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Hi Cemus, no problem and I do highly apologize for my last minute review or your game.

Besides, I now have a reason to keep an eye on you so be sure to send in another magical girl game hopefully in the next MGGJ session (─‿‿─)♡.

Hi Jnpicklee, thanks for your reply and informative explanation to my questions.

I do apologize for my ignorance since I have not thought that the controls were built with consoles in mind, this actually made sense then since I assume incorrectly that the game was built with PC controls as it did not feature any gamepad controls. It would be nice to inform in the main page that gamepad controls are recommended so long as you have them in place.

Its good that you are continuing development with the feedback in mind and I can see that you have what it takes to get a good game out with a novel concept. So, I wish you all the best with this current dev and any future developments.

After checking out the English version of the game manual, you guys should try hosting a game session in the MGGJ discord server.

I'm surprised the game is surprisingly a gem in the lot because its a magical girl card game with procedurally generated level selection and has solid gameplay with its card mechanics. The developer seem to have went with a retro pixel art style in a monotonous color scheme which is alright considering that the sprites is consistent through out the game. The game doesn't have a tutorial or even a description on its main page then its an added challenge to the player to figure out the game and what each card actually do. The pictograms on the card is pretty obvious with the common attack and defend but there are some special card among the starter deck which I think increases attack power and some I have not been able to try out since I can't get past the second stage bandits.

Anyway, this is a surprising find in the game jam entry and although the objective is clear wiht the beginning of the cutscene, I hope the developer could furnish the main page with some details about the game.

Glad you like the lengthy review, good that there are consideration for improvements to the game after the jam ends.

Lol, I like the long title and yes a lot of magical girl titles are getting longer every year. Too bad I couldn't think of one for mine (⌒_⌒;) .

Cool and thanks for the explanation.

Le temps de Escargot is a nice and quick top down shooter game where you play a magical girl that has the power to slow down enemy movement. Apparently what I understand from the developer is that it was made in regards to the Paris Commune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune). The game is really short but the mechanics and gameplay are all playable. I've enjoyed this little game and hope to see more from the developer.

Really nice kinect novel adaptation of the original short story. The execution of it was done pretty well as the quality artwork and voice acting enhances the experience. The interactivity with the  single choice is a good step in complementing the experience as well.

Thanks for checking out the game and I highly appreciate the feedback too!

I really apologize for the missing sound effects since I got caught up with work and had almost no time to select and edit the audio clips for the game.

Thanks for checking out the game! Appreciate the time you took in trying out the game and giving us some useful feedback!

Definitely going to stay tuned to another exciting episode!

Hey Ran, thanks for playing the game and I appreciate the time  you took in giving me some good feedback points.

Yes, the particle wave duality mechanic is intentional and the waves are balanced so that it has a short life span/range with high armor penetrating damage while the quarks are low damaging but long range weapons that bounces off armor. There is no restriction in changing between the two states (note: for the first generation of bullets/waves) so its a kind of play style I want to encourage that requires some strategic play into the game.

I think you got one of the more rarer bugs because I do get that as well but it rarely happens  and I can't seem to recreate it. I suspect its a WebGL thing to so I will figure it out once I'm back at updating the project.

I appreciate the suggestions as well, and will be glad to answer them all:

• "...have a better way of introducing your game aside from using texts."
  • True, since I crammed everything thing with the tutorials into a single level, I got a lot of feedback that it should be spread out, which I am in favor of too. So yeah, I have to think carefully about spreading the tutorial into several stages because it does seem overwhelming with the chunky texts.
• "Why did you not add any sound effects?"
  • I kind of went on a hiatus from the project for the entire month of April due to other projects. I had plans to put them in during the rating period but work just caught up and clients got impatient.
• "...are a little bit too ambitious for a month long game jam?"
  • Exactly, it humorously ambitious and I did not expect the game to evolved into something huge. I only realize it getting overladen a week before the game jam submission ends so I just kept course ended up not being able to complete 90% of the stages.
• "but imho you should've spent some more time polishing your game"
  • Which continues my answer from above, I did plan to polish it during the rating period but ended up on a hiatus from it.

As for the warp button its the space bar only and the focus mode is left shift using the default keyboard mouse layout. The game allows you to change between 4 KBM layout which you can select from the settings menu from the main menu  or in-game menu.

P.S.S. Yeah, I know about it and its an intentional design for the first magical girl... Its suppose to be a dev secret btw (⌒‿⌒) but I will make a much cuter one the next year.

Are You Certain About That? Well, I'm quite certain this visual novel has tons of comedic elements and it does have shine with its funny conversation and slapstick jokes revolving the game Jam themes that they picked. Seriously, I'm pretty much certain it IS a gem of a comedy too.

So Are You Certain About That? is a whimsical and light hearted comedy kinetic novel about four characters (not certain of their relationship tho) and out of the two, Wanda and Ellie, are able to transform into magical girls. The story and dialogs are well written with some funny bits here and there and can get hilariously weird at some points, certainly in a good way. The character art is well drawn for the visual novel genre and the characters have facial expressions of their own. The CGs are really nice with good color composition and layout. The UI and graphics use is well made and does fit well with the story genre. Its a nice short comedy that teases the game jams themes so basically the developers manage to pull that off with a laugh. I got to enjoy the character dialog and and had a few chuckles here and there which stands out as something fresh for me compared to all the entries in the jam.

Really like the concept and idea that electrical energy can be absorbed and redirected against the enemy monster while being able to stored it as fuel for the slow motion effect. The lightning effect is really neat and I manage to fry a group of three enemies at one time. After playing the game several times, you should consider further develope the game in terms of the the attack system and maybe even turn the concept into a puzzle based game utilizing this attack mechanic. I would like to see more of it if there are plans for more development.

By the way, the main menu UI is really fantastic and is a good setup for your future games.

There is a lot I wanted to write about but I'm out of time so all I can say is...

Good job!

So I manage to find some time to try out this game and wow, this concept is pretty unique in its way and surprisingly its built using the Panda3D framework which is kind of a niche game engine as an entry for this game jam besides the MegaZeux ones.

So I tried the game and I like the idea of how the twirling mechanic maintains a force on that keeps the player character on a sloped surface without falling off. The game has quite a steep learning curve due to the bunch of buttons at the player disposal which confuses me at first but I got around it by trying out each key on my own and discovering that its basically made up of two sets of keys, with one controlling character movement relative to the camera direction, and the other sets is for the camera orbit/zoom controls. Somehow the jump and twirl button is grouped with the camera controls which is not a big deal but I notice that the arrow keys were not present as part of the UI which only shows the camera controls. I didn't get to read the instructions in the comments below (due to spoilers) or on the page (the yellow text blends in with the wallpaper making it hard to read). I was assuming there were UI hint for the character movement in the game but unfortunately there isn't any in the game.

So my suggestion for control key is that would it be possible to shift the camera rotation/zoom controls to the mouse instead? I'm not familiar how Panda3D handles the control system but it would be easy to pick up the game with mouse movement controlling the camera direction, which help with pointing the character direction as well. Besides that, I notice how the character movement is different when twirling on a vertical wall and on the horizontal surface. The former feels right since the left and right arrow key moves the character horizontally and the up/down moves vertically. Where as the later seems have the character strafe around the camera point, making the character move around the camera. Obviously I could rotate the camera in that direction but notice that strafe is tied to the camera origin point and is not actually a linear strafe. Its a common issue in early 3D adventure games where navigating the character to a transition point to the next scene with the camera angle at a different configuration screws up the character relative bearings to the camera direction. One way to resolve this is to have the camera strafe along with the character so the camera doesn't rotate in any way and maintains distance to the character. One other controller suggestion is that since the twirl is pretty much used through out the entire game, it would make more sense if there is a switch on/off state button rather than holding down the twirl button for long periods of time. This way players could  turn on or off twirl and would have a free finger for the camera controls.

Besides that, basically the game has good ground work here and the mechanics is fun to play around with. Since the game starts off with a mission, an indicator of where to go would be nice since I do know I have to collect 4 bells from the first cut scene but since I'm not familiar with the terrain or how the bell looks so I was a little clueless at finding it. There was one near the start point but it looked like a rock at first and there wasn't any indicator that I actually picked up a bell. Maybe something to highlight it or a UI prompt saying I picked up a bell?

Anyway, I can see you have put in a lot of good effort in the level design and populating it with tons of fun models so do keep up the good work and keep on developing the game. Hopefully my suggestion could help improve the UI/UX side of the game since it vital when new players are exposed to a game with a niche concept. By the way, I only notice the walkthrough and other stuff you post down in the comments after trying out the game.

Sora (prototype) is pretty much as the title says a prototype that shows some good mechanics used and basic animations that made the game really fun to play even with the lack of polish. The rad and high tempo use of the music track that builds up during the boss stages work really well with what it is intended as an intense boss fight.

Magical Girl Concept:

Sora, a magical girl dresses as a priest, possess magical powers to slow down time as well fire a blast of penetrating air projectile. She basically fulfills the magical girl trait/trope but could use a bit more development in her design to make her stand out more like a magical girl.

Visual:

I find that the level of detail and 3D model art style resembles a PS1 era game where the medium to low image resolution and low poly models gives it that retro feel. Its pretty well implemented with that style as a beat'em up game and it matches the enemy design elements and context in the story. The effort put in to designing the level is commendable since there is a lot of attention to detail due to the various objects and textures used in the level environment. The character as well as the enemy models are animated sufficiently enough to make the game appealing but there is a lot of room for improvements in terms of smoothing the effects and the transitions between animation states. Lots of visual effects have been implemented into the game giving it a much vibrant look in the outcome.

Audio:

The music was used in such a manner that it gives an intense impression during the boss fight. The tracks were either layered or swapped into much higher tempo creating that intensity feel of almost beating the boss. I like the idea of the music being used in such a way to create that tense atmosphere though, it was a little of a let down when the game boss isn't finished at the end as the music got really good when it transitions into the last one.

Theme:

The developer picked Time Dilation and Entanglement where both themes were seen being used in the game mechanics itself. The main character, Sora can slow down time which is relevant with time dilation. For entanglement, the boss split into two with both of them sharing the same health pool.

Challenge / Engagement:

Th game is challenging in terms of having to constantly run around the game field and avoid being hit by the enemy mooks. Its challenging since the horde of monsters keeps coming and can saturate the movable area. There are instances that the enemy can group hit stun lock the player character in place making it unavoidable to escape. Though crowd management can be easily achieved by using the air projectile attack which can penetrate and to travel through several enemies in a group, causing massive group damage. Besides that the time slow and parry is mostly used during the boss fight where the boss only give a brief second to the player to attack after she is parried. The boss fight was really challenging with some surprise change up in the attack pattern but this can be curb by baiting her to initiate the attack at an early state. Besides that, the gameplay quite engaging with some cut scenes when reaching the boss fight. On thing to note is that the boss isn't complete so after reaching the third music track the boss would stay invincible and the health bar never depletes.

Overall:

The game need a lot more of development and polish in order to make the game a complete experience. Even though the game is still rough around the edges and unfinished, I can see that there is a lot of good effort and time invested int the game. I had quite a lot of fun with several play through of the game and hope to see it come out of the prototype stage and into a complete game.

Tengoku: Eternal Sunset is a well polished danmaku/bullet hell game with good amounts of bullet patterns and challenging boss fight. The main character, Angelica is an angel and has to fight through 5 stages consisting of several types of enemies and three bosses. In the final stage, the entanglement theme is part of the game mechanic where the three bosses share a single their health pool. 

Magical Girl Concept:

Angelica displays magical powers of flight and is able to fire bullets or lasers. Her full character design isn't present in the game but it can be seen from her top down sprite that she has angel wings which is a magical girl trait.

Visual:

The art style is simple and clean with little complexity in the character designs. The number of sprites used in the game are sufficient for a small bullet hell game and the color composition is spot on, where the bullets are brightly colored and enemies don't blend with the background, allowing players to identify both bullet and enemy positions. The minimalist style background isn't too distracting and it gives a good sense of the environment where each of the stages are being held. UI art and layout are neatly done with all the necessary indicators placed on the right side of the screen while the title is placed on the bottom right. The UI style resembles a Touhou game which if not mistaken is the developer's main intention.

Audio:

The music tracks used in the game is catchy and matches well in each stages. A good number of sound effects are applied to most actions in the game from firing bullets to enemies dying.

