itch.io

Hey, thank you for this - I saw a comment from a few years back where you said you might try to support URP in the future for this. Do you still have plans to do that? 

fantastic game

hi what is this jam about

So while I didn't quite finish this game due to a bug I encountered, I do have feedback.

I'll start off by saying I really liked this game - it's reminiscent of old school point n' click adventure games that I loved as a child like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle, and I think you've done well in your layout of levels. The movement is pretty good, and as Charlie has said, the difficulty ramps up in a very reasonable way. You guys should definitely work on this and expand it more.

However, I did have some issues that I'd like to mention should you wish to improve this. For one, I encountered a bug in the second level with the tree where I just couldn't interact with anything or move, almost as if the game froze. I managed to replicate this twice when playing, so not sure if it's an issue on my end?

Good submission overall!

So I'm not quite the target audience for this game despite being childlike in nature - however, I do have feedback regardless!

Firstly, this is incredible - the game you've produced here despite worldwide carnage and the walls of reality breaking down like that one season of Doctor Who is seriously impressive, and it's clear that every part of this has been thought out in great detail. The art is consistent,  the level design is great, and there's a general sense of cohesiveness in this that I've not even seen in some of the games I've paid money for.  The music is great and overall it's a really solid game that you could honestly probably end up selling with some work.

The attention to detail is amazing, these are some standout things I noticed:

- Little icon in the taskbar as the game's running
- Walking sound changes places on surface you walk on (ie metal, stone etc)
- Little animations for things like lifting an object, diving through a portal
- The builders hammering away in Happiness

There are some things to be improved of course:

I agree with Charlie here on the control feedback, to a certain extent. Standard WASD controls might be too much for some kids, but it could also serve as a really good gateway into getting kids used to general keyboard and mouse controls. Weirdly enough, I tested the game with an Xbox 360 controller and it worked, but the sprint button was also bound to the punch button, and I found no explanation on controls for a joystick anywhere. Was this intended or are joysticks just a side effect of how your input system is set up?

General Feedback per level

Envy

A nice level, with a few flaws. It could be an idea to have a counter for how many objects you have left to place on the pedestal. The little blue guys that float around the level also seem to cause a lot of issues in terms of collisions, I got stuck on them a few times. Also, some kind of audible/visual feedback for how close you are to an item could be good.

Fear

Unfortunately this is my least favorite level of the lot, but it's still good. This is incredibly unforgiving (the dark souls of TDEMO games) for reasons I'm not really sure of. The ghost's spotlight movement was very unpredictable and unforgiving in terms of moving through the levels - I often found myself using the hide button to hide from the outer circle, but i would also be moving too slowly to outrun the inner circle. Having to completely restart when you get caught feels a bit much for a kid's game personally, and having to traverse the maze 3 separate times to collect all the keys could make this very stressful for a kid. Perhaps they could collect more than 1 key at a time, or when they get caught any keys they've already used remain used? 

It's not all bad for this level though - in my opinion this has the most distinct visual style

Happiness

This is my favorite level of all of them. The visual consistency is on point here, and the level design thrives. The world in this level really feels alive. 

Is the maze at the start necessary? It doesn't feel integral to the experience in my opinion. You could make it more a central set piece by having the maze be the way that players navigate between the different tasks, with the cage at the center.

I had some issues finding the apples for the same reasons listed in the Envy section, but this is probably due to me having played it at 4am like a weirdo.

The math part felt a little bit out of place if I'm honest - the game seems marketed as one to teach kids about emotion, so unless you're trying to teach them how to be confused, angry or just sad maths at this scale doesn't seem to fit in.
Also the main point of this level seems to be that collecting objects (keys) and doing tasks for others in hope of a reward brings happiness? This is me being really nitpicky, but that's only because I love this level a lot.

Angry

A really fun little level, hard to fault this one. The box smashing challenge gave me real Kingdom Hearts Coliseum trauma so thanks for bringing up those repressed memories. 
The section where you have to hit the wisps at the end feels a little mean and out of character - maybe instead of hitting them, you have to pick them up and place them into a box of some kind? It feels unnecessarily violent, even if the levels of violence are minuscule anyway.

Sad

A short level, that I really liked regardless. One thing I noticed is that the platforming sections were a bit difficult due to the way your jumps work, and the lack of some kind of clear shadow under the character. In the final key section, when you drop the key in the water it seems to just respawn at another key point. Considering how long some of the bridge segments take to appear, this could be frustrating for some kids. Maybe you could have it just reappear on the same floor tile the player is on?

Overall this is incredible guys - the portraits at the end credits are really nice and you guys have obviously worked super duper hard to make this game. Some of the design in terms of the theme of teaching kids about emotions needs refining but I appreciate that none of you are child psychologists and if this was a real project you would have gotten a specialist in to help properly frame these themes. It's a targeting market you've taken on and I think you've done well!

I hope I haven't been too harsh in my feedback and I'm happy to elaborate further on any points should you need!

Wow, thank you for the kind words and the video!

Thanks for this Johnny - this period of isolation has meant I've been able to reconnect with some online friends for the first time in a while, and most of them practically leaped out of their seats with excitement when I showed this to them. Really looking forward to giving it a go.

