Haven't been doing 100% the most, but been trying! Mostly refining the message windows, implementing the opening cutscene, and making sure the choice boxes work. Realised that devlogs might not be the best for me right now because I'm super tired and it's 5:06am BUT i will post these screenshots for your perusal...
I also spent some time today making multiline choices with word wrapping! Fun stuff. Hacked together, but fun.
I dunno if this is the right place but I'm just gonna post stuff here that we're doing, to keep people's juices flowing
This is the beginning of a little town that will hopefully appear in-game. The tileset is cute and it looks like there may be cards in this game.
Tonight I went on a bit of a frenzy
Tomorrow there will be more! My developer partner narcodis will be dealing with the gameplay side of things, which can I say looks SWELL so far. Anyways, it's 2:20am and it's bedtime for me. Night, night!
Thank you! Indeed, I felt the need to apologise that given the circumstances, I could only create something so short. Of course, given how much a fan I am of your work, any positive praise from you is quite welcome.
And yes, the hugging sprite for DZ and Riggy would be very welcome. I'd almost have done it if I had prioritised it. I very much appreciate that your socks were knocked off, and I would like to knock them off again in future - perhaps even the shoes, too!
Thank you for playing, dear friend :)
Love this game! So addictive. I also think I've found a bug. If you:
1. Get to an upgrade screen.
2. Click on a "Wildcard" you've acquired previously.
3. It will detect it as a valid "upgrade" when it's not (presumably).
4. Then the following screenshot will show (entire deck is available for selection).
Above bug aside, love this game! The design is addicting and thank you for making it <3
hmm. Maybe i should make a game for this jam i have an idea but i would like a spriter, music maker, scripter, 3d sculptor, AI engineer, MMO engine scripter, to work for me free while this game gets created according to a confidential specification, an idea that has not been done before in this undustry,
What an incredible game! I'm just over halfway through, and this could probably be honestly one of the best pieces of superhero media I've experienced. I was tentative in expectations to start off with, but it only got better and better over time. Really recommend this to anybody who is a fan of either superhero media or tactics RPGs... or just good stories in general. I'm a big fan of most of Calunio's games, but this is him operating at the peak of his powers. Will give a full review when I'm finished! :)
Wow! The portraits add a whole lot! I’m sorry i never got to write out my full thoughts on this game but i did quite love it. I’m a fellow puzzle maker so i’m happy you made something fantastic like this.
just an idea - i wonder if it will be good to include some kind of counter for which form you are using so people don’t lose track? It’s up to you, but this would have helped me be a little less confused (i learned after a while! And loved it :) )
That’s all. Love the game! Wish it was in the top selection, but ah well <3
What an excellent game! This is one of my favourites of this jam that I've played so far, for sure!
I think this game represents a good response to some of the common downfalls of jam games - oftentimes they're very high concept, sometimes technical demos of projects that don't have the length to explore all the ways that their many mechanics intersect - but this game seems to dodge that minefield entirely by providing many of the mechanics that RPG Maker was exactly designed for, polishing it in certain places (instant text speed, varied movesets, on-screen encounters etc.) and fleshing the existing mechanics out by providing them a long-form bed to sit on.
The game is super fun, with gameplay and story zipping by at a cracking pace. The story is well-told, even if I did get confused at the amount of characters and subplots that were happening, I still enjoyed the effervescent nature of the dialogue that seemed to sparkle as I read it. There's very little long-term rumination or moody pauses - the game (after admittedly what I think might be a bit too big of a initial map portion with so many interactable NPCs before I've even started the actual gameplay action, but that's a minor gripe) just sets up an instant clarity of stakes and moves from there.
The dungeon crawling is swift, with reasons for victories/losses (both macro ("game overs") and micro ("inefficiency in battles")) easily portrayed through animations and the like, making me feel like I had a full understanding of what was going on in battles.
Moment-to-Moment Notes
I love the oodles of graphical style, cuteness, and monsters just jumping around and having cool movesets. It's all just fun. Even if the beginning was just a bit too long - I wanted to get right into gameplay, which is a lot more fun. There's some tutorial textdumps, which I didn't read because it was just too much information for me at the time, and most of it didn't need explaining except for the Skill Tree, which was unfortunately tucked away behind the "Skills" menu. I think that it should have been in the Main Menu, maybe replacing "Status", because I don't think I ever looked at "Status" once - most of that info was on the Main Menu screen anyway.
The "Overflow" skill is so COOL! I like the idea of when you attack, then the overflow attack damage gets multiplied to everyone else, which I used a lot initially, but became much harder to use later on in the game, for some reason, because I think I just killed most monsters in 1 or 2 hits anyway. This skill seemed to provide a major source of strategy to the early game.