Theme:

The developer picked Energy and Entanglement where both themes have been successfully applied in the game mechanics where the first involves collecting energy and the second is during the final boss stage where the three bosses share one single health bar.

Challenge / Engagement:

There are three difficulty settings in the game ranging from easy to hard and an additional 1 cc play through in order to reach the true ending. The game is quite challenging between the difficult as the hard mode makes the enemies take more hits and seem to be a lot faster than the other two modes. Besides that, essential drops like the life, and bomb feels a lot less in hard mode. In other words, the scale of difficulty seem to correlate with the enemy difficulty and drop probability while not affecting the enemy spawn count or bullet pattern. Besides that, the player starts off with less health and bomb count. Besides that the challenge also comes from the enemy behavior where they are able to aim and fire at the players in any direction. Moving on, the story is written without any issues but it is quite short and most of it is just regular banter between the boss character and the player character. In other words, the story doesn't have much development or that further reveals the situation as to the opening description to the game.

Overall:

The game has good ground work done with almost no lag or gameplay issues, I have a stable 60 fps throughout the game even during boss fights with heavy bullet spawns. The game has more than enough content to be considered complete but additional UI like the settings menu and having an in-game menu will definitely complete the game further. The minimal art style gives the game a unique sense of it feeling like an arcade game. The game is easy to pick up with the familiar control scheme.

Reviewer notes: This review was done via HTML5 on Firefox browser and on hard mode till the end of stage 4. Final boss stage was evaluated in easy mode.

[Narrator voice begins] On the previous episode of Tama and Paisley's adventures, after Paisley came to realize her true feelings towards Tama, she awakens as a magical girl and confesses her feelings to Tama. After months have passed, Paisley has yet to receive an answer from Tama and decides to try again on Valentine's day but not knowing there lurks in the shadows an unknown group who plans on testing the strength of their Entangled Hearts. So be sure to tune in to tonight's short and highly polished magical girl game and find out if the two magical girl's heart are truly entangled as one [Narrator voice end].

Entangled Hearts is a game that is part of a series of game jams about the adventures and relationship between Tama and Paisley. In this latest part, the player plays as Tama, a magical girl wielding the powers of art, battles against the nightmares appearing through the city as she seeks to save Paisley from her captors.

Magical Girl Concept:

The game portrays several magical girl who wields a magical weapon and can also transform between their magical and non-magical form.

Visual:

The art style is really nice and it portrays the magical girl world in a vibrant manner making it feel like it came out from a super hero comic book. The choice of using pixel art sprites and animation gave it a very polished feeling to the game and is very consistent through out the gameplay. Every sprites, which includes the character, enemies, and parts of the background, are all animated and it can be seen that it is done with a lot of care and effort put into it. The UI art and design is clean and laid out neatly which isn't distracting in any way while being able to visually show the player character status.

Audio:

The music composed for the game is well in tune with the art style and the genre for a Beat'em up. Every scene of the game has a track attached to it, from the main menu to the boss fight so their is a good amount of tracks to keep the player entertained. The sound effect gave the game an added bonus to the feel and feedback especially during combat.

Theme:

The theme picked is Entanglement and Energy. Entanglement is immediately displayed in the title of the game and also found in the story where it is mention whether both Tama and Paisley's heart is truly connected. As for energy, it is part of the story and in the game mechanics where the player collects a sort of magical energy from fallen enemies and is used to fuel the healing magic or allows Tama to fire a ranged attack. (Spoiler Alert! Start) Later in the end it is shown that when Paisley and Tama worked together in battling Tama's doubt, a large amount of energy can be seen released after defeating her doubts (Spoiler Alert! End) .

Challenge / Engagement:

The game has several levels featuring many enemies types that consist of either melee or range attacks with some range attacks being able to track the player character position. The game level of challenge is quite balanced where you get a group of weaker enemies with a good mix appearing while at times harder but only a couple of them appears at times. (Spoiler Alert! Start) The difficulty isn't very apparent during battle with the nightmares or minions until the player reaches the first and final boss fight which consist of a magical girl, number 21, and then Tama's doubt which requires a good level of dodging enemy attacks (Spoiler Alert! End). Besides that the story is engaging in a way that it drives the plot towards the romance genre and how there is also a sort of mystery being revealed mid to end section of the game. I expect this is possibly a setup for the next release so it good that there might be plans ahead of time.

Overall:

Mechanics in the gameplay is solidly built with some fine tuning required on the combat segment. I find that the move distance on each attack executed could be toned down so the player character doesn't move into enemy range while the animation attack speed could have been a little faster. The artwork in the game is absolutely wonderful and it shows a lot of passion and care has been put into building the world for the two characters. The choice of music track composed for the game is pretty accurate with the game depiction and suites really well for the genre. The story is well written with no issues and has a solid direction with what comes next.

Scarlet Heels is a horror mystery visual novel that follows Marion, a private investigator who uncovers the mystery behind the disappearance of several girls from the dance school. The story is written with mystery in mind and the art style uses noir and pictograms as representation of the visual part of the story.

Story and Art:

The visual novel is well written with has no issues and has sufficient enough content to tell the entire story while having a solid direction from the start. The depiction of the story with the noir stylized art is really effective and helps captivating the idea of a mystery genre. The use of pictograms to represent part of the story work really well in simplifying the visual needs of the story and gives the reader an immediate sense of who and what is happening at the moment. Good use of ADV and NVL dialogs since it creates a sense of transition between scenes and forwarding time in the story. The dialogs between the two main character Marion and Charles were smooth flowing and natural with a good sense of distinguishable identity and their relationship on the matter. The depiction of the victims through a painted artistic manner gives both the feel of horror as well as beauty, something that isn't easy to explain in words. The audio used pair well with the entire visual novel while the climatic segment had its own track that sends chills down ones's spine.

Theme:

(Spoiler Alert! Start)The theme that was picked is conservation of energy which is acceptable in this context since it was described how the victims are drained of bodily fluids (a resource for the magical plant) and becoming dried husks. Besides that the game does feature a magical girl, albeit for a short moment during the climax segment, where the missing girl, Hazel, was able to grow the life draining vines engulfing the entire house which can be identified as a magical girl powers(Spoiler Alert! End).

Overall:

Its a good short horror mystery that could be expanded on further since the story ends in a manner than writes off the mystery for lunch.

This is pretty much a nostalgic trip for me where back in the days when games did not have such sophisticated graphical fidelity and due to limitations are displayed in chunks of bitmap fonts.

Its nice to see submissions like this once in a while since this reminds us how game mechanics in the past is no different with what modern games can offer. Besides the gameplay is pretty solid even with the lack of graphics and seeing that its another MegaZeux game, I'm astounded by how it got pretty modernized with a HTML5 release.

Anyway, the gameplay is fun and quite engaging with the dungeon crawling and  searching for all those upgrades just to be able to survive the next level below. I manage to get to B9 dying to a Nightcrawler in one single hit but on several play through I notice the game does a lot of one hit kill at times. It could use a little fine tuning with item spawn rate because there are instances where I had a play through with 3 to 4 pickups consisting of Citrine rings which doesn't seem to do anything. Also sometimes I do get lucky with the stat boost but it seems really rare in all my play through. Almost forgot, the game could use some chiptune or sound effects just to break the long standing silence.

Still, I look forward to more of this sort of games.

This is pretty much a nostalgic trip for me where back in the days when games did not have such sophisticated graphical fidelity and due to limitations are displayed in chunks of bitmap fonts.

Its nice to see submissions like this once in a while since this reminds us how game mechanics in the past is no different with what modern games can offer. Besides the gameplay is pretty solid even with the lack of graphics and seeing that its another MegaZeux game, I'm astounded by how it got pretty modernized with a HTML5 release.

Anyway, the gameplay is fun and quite engaging with the dungeon crawling and  searching for all those upgrades just to be able to survive the next level below. I manage to get to B9 dying to a Nightcrawler in one single hit but on several play through I notice the game does a lot of one hit kill at times. It could use a little fine tuning with item spawn rate because there are instances where I had a play through with 3 to 4 pickups consisting of Citrine rings which doesn't seem to do anything. Also sometimes I do get lucky with the stat boost but it seems really rare in all my play through.

Still, I look forward to more of this sort of games.

After falling down the rabbit hole, I'm never coming back up again after experiencing the overflowing cuteness of what's called Magical Girl Alice a magical girl game that's short but super adorable to the core.

Magical Girl Concept:

This one is pretty hard to evaluate because you are looking at a really cute bunny girl that fires off magical hearts and is able to transform between humanoid form and a rabbit... Yes, literally a plain old rabbit that don't even shoot magical hearts, which begs the question, do magical girls only transform between two humanoid forms or can it be between a non-magical animal form and magical humanoid form. Technically, it does fall in the magical girl criteria since the transformation is basically a magical transition, an impossibility that can only be explained by magic, hence this game definitely has magical girls in it and a bunny one it seems (￣ω￣).

Visual:

Right off the bat the game reeks with overflowing cuteness which is hard to explain in words so playing the game makes sense since the art style are all oriented towards the soft pastel colored look and feel. However in general, everything is really well made and it feel professionally done to begin with. The character animations, including the enemies, are all nicely animated giving the extra cuteness and appeal of a complete game. The tile maps and background for the environment is designed with multiple layers, making the environment design rich with different shapes and sizes. The title screen is simple but quite polished in terms of the artwork used. It feels like nothing is left out in the art department and everything seem to have been taken into careful consideration.

Audio:

The game uses some really cute choices of sound effects especially for the player character. Besides that the music composed suites the art style very well and the stingers for the game over scene complements the animation closely.

Theme:

Wave and particle duality was picked for the theme in this game, although it could just be duality, omitting the wave and particle bit, but its still within acceptable reason that their intention was to show that the player character can transform between a person and a bunny. Besides that the theme is well ingrained with the mechanics as certain parts of the environment requires the player to change into a bunny to traverse over narrow pathways.

Challenge / Engagement:

Since the game has only two playable levels, its reasonable that the game should be hard at the start and it is quite challenging even with the familiar control layout. The challenge comes not from platforming rather the limited view of the game area where a lot of it involves guess what comes next and also taking a leap of faith into unknown territory which could lead to discovering a pit full of spikes. The level design is good as it has multiple paths and options available when it come to going from one end to another. The boss fight is quite easy to beat once its behavior pattern is laid down but I find that since her movement rate is quite slow, the dash ability comes in handy when closing in for the attack. As for the engagement, its engaging in the gameplay side of things which might have most of the attention in the development while on the other hand the story is a little short ended for what it is since it is written to be pretty casual and laid back, without any direction in the story development. However there is a level of creativity with how the dialog is conducted between the two characters, Umi and Mimi, where their conversation is fun and playful.

Overall:

The game has a solid outlook to it and has good ground work for further development in terms of level design and story development. There is a lot of elements in the game that isn't utilized yet but is present in the game, such as trading cards and collecting fruits. With that in mind, I can guess the game would have a lot more going than what was released for the game jam, so I hope more development can be considered in the future.

Yternis Magissa Novella is a short but pretty complete game made using the MegaZeux game creation system that showcased the early part of the story about Novella who is tasked to save her village from a group of invading monsters and in the process obtains the power to transform into a magical girl. The game may look like it was made using a really old version of RPGMaker but I was fooled after doing a little reading about the MegaZeux and to my surprise found out that its a game engine from the 90ies that has been updated till this day.

Magical Girl Concept:

Novella at first is just your typical village protector who wields a bow and arrow and is sent through the village to clear out the invading monsters. At one point, she bumps in to a magical talking dog and is given a magical pocket watch that enables Novella to transform into a magical girl equipped with a full suit of armor and fires a powerful magical ball that damages enemies in its path. The transformation can be performed anytime as long as the soul bar is full. Also, she gains a magical companions named Lucy who comes along with on her adventure. In essence, the game is about a magical girl and the concept is pretty much utilized with her being able to wield destructive magical powers and is able to transform whenever possible.

Visual:

The visuals feel very relevant with the retro stylized look of the game and the decorated window edge gives it a classic western RPG sort of look which I'm quite familliar for the era. I like how the sprites have animation for both characters and enemies making the game visually appealing. The effect is simple but effective when keeping the art style relevant for a retro feel.

