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Witching Hour's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #2 | 4.455 | 4.455 |
| Creativity | #5 | 4.091 | 4.091 |
| Gameplay | #10 | 3.182 | 3.182 |
| Overall | #11 | 3.348 | 3.348 |
| Presentation | #12 | 3.636 | 3.636 |
| Story | #18 | 2.455 | 2.455 |
| Horror | #21 | 2.273 | 2.273 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Which Theme from the list did you choose to implement in your game?
Witching Hour
How did you choose to implement your chosen Theme in your game?
The witch is brewing a potion to end the zombie apocalypse along with the helper of her minions
Did you implement any of the optional Bonus Challenges, and if so, which ones?
Yes. 1) Witchcraft - shoot magic missile, ward sides of cabin 2) Familiar - her minions that do repairs, stir the potion
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Comments
This was a fun game, but also somewhat consusing at first.
This game could certainly use a short tutorial level. There's a fair amount of game mechanics, it's easy to get overwhelmed, the difficulty ramps up quickly and it seems like you need to restart this multiple times to grasp the basics.
That said, the gameplay is fun once you figure out what to do and the graphics and audio are very good, so good job overall!
Thank you for the kind words and feedback!
The action is purposefully turned up a bit at the beginning to set the player on edge. I think for many players it’s a bit too much and we could scale it back a bit. We’ve talked about adding difficulty levels and let the player choose where to start or change too next game session. As for the tutorial, we’ve gone with feedback messages for now. Maybe a few more messages to nudge the player in the right direction would be enough to serve as tutorial for this little game jam game. We’re working on a post jam update now and will consider all of this and more.
I’ll be sure to tell our artists that yet another player loves their stuff! Thanks!
Ok so after reading some comments on this game, it seems more like a ME problem than a game problem, but I still stand by what I said in that it seems a LITTLE unfair for the player, and hopefully my video shows and explains it better. I did enjoy it, it's visually impressive, but maybe it's just not my type of game and I'm really bad at it, hence why my video isn't super positive.
Thank you for making the video! What an eye opener!
I hate to hear a player say they’re bad at a game. It’s actually the games fault. Well, at least this time. We neglected to give player any feedback and made the mistake thinking that instructions at the beginning were sufficient. Since there’s no tutorial either, it’s completely understandable why a player would be confused by it.
We will have a post jam update that should help with that somewhat by introducing messages during the game. When you try something and it doesn’t work, the game will tell you why and even what you might want to do instead.
The story around the spellbook is that it imbues the minions with powers they don’t have otherwise. That is they can now shoot magic missiles. They also get a speed boost fixing things and stirring the cauldron. But this is in effect only so long as the witch reads from the spellbook.
Any character can stir the pot and multiple can at the time time. However, the rate the potion finishes is independent of the number of characters stirring it. I sometimes have the minions both stirring and trade off depending on the mana they have to defend and repair.
The ward cast from the crystal ball only lasts for so long. (5 warded enemies to be exact) Another fact we still do not mention anywhere in the game. Shame on us!
Thanks once again for trying our game and the excellent feedback!
Oh yeah for sure! I will admit I was trying to be nicer because it was a game jam (My game has issues too of course) but I did enjoy it for what I could play. I am excited to see the post jam updates, but if I can make two minor suggestions, make the mana do more damage, don't have to constantly click on the enemy, and maybe let the minions fight without mana but only do a little damage.
We just did a post jam update. While we did not make the magic missiles do more damage, I think we did everything else. The game now includes a tutorial (optional and skippable), the minions can do a melee attack when they can’t cast magic missiles, and characters auto-fire magic missiles till the target is dead. Oh, and the characters auto-generate health too. Plus there are messages added to the hud when an action is denied so the player knows why.
There are still existing bugs for sure. We could spend a very long time polishing this and other games, but there comes a time when it’s time to move on to the next adventure!
If you try it out again, thanks for your time and we hope you like the update!
Awesome! I will try it out asap!