Plus, I liked how you could see how much HP they had at any moment, so you can judge whether you should use the move or not. It was brilliant. I may have missed some of the other moves that were as genius as "Overflow", but it seemed to be the most original-feeling move in the moveset and I wish there were more like it. Indeed, later on, you'd get the dynamic where each monster was weak to a certain element, then you had to judge which "<Insert Element Here> All" spell you'd use, based on the individual enemies in the troop, but after that point, I did start using my favourite skill over and over again in the late game, and wasn't really punished for it. For me, it was Rowan's Berserker version of "Cleave", Alexander's "<Element> All" of whatever element they're generally weakest to, and Eva's "Shield Bash" unless a "Heal" is required. I didn't use much else after I had these skills, and I generally survived.
Since this isn't the type of RPG where you use "Guard" to regenerate MP or anything like that, there was a lot of using of items to regenerate MP. Thankfully, it didn't seem to fall into the trap where MP potions were too highly priced, and I always managed to get enough to be able to do interesting spells. Some games let you run out of MP fairly quickly and don't give you many ways to regenerate this, so you're stuck not being able to use interesting skills, but I'm glad this game didn't fall into that trap.
Oh, and with the tutorial text - telling me why a character is included, and what use their skills do and so on, is part of the fun of RPGs for me, so when I had that told to me, I didn't want to read it. I'd rather figure that stuff out for myself... it's part of the joy of figuring out "oh! this person heals this person and that person can buff. interesting!" that is one of the most fun aspects of RPGs to me.
But there were so many fun little things! I liked in the begining when you snacked on wedding food to recover, and when eyes appeared above things you can interact with (a neat user experience function!). I also liked "figuring out" that Berserker is just like Skill, but on a random target. Nice! That gives an extra layer of interest to the moveset.
There's lots of cute characters, and everything moves super quick to the beat of BANGER music. Seriously, the music is doing so much for this game. I loved the composition, I loved how it felt. It was really really well-composed music, and fit really well with the game, I felt.
I liked how the main character had a personality that's well-defined; even though we get to choose their gender and name at the beginning, it's not a blank slate. However, in the initial area, there was perhaps just a bit too much to interact with, I felt, and if I didn't know it was going to get interesting after the start, I might have not given it the full chance, because it does spend a lot of the initial part of the game putting story on you. I, however, liked the way the rest of the game was paced, interspersing the dialogue in amongst the gameplay in a really nice way.
I liked the backgrounds and the beautiful hero and enemy sprites and facesets. They are all gorgeous. I liked the tileset, and obviously the way it was used, which is a given since Indrah has always created fantastic maps. I liked how some of the enemies used potions to heal themselves - it was believable and cute. There was some funny joke told by a soldier about how stones are used as some sort of mobile phone technology... I thought that was kind of funny. Some battlers had incorrectly cropped sprite sets, which resulted in rows of horizontal and/or vertical pixels, but it wasn't a major because it didn't really spoil my fun too much. It was just noticeable, is all.
Statuses work well in this game. I understood almost every status that I got, despite them not having names next to them, and doing the "flashing" thing which usually means I don't actually understand how many statuses I have on me (lol). I'd much rather have status icons appear next to each other here, but it's a minor gripe.
In the first dungeon, I'll say it again - Splashback was so cool. I wish I saw more skills like that in other games, where the overflow becomes a stronger "Splashback" on all the other enemies. It's just really fun to try to control.
I attacked every monster encounter. Not sure if this was good or bad for me long term, but I guess it's indicative that I actually wanted to fight, which is good for an RPG.
Minor gripe - on-screen encounters could walk through followers, which exposed the "RPG Maker-ness" of it to me. I know this doesn't only happen in RPG Maker games, but it definitely happens in almost all RPG Maker games, so it exposed that to me. It's a difficult one to solve, but it was still noticeable.
There were other minor gripes - when you go through doors that span two tiles, it looks a little awkward because it looks like you're walking into the side pane of the door. When I rested, it triggered a cutscene, but I didn't really know whether I was supposed to rest at every single shop, and if I didn't would I miss a cutscene? I didn't get the memo, or if I did, my silly ADHD brain missed it. But either way, it did feel a bit weird to only trigger cutscenes (which are inherently "rewards" in my mind) when you "Rest", which isn't necessarily something that only good players do. In fact, some shops I didn't even Rest once.
I only "Rested" maybe 2-4 times in the game, 1-3 times in a single location (the final one) because of the difficult encounters near the end. But I think because of that, I missed out on vital cutscenes? I'm not sure.