UI:

As for the UI, the game screen, inventory, player status, and key items are laid out in a single screen and are placed in a clear and organized manner. Its quite rare to see this sort of layout nowadays since a lot of modern RPG game focus on maximizing the game screen area and having minimal overlays that goes over the game screen. The layout really does feel nostalgic especially in the late 80ies or 90ies since I recall a lot of them tend to have highly decorated static overlay that fills about 1/3 of the screen while the remainder area is reserved for the graphical window.

Audio:

Although the game uses the default sound from the MegaZeux PC speaker, it is used in a relevant fashion where it matches the art style the developer intended for. The high tempo chiptune tracks used in the game gives it a very wonderful and adventurous feel when Novella progresses through the game. I recall that each area of the game and during boss fights has its own track.

Theme:

The Conservation of Energy was picked as the theme for this game and I find that it is spot on with how soul energy is treated as a limited resource where using it would require the player to reclaim it back from either drinking soul potions or by killing monsters.

Challenge / Engagement:

The game doesn't have a steep learning curve when it comes to using the controls since the layout is pretty familiar with modern RPGmaker games. In terms of gameplay challenge, I find it challenging when it comes to different enemy types especially in the later half of the game where the enemies can fire projectiles, which adds the need to dodge and utilize the hold direction button. The story is somewhat engaging as it begins with the village being attacked by monsters and not knowing what it is happening. However, the ending is an open ended book as for now since it will be difficult to evaluate without knowing whats further down the road.

Overall:

In terms of gameplay mechanics, the game has a really solid setup with the MegaZeux as the game engine and though I'm not familiar with it but I will definitely check out more about it since I'm am developing toolkits aimed at game creation. I think the story could use a lot of development, since right now, it is bare bones at best but sufficient enough to know the bearings on where the developer could take the story progression towards. I hope to see more development of this type of games especially with a classic game engine that seem to be pretty up to date among the main stream engines.

Note to author: IINM are you one of the admins for the MegaZeux forum?

Atomic Bricco is an insanely fast pace and engaging 2D platformer where you play as a high school girl who suddenly gain magical powers from her miniature nuclear reactor and has to stop the villainous Ms Valentine who has catnapped Schrodinger. The game has some very challenging moments in terms of platforming as well as due to some bugs but the game is playable and the ending is reachable.

Magical Girl Concept:

Bricco the ordinary high school girl turned magical girl possesses the magical ability to dash through the air and performed double jumps that seem to be powered by her atomic powers. The magical girl concept is utilized in terms of magical powers but not fully utilized since she did not visually transform or look the part of a magical girl (still in her high school uniform). (Spoiler Alert! Start) However she does possess a magical companion which can be seen especially at the end of the game (Spoiler Alert! End). In other words, Bricco is pretty much a magical girl in terms of magic usage but could use a magical girl dress just to complete the magical girl trait/trope.

Mechanics:

The game has smooth movement controls with the player character moving at a very fast pace, (she is always in her running animation when moving) and I think it would be helpful to include a walk modifier button so at some points during platforming (near the end), smaller platforms can easily be landed on when movement speed can be controlled. For a game with fast pace platforming the player movement speed is good since and traversing through the game level did not feel slow. The player character can also double jump by double tapping the space bar while the attack is set to the K key which is a little odd but doesn't get in the way of gameplay. The attack behavior the player has is a sort of dash punch which can be charged while holding down the attack button and the player can also hover in place in mid air when charging the dash, quite a vital feature as most platforms in the game requires hovering at a certain height to be able to make it past certain hazards. The combination of careful jumps and dashes is important in traversing the level as the hazards are placed in a particular configuration, making the player utilize the mobility at its fullest. The dash punch also has a very heavy knock back to the player character where the higher the charge, the further the character will bounce off any walls. The game becomes pretty insane (at some point hilarious in one of my play through) when the character bounces off all over the place but the generous respawns made it a lot acceptable even when getting killed by spikes which are one hit kill hazards. One thing that needs to be considered are the strange one hit kills and the super fast laser shots which for the first one seem to happen often when touching certain enemies and the second one kind of stun locks the player character into oblivion. Besides that the game featured decent platforming mechanics with moving platforms as one of the challenges. The moving platform could use some improvements especially with the vertical ones as it clearly shows that character physics behavior did not sync well with the platform movements. Besides that the game features a VN dialog system where the character art is displayed along with a text readout and dialog is forwarded with the Space key. I notice the read out sound effect did not line up with the readout and seems that the text appear to be delayed by a second long. For QOL, the dialog could use a line of code that lets it complete the entire readout while the text is being displayed with one press of the Space key and the completed text allows the next key press to forward the dialog. Reason for suggesting this is that I seem to missed several dialogs by accidentally pressing the forward dialog key skipping it unintentionally due to a habit from playing RenPy games. So far the dialog system is basically good and it could use some improvements where there was a point in the game where I was able to trigger a slow motion bug when the dialog open while doing a dash, its possible that the slow mo effect caused by the dash when in contact with an enemy may have not reset correctly when dialog came up at the same time (this one happen in my second play through). Moving on the camera tracking on the player character is really smooth even with the zoom in effect but do note that some areas of the game don't necessarily need to zoom in at times so setting up a careful plan of where zooming in or out is necessary, e.g. the part where Bricco jumps down into the school gym is a well planned camera angle but zooming in at the science class room may not be necessary. Basically, the mechanics are good just required some time to polish up and iron out the bugs which seem to contribute to the challenge of completing the game (I ended up freezing the dialog system at the end of the game by making the character fall through the platform in my first play through so I only got to see the entire end credits in my third run).

Visual:

The art style for the characters and sprites made are pretty good with the sprites being fully animated an all. The background art and tile set is made with good intention and purpose for the setting as well as the genre. The character art is really good and well made but it could use some additional facial expressions that could go along with the dialog instead of a single image, which is a norm for most VN games. The animated pixel art sprites is one of the best so far as it makes the game feel complete and does make it appealing to watch. By the way, appealing part is in regards to the fluid movements and how it lines up with the character's actions, not the surprisingly extra fabric exposure bit (⌒_⌒;) which I will take it as a lewd joke. Besides that the UI for her health and dash charge bar is pretty decent and clearly shows the relevant information. One minor but not important thing I notice is that Schrodinger the cat appears to be a cutout photo for some apparent reason. Anyway the artwork in the game is really good with lots of thought and effort put into making the game feel complete visually.

UI:

There seems to be no main menu or in-game menu present in the game. The only UI present is the health bar and dash charge bar which has been explained in Visual.

Audio:

The game uses some sound effects in the relevant parts of the game and fits well with the pixel art style during gameplay. One thing I want to highlight is the music tracks used in the game which gives the game a nice fast pace feel. Also different levels uses different track relevant to the environment.

Theme:

The developers picked Nuclear Energy as their main theme and that matches very well with both the title and the character's magical powers. I appreciate that the developers did not include Schrodinger Cat in the theme even though the game features a cat named Schrodinger.

Challenge / Engagement:

The game is really challenging and very engaging with the tough level designs and layout of hazards throughout the game. Do note that since the game is short, it is reasonable for the game to be difficult and besides the game can be completed when the jump patterns are known or discovered. In terms of story, I think its lack engagement since the story is written in a generic manner where there is a villain and the magical girls is set out to defeat the villain due to X reason.

Originality / Creativity:

The idea and concept of a high school girl turning into a magical girl due to nuclear powers seems original and creative at best but I would say the artwork and level design has good level of creativity put into it.

Story (Spoiler Section ahead!):

The story is basically about a high school girl who somehow manage to build a mini nuclear reactor that gave her tremendous magical powers. Bricco the newly powered up magical girl has to save her pet Schrodinger from Ms Valentine the science teacher who has somehow taken over the school turned the male students in to her minions. In the final battle where Bricco defeated the villainous teacher, she escaped the secret lab facility with her pet cat, and to her surprise gained a magical companion. The story and plot is decent as a good minimum base line for the game but it could be expanded by giving the game more depth to the game world.

Overall:

The game is really fun and engaging with its fast pace platforming gameplay featuring a fun dash mechanic that is pretty much tied in with how the level and hazards are designed. The developers have all done a really good job in bringing something that's fun, comedic, and definitely challenging. Anyway, if there are plans for further development, I would really like to see the story having a bit more content and with each character a little more fleshed out, giving them a presence in the game.

Magical Princesses: Forest Journey. Save the Day!! is a really short and simple bullet hell prototype, with a really long title (─‿‿─), about two magical girls defending the forest against a horde of monsters. The game has good magical girl designs, however the gameplay could use a bit of improvements.

Magical Girl Concept:

The game features two magical girl characters, Violetta and Passione as magical girls (I assume the former has blue hair and the latter has red hair?), with them clearly exhibiting frilly dresses and magical accessories. Both character possess magical powers where they can shoot magical bullets that are used in eliminating the monsters emerging from the forest. Violette fires a range limited spread shot while Passione fires a rapid single direction shot. Besides that, there isn't a transforming scene or animation present while there are no familiar or animal companion in their designs. Anyway the developer made use of the magical girl concept in the game so it qualifies as a magical girl game.

Mechanics:

The game utilizes basic movement controls where the player character can move anywhere on the plying field limited to 1/3 of the area in the middle. There is the attack button which fires either a spread shot or single direction shot depending on the character chosen. On thing I notice is that the attack button is mapped to the Z key, which is normal for most games, and there is the Y key, which to me seems strange and is not common practice. Moving on, there is the switch button which allows the player to switch between the two characters, giving the player two different play styles or weapons, namely attacking the enemies at an angle or head on. To me the spread shot is the most effective play style since it allows players to hit enemies incoming from the side of the screen. Since the player is only allowed to move withing the 1/3 of the game area and enemies are spawning from the sides, it makes the spread shot a more reasonable weapon of choice in this case. In addition, on thing to highlight is the changing environment and background music when switching between the two characters which is an interesting mechanic. I think more can be done with the switching mechanic, say changing the enemy type when switching the characters since in the theme description, it is written "same world different perspective". There is also the special button which fires a single shot which will evolve into a circular burst shot, similar to a bomb, but the effectiveness is limited when the bullets spreads further leaving gaps in between the bullet spaces. The game uses the life point setup where by when the player is given a chance to respawn after after several seconds when the character is hit by an enemy bullet. The implementation could be improved since after respawn, there is no invulnerable or grace period for the player to reposition the character to a safer space before getting hit by the next shot. Besides that, the character's number of life is represented by both the text indicator and the changing condition of the character on the right. The changing expression from each shot makes a nice qualitative indicator but is not a clear indicator of how many lives are actually present, hence keeping the text indicator compliments the quantitative side of it. The enemies follows a predictable movement pattern while firing at specific intervals. It seems on several play through, the number of enemies spawning seem to vary each time and I'm not sure if it is intentional or it could be due to some spawning issues. The types of enemies is limited to different shot configurations and movement pattern and I find the different enemy color doesn't seem to make them distinguishable from one another in behavior. I think since the game only has one level, its is acceptable that the game starts off with lots of enemies but for a longer game, when more levels are present, the difficulty and enemy presence has to scale from easy to impossibly difficult.

Visual:

The cute and cartoony character art style fits the magical girl genre really well and the different expressions they make at different life points tells a lot about their current condition. I find that the character art is done with a lot of thought and effort put into it so kudos to the artist. Both the player character on the game area are animated with a continuous walking/running cycle. The enemies comes in different hues and are animated in a simple manner. The simple animation gives the game an additional appeal to it and it should be improved on a lot more. One odd thing I notice is that the resolution for the player character sprite seems much lower than the enemy sprites. I assume the two is made by different artists.  The title screen text is really well made with the colorful font, it gives a fun and inspiring impression. I find that the title screen commendable since there are particle effects included while the sleeping magical princesses gives a casual impression. The background art used during gameplay is suitable for its purpose is not distracting or gets in the way when shooting at enemies. The forest canopy could have been a little transparent so its easy for players to spot the enemies and bullets coming from the sides. Since the art assets was made, I would say the artists gave good effort in fulfilling their role.

UI:

The title screen has both Start and Quit button with a simple centered layout, giving players easy access to a list of level (currently only one level present). I think the buttons could be located somewhere at the corner of the screen as it does not overlay on top of the animating background. There appears to be no settings/options menu in the main menu or in-game. Most of the indicators in the gameplay are straight forward but the line up of enemies on the left is not clearly explained, I assume it means the type of enemies present in the game area. The death scene has buttons to return to main menu or quit the game but the ending scene doesn't have any way to return to the main menu.