This was a cool looking game with a great idea! It reminds me of Overcooked, but with a bit of a twist. Especially, I thought the art direction, animations, and environment were big positives for the game. It felt well thought out, and the single room was a smart way to focus on mechanics and gameplay. I think this is a pretty strong game + premise.
Personally, this isn't the type of game I would typically play, so consider my below feedback with that in mind and a relatively large grain of salt :).
I really struggled to win the game, but not in a way that I felt I could learn a better strategy and eventually win every time. There were attempts where about 15+ zombies entered the shack, and there didn't seem like there was a way to win when that happened. I ended up only having a successful run because one of my minions got stuck on the wood pile and was able to brew the potion from there. I really wanted something besides the crystal ball to alert me that a new wave of zombies was coming to better prepare. However, this could all be because I am very bad at this type of game and may be perfectly suitable for your target audience.
One thing that would have improved my experience drastically is for the minions to have an attack mode. Once I right click a zombie to target them, I would expect my minion to keep firing until the zombie is dead or they run out of mana. But in my game, they did not. I had to constantly right click to attack, which made it really difficult to multitask during a zombie wave. Minions also couldn't both gather wood at once, even though it looked like they were. Once wood collection finished, only one minion would have any wood. I'd have to restart the process for the other minion afterwards. This may have been intentional, but it wasn't obvious to me that it was.
As others said, my characters often got stuck on each other, which required some extra clicking to herd to the correct station. Better navigation routes would likely fix this problem relatively easily. In addition, I had several instances of something going awry with colliders where the witch or a zombie would end up in the ceiling. Once there, they were stuck until something else bumped into them.
Overall, though, I was pretty determined to beat it, so you scratched some itch in me to play your game more. So good job to everyone on the team! This really feels like a game on its way to being something really cool once it's streamlined a bit more.
Thanks for all of the awesome feedback! You brought some new issues to light and reiterated some, which is fine. More votes to things that we really need to fix.
Sounds like the rng gods really frowned at your! But that just points out a balance issue that we thought wouldn’t be that big of a deal. There really aught to be a limit to the number of zombies allowed in the cabin at any one time. And we could base that off a chosen difficulty level.
When you said that you wished for a way to be alerted to a new wave starting, I instantly thought of Left 4 Dead. I’m not sure we’ll do that, but it’s something we’ll definitely consider.
The attack mode is a good idea too. Or maybe just make it a “one shot” deal. And I knew about the simultaneous wood gathering issue but ran out of time/energy before the deadline. When we started the game, we started with stations where either only one at a time was allowed to interact with it or multiple could and it didn’t matter. But for resource giving stations such as the wood pile, I should have made the progress bar character specific (in that each character had their own progress bar). This is something I’m thinking of doing as well. Especially when I think about using the interaction system in future games.
I’ve never experienced an issue with characters ending up on the ceiling! I’ll try to reproduce this as it seems a game breaking bug when it happens. Thanks for reporting it!
Thanks again for the feedback! This is what I consider “gold” in game jams!
this one is pretty good, it has gameplay with just enough challenge it doesnt become frustrating.
Although its not intuitive and requires you to read the tutorial in the beginning or you cannot play the game which in a game is often very off-putting, and also the path finding would always get stuck on my characters which was a bit frustrating. Using the witch's attack was also a bit janky you had to spam click the zombies that had some inconsistent hitboxes and i would often end up clicking the floor instead which would throw me into them to be eaten.
So for gameplay i would simply remove friendly collision and make the attack automatic after the first click.
The theme was spot on, but if we talk about horror, there is none to be found.
Overall though it was enjoiable and definitely gets high rating on gameplay and theme
All very valid feedback! Thanks!
The new one here is the hit box for the zombies. I’ll need to look into doing it different. I think the minions suffer from the same issue when trying to select them.
I should be able to get the characters (friendlies) to path around each other by adding obstacle avoidance. If I allow them to occupy the same space, I’m afraid at times it’ll be hard to pick one out or become confusing when they overlap. I could use a steering approach and add separation so they don’t do that, but that’s more work. I’ve done it before and it can be hard to get working in an appealing way. I’ll figure it out one way or another though.
Thanks!
