itch.io

It's like if Super Paper Mario had random battles and far more puzzles.  A storyline about love, love and apples. Cute and Adorable scenes and characters, and some dark moments towards the end! 

The battle system is quite innovative. Using an aiming mechanic you can defeat foes, incapacitate them or use a simple SMT/Undertale style negotiation. What's praiseworthy is that pacifying enemies is intuitive. Such as tossing an apple into the open mouth of certain monsters can be more strategically viable than killing or incapaciting. Solving the issue in Undertale/Deltarune where the pacifist option is longer and clunkier.

Only flaw is really the areas overstay the welcome a bit. The self-contained scenario of each area is fairly low-key for the length it takes to beat them.  With most of the significance being the symbolic links to the main storyline which is revealed later in the game. 

Overall a very good indie game, well worth playing! 

Given its free and you're interested enough to have read this far in, there isn't any reason not to give it a try. 

Awesome, 11s really great for a 1st playthrough.

It's possible to get them all in one run. But it's more of a case of learning where they are first.

Ah I think I found the issue with the bird. she's meant to fly back behind robot but an oversight got her stuck in the wall with the game waiting for her to move to the position. I've found a fix for it. 

Re: the battle with Wendigo I tried it out and it completed it. After he transforms and turns dark, there's a skill that gets added to your skill set called Deus, did you use that against him?  

Anyway I've made a new version and did a bit of a blitz through the main story and checked the Tower of Trials entrance. I'll get it uploaded.

Hi thanks for playing the game, very happy to hear you loved it.

I see re: the bug, I'll have a look into it this week and get back to you about it.

Are you getting stuck immediately after talking to the bird at the entrance?

Rightio, that's a pretty good point regarding the name.

Thanks for playing the game and the feedback. 

The theme was to try to be novel and sarcy about the premise, but with strong gameplay underneath it. Usually a Winter or Christmas themed game tends to be a bit throwaway or dismissed titles like you mentioned. However I was thinking if I delivered something of quality it could hit a niche that might not be covered by other games(I think the only other one in a similar setting is Cthulu Saves Christmas). The main target audience I envisioned would be some of the Mario RPG or Undertale/Deltarune players who'd be more receptive the cuter character designs, and non-standard RPG settings.

Re: the warping, yeah fair enough,  I've gotten quite a lot of feedback on that so I'll look into making it so the characters move into position instead of warping.

Thanks again. 

I think there's some charm in the character designs and scenario but it's controls are pretty wacked out. 

The Jumping is so sluggish and the randomness in the fireball trajectories just make it frustrating to play.

Gave it a play.

Though the animation is rough as understandable this early. The gameplay is fairly smooth and fun, I played a few waves fighting against the player. 

Even though I'm not one for beat-em-ups/fighters  I do like the flying kick you can do from a sprint and the attacks being assigned to the bumper and triggers

The camera kinda freaks out if you go between it and an obstacle like a pillar.

The lighting is a bit odd and harsh. from one side of the orb the lighting/shadow is so harsh that the player character might as well be a silhouette at times, which kind of defeats the purpose of them running around with huge tits and ass on show,. 

Thanks for playing and for the feedback. I'll take a look at the bugs. 

I see regarding the locomotion, in practice they're basically the same. Maybe it's just the animation and the nature of Lux's sprite being longer from the side view.

If you stun an enemy with the nose blast and then ram into them with the horns it destroys them in the overwrold.

Regarding the combat Upgraded equipment boosts the power of your standard attacks.  The melee moves scale a bit more with the boosted equipment. There's a few skills that you can pick up to make Partridge and Chestni easier.  The shelled enemies defence can be overcome via Z-Skills which always deal 1 damage, getting the Timed Hits which boosts damage by 1.5x and always deals a minimum of 1, or equipping more powerful skills.

The story and dialogue of the prototype is wholey tongue-in-cheek tbh, to avoid needing to commit to main story elements while I was still designing the games systems. 