Audio:

The music used in the game is suitable for its genre where the main menus music is a nice short easy going loop while the two in-game music are composed for each character. I notice that each characters music is slightly different, albeit plays on the same base tune but some instruments are replaced by different percussion instruments. I believe that Besides that Violetta has some bass drums and piano while Passione instruments are tambourine and claves, giving the former a creepy and dark tone while the latter has a brighter feel to it. I find that using the different musical elements is a really good point as the music is utilized in such a manner where the two character background is revealed without the need for words. There seem to be no sound effects used in the game.

Theme:

The magical girl theme is present in the game as the characters are designed to be magical girls. As for the theme, the developers picked Relativity, which I think in their context and description, relativity is about the different view that the two magical girl sees which is especially apparent in the switch mechanic. Violetta seems to see the world as dark (seems to be night for her) and twisted (due to the low bass and creepy music) while Passione sees the world as bright and vibrant (high pitch music). To me the term relativity does loosely mean different perspective since it does touch on the point of observation but its more relevant when it is put in terms of the different environmental/physical conditions when the observation is made. Simply put that the same person sees a different thing when located at two very different places, e.g. the passenger on a moving train sees the background moving and when he gets off, the trains is seen moving away. The interpretation for the game seems like a psychological one since its coming from two different person seeing the same world. Anyway, its still within acceptable reason in the abstract notion of it.

Challenge / Engagement:

The game can be challenging when the enemy population is not controlled and on the other hand when enemies are killed fast enough the bullet spawns are much lessen and the game can be beaten easily. The game isn't too engaging since there isn't much to do other than defeating enemies while there isn't any story to follow in the game.

Originality / Creativity:

The characters are pretty original and the use of the different perspective especially the music is creative.

Story:

The game doesn't have much story to begin with and the only known fact that the magical girls are tasked in defending the forest from a horde of monsters without any reason. Some story can be derived from how the two magical girls sees the world when players switch between them. I think based on context, Violetta sees everything as dark and Passione sees everything as bright. In the comments below, the developers mentioned planning for some VN elements and story but it did not make it into this prototype version of the game.

Overall:

The artstyle and characters are done really well and more could have been done especially in the story department. The game mechanics feels good and doesn't have any issues happening during gameplay. Only drawback is the lack of invulnerability or grace period when respawning. Basically the game has the base line mechanics for a bullet hell game and tremendous improvements could be made in bullet pattern and enemy behavior. One thing to note is that a bullet hell games isn't about filling the entire screen with bullets rather creating a pattern that players can have a fighting chance of beating the game.

Put your fine motor skills to the test with Cat Wanderer because this 2D platform may seem difficult at first but with enough practice and the right set of skills the game becomes pretty much a breeze.

Magical Girl Concept:

This one is a little hard to evaluate because it is mentioned that in the "How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?" that the main character have super cat ability. Somehow, abilities like skill or something that consumes stamina points and not magic points can be confused and mixed up with the idea of what's magical because to me after playing the game for 2 hours, I feel that the main character possess extraordinary skills that may or may not rival what is considered magical in nature. In other words, the game is themed more around the sci-fi genre rather than a magical one since everything feels and explains in a sci-fi manner. The character design lack the typical magical girl traits as well.

Mechanics:

The one good thing about the game is its solid mechanics, where most controls are pretty much laid out to include movement, attack, jump, heal, and a dash ability. The key controls is a little odd since it uses the Z key for jump while the X key is for attack. Most games use the Z key for an active action response, namely interact, attack, and talk while the X key is meant for the back, cancel, or jump action. So there are many instances throughout the game that I got confused by the key controls, accidentally pressing X Key to jump and pressing the Z key to attack since I have prior experience playing Rouge Legacy, where their default key controls are mapped with Attack on the 1 Key, Jump for 2 Key, and Special for 3 Key so old habits die hard. Basically the game is comparable to Rouge Legacy with the difficulty and the attack behavior of most enemies with the exception that it features wall climbing and a controlled dash ability. The game also features exploration as part of the game play, making it a metroidvania sort of game where most access to each part of the game requires late game abilities or key access. The game attack mechanic is straightforward, where swinging the weapon in the enemy direction and a hit registers damage with displaying the damage amount on each hit as feedback to the player. One thins seems to be left out is the hit stun effect on enemies, where enemies would halt animation or stay in place for a brief moment before being able to move as per normal. It might be an intentional design since some of the enemy characters are animation with a wind up period before hitting. However for most enemies without a wind up animation, this makes CQC a little tricky since the player either needs to either kite, dodge with the dash ability which is provided at a later stage in the game, or out run the enemy which is a little impossible for those chasing the player character unless you employ the reset scene trick by moving between scenes (due to the fact that the enemy position between scenes is not persistent). One feature I would like to highlight is the climb ability where the player character can latch on to a vertical wall and scale the wall with the up and down arrow keys while holding the jump key. By holding the key away from the wall and releasing the jump button, the player can jump away from the wall which allows the player to traverse through many areas when combined with the remaining two abilities, the dash and drop kick. The dropkick ability is also an interesting facet of the game since the mechanic allows players to bounce off both horizontal and vertical spikes. Yes, you can practically climb spiked walls vertically which is not explained in the game and the dropkick isn't a downward attack rather a diagonal downward attack so standing in front of a vertical spike wall gives you that capability right away. Besides, being able to time and pull off dropkicks is vital since it will the most used ability in the entire game, next to dash and wall climb. Moving on, the game allows players to customize the main characters skills using modifying chips with up to two slots available. I realize early in the game that the most expensive skill was the Warp chip (invulnerable dash) costing 1000 Atoms (game currency), and I knew this is a vital skill to have since dodging with the dash after putting in a few hits at the enemy would make sense in this genre. However the chips offered is rather limited and most does not offer reasonable effectiveness to be used besides the Tank chip (extra 3 healing) and Quick Paw chip (faster attack). Since the warp chip is pretty much a must have hence its the least you need to beat the game until the end (you will want this for the final boss fight and tons of dodging enemy attacks). In addition, there is a slight bug or intentional design where the dash invulnerability does not work after the player dash past the mid point, requiring the player character to be next to or somewhere before the dash midpoint for it to work. Besides that the game has an managed inventory and item system which feels sparse and redundant since the player only has to pickup 6 crystallized atoms, and two sets of keys. The mobility abilities could have a slot of their own rather than being mixed with the key slots since the keys are items rather than an ability. The character stats is not fully utilized since the defense point never really changed unless you add the defense chip which only reduces damage by 1 point and is only a good reference to the attack damage that increase with the 3 levels of weapon upgrade available in the game. Moving on, the game utilizes the save point system, where the player character interacts with a device called the Termark that allows player to rest or teleport to another location. Each time the player rest at the save point, it would reset the entire game and enemies would be present at their usual spawn points, making grinding for Atoms a viable resource in the game. Besides that, the enemy behavior is simple with a line of sight sensor in which they will chase the player when in visual view and do not notice the player character coming from behind. The enemy behavior could be improved to include dodging the player attack or behave less zombie-like by reacting with the player hits, i.e. running away when health is low, or using a special move when in danger. Next as for the platforming aspect of the game, the platforming mechanics feels solid with a few animation glitches to the player character and one rare occasion getting stuck in a wall. The platforms work pretty well with the wall climbing feature along with the spiked walls when the dropkick ability is obtained. The platform doesn't feature slopes but there are some noticeable variation in height between different types of terrain. One thing to note is that the spiked walls collision detection seem to extend quite far to the sides because the player can get hit by walking near the ledge with spikes lined up on the edge of the ledge. Its a minor issues since it does not hinder the player movement much but can be an annoyance since players going for a running jump may end up getting hit by the ledge spikes instead. Frankly, once the three mobility abilities are obtained, the spikes isn't a frustrating obstacle to deal with but I do notice that the player can still get hit by spikes even when the dropkick attack is triggered successfully. Additionally, the level design is pretty spot as a metroidvania genre with many secret areas to explore accessible at late game, shortcuts, several pathways, and some interesting scenery to admire.

Visual:

The game has really good art assets and is consistent through out the gameplay, making it suitable for its purpose. The pixel art stylization makes the game feel more of a arcade and suits the difficulty it offers. The UI art is laid out nice and simple with little to no distracting parts. The background and platforming art assets used match well through out the different parts and are seamless in style. The main character sprite is animated and if I recall correctly it was mentioned in Discord that it was made and animated using a 3D model with a pixelizer shader. The enemies are also animated and the animation suites their attack behavior.

UI:

The title screen is made really well with the title clearly displayed and two accessible buttons to the main game, namely the start and continue button. There is a lack of a settings button in the main menu and in in-game so no methods to adjust volume or change any settings for the game. The in-game UI is laid out neatly with health bar showing the qualitative and quantitative state of the player character health. The quantity of healing item is also shown directly below it with the game currency on the bottom right. Accessing the animated menu with the E key gives you two options leading to the stats menu and the inventory menu. The stat menu displays several indicators, the weapon attack damage, defense, max health, and max healing tanks. Besides that the inventory menu shows several slot groups divided into chips, items and key slots. Clicking on the item gives the description of the item selected and chips can be used by clicking the chip. There needs to be a bit of a clean up with the abilities and items, where the player mobility abilities could go in the stat menu instead of behaving like an item in the inventory menu.

Audio:

The music tracks are quite limited with it appearing during boss fights, the main menu, and the ending scene. The platforming section only has an ambient audio track so it could use a few music tracks which matching the environment in the different parts of the game. The choice of sound effect used is decent for its purpose and is used in every part of the game.

Theme:

The developer picked Schrödinger's Cat as the main theme and the theme is fulfilled with the characters being humanoid cats.

Challenge / Engagement :

The game is quite challenging not only from the enemy attack behavior but also from the platforming aspect due to the hazardous spiked wall which make certain areas impassable without the right abilities. However the difficulty of the game seem to scaled down when more abilities are unlock and certain chips are in use. (Spoiler Alert! Start) The boss fights are quite interesting with spider boss being the best one while feeling a little let down for the final boss because the final boss is easily defeated with basically the dropkick attack alone (Spoiler Alert! End). As for engagement, it is highly engaging due to the combat system and the visuals of the game world.

Originality / Creativity:

The story is original and creative in its own way but I find that the story isn't well written as it lacks a lot of lore and answers that could have explain the character predicament in the world. The final ending is also dry as it feels very generic and lacks, e.g. where it feel like it is written with the sake of just ending the game.

Story (Spoiler Alert Section):

The story as I have mentioned in Discord the last time  has some resemblance to an existing game and its called ICEY (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icey) where a female cyborg awakens to fight a greater evil so I could say the base line of the story in the game is somewhat similar. Obviously its not entirely comparable since the game ICEY takes on a unique approach to story telling. As for Cat Wandered the dialogs is minimal, in which it tells what the player needs to know about the world and very little clues is given to what and why the alien invasion called the "Eye" has to do with the cat girls. On a deeper context, it is obvious the characters are developed by an unknown facility intending to destroy the alien invaders since there is no other purpose for their existence hinted through the game. The developer place some additional story regarding another character named Ruts where at one point the player encounters her in a cave killing one of the enemy but no dialog is initiated when approach. Other than that, a few minor issues with the writing but nothing significant about it.

Overall:

The game in terms of base mechanics and art is pretty much solid and complete. There are a few stuff that needs to be ironed out and probably a big overhaul to the story side of the game since the game only focuses on the platforming and combat aspect. The game is challenging with many enemy types and their difficulty and pattern of attack makes it engaging. For me, it took about at least 2 hours to beat the game with only 2 upgrades and a Warp chip, at minimal grinding while an extra hour to unlock everything and to beating the final boss on full stats.

Side note on how to beat the game (Spoiler Alert and walkthrough!): In case anyone says the game is too hard, stop, because its pretty playable and easily beaten once you are familiar with patterns. So the thing is in the early game, you will need to get the dash ability which is right after exiting the facility. Then grind enough until you can purchase the Warp Chip. Then from that point on just slash at incoming enemies and when they wind up or attack immediately, just dash past them and rinse repeat. To defeat the boss, just use the drop kick on it and be sure to have the warp chip ready. Some tips, you can climb up walls with the up/down arrow while holding jump. Use a combination of jump and dash to access certain areas. Don't forget you can vertical climb spike walls with the dropkick ability. Certain areas in the game requires players to drop kick an enemy to jump to higher places, this is obvious when you first exit the facility heading to the right where above has a crystallized atom.

