I 100% think your game would do very well on mobile- and if you do port it please let me know because I found myself having quite a lot of fun playing it! It feels very polished by the way- sound, animation, and gameplay were all very smooth and felt very professional. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the balancing by the way- that's always one of the hardest parts for me to wrap my head around. I'm one of those players who will backwards longjump my way into and out of problems, which makes it very hard to tell when I am setting the technical bar too high or low for the playerbase (doesn't really apply to Vale though, being that it was a narrative).
Speaking of! Huge thanks for checking it out! It's got those couple kinks I mentioned, and the ending is a jarring end (you'll see what I mean haha, no it's not a bug), so it has a way to go but this was our groups first game release and I feel pretty good about the direction it took.
Oh- and also if you add more abilities to your game you gotta keep rolling with the puns now! You set a high bar gotta keep it going, haha. Had a good laugh at the names.
I'm soo curious about your game, can't wait to try it out tonight, but now I've been writing feedbacks on itch since this morning, and I'm still getting paid by my company so I need to stop slacking off x) (gosh I love remote)
I'm happy that the game was fun to you, means a lot to me as I never really shared that much with the community for years of game dev. I'm actually starting this JAM to feel like being a community guy hahaha so you may see me around this week quite a lot !
Let's keep in touch :)
Edit: forgot to talk about scopes haha. It's obviously a challenging question to tackle, since to me it solely depends on your experience. At my beginnings making a JAM with two moving platforms and a player that can jump was almost everything I could handle in two days, but with time and experience you'll find better and better workflows. To this day the best thing I found for JAMs is to create content based games. It's tricky while programming, but that's what I like since I'm a software engineer. The essence of it is to find a system, for example a combat system, and making it as modulable as possible. This way no matter the time constraints you''l be able to create content quickly and even polish it. If I take my game a an example, I have all this that's modulable:
- Input system, it's decoupled so my players and AIs can all extend from it, this way coding new AIs is really quick as I don't care about handling their movement but just their "way of thinking"
- Upgrades, every entity have some kind of "Module pool" and each module is an actual self centered ability that can be attach to anything. So ofc the player get have dynamic modules at runtime, but I also give my enemies and allies modules in the same way so I don't have to handle any kind of specific attack system. Everything is based around the player.
When scoping my game, if I have entities other than the player, I like to make the player not standing out. Essentially in my game, the player has the exact same component as any other entities, the player has just the ability to gain more modules but that's it. And that's all, that's how you may obtain a rather polished game in 3 days like me. Creating a new module is a matter of 15min max if I have to extend my module, and an AI would maybe take 20min, all that's left is spending time balancing and polishing the game, which in the end takes the most time.
Oh that's a nice way to look at it! I quite enjoy that you have built yourself a modular framework for quick prototyping and rapid development- and honestly that's a really good idea. One of my personal projects right now is template creation, making control schemes, camera schemes, interactable systems, etc in a versatile way where I can piece the "blocks" of code together to create a way to test concepts quickly and start putting a higher amount of playable prototypes out in a short amount of time, seeing which have the best impact or gameplay and figuring out which ideas to devote more time to! (Nothing quite like the feeling of designing a game for a while and then realizing the harsh truth- that it isn't fun!)
Feel free to reach out any time I'd love to chat concepts and anything you feel like. I'll probably open a guest chat channel on our company discord at some point for developers to chit chat back and forth if you'd be interested. It would be nice to have a community of like-minded people who are interested in the design process!
Putting some effort in your workflow is definitely worth it, I tried putting a library together from a variety of my projects so that I don't have to re-code every extentions and tools from one project to another and it's definitely a lot of time saved.
I'd love to chat about design concepts with you in the future your idea sounds great !
Feel free to add me on discord: Nawlian#1487
Also now that I'm off work, time to give a try at your game :D