One thing that was perhaps a bit of a weird point of this game - it is so easy to forget about the Skill Trees altogether, because it's so tucked away, but also because it doesn't alert you when you unlock the ability to have new Skills. I actually don't know why it didn't automatically unlock new Skills, because if you're activating a certain pathway, you're probably going to buy those skills anyway, so there's no real need to "choose" which ones you should have. I think it should just be an automatic "you learned <Skill>!" popup so you don't have to keep looking at the Skill Tree over and over. Plus, I would have liked it to alert me when I reached the maximum "experience points" reached (or whatever the term was to track the points unlocking the progression of Skills) and then urged me to change Skill Tree branches, because staying on the same one would probably do nothing, unless I was set on that one branch forever. Anyway, it was a great idea, and I think it could be improved with further iterations. As I said earlier, it should have probably been on the main menu as well, because it's likely one of the most accessed menus in the game.
I also wonder if it would have been good to disable "Berserk" skill type if there was only one enemy left? But I don't know... it just seems a little weird to allow the benefit of a "randomised attack" when there's only one enemy. But also, "Berserk" skill type can be applied to moves with a "random target" already, which I took to my advantage, meaning that it would just generally be a stronger move, you'd think. For example, a move like "attack twice at random targets for higher damage" is able to be executed in Berserker mode, which gives MORE damage based on the idea it's... randomising the target? Didn't quite make sense to me, but at least it gave me a bit of a battle edge ;P
The idea of Gigi's Emporium and the way it was portrayed was so, so cute. It's such a brilliant addition to the game, and the way it's fleshed out is one of the most delightful parts of the worldbuilding to me. The shopkeeper is such a cute character, and the trope is played against delightfully.
Also, when it came to distributing items in chests throughout the game, it just felt really well distributed. I seemed to come across the right chests at the right time for my level. It seemed to be a perfect balance, and then when I went to the shop, I seemed to have enough money to buy some of the things, but not ALL the things, which makes the item-buying process a GREAT test of my purchasing skills.
I also liked that the antagonists were also pretty cute and not super super antagonistic in tone, even if some of the things they did were debatably really awful. Their dialogue was a delight to hear.
Conclusion to my Super Long Review
All in all, I really loved this game. I thought it was one of the best games of this jam, and a good contender for my #1. At the moment, I have 3 games out of the 18 I've played that are vying for the #1 spot, but the other 2 cater to my tastes, whereas this one impressed me a lot despite not being in the style I'm usually infatuated with. Fomar said that both he and Indrah thought that this was their best game, and I think it might be my favourite game of theirs that I've played, too! It brings together their strengths in such a way that's cohesive and really solid from front to back. Something to be truly proud of.
Thank you so much for making this game and letting us play it. I truly enjoyed it, and it is a gift to the world.
"Rivals Beyond" is a graphically pleasing game, draped in greens, pinks, and also in an unusual grey combination that evokes a certain mood, and has smooth lines like a Flash game, reminding me of such titles as "Fancy Pants Adventures" and "Fancy Pants Adventures: World 2". It's smooth and well-presented, and has lovely pacing to start.
You get plopped into a world where a dog with a moustache might just help you out, in a contest that you've found yourself a part of, to win your life back. Yes, win your life back.
Our voiceless protagonist finds themselves in a world snowing with Mint, where you win battles against winged creatures to gain points and progress to the Next Round. But before you progress, you will need to win a boss battle.
Battles are reffed by a squeaky little dude who counts you into duels with monsters that are resolved by selecting the right elemented attack. Indeed, many battles can just be won if you know what the opponent is weak to.
While it made sense to find the elemental weaknesses of each enemy, I struggled to find layers of strategy beyond that. Most times, I found myself experimenting with moves to find which one had the highest damage number, and then spam that one until the enemy died. If I got low on health, I'd use the highest HP heal - that was about it. Sometimes they'd kill me, but I'd come back and try again and, depending on RNG, I'd either lose or win.
Indeed, perhaps my biggest point of struggle I found with the game was that I felt much of the battle relied on RNG, whether I'd win or lose. There are a few moves that the enemy can make that seem to do nothing, and depending on whether they roll these attacks, would dictate usually whether I win or lose. So it seemed like the battles were largely reliant on RNG.
I feel like if the enemies' attacks were more consistently strong, or if there were more layers of strategy the player could use to counter these attacks, then it would have made for an overall more consistently entertaining battle experience for me.
However, despite the RNG, the battles were easy enough and spaced at a pace that was quick enough that I didn't get too frustrated. The enemies were cutely designed, and the environments are imaginative and easy to walk through.