Excessively cute, quirky, and story rich is what best describes Torangi! a truly magical girl game about Beomi and Saya whom they have to transform into their magical girl counterpart during their vacation to save a city from a Kaiju attack. Its a well written visual novel with a few mini game in between sessions.

Magical Girl Concept:

The game features 3 magical girls namely, Torangi, Lyna, and Yungi where their designs represent their animal counterpart consisting of, a cat, a lion, and a dragon respectively. They have the ability to transform between their non-magical and magical forms, wears cute frilly dresses and magical accessories, and even have their own magical familiars. In short the character designs are basically overflowing with magical girl traits and tropes.

Mechanics:

The game implements some simple visual novel mechanics which consist of a readout dialog box and character sprite changes. Besides that the game has two types of mini game with the first part involves moving through a grid playing field and laying traps or saving civilians from danger while avoiding being touched by the enemy that moves linearly from one point to another. The second part is a bullet color matching mini game where the player character either needs to switch between the matching color of the incoming bullet or dodge by moving into a space that has the matching bullet color. The first mini game is pretty straight forward where the player has to move into a the adjacent grid not blocked by a building and dodge enemies patrolling along a straight line. The mini game has two sub parts, where in the early game the payer has to make their way around the play area to lay a limited number of traps in enemy path while in a later stage players are tasked into saving civilians, in which timing the character's movement takes precedence. In the second mini game, the player has to match the color of the current character selected with the incoming bullets (called spikes), the character consist of 3 colors, blue, yellow, and red which corresponds to the color of the bullets. One issue with the design is that the bullets spawn from a center and spreads out radially, making it difficult to determine which color bullet would take priority in the color matching mechanic. However this can be remedied by moving the character somewhere close to the center and match the color to one bullet that is sure to occupied the grid space. There should be some design consideration where instead of a radially spreading shot, it could have been design fall vertically down the screen so the player could either dodge or change characters with two gameplay styles. Anyway, as for the button control for the mini game, they consist of the arrow keys for moving the player character while the Space or Enter key act as either action for laying a trap or changing characters.

Visual:

The character art style and quality is really apparent with lot of effort put into its design. The cute mini game sprites and many prompts make the game visually appealing with some amount of animation. I would also want to note that the UI and CG art is quite polished. Basically the art style the developer went for is oriented towards the cute, pastel colored, and slice of life outlook which is a reasonable choice considering it source material is from a webtoon.

UI:

The main menu or title screen is really well made with lots of animated sprites with easy access to the main game and the credits screen. The mini game UI layout is clean and relevant information is displayed clearly. There doesn't appear to be a settings button so there is no way to adjust game settings anywhere in the game. There is also no in-game menu during game play.

Audio:

The music in the game is really well made and fits the genre really well with several scenes and events having their own music track. Every part of the game has a track of its own, from main menu to the visual novel segments, and the mini game featuring several different tracks as well. The game made use of some sound effects as well.

Theme:

The magical girl theme is obviously present in the game with the characters designs and the way the story is written. The developer picked three themes which are pretty much spot on with it being Nuclear Energy, Cat, and Duality. (Spoiler Alert! Start) Its clearly shown at the start of the story that energy is involved in producing the Kaiju that is rampaging the city at the later time  but its not known whether the energy is magical or nuclear, however it still fits the theme directly with the use of energy (Spoiler Alert! End). It is quite obvious that the Cat and Duality theme represents their cat forms and duality for the transformation ability.

Challenge / Engagement:

The mini game is somewhat challenging especially for the last one since the design itself makes it difficult while the need to have good reaction time and accuracy add a little challenge. The story is engaging with its naturally fun and quirky dialog between Beomi and Saya.

Originality / Creativity:

Since the character is based off an existing source material, the originality and creativity shines from the new story line written for the game. The story is refreshing and has its own spin on the adventurers the three character have undergone.

Story (Spoiler Alert Section):

The story is really well written with no issues while a lot of thought and effort can be seen in the refreshing content it offers. I really like the fun and naturally written dialogs between Beomi/Torangi, Saya/Lyna and Yungi, the way they interact with each other while trying to figure a way to stop Spikey from destroying the city. Basically the story is about the two girls in their non-magical form are at the beach soon discovers sea pineapples invading the beach front. The sea pineapple cause a scene and soon manage to made its way to the city causing havoc and destruction. To put a stop to it, the two girls transform into their magical forms and later met another magical girl by the name of Yungi (a play on words with Torangi). Then with the three magical girls, they put an end to Spikey rampage and sent it to another world. The end is really nice with a level of light heartedness to it and I really that aspect of the magical girl genre.

Overall:

There is a lots of potential in developing more of the story aspect of the game while having mini games in between VN segments is good as it helps break the VN flow while acting as an intermission between lines of dialog. The developers do have a good plan in place when creating this game during the jam as it does not exceed the level of scope that they can handle. The best direction they should go towards is in developing small to medium series of VN based off the webtoon since the story and character art is well established.

CopyKat is a really short game concept about a mystery surrounding a girl who one day wakes up in a magical but monochromatic world that tells her story as the player progresses through puzzles and magical mirrors.

Magical Girl Concept:

The game doesn't feature a magical girl although the main character, Katherine, seem to dress like one. However there are elements of magic present in the world instead with talking mirrors and gates. Katherine doesn't exhibit any magical powers or transformation but being able to talk to inanimate object could be a magical trait that have yet to show up in the game.

Mechanics:

The movement control is similar to RPGMaker, arrow keys for move direction, while the interact button is located on the A key instead of the Z key. I find that there might be a bit of a confusion with the interact button and the progress dialog button (Space or Enter key) because its a little strange to have the two separated since the Interact button is normally a button that confirms the player action whether it be confirm the dialog progress or confirm interacting with objects in the environment. On many occasion I was pressing the A key to progress the dialog while not realizing I was repeating the first line dialog and later found that the Space key forwards the next dialog. The game has a simple dialog and options/choice interface which is decent for its use. I would recommend a bit more development into it since the dialog doesn't allow players to reverse to a previous dialog line especially when trying to figure out the answer to the riddle mini game. Another solution would be to line the riddle in the last dialog before the choice prompt or have the full riddle display in a separate dialog box. Besides that, there is a jigsaw puzzle mini game where the player have to assemble pieces of a broken mirror to progress the story. The mechanics behind is decently implemented but more could have been done to have the pieces line up perfectly, not have the mouse drag multiple pieces at a time, and the rotation sometimes do skip a few angles. I am not too sure how Godot handles mouse events and UI layout but it would be good to explore other ways or solution in creating the same mini game.

Visual:

I really like the art style the developer have decided on and it does create this fantasy and mystical air that enhances the story behind it. At the same time, the decision to utilize monotonous colors is a good choice in this type of genre when the story is oriented towards mystery. The cute and simple walk animation on the player character makes her appealing to watch and it enhances the gameplay by a ton. Although the background art is limited, it is designed with sufficient intend to tell what is needed in the current story itself. The title screen is designed really well as it immediately tells the player that the game tells a story of what might have happen to Katherine. Good effort has been put into creating the art assets for the game and I think there would be a lot more required when the game gets further developed.

UI:

The game has a title screen that has the essential buttons laid out in a neat orderly fashion and not overlapping with the title screen art. The options button allows players to adjust the music and sound effects volume. There seems to be no in-game menu or ways to return back to the main menu from within the game. The dialog and choice prompt UI is simple and practical for its use.

Audio:

The dreamy and magical fantasy music is really good as it is composed to matches well with each of the scenes in mind. The slow and dreamy title screen music gives it a really inviting vibe to start the game while the music for the two levels has a magical fantasy feel to it, giving a feeling of a magical environment.

Theme:

The developer picked three themes which are Schrödinger's Cat, Time Dilation, and Uncertainty. However I think three is a little too many since the game isn't too complete at this point to know if the theme is actually utilized in the game. It is described that Katherine is trapped in a box, but its not shown in the game or story that she is actually trapped (the bedroom doesn't even have solid walls (⊙_⊙)!). It might be an intention for the story to be developed towards that idea but its not currently implemented yet. The time dilation isn't apparent in the game since there is no indication of time flowing or mention of how the real world and mirror world are moving at different time scales. The theme that would definitely match is the level of uncertainty present in the story where the girl wakes up not knowing anything where she is and no memory of what happen (Spoiler: she mentions having no memory). I think if the developer could write the story with regards to the uncertainty theme in mind then the shroud of mystery and tension surrounding the girl would be an engaging point.

Challenge / Engagement:

The game offers jigsaw puzzle and riddles as a medium of challenge. Its not too challenging considering the puzzles are familiar but the riddles can be a little challenging when the riddle isn't very clear or obvious at first which requires several readings. The story is engaging as the player is given clues when answering the riddles on the gate, possibly clues of what is to come further down the road and adding fuel to the mystery behind it.

Originality / Creativity:

The art, music, and story is quite original in its own way and there is a good level of creativity when the riddles are used with possible an intent to reveal part of the main character backstory.

Story:

The story is well written with few minor issues. The writing direction seems skewed towards the mystery side and its hard to imagine what will come next since the main character backstory is pretty much shrouded in mystery (even though its was described in the "How does your game fit the theme(s)?"). I think the current direction is a good choice since its still in the early stages of a story structure but a few unexpected turn should occur along the way and how that is told will be the important factor in any story laden game.

Overall:

The basic concept and idea about a girl waking up to a mystery is a solid idea while taking into account of the visuals and base mechanics implemented, there is good potential in developing the game further. Story wise, I would say it has a good start but how it unfolds will be the key factor on how it can get players to be engaged further.

Side note: I notice for a 2D Godot game it takes a very long time to load each part of the game.

Since the game, Gravitas Magica : Rhythmic Sunrise, isn't ready, hence I will kindly skip on rating the game. Still I would like to discuss about the plot and concept with what is currently present from the main page and comment section.

So the story is about a retired magical girl now an office lady who one day found out that the sun is burning hydrogen at an abnormal rate, possibly someone is behind the mischievous act so our office lady has to come back into magical girl service to save the human race from extinction. Basically the plot sounds interesting and I think the beginning of the story is fine but I can't imagine just yet how the story would evolve down the line since its pretty much open ended at this point.

From the screenshots, I assume there will be an inventory and item system while the player character is allowed to move about in a 3D environment with stuff that can be interacted. The tank movement controls using the virtual control is fine if the aim is for a mobile device but since it is mentioned in one of the comment that it will be a HTML5 release so its best to change out to a keyboard and mouse control setup instead. Just something from my experience working with the audio system in Unity, the rhythm battle system might be a difficult setup even with the tutorials since in Unity the game time by default runs on a separate time system from the audio system which uses the AudioSettings.dspTime, so happens it never syncs well with one another. So this leads to an intricate setup where you have to make the existing components sync up along side the dspTime. One of the component mention in the tutorial is the animator system but later you may have to consider button press events and coroutines with further development down the road.

Besides that, this might sound discouraging but you might want to consider scaling down on development. In my opinion, I would cut out inventory and item since that would take a lot of time to craft and plan while focusing on the rhythm battle instead. It would feel redundant to some players when you have an inventory and items system and there is only a few usable items with no way of buying or selling those items... Which also requires currency and ways to earn currency. Besides each item would apply an effect which requires pretty much needs individual scripts for them. However its pretty much your call to make towards its current development.

By the way, I tried the game on a Oneplus Nord with Android 11 and the game is giving me a steady 60fps with no issues on Chrome.

Hey KV_Kingdom, glad to know the feedback is helpful to you. Its cool, I will gladly try out your other games and give a short feedback on them.

Elora's Quest is a really well made RPG Maker game with a good level of replayability due to its random level boss. The game is somewhat challenging on the basis that the battle mechanics are designed around a battle/war of attrition (pure dps and tanking damage) gameplay rather than trying to use strategy/tactics since the ability/magic/item options are quite limited during the battle gameplay which made me feel like its oriented for a casual game.