A good looking game that gave me some COD Zombies vibes, it probably needed to start slower with more of a tutorial feel so you could find how everything worked. I think main down side is that i felt and was over powered fairly quickly - although I did better in following attempts.
My minions did get stuck as was mentioned and it didn't seem at times I could break them from their tasks (to help fight the zombies).
Great music and art and design in general and certainly met the theme.
Thanks for playing and the feedback!
Yep. Working on minions getting stuck right now. And I’ve noticed that at times selecting them doesn’t seem to work, but that’s because their collision shape doesn’t move while their mesh does during animations. So players click on what they can see, but that isn’t detected because it’s the collision shape that counts for that. I’m thinking up ways to fix that too, but as no one had said anything about it (that I remember anyway) I wasn’t sure if I should spend a lot of time on that. Now I know. So, thanks!
Yeah, COD Zombies was an inspiration of the game. That and Five Nights as Freddy’s.
Its a well made game, although i admit i had a hard time finding out what i had to do, it could use a tutorial. Apart from that the art and the concept is also nice and keeps with the theme.
Thanks for trying our game and the feedback!
Yes, a tutorial and more help seems to be needed. Sometimes these things are left to the last minute and don’t make it in, but they are important. We’ll try to to better next time!
Thanks!
Good game! A unique idea for the jam and the premise and aesthetic were cool. The game mechanics were also unique and enjoyable too. I quite liked the artistic direction and the models for the characters.
The soundtrack did a good job of emphasising the intensity of the setting.
I know others have already pointed it out, but I'd say the main issues I found with the game were the avoidance and pathing for the characters getting stuck, and also the difficulty, given the length of time the potion takes to make, either a passive healing system, or maybe a health item drop would have balanced it out a bit.
But all in all, a nice and fun game, great work!
Hey! Thanks for playing and the feedback! I’ll definitely pass it on to the team and look into the character pathing issue. Thanks!
First, I loved how the art and soundtrack fits the theme and the idea of the game is so creative and unique makes me want to check out other game you guys developed.
The only issues that I saw is the characters and enemy's getting stuck probably because of collision. I don't why it doesn't let me repair the doors.
But I love the idea of the game of that your limitation is you only have the witch and the one minion to fend of the zombies while waiting for minion 2 to finish the potion. If you decide to continue this game, my suggestion is to add rounds and every time it gets more difficult. Goodluck <3
Thanks for playing!
Yeah, avoidance between characters is something I didn’t get get working. Maybe on a post-jam update.
The witch can’t repair anything. If it was one of the minions not being able to repair a door this might be because they didn’t have any wood from the wood pile. Or maybe it’s a bug. I’ll need to do some more testing to see.
The idea of adding rounds and ratcheting up the difficulty is a cool idea! Thanks for that! We’ll keep it in mind if we decide to do updates to the gameplay after the jam.
Nice game! I won at the price of one of my minions, rip.
I really like the idea of the crystal ball, and it was satisfying placing a ward on a bunch of zombies trying to enter, and it was tense deciding if I should fix the doors right away or keep them on the cauldron a bit longer
The characters did sometimes get stuck on other characters while going to the place I wanted them to go
Thanks for the feedback!
Yes, I never got the avoidance working between the characters, unfortunately. Something to put on the “fix after jam” list.
Thanks!
Wow, definitely a unique game! Love the art direction and sound design.
The gameplay is also very cool! I think it's really hard (or maybe I'm just missing out on some mechanics), but that's a good thing since it encourages experimentation. One strategy I came to use was always having wood on stock with the minions, so they can be ready to repair as they are helping the witch brew. Given this strategy, I think it might be nice to have an indicator that a minion is already holding since I lose track sometimes.
One other mechanic that I thought could fit (but you might disagree) was maybe some way to heal? Or atleast regen. On one hand, the game gets very tense near the end where you have low health. But sometimes I messed up near the middle and get stuck with low health for the rest of the game.
But anyway, definitely one of the most unique gameplay I've seen in this jam! :D
Great suggestions! I’ll be sure to pass it on to the team!
Thanks for the feedback!!