As for the story, there is one! Although it took me a while to get the "central piece" to the story that made me feel things, the ending in particular is the moment that made me actually care about the protagonists, because the way that the scenario was constructed made me pity them, and pity can often be an entryway to relatability. However, it was a little late in the piece, so I felt like I wanted to get a story hook earlier in the story, rather than nearly at the end.
However, I overall actually liked this game, mostly because of its charming presentation, its smooth and well-polished graphics, its lovely, well-placed music and cute assembly of characters, which were well-employed to the point that it made me have an overall pleasant experience despite what I perceived to be its flaws.
Overall, its world, its audio, and its imagination are its strong points, along with the end of its story really tugging on the heart strings.
Thank you for making this game, Steve. I really enjoyed playing it and I appreciate that you made it for us. <3
Wow.
Firstly, this game is excellent. I loved the writing, the way the gameplay reinforces the writing, and the balancing that even for such a short game, provides a few nice challenges. The presentation, while scribbly and purposely amateurish, it is consistent and still provides a sort of surreal and haunting atmosphere. While I do think that scitydreamer could work with an artist to help achieve her visions, I still think there's some merit to replicating the initial character of the sketches they draw up. In fact, having an artist join them on the mission would be a REALLY cool thing to see, even if these sketches still provide a lot of emotion themselves.
THE KID is a kid on a mission... a mission from the Goddess. There's a Dark Lord attempting to rise, and you have a FATHER and MOTHER who have raised you to act as one of the hands of the Goddess on this Earth. But you are unnamed, you do not speak.
The first battle is good, it's well-paced, and you fight alongside ROSA, a knight tasked with fighting the Dark Lord. We get really exceptional motifs played throughout - every time the "noise" that covers the screen happens, it seems to coincide with THE KID's "programming" taking over, borrowing from the visual aesthetic of a VCR, including a "scene skip" button that lets us skip periods of time effectively.
Indeed, when this noise turns red, the programming turns to a raging firy anger that takes over, where all the programming drummed into THE KID throughout their years in a commune with their family turns to outright rage that any figure may threaten the sanctity of this life... which really is just, in the end, safety in what he already knows.
For kids who haven't figured out their own faith (and, indeed, adults) quite often operate on autopilot, in the comfort of what their parents/caregivers have trained into them. And in this case, the method is included in the trigger warnings present in the game - namely, emotional abuse.
I won't spoil much more of the story, but I think scitydreamer, the creator of "Slimes", has a 2/2 in my record of hits - this story hit hard, and made me a little bit teary towards the end. It's a very emotional ride, and players should be aware of this. But if you're looking for something emotionally hard-hitting, have a go here.
Time to talk about... the gameplay!
Battles were actually really well-balanced for the most part. I like how each person has a function - the protag has the ability to enhance their own attack by using "Destructive Prayer" (which also, conversely, damages their own defense), and use their own HP to enhance their attack with "Sufferer's Strike", a moveset that thoroughly fits THE KID's personality.
The second character, TY, on the other hand, can either recover TP or use it to heal or transfer it to another player. This creates a really nice balance in gameplay where each party member has a couple of useful related functions that they can choose between. I love that the action types resonate with the journey and personality that the main characters represent.
TY brings a balm that soothes the other characters with healing and encouragement, rowdy MICHELLE can "Rally" to increase all the party's attack, representing their leadership spirit and ability to spark kindred, and upstanding knight ROSA can "provoke" attacks and use a "Purifying Strike" to remove enemy debuffs.
There is one thing that helps this balance - the lack of items. If there were items added, I feel they'd add an unnecessary level of complication to the piece, which the developer here allows skills to have their shine instead.
I feel as if that's a common lesson many RPG developers need to learn - if you don't need it, don't include it. If you include a system, it should have a purpose, and add a strategic element to the game that tests a player skill. But here, omitting items allowed the player to be forced to use the skills, meaning that skills like revive skills were one-of-a-kind, instead of adding Phoenix Downs to the mix to render them useless.
While the gameplay principles were super admirable, there were parts that I felt could be improved, at least in my experience (all the while acknowledging that I only played through it once, and there could be improvements to what I say next).
For example, when TY dies, it can almost be like a death sentence if you're not careful. Even with all 4 members, only 2 party members can revive, and if they're gone, you're done for! They're kind of low HP, and even though ROSA has an ability to attract attacks, she happens to be one of the "Revivers", and there's a few "Attack All" moves from the enemy that will just about annihilate anyone who's more dainty - including TY.