Magical Girl Concept: The game features two magical girl characters, Elora and Divini as magical girls, with Divini appearing for a short time while in the early game. Elora takes up the magical girl form when a pendant is filled with fairy power and she transforms into a magical girl that can perform magical attacks in the nature category. I'm not sure if the character design comes from a premade set but looking at the sprite and portrait before and after transforming the character does show a difference in the design from ordinary to a magical one. Its a little hard to evaluate more since there is no full body character art and the designs are limited to the overworld sprite and the portrait. However, the game does feature magical girls in an obvious manner. Besides that, I think the Magical Girl concept would look more apparent or is fully utilized if the companions could display magical girl features or are magical girls.

Mechanics: For a RPG Maker game, which if not mistaken is using mechanics from the latest RPGMaker MZ, I think the combinations of plugins and scripts used is good since it is designed as a simple and straight forward JRPG game. Its simple being that there is very little available strategy to utilize during the battle sequence and only a limited set of attack, magic/ability, and item options (only one item) are available during battle. I'm not too fond of the sparse options during battle since, it makes the game more of a battle/war of attrition where the player has to output the most dps, and tanking in all the damage from random enemy hits, while hoping the damage is evenly spread among the party members. I used Sasha's Inspire ability a ton through the game and even double buff each character to output the most damage, making the game really easy to complete without relying on Elora's magical form. Still this means there is very little though process involve for the player in defeating a particular enemy since there isn't much to play around in the battle sequence. It feels like the battle gameplay is designed to be of a casual game sort of nature since its limited to the attack and item button while the ability or nature button can only exist in either one time depending on Elora's being transform or not. Besides that, I kept getting only one type of item through the game which is restoration tea and there doesn't seem to be any other item that can restore MP, which I want to point out that it kinds of defeats the use of the transforming pendant aka Elora's magical form. Besides that, I like the boulder pushing puzzle that is different in each level, which helps break the game flow a little, as well as providing more gameplay that complements the battle sequence. However I find that the effort put into obtaining the magical form by completing the puzzle outweighs the effort by fighting the enemy in the direct approach. Basically it means that, I can clear then entire game by fighting head on without the need for the transforming spell. By the way, collecting energy for the pendant to work is quite an interesting idea but somehow it got overshadowed by the non magical attacks/abilities and should be implemented in a better way. There should be someway to emphasize the use of the transformation and provide reasonable incentives to the player so they are encouraged to use it often. So one incentive of transforming that I like is how there are new spells and magic ability (there are up to 4 powerful magic spells) each time Elora transforms into her magical form, but the oversight of a lack of methods or items to restore MP made me reluctant to actually want to transforms since her warrior abilities, triple attacks + double attack buff, can caused about 120 damage to the final boss, which when I think about, feels a little unfair since the magic attack can be performed on a limited count due to limited MP. Anyway, I find that the battles is skewed a little to the easy side but can get a little heated at times. Next thing I want to highlight is the randomness in the enemy type for the particular level which gives it a nice touch of replayability. Based on 6 different full playthrough and several new/load games, I manage to be able fight all 9 available types in all 3 levels. I would say the random set of enemy types per level is quite limited (3 types per level) so there are many occasions I ended up with the same enemy type on every new game or on every next level loaded (as in moving to the next level and not loading from a save game). I'm not sure if there is more but so far a solid 3 types is the most I have fought on several playthroughs. A good random set for a short game would have about 5 to 7 enemy types per level but if the game is a longer release, this sort of randomness can't happen often, since players don't replay longer games in rapid succession, so a smaller set is more reasonable. Also its probably because the game is designed for the game jam so I want to point out that there is no emphasis on grinding for levels (leveling up) or fighting against any random encounters (random minions) in any of the levels, making it a very straight forward game of fight each enemy boss blocking the path and gathering party members.

Visual: The selected arts assets use really complement the look of the game and intention of the game design. The tile set used gave a nice touch of what Emerald mountain would look like, on top, and within, and its presented very cleanly. I notice that the tile set in the second level, where Sasha becomes a party member, had a little issue matching up on some corners. Its not a significant issue but I am a little curious at why it doesn't match up and would be good to note to the developer if there are plans to work on the game further. Besides that, the enemy sprites blocking the path didn't look out of place and I felt that they all match the intended game art style pretty well. The battler background art used suites the tile set in the location and made its feel relevant. The character sprites are all animated but I notice the enemies didn't have an animation of its own during the battle sequence. It would be nice to watch enemy have their own animation as well which will definitely add lots of visual points and appeal but I don't know if its a limitation in RPGMaker or the art asset pack that does not include it or something that can be done about it. The use of the final boss art is really nice and I have to mentions how it correlates very well with the music track which will be discussed in the audio section later. Lastly, I want to say that the flashy transformation effect really does radiates the right vibe when the character transform.

UI: Since its a RPGMaker MZ game, a lot of the game menu and in-game menus are present through out the game. However, the developer has obviously put in time and effort in making the UI look good, unique, and is well laid out with easy access to the main game. The UI in the battle sequence is clean and pretty straight forward on its layout. Its commendable that the UI has some customization done to it while there are no issues with it with my playthrough. One thing I do find a little peculiar is that Elora in her magical form had her ability button replaced by the nature button, making her ability not accessible when her MP is empty. I'm not sure if its a thing with PRGMaker MZ or if its an intended design decision to have the ability button replaced. Though, can be a problem in much longer games because Elora basically becomes dead weight without any way to restore her MP or utilize her build up of TP in the magical form.

Audio: The audio selection use is really pleasing and are used in the appropriate situations throughout the game. The battle track used feels a little mild but exciting at the same time. (Spoiler Alert! Start) As for the battle tracks used before and during the demon king segment, the music theme that was use matches really well with what is happening which does feel like a face off between Elora and the Demon King. Also, the upbeat track during the battle enhanced the feeling of fighting against the demon king and is really relevant to his presence (Spoiler Alert! End). Besides that, sound effects are used appropriately and are quite pleasing when certain effects happen like Elora's transformation, when the boulder is pushed, and even during the battler segments when a magic spell is used and attack is performed. In other words, there is nothing that is left out in the game when it comes to the audio being used through out the game. Two improvement I would suggest is to get a voice pack so at least the characters can grunt and puff during battles or dialog sequence, and secondly, try to explore more music track options outside of what RPGMaker offers since there are much more exciting and powerful music packs that would enhance the gameplay further.

Theme: The magical girl theme is very obvious in this game since there are two characters that are designed to look like magical girls while the main character, Elora can transform between her warrior and magical form. As for the theme that the developer picked, they are Uncertainty Principle and Nuclear Energy. It is mentioned that Elora transformation effect represents the Nuclear Energy theme because it is called "Radiation" and after seeing the effect several times I have to agree that the effect does radiate intensely like the sun which is relevant to what Nuclear Energy comprise off. Besides that, the game does feature some level of randomness which fulfills the Uncertainty Principle since each time I start a new game or enter the next level a different enemy type lies in the path of progress. However since the random enemy set is quite small, I did mention above that on occasion the randomness is not apparent at times due to the limited set.

Challenge / Engagement: The game starts off quite challenging when the player has to face the first enemy alone but after a while with more available abilities and party members the game can be easily beaten without the use of the magical form. Basically, the magical form is a good supplement to the existing party outfit and it could have been utilized a little better so it would take up a major role in the battler segments. Maybe have Elora be able to transform during battle (after collecting fairies, and in both ways between normal and magical) and not immediately after collecting all three fairies since I find it a little troublesome to have one party member limited to the attack button alone after MP is used up while with no way of spending the pent up TP points. As for engagement, the game is pretty engaging with a decent level of story and gameplay. The randomness of the enemy and puzzle elements kept the game engaging but after the first few playthrough, I find that the game could use improvements on the story and gameplay in terms of item variety, companion abilities, grinding, treasure hunting, activities, etc. Basically, the game seem to have left out a good amount of its RPG and grinding elements, causing it to feel like a game that focuses on the boulder pushing puzzle and straight forward battlers, making it not as appealing in the long run. I don't know if its due to time constraint or intended design to test out the two elements

Originality / Creativity: The story and game level is setup in an original manner but not much else to say besides the two. For creativity, the use of randomness to the enemies in each level give it a nice creative touch while the different puzzle designs of the same puzzle mechanics utilizes a good level of creativity. The story does feel a little generic and could use some creative inspiration to spice up the dialog. Anyway, this will be discussed in the next section.

Story (Entire section is a spoiler): The game basically presents a simple story about Elora saving a group of her companions and I find that adding Divini does make the story interesting at first but at later stages of the game the story got a little generic when all it involves is just fighting the monster blocking the path, meet new party member, solve puzzle, then rinse and repeat. There is some level of creativity in the dialogs since they are different when meeting each new companion, as well as the hints being pointed by Elora when fighting an enemy. I like the hints from Elora since it helps me understand what I would be fighting in the battler and what to expect, such as the elemental dragon being able to change forms. As for spicing up the story, I was actually expecting some additional lore from the main game "Divini" in this game since I have not touched any of the main game yet and it was mention this is a side-story to the main game (I think its was in the comments below somewhere). I'm not sure this is suppose to be a non-canon or canon story since it felt like the former as there wasn't anything more after meeting Divini for the first time. I think there is some relationship between Elora and the Demon King since she did mention that she knows of his second form so this might just be a part of the main game lore that I'm not able to relate to. Anyway, the story is sufficient for its use in a game jam setting but I think there needs to be a well written story if the game does intend to be a canon side story to the main game. Hopefully story elements from the main game gets implemented into this game so that new players, like myself, who pick up the game can look forward to the main game expecting some continuity to the main story and world lore.

Overall: Its a really well polished RPGMaker game with good use of art/audio assets and really good level of presentation. I really enjoy the battler gameplay aspects of it but the story could use some work. I find that the game seem to emphasis on the gameplay and puzzle solving elements, possibly due to the game jam theme and it ends up attributing to the lack of substance in the story. In its current state, it feels more of a casual game because its very easy to pick up and the game mechanics are straight forward to play with while having nothing sophisticated or any advanced/deep gameplay involved. I think with more improvement in the story department and employing a good amount of emphasis on the RPG elements that RPGMaker offers, the game would feel a lot more complete and engaging this way rather than relying on the theme.

Note: For reference, the feedback is from playing the WebGL version on the latest Firefox browser. (Spoilers Ahead! Start) The enemy bosses are Treant, Garuda, Harpy, Dragon, Elemental Dragon (at least 4 different forms), Lamia, Ogre, Iron giant, Behemoth, and Demon King which doesn't get randomize at all (Spoilers Ahead! End).

Super short but super sweet game about following the daily life of an ordinary girl who at times becomes a magical girl fighting enemies out on the street.

Magical Girl Concept: The game at first did not make the magical girl concept apparent because the main character is basically a silhouette of an ordinary girl. However after engaging in battle with an enemy, the main character displays an exciting amount of magical effects and attacks in its animation while wielding a magic wand/staff that fulfills the magical girl concept. I think the normal silhouette is fine but a separate silhouette with more magical looks/accessories would fully utilize the Magical Girl idea.

Mechanics: There isn't any keyboard controls being used in the game and input is confined to the two UI visible button and left mouse button over certain hot zones in the game screen. Basically the game contains mechanics that is based off a point and click adventure game with the cursor icon changing when its over an object that is interactable. There is a simple day/night cycle which can be controlled by pressing the fast forward icon, changing the current activity of the main character, the scene, and the background image. I notice that depending on the time based on the background, the main character could be sleeping or working when the house entrance is clicked while at certain times no other actions can be performed (besides sleeping) until the fast forward button is used. It would be nice to have a time display or text display showing at what point in time the game state is in rather than relying on the background alone, since the same night background is used several times in a row. Moving on, the game provides several hot zones a player can click on that will change the action the main character will perform, e.g. shopping, working, and relaxing at a bench, and etc. One of the things I want to highlight is that the main character does engage in battle with enemies in the scene. The enemies have health bar that doesn't get replenished over time but it helps indicate that the main character which at that point is a magical girl is slowly chipping away at the enemy's health. Frankly, the mechanics used is simple and straight forward but the combination of it makes the game really interesting to play and coupled with some imagination, the game basically tells a sort of slice-of-life story of a magical girl. Besides that, one thing I like is, even the game does not feature a tutorial, the simple yet helpful UI pointer that pops up when no clicks have been registered really guides the player in click on the hot zones. Overall, there doesn't seem to be any bugs or issues, so the mechanics are pretty solid.