 Hi again! The composer has started to upload the demo music to youtube:

Reindeer Story - YouTube

Thanks for the in-depth review, you definitely put the game through its paces! Glad you enjoyed it. 

Thanks for the info up re:  the glitches with the vertical Spin Jumps and Bob's Sleds. I'll take a look into correcting them. 

Reindeer Story by Azzie (itch.io) 

For the last two years I've been putting a lot of time, effort and passion into developing Reindeer Story. 

Reindeer Story is an RPG inspired by the Mario RPGs. 

It features exploration and Platforming Action and Turn Based Combat with Real Time Elements! 

- Azzie 

Reindeer Story by Azzie (itch.io)

Reindeer Story is a Hybrid RPG. It mixes platforming and exploration in the overworld with turn based battles with a real time element similar to Deltarune.

In Battle between the player and enemy is the Battle Zone! When the enemies attack control your character in the battle zone to avoid damage! Master Z-Attacks  to strike the enemy during their own turn!

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.

Not yet, the main composer I commissioned has rights to the music.

He'll probably  make it available with more tracks shortly after the game is out.  I'm aiming for an early access beta for the end of the year.

Controls

Arrows: Movement

[Space]: "Jump"

[X] : "Cancel"

[Z]: "Action"

[C]: "Special"

[ESC]: Open Pause Screen

[O]: Toggle characters in menu, Hold to Escape in Battle

[P]: Toggle characters in menu screens

Whoops, I'll take a look into that. Thanks.

Thanks, definitely going to take a look at collisions and bugs.  I was a bit lazy in halting the players diagonal movement entirely if either direction was impassable but I'll get that sorted to have the player move in the free direction in those instances.

Played for a while until I accidentally killed myself with Basic Fireball. 12 floors in after after beating two of the bosses. 

Pretty great atmosphere, the sound design especially sets the mood along with the graphical style. I like the design of the enemies, the flat 2d designs seem like a comic book. But It was actually quite a shock when fighting the first  boss, I'm guessing it's supposed to be a sand golem because I was expecting those to be 2D as well. 

Gameplay is pretty fun too, I ran out of weapons by the 2nd boss, managed to make it through but had to end up killing the next merchant to steal one. Is running out of weapons generally expected or is there a mechanic that influences how much durability is lost based on timing of attacks? 

All-in-all enjoyable. 

Cool, thanks for playing it. I'll take a look into making the improvements. 

The present and appears some old code I had. the hit box for opening/interacting used to be a square but I made it into a radius while also requiring the player to be facting towards it. However I had left in hardcoded value for the radius (25 pixels) for the presents which makes it a tighter hitbox than the NPCs(32 pixels). 

Having diagonals slide the player up/down right/left against a wall makes sense too.

Played it a bit, it's seems like a promising idea. But I found it really difficult to reliably off the angled hits with Z and the arrow keys.

Thanks for the thorough feedback.

That's a decent point about the controls/platforming, I'll review the level design and character jumping mechanics/speed.  

Regarding combat I see what you mean.  I probably went overboard giving the characters 3 different attack types character. I think I'll simply it down to two Melee and Ranged/Magic and make them in a straight line rather than the current diamond pattern (currently Right --> clockwise , Left --> Anticlockwise but I can see why that'd be a bit confusing) .

I'm in the middle of re-doing the battle zone/square, in this demo it's a pre-set size but I'm changing the logic so it's a logical grid of squares sized 16x16(same for enemy attacks) and the top of the grid being slightly higher so that the player doesn't look like they can stand ontop of it.  So I can potentially have different sized Battle Zones or ones which can change in the middle of gameplay based on enemy attacks.

I agree enemies/bosses/balance has a lot of room for improvement. One of the things I've got planned is  enemy/boss behaviour/AI .  I'm planning on making a scripts to influence which attacks they have available/choose and how powerful their attack is (or letting a boss use 2 attacks in 1 turn) based on factors like how much HP they have left, number of turns in the battle, and how many other enemies are present. I think this will help make boss fights get more intense as you progress through a battle. 