I also quickly realised that some moves, like THE KID's "Sufferer's Strike", were often just costing too much HP for what they provided. I started under the assumption that "Skills will probably do more damage than regular attacks", but honestly, oftentimes just regular attacking was great enough, with the occasional skill peppered in. Because there are a lot of Skills that modify things for 2/3 turns, and if you spam them too much, you don't get to utilise them to their fullest - e.g. if you take one enemy's DEF down, I would just end up resolving to attack enemies with vanilla attacks until they die - no need to do anything else fancy - just Attack, not as much Skills required. This means most rounds, in my optimal strategy, I'd only be using 1 or 2 Skills, which is okay, but I'd much rather be making more interesting decisions every turn of my battles.
Some skills were also so useful that I didn't use anything else for that character. Namely, TY's "Heal All" ability was so necessary, that I ended up not Transferring any TP to other heroes, who mostly thrived of the vanilla "Attack" most of the time, or at least enough to generate their own TP when Attacked. Likewise, MICHELLE's "Rally" seemed to work well to raise ATK of all the party members, and I used that as my only skill for them.
Another example is that ROSA's "Triple Threat" seemed less useful when there were many enemies existing, since it would just target them at random, and I wanted to focus on one enemy at a time. The only time I used "Triple Threat" was when there was one enemy left, and even then, I'd probably want to save that TP for "Purifying Strike", an attack that was actually useful in debuffing the ATK+'s the enemy would get from rallying themselves.
That is one of the game's strengths too - the status effects are few, but effective. Particularly, ATK+ /- and DEF+/- were easy to understand, and even within the short runtime of the game, they made a lot of difference. The other status effects... I oftentimes didn't even know what they were. I remember reading in a scitydreamer devlog that she lamented why status effects didn't have labels next to them, and I agree mostly. It's hard... I'll have to research how other games communicate lots of different types of buffs effectively using UI.
Another example is that THE KID's "Threatening Crusade" didn't seem to be worth the 30TP cost, since it would weaken the party as well... although, it did provide a nice insight into THE KID's personality, that a skill that cost a lot would also hurt their friends, to their great detriment. It was a great metaphorical parallel for their personal crusade... even if it didn't translate into a move I actually wanted to use. *sweats, smiling*
As for the themes...
...they're largely present in the content warnings for this game. If you read them, you kind of know what you're in for. The MOTHER figure seems to talk about a "pain tolerance" required for worship of The Goddess, and "sessions" that you need to attend to build said tolerance. This all struck incredibly true for myself, a person who was not in a cult, per se, but who was child born into Christian fundamentalism and still deals with the confusing echoes of this past.
If I am to be transparent, in my case, I have loving parents who care for me and are also passionate about Christianity, but also strict in the way they want me to believe this too, while also respecting my choice... it's a difficult and multifaceted thing. I feel split in two, between two worldviews, and the story of this character really resonated with me. I'm actually making a game with these exact same themes, tackled in a completely different way, but I really appreciated these themes being addressed.
I could start to get into spoiler territory (some might argue I already have, but I've tried! lol), but I'll save it.
All in all, this is an incredibly thoughtful story about a KID with a troubled past being awakened to a different possible reality. It's touching, well-presented, well-written, and all under an hour.
This is a good contender for my favourite game of this jam I've played so far.
Thank you for making this game for us, scitydreamer, and letting us play it. Appreciate you.
"Stray Kitten and the Magical Lantern" is a really nice vibe. Very nice music. I liked it a lot. Dare say, I might have enjoyed it even more than your last year's entry. I liked that the gameplay was interspersed with the story. This had a really nice balance of doing something, and having a reward of the relationship between the lantern and the cat improving. This idea of a magical lantern with wings and a stray kitten having this unlikely friendship and forming this bond is a pretty interesting idea, and this concept felt like it was able to hold it all together.
It was interesting to have a lot of people speak Wingdings. I may have not been paying attention, but perhaps that represented how cats can't speak English - not sure. There were some antagonistic forces towards the end which were quite forgiving, but the whole game in general is quite forgiving, and that lends to its comfortable vibe. I enjoyed this, it was pleasing. There was nothing really too frustrating about it. I think it was a perfectly nice little story.
There was a really lovely storybook vibe that made everything feel well-paced. I feel as if the puzzles and dodging sneaking minigames were quite simplistic, but they served okay for what the game was.
The window boxes were really well polished. Sometimes it was difficult to understand the levels, and the jumping mechanic was a minigame that was nice for this small adventure but I think wouldn't be able to last for a longer game.
The music was soothing and set a vibe. The puzzle with all the jumps was a little bit chaotic, and I wasn't able to discern a strategy that would decide between a win and a loss, and because you had 9 lives, I wasn't sure what would happen if they all went away, but I didn't have to experience that anyway, because I didn't lose enough to die 9 times.