Visual: The art style is quite unique and I can see that most of them has been made by the developer. The silhouette for the characters are done well and is easy to tell apart from the other characters on screen. A lot of the visual depiction of an object/scenery is spot on since it clearly shows that there is a gym in the house, that the main character is working at her computer, and the grocery store looks like what it is, a grocery store. I think the clever combination of shapes and color makes the game stand out and is easy to actually make out what is going on. The background that represents the time of the day helps enhance the experience that time in the game does move, albeit in a sort of turn based sort of way. The additional lighting in the night scene shows there is a good level of effort put into making the night scene appealing. I notice that animation is quite limited but a good amount of effort is seen in the magical girl battle with the enemies, which apparently to me is surprisingly quite nicely animated. There isn't much else to say regarding the art assets but I think the developer should consider adding more scenes and visual activities that the magical girl can do so the narrative of a slice-of-life sort of story can be expanded further.

UI: The game doesn't have a main menu or title screen and starts off in the main game immediately. Even if it doesn't have an in-game menu, at least the developer is considerate enough to put an audio button that mutes the music being played in the background. Besides that, there is a UI button with the fast forward symbol and its obvious to the player since it stands out really well from the other art assets and it doesn't get blended in with the background scene.

Audio: The game uses two music tracks, one in the normal daily life activity and another when battling with enemies. The normal track, gives the game a good dreamy and slice-of-life kind of feel, while the battle track enhances the magical girl animations and effects. Since it is stated that the audio tracks were made during the game, I think the developer really did a good job composing these simple yet effective tracks. However I didn't notice any sound effects being played during the game so I would suggest putting in some stock sound effects like keyboard clacking and busy supermarket ambiance for their respective activities, just to give the game a complete feel. Besides that, the music tracks used are more than enough for a single scene in this game but could use a night music track to highlight the sleeping activity.

Theme: The magical girl theme is apparent in the battle sequence and it isn't during normal activities. As for the side theme that the developer picked which is Time, apparently the use of time is integrated into the mechanics which is in the fast forward button and changing time does affect which activity the main character will perform. In other words, the theme for time is fully utilized in the game. Though one thing I want to point out is that the two themes of magical girl and time isn't something that is being used at the same wavelength, meaning that it feels like there is a separation between the two themes used, or are not very well combined/mixed. However, its not important, but I want to mention this because there is more that the theme for time alone can offer. A good combination of time and the Magical Girl concept would go a long way in making the activities more interesting, instead of forwarding time alone.

Challenge / Engagement: The game isn't designed to be challenging at all. However its is engaging since a good level of imagination is needed to create a sort of self made story that comes out of this game. Basically, the gameplay is designed to be a sort of visually interactive picture book, which tell a nice little story of an ordinary girl who at times becomes a magical girl that fights enemies. Its engaging in a way that you can sort of create a story out of it by selecting activities depending on the day or time. An example I would put that is comparable with this game design is like the game House, where each person in a group takes up a role in the family. However, since the game is limited to one single scene then the story sort of hits a limit, which also limits the engagement of it. Hence, if the game comes with more scenes or activities, then the game can be pretty engaging and would last much longer until the player has exhausted every combinations of each activity.

Originality / Creativity: There isn't anything notable about the game mechanics per say since its basically a point and click game. In terms of visual design, and how it is executed, I would say the game layout of its art asset is pretty original and as I have mentioned early the use of shapes and color is creative enough to have them easily distinguishable. Besides that the activities that are available in the game is quite creative and are activities that don't coincide. I would like to see more activities added if the game gets develop further and this will entail an enormous amount of creative juice.

Story: The game doesn't exactly present a story but by watching how time flies and the different activities the main character does in that limited scene, it feels like there is a slice-of-life story that unfolds with each click with no words spoken.

Overall: The game presents its ideas and themes very clearly while gameplay is limited, simple, and super short game. I think right now the game can in fact expand into a lot of possible directions if the developer choose to invest time into this game. Although these types of games are depicted to be simple games, but they are one of the hardest to develop because of the level of intricacies involved in getting the player involved with the gameplay and engagement from a visual presentation alone.

Although the developer had only 3 days to make this but it was done really well to a pretty much playable point. The game is really challenging and possibly a little confusing at times on how the mechanics actually works. Note that since the game doesn't exactly feature the main or side theme at all, I will pass on rating the game.

Magical Girl Concept: Since the game isn't actually finished, there is no visual signs of a magical girl in the game.

Mechanics: The game uses some basic movement controls with aim tied to the mouse pointer. There are some well thought of player weapon designs, where the left mouse does a continuous stream of bullets while the right mouse button fires off a powerful burst of bullets which takes time to reload. There is also a really neat melee attack but I notice there is a sort of cool down delay which is not indicated after hitting the melee attack. Its a little difficult to determine the melee attack effective range and there are times when going near an enemy results in being hit rather than being able to execute the melee attack. The health mechanics in the game is kind of unique but not obvious since the health bar is revealed using the shift key which also shows the player character hit box as well as slowing down the movement. I notice there are may instances that the health is replenished when the combo hit counter increases or something else is triggering the health refill. The health packs help in replenishing the health bar but its drop rate is almost close to uncommon. The combo meter isn't very well explained but each time an enemy is hit, the combo bar fills but drops over time. It also resets if the player character gets hits. I'm not sure if the bullet damage gets multiplied by the combo level but it doesn't feel like bullets are getting stronger. Besides that the enemies spawn on each wave, and what type would spawn on each wave seems random, whilst there is some enemies types that would only appear at certain waves. The player bullet is able to destroy enemy bullets and seems to be a vital survival mechanic especially with how enemies and even the first boss spews bullets that do not seem to decay or time out. There seem to be a bug or intentional design that the bullets goes past the boss hitbox and doesn't register a hit when it is changing into its next pattern of attack.  Basically, the game mechanics is promising but there needs to be some  reasonable balancing and due to its difficulty, providing save checkpoints in the game would be one helpful point for players to actually be able to complete all 25 wave.

Visual: The game basic hand drawn art style is cute and give it a very playful feel to it. I like how that there are many variations of enemy types with its own visual attack while being animated. The player character is animated as well which gives the game quite a good visual sense of movement to the player. However, there is no color or backgrounds in the game, just lineart and placeholders for the first boss. Its not an ideal design choice for full games but if done correctly can be an artstyle some would appreciate.

UI: The game has a simple main menu that lets you start the game immediately and also lets you get back to the first boss wave after reaching the boss level. There is no in-game menu but by pressing Escape key, the main menu is brought up. There is a sort of video tutorial on the controls but I notice the video background is glitching up.

Audio: The game doesn't feature any audio of any kind.

Theme: The developer picked Nuclear Energy as the side theme but I felt that it might have be left out in this version due to time constraints.

Challenge / Engagement: The game is really challenging with the extremely high randomness of enemy types, bullets pattern, enemy movement pattern, and spawning. Some enemy types would give enough time for players to react and some flies straight towards the player character without notice, so dodging in this game is a very continuous activity and at no point I was able to hover in place for more than 1 second. Frankly, I only managed to reach wave 19 after fighting the boss several times and past that I wasn't able to continue further since there isn't a save point in the game. The main menu has an extra button that appears when reaching wave 20 but I don't have the mental stamina to fight the boss just to find out what beyond wave 19. However, the game even though in its initial state is engaging with its current  game play but no story or visual aspect are currently present in the game to further enhance the gameplay experience.

Originality / Creativity: The visual aspect of it is quite original with the character and enemy designs and there is some level of creativity in creating the enemy behavior and its initial art. I can't evaluate more since there needs to be more art assets or even a story to determine whether or not the game is original or creative in its own way.

Story: There is no noticeable story except for the curious title which also doesn't explain or indicate that the player character is killing any magical girls until the boss fight begins. I assume the placeholder OHSG art is a magical girl but its not confirmed even with the text description.

Overall: The game is fun to try out and might be beatable if a lot of time and patience is invested. There is a needs to have its difficulty balanced if this game were to be developed for a wider range of player skill level. However, the game should be developed further and lots of consideration needs to be addressed not only visually but the level design as well.

A really cutesy hi-bit pixelart platformer game featuring a Magical Girl that has the ability to control an orb of light. The game artstyle, music, and sounds are really good and is well polished for its Magical Girl theme. However there needs to be improvement in the game mechanics and execution of the game play for this to be a complete game.

Magical Girl Concept: The main character Glimmer dresses as a Magical Girl and has only one magical ability of firing and controlling an orb of light, used only in lighting torches along a dark path. The Magical Girl theme is present but there is room for improvement in the character design and concept. I find that she could use more magical girl features like an offensive or defensive magical abilities/spells, have a flashy animation or be able to transform, or have a light familiar/fairy follow her as a companion.

Mechanics: The game utilizes some platforming movement controls and wall jump mechanics, which feels a little awkward at first but can be adapted easily. The player character run speed is comfortable for platformer of these types but a walk button will add a good deal of control for more careful players. As for the jump mechanics, the jumping feels good on the up direction but falling feels a little sudden or heavy. The jump animation corresponds well with the jump. However, there is some slight unresponsiveness when pressing the jump button and it happened in several instances in my playthrough where the character doesn't jump when moving. This seems to happen a lot on breaking platforms and when the character lands on a platform (seems to take a lot of time to register ground presence). The wall jump/slide mechanic is fun to use but one thing I notice is that at times the character animation for wall slide doesn't play correctly and defaults to the left/right run animations. Besides that, the character left/right hit box is off centered, causing some strange bugs when turning away from spiked wall, which causes the character to jump into the spike wall, or slip off edges when turning. I'm a little curious why the left/right movement key has an S key in the instructions. Other than that health and magic gauge mechanics are employed in the game while coupled with the the forgiving death mechanics, player character would restart their play through by spawning at an unmarked checkpoint. The magic gauge is used as a means of limiting how many light orbs can be fired and how long a light orb can be controlled which is a really neat setup. The consumption rate for the light orbs both firing off one and controlling feels reasonable enough. One notable mechanic is the ability to control the position of the light orb, which helps in lighting up certain paths and also to activate certain switches. Although this mechanics isn't a novel idea, but the developers manage to utilized it as part of an important mechanic in the game. However I felt that it can do more by doubling as an attack ability against enemies, since the melee attack ability feels somewhat odd and really redundant in this game. The melee attack seemed to be a two swipe attack which makes it feel overly long for a single button press and not closely responsive when the attack button is pressed. Although the enemy ghost would knock back (feels like a push back) when the melee attack occurs, it wasn't very exciting as there isn't any impact or hit indicator to tell the player if the enemy is hit. This goes the same for the Boss fight which was quite a let down (will explain more in Challenge/Engagement). I think the melee attack should either be improved, give a better feel to the enemy hit with animation/effects, or be replaced by the light orb which can naturally double as an attack. Another thing to note is the fixed camera tracking on the player character which feels stiff as the camera follows the player character. The camera movements and tracking needs a lot of adjustments and can also be used to address the "leap of faith" issue since this can be coupled with the light orb control mechanic. What I meant is that, when the right mouse button is held down, the camera could track the light orb or pan towards the light orb position instead, giving players a lot more visibility around the scene.

Visual: All the art and visual aspect of the game is done really well and the cute character design made the game very appealing to as a platformer. In terms of pixel art quality, everything is really spot on and is made with utmost care. The color choice and composition in the visuals really contrast the story and the character background very clearly as it highlights the main character, Glimmer in a really dark and possibly unforgiving world. Its know to be difficult to balance both the lighting and color especially when the background and world environment arts is set in a pitch black ambiance, so I would say the developer manage to pull it off without sacrificing the clarity of the artwork. As for the boss design, I find it well executed since the boss looks intimidating while has that mild scary sort of clown theme going on. I think the game is visually amazing since a lot of thought and effort must have gone into making it look so good.

UI: The game has a well laid out main menu and in-game menu but there isn't any exit button the in-game menu. There is a controller instruction screen which is helpful but the layout of each control keys seems really disorganized and it did not have any obvious flow or segmentation between each key control. I don't mind the creative instruction screen but having too much creativity to a point it looks disorganized makes it unappealing at times. Besides that, the UI used for the health (both main character and boss) and magic bar is simple and straight forward, so nothing to note. The dialog box has a character portrait display which makes it easy to identify which character is speaking at the moment. There are times when the ghost attack the character when dialog is being played, the ghost movement or AI should pause during such events as to avoid players from being harassed when reading dialog.