But I also want to play with some more ideas with the battle zone, like the Robot that's in the middle. I was considering boss battles where the Zone is a lot bigger and you have to do certain things, press buttons, interact with things during the enemies attack. 

Dialogue and story I'll probably need to make snappier. Someone else on /vg/ said the scene with the other Reindeer should have only been 3 lines long, and in retrospective while it wasn't a wordy scene, a lot of the lines were basically just a different character saying the same thing.

Glad you enjoyed playing it, but also for a feedback. Those points regarding the platforming and the combat complexity are very good ones, I really didn't think about how accessible it was.

Really charming graphics, I like the pixelart a lot and the music. The Rabbit's idle animation is a bit hyperactive.

Decent gameplay for how quickly you made it.  But camera was a bit iffy. If you fall/jump from high up the camera doesn't keep up with you until you're at the bottom of the screen. and you can't pan the camera down to look at ledges off screen.  So I couldn't really tell whether I'd land on a platform or a bottomless pit and once I could, it was too late to change direction.

But I had fun playing the level overall.

Cool, thanks for the feedback, glad you like it enough to consider playing to the end. 

The ingame menu's "exit" meant closing the menu screen rather than quitting the game. But I could add an option to quit the game as well.

And I'll have a bit of a think about the battle pacing near the start . But  yeah rewards for battles are exp, gold and items.    

Very nice game, I was surprised by how many characters there were.

I really liked the in-engine cinematics as well, very N64/PS1-like.

Pretty clever puzzle game. I like how more mechanics were introduced evolved between each level. I got a bit confused during the 1st level because I thought you had to keep poking them. But very fun!

Only bugbear is swapping between fairies is a bit clunky. I  wish there was a smoother way. Like if you assigned the Fairies a number and pressing a number key 1-9 would swap you straight to that number. 

£14.99 on Steam in the UK? You know that's over $20? 

Thanks for the thorough feedback.

I see what you mean about the size of the levels and the tree collisions(since you can walk "under").  In terms of combat, I didn't want player bogged down fighting Tigers at the expense of game progression.  I put the two boss fights as lowest priority and squeezed them in during the weekend before the deadline for that reason, since it kind of takes longer to get those than any other slab in the game.

Regarding the amount of content. When I found out the theme of the Jam I wrote out a word document plan of all the characters and features I wanted to implement and how I'd expect to create/code them. I also had some restrictions on myself to make sure I didn't spend too much time on an individual thing like as soon as I finished a sprite, I would not go back to adjust it, same with the map layouts and some of the mechanics.  Though I did end up making concessions by the end, I ended up implementing 21 of 30 slabs, leaving some parts of the map a bit empty and kind of left the trees as they were in order to work on the rest of the content.

(Though I think if the whole lockdown didn't happen I doubt I would have finished on time, I'm working remotely during it so not having to travel to work and back gave me a lot more time during the morning and evenings)

Thanks again.

Thanks! Glad to hear that the dialogue was helpful, I wanted to make sure the open/sandbox world wasn't overwhelming. 

Liked it very much. Nice graphics and the controls worked well.

Nice to hear! I spent a good chunk of the 1st half of the jam trying to get the controls/mechanics to feel smooth. Glad you enjoyed it. 

Thanks very much! 

Really fun game. The feedback system of sound effects and the screen shaking were cool and the different weapons were fun to use. 

Good job! Really liked the atmospheric music and the gameplay was quite tense with those dinosaurs running about.

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you liked the game. 

Eggcellent!

Nice game! The second section reminded me a lot of the skypop or submarine sections of Super Mario Land.

Had fun playing it, loved the pixel art and the music. Plus the rocklifting and snake surfing are pretty cool mechanics.

Like others mentioned I can't really see the HUD. The jumping is a bit unforgiving around the bottomless pits/waterfalls.

Glad you liked it and thanks very much for the feedback.

I see what you mean about the area sizes. I think in the future I could make them a bit more compact and make the slab teleporters more prominent(perhaps if I put them in view as soon as you enter certain maps that have them).

Yeah I had fun with it.