All in all, the game was a cute and comfortable vibe, and I had an overall pleasant experience.
Thank you, slim, for letting us play your game, and for making it for us. It's a real treasure.
Hi JosephSeraph!
It's "RESONATE 2"!!!! WOO!!!!
I loved "Resonate ~call out my angel~", a game that, while its initial jam submission had a few unfortunate bugs, really impressed and felt full and complete. Jo has a REALLY awesome idea of how to implement innovative systems and graphics that feel totally fresh! It's lovely to see whatever Jo comes up with time and time again.
I've also been a good friend of Jo for a long time. We've shared a creative journey together, especially in our early formative years of game development on RPGMaker.net. So I know where a lot of the creative drive behind a game like "Resonate 2" will come from.
What I see it is as a tech demo for awesome things to come. I'm not sure if I played the right version, but a lot of it seemed to be almost like a tech demo, and I wasn't sure how to progress, which might boil down to not having enough time to implement everything that Jo wanted to.
Either way, the technical achievement of what is here is staggering.
Even if its implementation had battles that I couldn't figure out the balance of, and there seems to be swathes of items EVERYWHERE (lol), it still feels like the start of something fantastic.
Utilising isometric walking systems that... might honestly need a bit of work in the "controls" department, but it's a good start. The battle system, however, seems very well-polished, and the perspective it provides is very impressive. I was wowwweed hehehehehe
While it does feel largely unfinished, it's still a good promise, and I like that a lot.
Thanks for creating this wonderful proof of concept <3
Out of the two projects that WrathOfWood submitted, this is my preferred one, for several reasons.
1. It's a 3D game that doesn't use the first-person perspective, and thus didn't give me motion sickness.
2. It has more mechanics that it can explore, and more content in general to explore.
3. The visual style is incredibly appealing. I liked it a lot, and it oozes a lot of personality.
In "Pocket Kaiju", you name your Kaiju friend, and the game offers a tutorial to you to help you understand. It explains that if you pet your kaiju, it'll be happy, but if it's unhappy, it'll return to an egg.
You plant seeds to grow plants there, but there's only 2 plots, so you basically just choose what seeds go in at any one time. It's very likely you're going to have a LOT of seeds when playing.
The seeds grow into fruit which you can feed to your Kaiju.
What I didn't know was that the Kaiju have a branch of monster evolutions that they can do, but only if you feed them specific foods. So it just so happened that I was feeding a Kaiju for a long time, but I was unaware that what I was feeding them was not going to do anything. It was just going to feed them forever, unless I fed them the specific thing - at least that's what I understood. I think that there's branching Kaiju that can occur, but only if you feed them the same thing the whole time? For example, if you feed them yellow fruit, you have to feed them yellow fruit the whole time. If I misunderstood this, please let me know, but that's how it ended up coming across, because what I was feeding them wasn't doing anything after a while.
A possible solution to this could be having lots of different branching Kaiju based on fruit? That's just a possibility.
In fact, there's a lot of room for expansion in this framework. The developer, WrathOfWood, could definitely expand on this incredibly sound framework to produce something that lasts hours, even, and keeps on being addicting and fun, if they tune the gameplay mechanics just right. There's room for expanding and unlocking new areas, implementing sowing of farm plots, and visualising things like the time system and Kaiju tree and so on.
I don't usually mention solutions to issues in my critiques, because I prefer to just explain what I'm feeling and stop there, but in this case, I feel it's important to recognise that there is just SO MUCH POTENTIAL here. It can be expanded in so many different directions, at least I feel so.
The flavour of the game is really cute, and I like the general feel of the retro graphics and style.
All in all, this is a cute raising game where you have plenty of mechanics that could be expanded, but even as is, provide a good amount of gameplay. It's a concept that definitely is promising, for sure. I keep looking forward to future WrathOfWood projects.
Well done on this game, WrathOfWood. Thank you for making it for us. It's a true pleasure to be able to play your game.
"Dead Paper" is another WrathOfWood game in the tradition of RPG Maker 3D experimental forays. As usual, their distinctive visual style of trippy, surreal sprites and level structure of maze-like wandering simulations akin to Yume Nikki, they also combine it with a 3D plugin that is... honestly super impressive.
Kudos to the creator of the 3D plugin for MV and MZ. It truly allows us to create 3D games in RPG Maker, something I never thought would happen... ever.
You escape a burning house to follow your pet cat, and evade and/or slash at monsters scattered throughout.
The wandering, as is usual with a WrathOfWood game, is trippy and trance-like, with sprites and textures that run the line between cute and uncanny. However, in this game, the cat itself is pure cuteness. Just look at that thing in the screenshots. You want to follow it. Probably.