Audio: The original music adds a fine touch to what the game entails from the very start since the title screen and I really like how the title screen track creates this ambiance of darkness lit by a glimmer of light, just as the title's namesake. However, the platforming stage with the cave background doesn't seem to be playing any music track, rather just soft cave ambiance and it seems to last until the clown area. I think music should be introduced since the first ghost appears or when the first torch is lit so this way it lightens the heavy dreary feel of the dark cave which became monotonous after a while. (Spoiler Alert! Start) The music used in the clown area suites the intended message given off by the visuals and it became quite a relieve when discovering this area. Then there is the music track used in the boss stage, which gives that really nice exciting clown battle expected in this part of the game. Just like what the rest have mention in their comments, somehow the audio did not loop so was met with silence instead. Anyway, at least there is a rewarding but sort of melancholy piano track after beating the boss (Spoiler Alert! End).  Besides the issues, the music composition suites the visual design aspects really well and it matches well with the environment the player is in. As for sound effects, the developers use a good selection of sounds effects and are used at the right moments in the game. Nothing of significant to say about it.

Theme: The game does fulfill the Magical Girl theme since the Glimmer has a very magical look to her and have the magical ability to manipulate an orb of light. However, the side theme wasn't really addressed well or is misrepresented because the developers picked conservation of energy as their side theme. They related conservation of energy to how "the light [brought] into the dark zones can light the way." and "There is no light except that which you produce", which to me doesn't ring conservation at all, rather it sounds more like "filling the empty void with hope of light" that sort of theme. My interpretation to conservation of energy in a game involving light would be like this: light is a precious magical resource in this dark world and any use of it will limit your progress into the game. So, in other words, whenever the player uses light the magic bar doesn't get filled until that light source is recovered, e.g. extinguish the light from lit torch to recover magic power, then that sort of interpretation molds well with conservation of energy. Obviously with the current story and design decisions made in this game, the developers can forgo the idea of this theme of conservation of energy and focus on telling a story oriented towards hope instead.

Challenge / Engagement (Large spoiler text ahead!): First of all, the game isn't very challenging, rather has several mild surprises when it comes to platforming, such as the broken platform and out of place canons. (Spoiler Alert! Start) The first part of the game (the cave area) is basically just to get the hang of the movement control and there isn't any excitement in avoiding environmental obstacles. The spike walls and sludge feels more like barricades or a means to guide the player to their destinations. The fire traps give a sense of dynamic level design but was poorly executed since the trap can be easily avoided with the right timing and player placement. One thing I would highlight is the use of torches as switches as puzzle elements to deactivate certain traps in the game. So far the only one puzzle I like is when you need to hover an orb of light under a platform and activating a switch torch (green lit torch). On to the next area, the clown area, feels the same as the cave area but bouncing beach balls fired off from cannons are dynamic obstacles which did give a little pressure to progress past it. Besides that, the ghost appearing at first in the cave area and several times along the way did not pose any risk. At first I assume they were not killable as I was firing off light orbs at them, while on many occasions I was able to out run past them until I started using the melee attack. As for the boss, the attacks pattern and decision for each attack style are done really well with predictable times to avoid the attack. What broke it was the confusion that whether lighting up the bulbs around its neck actually lead to defeating it, while after one point the center bulb couldn't be lit up anymore. In the heat of the moment, I was assuming that the player needs to cause the boss to falls down onto the ground by lighting up all bulbs in order to hit him on ground level but that seems to be the wrong way to fight him. So it seems that jumping and smacking him with the melee attack is the right way of fighting the boss, which is a big let down because the most important mechanic (the light mechanic) became something of an afterthought in this fight. So I want to say that a good challenge is in the level design and in how the player can make full use of the available mechanics in defeating the boss (Spoiler Alert! End). In order to make the level challenging, the game could use more dynamic obstacles, challenging wall jumping sequences, and puzzle elements. In other words, make full use of what is available and have it do a lot more than just being barricades and lighting torches. (Spoiler Alert! Start) As for engagement, the story is pretty engaging since the unexpected twist is in defeating the final boss and discovering the true intend of defeating the boss (Spoiler Alert! End).

Originality / Creativity: The story has some level of originality with the use of dark zones and how darkness is involved with magical girls. However, the developer might want to reconsider writing something that isn't based on a familiar magical girl trope that is known by the masses. Besides that, the level of creativity is substantial with the art and music put into the game.

Story: The initial cutscene story gave a good ground of what to expect in the game but then it felt quite odd since it wasn't consistent with what is depicted visually during the gameplay. I would expect Glimmer to be fighting against monsters made from pure darkness (you get a bunch of ghost clowns instead) while the final boss didn't exactly use any abilities that represents darkness. However, there needs to be some good deal of reassessing the story and lore within the gameplay. Besides that, the story created quite a mystery after the final boss is defeated. (Spoiler Alert! Start) Which it raises the question whether Glimmer is the only magical girl capable of defeating darkness, why are other Magical Girls involved and what made them monster in the first place (Spoiler Alert! End)? Anyway if the game ever gets further developed, the story direction could use some work and reconsideration because a good well fleshed out world can in fact keep the story consistent while making it believable during game play.

Overall: The game excels in its original pixel artwork and audio content. Their well to do light manipulating mechanics stands out as something that makes this game have its own identity. However, there are some game breaking mechanics and level designs that needs to be reconsidered if the developers wish to further develop this game or even the next set of games. Currently, I can see the mechanics are not fully utilized and how its being used is at bare minimum which means a lot more can be done with what is available. I'm not sure if the developer intentionally made the game too easy but I think there needs to be a lot more thought put into making the game a little more exciting.

Note: The breaking platform should reset after a set amount of time instead of forcing the player to KYS just to reset the level.

I used to have such a set up before in another indie game where players can rebind keys to whatever they want but due to the game's design and complexity in setting up the instruction screen and tutorials it can get really out of hand at times. So in the end we decided to remove it and ended up with only one control layout but multiple keys assigned to one action. Besides, the decision that seals it was because of the porting to consoles for that game, therefore rebinding keys got abandoned with that move. Hence with that experience and the design decision in this game, I have prepared as many possible control layouts including an Xbox controller (works in any control layout). Well, a lot of indie developers take control input and its integration into game design for granted so I can't blame them since its like an entire topic on its own. I may not want to implement rebind able controls for this game but I will certainly look into making a better setup that integrates with future game.

Hi invadererik, thanks for taking the time in checking out the game and leaving a feedback.

Glad that you pointed out the lack of numpads on the Mac laptops since, I had actually added additional keys (Page Up / Page Down key) for the aim buttons on all control layouts in consideration for laptops without numpad in the current version (v0.7.3). However, its also my fault since they are not listed in the How to Play and me once again forgetting to update the instruction list. If I'm not mistaken and correct me if I'm wrong, that from my limited understanding those keys are accessible with the Fn + Up / Arrow keys on the laptop, even Mac ones. I will try to add more keys in consideration for laptops and also a note to update the control instructions on the next update. I think the location for those aim buttons for laptops could have been in a better location but I don't have a laptop with a compact layout to figure it out so do let me know if you can suggest some keys.

A nicely polished RPG maker game with a good balance between story and gameplay. The current state of the game is promising enough as an introductory game (chapter 0) and the ending leaves a lot of room for story progression if the developer does decide to continue development.

Magical Girl Concept: The entire game is based on the Magical girl concept where you play as a Magical Girl and is sent out on a task while battling against monsters of varying types using a handful of magic spells. The protag magical girl in the game have a transformation sequence.

Mechanics: Since the game is made from RPG maker MV, I will mentioned the plugins used in the game. So the combinations of plugin used is pretty good since the selection creates a complete gameplay experience with lots of functionality you would expect in a proper JRPG front view battler. In other words, a lot of thought must have been put into choosing this design and setup which feels like a reasonably good combination for the best gameplay. No notable mechanics to be mentioned, since it is setup to be a traditional JRPG style game.

Visual: The original character and enemy (bosses) sprites is really well done with good effort being put especially into the two magical girl design. The art quality for the characters are really decent for an introductory game and can be improved on a lot further with more solid lineart and slightly complex dress/uniform designs. In the battlers, the enemies are animated which gives the game a nice feel during the battle. Since a lot of art used here came from RPGMakerMV, then I would say the selections of background tiles and art gives the game a good sci-fi like vibe while the enemy sprites have that magical fantasy look. It is mentioned some of the backgrounds are made by the developer but I find it a little hard to differentiate between the original one and the stock assets. The title screen is a straight forward white text on black background which tells a lot about what it is but since the story isn't a complete one I think it can be designed a lot unique with some added graphics. Say instead of a straight line for the sides of the word "End", draw thorn vines instead to give it a much edgier feel to what the story is depicting.

UI: The UI layout uses the stock RPGMakerMV setup but with some customization made to the in-game menu.

Audio: The music selection is pretty good and is typical for a JRPG style game. I can't comment much except that the super short title screen music track gives that dreaded vibe which compliments the meaning behind the title screen. The sound effects used are in the right place and didn't feel distracting at all.

Theme: The game definitely conforms to the Magical Girl theme since the Magical Girls are dressed like one and the magic ability reflect their magical girl nature. Besides that, the side theme the developer picked is conservation of energy and in every instances when an enemy is killed, the MP gets replenish which does represent the theme really well. Since MP is expanded through the use of magic and is recovered from killing magical enemies, that alone interprets conservation really well. However, the idea of recovering and turning enemy crystals into items isn't really about conservation, rather it more relevant to one of the law of thermodynamics instead.

Challenge / Engagement: The game is quite challenging with the over the top boss fights since the bosses use way more magic abilities and number of attack turns the two Magical Girls can output. I manage to beat the game in 3 hr (game time) with both girls at level 13. There are many times the final boss would KO all the girls in the first turn (4 hits), so the initial attack phase could have been adjusted a lot better. Apparently no new abilities were given after level 10. (Spoiler Alert! Start) Even though the game feels quite balanced and requires a few extra levels of grinding to be able to overcome the first set of bosses since they require certain magic attack they are weak against that are only available after level 7. Besides that the final boss is easily beaten by taking advantage of one of his magic element weakness, so a element magic attack (from spells and item) + guard combo on each turn, while from time to time reviving, and using the special abilities seems to be the best strategy (Spoiler Alert! End). As for engagement, I find that the game got me hooked to its compelling and mystery story which at this time feels incomplete but good in a way that I wanted to know more beyond chapter 0. Since the game play is a complete JRPG, I find that the game isn't limiting in any way when I played it. However at late game, it would be nice to be able to buy weapons, armor, or accessories from the shop or introduce new items to buy after level 10.

Originality / Creativity: The story is unique in its own way since the ending gave it several possible directions where this can go into. The story idea is creative since its about saving the sun but I think the writing could use a lot more creativity since it is written a little conservative at the moment.

Story: I really like the initial story here in the game and would like to know more if the game gets developed. Since English isn't the developer native language, I did expect a few issues with the text script but the story is understandable even with the issues. One thing I want to point out is that the ending dialogs (after final boss fight) feels a little confusing since a lot of the context is missing from the game and could have been improved with a lot more backstory and world lore. (Spoiler Alert! Start) From what I currently understand, I can tell based on the ending that there is a greater evil organization that is planning to do something much sinister and the mystery about how Magical Girls are created raises the mystery bar a lot higher. Also, extra points for the mystery lady in the afterlife scene each time the game fails (Spoiler Alert! End). The side characters in the cafeteria did provide some small amount of lore but it wasn't enough to compliment the entire main story. Something to mentions here is that, I like the game jam mascot cameo in the game, she looks familiar but wasn't obvious from the start until the name is mentioned.

Overall: Its a really decent RPG maker game with a good mix of gameplay and balance to the story. I think the point forward with this game is that it needs a lot of story development and a ton of additional stuff like the items selections, magic abilities, and definitely more magical girls. The main focus for most RPG maker games is the story in itself but since battler game mechanics are in, then that aspect of item, ability, and enemy variety will also need to be taken into consideration for future development.

Hi CaptainAfrica, thanks for the comment!