top down, dungeon crawler, turn based combat elements. <3+ for the great vibes. Everything worked together really well, and I would definitely be hyped to play a full game based on this. :) I think the concept fit the theme really well, as you weren't playing as the main character. You were the sidekick essentially, but still important. I could see how that dynamic of playing through the experience of a sidekick character for a full game could be interesting, maybe explored in deeper ways, maybe have role reversal later in the game even. I experienced a browser-based issue with the sound not playing in Safari, had to the switch to Chrome. Not a big deal, but wanted to note that for future reference. Really solid, fun, and well done development! Thank you for sharing your time and skills to make this! :)
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Comments
I love this! Great concept, great writing, and of course very SNES accurate. This game embraces the “you are not the main character” theme in poignant and hilarious ways.
I found a bug. Go to the options screen, then press X, and the game will crash:
Thank you for giving it a spin! And for the bug report too, hrm. I'm not sure where to begin unpicking that since it seems like an interaction across multiple code sections and how it's interacting with running on the browser? I'll peck at it and see if I can reproduce and start sorting it out. Or at least, stop it from occurring in later projects (I don't always remember to test the options scene, so I'll make a note on it).
Taking a quick swing at it, I don't get an error opening and then canceling the options screen (it loops back to title as intended), but I'll have to try it from a clean cache. If it's some kind of storage issue it might not trigger if there's already like, successfully stored information (or at least, that being true rules out the storage issue). What browser did you get this issue with? It might not be pertinent, but it's the first thing I can think of.
This was cute! I didn't enjoy being the healer and not the big bad hero, but that was the theme constraint, so well done!
Thank you! I appreciate y'all hosting the jam and such, it was a really nice exercise!
Nice!! I really like your take on the jam theme, especially touches like "Zeffir forgot to equip you with the pine" :D The art style and colour palette you've used are also very cool.
I imagine there'd be quite a few directions you could take this if you did pick it back up again in the future :)
Thank you for giving it a try! I definitely spent most of my dev time making the sprites and tiles and stuff, so it's nice to know they went over okay! I meant to do more Zeffir behaviors but I didn't have a lot of time around my studies ^^;
The master like color pool I used was the "Jehkoba 32 " palette via Lospec (https://lospec.com/palette-list/jehkoba32). They also have a 64 color version but I liked the restriction of just 32, from which I derived the 15 color palettes per sprite, and I think overall I had 4 of those out of the 8 or whatever the SNES apparently had a limit for? It's kinda neat just browsing palettes, I dunno XD
My next project or two in my queue are spooky, but I'd like to do a brighter-colored RPG like Dedicated Healer on a sorta bigger scope at some point. And while I'm not sure I'd make DH it's own full game I'd probably take the scenario of it, flesh the dungeon and village out more, and use it as part of the early game in said larger project.
Oh amazing! Yeah, I love browsing Lospec palettes too, though I'm a programmer rather than artist so don't get very far with them 😆!
Will definitely keep an eye out for whatever you are working on next 😊
I'm more of an artist than a programmer; the most I can do is some clumsy JavaScript surgery to jury-rig my RPG Maker addons into performing the aesthetic stuff I want it to. But I'm also a pretty amateur artist as well, so, c'est la vie ^^;
I have horror stuff on the roster next; I'm hoping to put something out for SCREAMJAM and I'm pecking at another short RPG that just has kind of a grim vibe all around. After that though I'm hoping to make something cheery, maybe around the holidays if I am weirdly on-the-ball in my production schedule XD
I'll put a full playthrough into Karma when I have a moment, but I'd love to see whatever else you cook up too :3
Ooooh exciting – fun to have some variety! I’m taking part in the Revival jam, working on more of a point and click style game for that :) Not quite sure yet what to do after, but feeling something RPGish again!
Oooo the revival jam looks super cool, I have half a mind to join but I'd be startin' behind the 8-ball and I still have midterms kickin' around, and the other jam starts in 7 days...point and clicks are super cool though, so I'll have to remember to stop by and check out your submission once it's served up ^^
Thanks! Yeah Halloween season brings around some cool jam themes :) Good luck with the midterms!
I really enjoy it, hope you turn it into a full game because the concept has a lot of potential.
Thanks! I'd like to do something like it on a fuller degree, but I'm not sure when I'll manage it or how. If I was going to keep the bookends and just flesh out the middle, I'd probably make it something like DQH Rocket Slime where you are intermittently rescuing Jellies as you advance through a larger dungeon, I think? Not sure. Either way I appreciate you giving it a look :3
Cute game really nice concept. I can see your inspiration from dragon quest for sure on this. It's honestly a very cute game. I hope you continue to work on this and finish it!
Thank you for giving it a go! I'm not sure I can continue Dedicated Healer necessarily, but I do really hope to make a fully fleshed Dragon Quest-like at some point in my tinkering! A lion's share of the time went into doing the pixel art, and I'm happy it ended up with a good vibe to it ^^
Probably the only things I needed to round the bases on were some more set dressing for the dungeon, face graphics for the characters, and some more tuning and balance. There was also some more independent behaviors I wanted to set up for Zeffir, like using a healing item after battle even though he has 80-90% of health, to kind of reflect some quirks old AI controlled part members did in RPGs that unfortunately fell to the time budget.
If I return to it, it will probably have to follow the "main" plot you're not actually involved in in Dedicated Healer, but I think the events of DH would still take place. I think it would be a good way to introduce the theme around power if that remained as a theme I wanted to involve in the "main" game.
What can I say, the concept of you not being the protagonist is solved perfectly!
I enjoyed the story of the little slime who is incapable of doing anything by himself and needing someone, who can help him as the healer slime can help him too.
The RPG maker is for sure the best way to create a game like this, which gives a lot retro games vibes.
Also the graphics and the music are really simple, as a compliment, that resembles the aspect of this game which is very funny to play.
Thank you for giving the game a go! It's sort of inspired by Dragon Quest 4, which I have a lot of fondness for. If it gave off that very retro vibe, than it's certainly functioning as intended!
RPG Maker MV is my darling, but it takes an awful lot of fussing with custom packages for it to get the aesthetic output I want. There's a lot of things I wanted to tweak with it to get the feeling more SNES-y, but my talents are more in art than coding :V
I'm swamped in the middle of midterms/finals, but once my schedule clears up I'm hoping to take a swing at the other submissions and will have to give y'all's Wars a go. I love mecha stuff a ton so I feel like I will appreciate it a lot ^^