The wandering does seem to be the whole thing, which doesn't necessarily mean something can't be effective, but in this case I do feel like there was one thing in particular which made my experience not the most optimal - it's the feel of the RPG Maker 3D plugin itself making me get motion sickness.
I tend to have an easier time with the "above head" 3D version that this plugin has, rather than its first-person perspective, particularly when using the mouse. The combination of grid movement and mouse movement that was slow, but very precise, was quite unnerving to me all the way through. Sometimes if RPG Maker 3D games eschew the mouse movement, it becomes a more pleasant experience for me, even if you aren't able to look around with the mouse like you would most other 3D games, at least it doesn't cause motion sickness.
On top of that, the wandering and the slashing and following kitty is enough to sustain its 15-minute runtime, though I suspect that more would have been welcome. It is the same thing, and to have mini-objectives and little things throughout that you can pursue, would have been absolutely fantastic.
All in all, I still think this was a very unique game with cute graphics, a simple premise and definitely a worthy entry into WrathOfWood's eclectic and unique catalogue. I'm always interested in seeing what Wrath does next.
Thank you for making this game for us, Wrath. I appreciate it.
Thanks for making this game! I had an interesting experience with this one.
Obviously, one of the greatest things about this game is that it's so technically impressive.
TheUnproPro's technical scripting prowess shows off to great aplomb here, with the game feeling like it wasn't made in RPG Maker at all, with custom windows, smooth animations, and custom fonts. If you had told me this was made in Game Maker or some other engine, I would have 100% believed you.
Another magnificent thing about this game was that it was incredibly on theme. Sometimes, when playing games in this jam, I felt like the theme was an incidental thing, but here it was right smack bang in the centre.
When I entered the meat of the game, I became immediately aware that it was almost like an idle RPG sort of game, except you chose your actions, so I guess it wasn't an idle RPG at all, but in ways it did feel like it was. When you execute actions, stats improve by themselves for the most part, and you can choose from maybe 5 actions to improve your stats, and each of those has a respective minigame.
I found the minigames were technically impressive in the way they were implemented, but perhaps the part where I started to detach from the game was because of the gameplay nature of the minigames.
When going on an Adventure, I was never quite sure what to pick. Oftentimes I'd get totally annihilated by enemies, and I had no idea why, or how to improve. When fighting enemies, you select between 3 options, and I think I knew generally when to use each, but I wasn't sure the best way to improve my character to get further into the dungeon.
I appreciated the ability to speed it up, but because actions in Adventures happened in real time, and they wouldn't pause when I encountered them, speeding it up meant that it would also speed up the danger that was coming towards me to a rate where I felt I couldn't respond in quick time.
With the dance game, this was also super impressive! I don't think I've seen a rhythm game completed in RPG Maker with that high precision - it was very high!... eeeeeeexcept when trying to press two keys at once. For some reason, if I pressed two direction keys at once, it only received one key press, so I was unable to do this minigame in a way that satisfied me because a lot of moves were essentially impossible for me. But I would LOVE to see an entire rhythm game made in RPG Maker on this concept... IF that bug was fixed on my system. I assume it's only on some systems, otherwise the developer would have picked it up in testing.
There's a well-implemented "ball bouncing" minigame to represent howling at the moon, but sadly this got quite irritating quickly, even though it was really impressive. It was high stress on my brain and hands, in a way that wasn't super fun, although with a few tweaks I think it would be a lot more fun. Introducing different concepts like maybe you have to avoid obstacles that fall, pick up power-ups, etc. to make this minigame more fun in general. It feels sad saying this about something so technically impressive, but it's important not to ignore gameplay considerations even if something is technically impressive. If anything, I think that there's a framework that can be built upon and polished into something even more fantastic than what already exists.
All in all, I would say that this game is a very technically impressive feat that has a fantastic premise and concept... that I sort of lost interest after a little while playing, for some reason, which is a sad outcome. Maybe it's the interestingness of the minigames that needs to increase, or the overall balance, but something about it made me check out after a bit. I feel like if it were tightened around the edges, it could become something that would be truly addictive and I would return to again and again, BUT I still will marvel at this amazing technical piece of work that has a LOT of awesome scripting behind it from a promising developer who I will follow now on itch.io because I can't wait to see what comes next.
Thanks for giving us this fantastic gift of a game :)
no worries, i really appreciated playing, and to me it only highlighted your unique strengths in worldbuilding and attention to detail with storycrafting… even in spite of the time crunch you experienced at the end :D It makes me really interested to experience future erin stories as i feel that you could prove yourself an absolute powerhouse in this strength of yours. It makes me more hyped for All the King’s Men actually :D
This is the most new-player-friendly IGMC entry I've played, I think, which is a fantastic thing. From the beginning, it starts minimal, providing a quick intro into the high-stakes infiltration, setting personalities for the main cast, and providing a sleek "attack/defend/items" UI for the player to interact with.
