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Keys to the Castle's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Gameplay | #12 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
How much do you enjoy the game overall? | #13 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Overall | #15 | 2.825 | 2.825 |
Visuals | #18 | 2.750 | 2.750 |
How well does the game fit the themes? | #22 | 3.125 | 3.125 |
Audio | #25 | 2.250 | 2.250 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How long was your dev time?
3 hours, split into multiple blocks
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Comments
An interesting take on the theme, especially since it's one of the few games to make difficulty change based off accuracy, rather than just "you miss, you lose" sorta thing. Which is a nice change of pace.
It's also got some nice art, especially mixing it up for the enemies. Though when the enemies overlapped it wasn't great, especially if you got some long word stuck behind one or two words. Made it a little hard to actually get it. Though that tended to be pretty rare.
I did run into a slight issue with the word "focusing" where sometimes when a new monster would show up it would reset the focus and lead to incorrect presses being registered. I managed to replicate it a few times. Not game breaking, but figured I'd mention it in case.
Overall though, a nice setting, some cool visuals and a pretty cool mechanic that makes difficulty go ABSOLUTELY crazy.
Side Suggestion from my chat:
Fun, but only when you lose few times, because it's way too easy at the start, and it's way too hard to lose, so it should get more difficult over time, because now if you just don't miss the easy ones, you never lose, and when you start missing, you lose very fast, as they start getting faster and faster, because when you fail, it get's just harder. Also sometimes the enemies were overlapping and you couldn't see what the text was.
Thanks for the feedback. I did feel that the game was too easy at the start, but I try to lean towards making my jam games too easy rather than too difficult, because it's really hard to judge the difficulty of a game you've been constantly playing during development.
I'm curious, was the game still too easy after 3 minutes, when the harder words started spawning?
I didn't even notice that there were harder words, in my mind I was like: "Hmm, there should be more difficult words after time...", but forgot to say that, but yes, it was, I didn't even notice that there were harder words, they should start appearing about 15 seconds in to the game, so there's at least some diffiuclty, because maybe you notice it, if the change is faster.
If you are good at the game you never lose because it doesn't get harder until you lose, otherwise great idea and use of the theme, the art is what it is, but trijam games dont usually have hollow knight art so yeah :)
It does get progressively harder, it just isn't as balanced as I'd like. It starts off spawning 1 "easy" 3 letter words every 3 seconds. At the 1 minute mark, it ads an additional spawner for 4-letter words every 4 seconds. Then at the 3 minute mark it starts spawning 5-6 letter words every 5 seconds. I find that once the "hard" words are spawning it's only a matter of time until I get overwhelmed.
After releasing a few game jam games that were just way too hard I've taken to always leaning towards making them easy. Especially if I don't have time for a real balance pass. After all, most players will only play a game jam game for about 5-10 minutes max, so they don't have time to get good at the game anyway.