Everything feels seamless, and that might be Ever, In Time's best skill - onboarding the player into the experience and making it feel seamless in the onboarding.
Instantly, at any moment, you know what the stakes are, and why you're doing what you're doing, and the gameplay is easy enough to follow. The sprites are cute, the backgrounds are cute - everything is super cute.
There's a neat puzzle that might be the most difficult thing the game has to offer, but after a while of not being able to solve it, a "guidance voice" that embodies the voice of your friends prompts you that if you're having trouble, they can solve it for you.
I DID NOT use this. I solved it using my brain, because i am SMURT. (i'm smurt!!!)
The game has a great amount of polish, and that's just testament to how coda usually does things... full of polish. It might not be as down my alley as, say, his darkly humorous in-development project Dog Eat Dog (of which I'm ravenously hungry for!) but I do feel like this game will please many people who want a nice, singular RPG experience with easy-to-follow characters and conflicts, and a light tone.
It has some promising concepts here, plus a really fun use of the fantastic scripter gimmer's "Rewind Time" script... lovely to see it used here.
Overall, I do feel like it was a well-crafted story with polished UI, and a good arc and playful tone. Ever, In Time is codapill doing what he does - delivering a polished game with very few cracks! Love it. Thank you, friend.
"The Phoenix Project" is a game by my friend erin foster, who I really appreciate and have been wanting to experience them telling a story for som etime.
There is a great promise in erin's work. Every time a cutscene is on screen, it drew me into the world that was being presented. There is clearly so much thought put into the happenings of the story, the characters, the conflicts, the ideas at play - this is a very DENSE political work. And it serves best, I feel, as a narrative-based game, with gameplay yet to be expanded upon.
Even as some cutscenes do feel like sometimes a LOT at once, it is information that drew me IN to the world at play, immersing me into what is happening. I feel like there was a lot of thought put into the conflicts at play, and it's suspenseful when it needs to be.
And so the narrative is the part of the game that really shines here, despite me having a few issues with puzzle presentation and gameplay balancing - which are mostly because the developer ran out of time :) I know that behind the scenes, there was a lot of time crunch here, resulting in some systems that were less-than-finished. The cursor in the puzzles became obtrusive, the sliding puzzle felt like an RPG Maker sin being committed against me, perhaps even more than ice sliding puzzles and boulder pushing puzzles combined (XD) but I know that erin will gladly remove that puzzle from the game for me LOOOOOOL :P
I want to focus on the strengths - the story crafting draws you in, the atmosphere is thick, and the feeling is there. The conversations hold great weight, and I feel that it when it is at its best. I do feel as if the details of the larger narrative, particularly with the girl, did become a little confusing, but I can see they could become clear very soon so that my understanding can be tracked along with it.
All in all, thank you erin for providing a fantastic entry to this jam. I loved playing it and I hope to enjoy more fantastic erin content in future :)
(Here's me playing it)
Somniloquy is a jazzy repartee-based battle system game where you do Undertale dodging, and combine it with some conversational persuasion systems. Depending on whether you succeed or fail these encounters, you get different endings! It's a great concept...
...and it's backed up by effervescent, crispy writing that just dances on the page. It's clear that HuntingSwan knows exactly how to play those notes, just dance on those story-beat keys, for me, will you? Will you really, now - will you, darling?
The hilarious caricatured battlers shoot out pine trees and pickles at your "heart-like object" (we're thinking Undertale here again), as HuntingSwan utilises a SumRandomDude plugin to great aplomb! These plugins are there to be used, and it still takes some great talent to integrate it with a project that has weight.
One of the reasons why I feel Somniloquy has weight, is that it's also rooted in the serious - notions of the inequality of balance in Hollywood, the necessity of being assertive, aggressive, passive and passive-aggressive in turn to tip the scale of power your way, and the bleak reality that women were trampled all over in this industry, and didn't seem to get their fair recompense.
I didn't manage to get a "good" ending, so I suppose my experience curved towards the "pessimistic" in this case. However, being the type to play a game once and embrace its ending, I enjoyed it as a cautionary tale. I can imagine that if you get the "good ending" it might be a little different? Only Heaven knows!
All in all, this is a fun, comedic romp of tête-à-tête tit-for-tatting, petty persuasion, and the struggle for power in a game where everything's fake, even the points. If this is any indication of other HuntingSwan games, then I must have more!
(Here's a video of me playing on stream:)