Really awesome game! Visually reminds me a lot of Into the Breach.

wow very nice

I'm going to give more professional and constructive feedback on the google form but all I'm going to say is that this is being added to my rotation of local multiplayer games because I wasted so much time playing this it's unreal. Probably my favourite game out of all three jams so far, you should be proud of yourselves.

Just a note, I think they meant to submit this one:

https://jakehrr.itch.io/great-warriors-epic

A couple of things before some of you plow ahead with this (promise I'm not making excuses, just owning up to genuine mistakes)

The original game for this was a lot more fleshed out. Everyone on the team came together to give me some really great stuff to work with. For some reason I appear to be a human EMP, and at about 1am this morning when I was wrapping up development disaster struck, and I lost access to all of my files on my laptop. I've spent the past 6 hours cobbling together what I could as fast as I could to demonstrate the proof of concept our team came up with, but ultimately this isn't a very fleshed out game, and lacks enemies, sound, and the level designs the rest of the team worked hard on.

There's a lesson to be learned here about using source control and backing things up - I lost about 6 hours straight worth of development on this because I was very silly and had the mentality of "it's never happened to me before, why would it happen now" - use. source. control. please. don't. do. a. dan.

I'm very sorry to my team for not being more responsible with this, it's a lesson learned for me for future weeks.

You'll undoubtedly find bugs in here, particularly when it comes to detection of being behind walls in a 2d space and death detection. if you'd like to point out any bugs I'd be more than grateful.

This filled me with a rage I didn't initially anticipate - I'm notoriously bad at games like this so couldn't actually complete it, but you've managed to make a frustrating game successfully, congratulations on being my first rage file delete of 2019

I really enjoyed playing this! Controls really well and very easy to understand, although as the level got quicker the movement of the level made me feel a little bit sick. Definitely work on this more as a full release would be great, especially paired with the leaderboard!

Firstly, thank you for uploading both an installer and a zipped folder of the game - I hate installers for small games but I can appreciate they're preferred for a lot of people. I'm a big fan of the music and the art, and there's a really nice difficulty curve to this. It's the exact kind of game I'd play a lot so if you worked on this more I'd almost definitely purchase it. Good job!

Really solid platformer with only a few issues I can identify - the hitboxes on the platforms are very generous, and there were plenty of times where I shouldn't have made a jump where I did. This could benefit from some more sound added but overall really good!

Really fun game! I love the main character and it's super easy to understand. It's incredibly difficult though and has made me doubt my gaming abilities. I think previous comments have summed up what causes this difficulty, but overall I think that this is another game that if given more polish could thrive on mobile. Good job!

I promise it's not a jab, but I like how simplistic this is both in visuals and in gameplay - it's really accessible and i could definitely see this being released on a mobile storefront if given just a little bit of polish in areas others have already covered. Really nice job!

This game is really enjoyable, allbeit very hard to play - perhaps you could consider adding a display that shows how long your current stick is? Please don't quote me on that out of context.

Thanks a lot Summer!

Thank you very much!

Thank you so much!

Thanks a lot Mitchell! I'll probably work on this further so I'm looking forward to ironing out the animations a bit more and learning more about animation as i do so!

Finding it hard to offer any actual critique of this game, grappling hook mechanics in games are my weakness and this is just incredibly fun overall. As said before, if you add more levels I'd one hundred percent buy this. Great job!

Really enjoyed playing this - was definitely challenging. A bug i noticed is that it's possible to just hold space and soar very high over the game area, which doesn't net you points but is still worth mentioning. I also noticed an issue with the jumping where sometimes buildings spawn too close together so you don't have time to land and jump before smacking into one. Great submission though, if you worked on it more you'd probably be able to put this on a mobile storefront.

Thanks a lot Elliot!

Fun game! To expand I'd maybe look at adding some hazards to dodge or as previously suggested a timer just to add some suspense. I like the main character and the feedback you get from picking up the diamonds, so good job!

Really great game! I'm not sure what you have against swede but the different enemy types are really great, particularly the heart tattoo on the stronger swede's arm. If you wanted to improve this I'd maybe add some kind of reload mechanic so you can't spam click to kill all the swede, and also I'd add a way to restart the game from the game over screen. Nice job though!

Unfortunately unplayable in it's current state

Thank you for the feedback Charlie!

There should have been a clear starting zone that made it so that your first issue didn't happen, but obviously this didn't trigger as intended so another bug for the list! I agree on the mouse input as well, I initially designed this with the idea of having it as a mobile title so the click and drag is indicative of a touch screen swipe, which I suppose doesn't make much sense on the pc platform, I'll amend this if I work on it further!
Thanks for pointing out the soundtrack issue as well, something's gone wrong there too, probably my fault for only testing the game in editor and not testing an exported build.
In the future i'll see if I can set it up to be an installer or a single executable of some kind - the main game page has some information on how to run/install it but the submission page doesn't seem to have carried that over.

Thank you Vic!

Thank you Kian! Roomberto is a big fan of yours.

I probably spent waaay longer than I should have done playing this - it's really good! I love the art and it's definitely addictive. I only noticed one bug which is that you can spam the space bar and click to get double the coins, but aside from that this is a great submission!

Others have reported this on the actual game's page but this seems to be unplayable in its current state

Functions well as a flappy bird style game! A few points though;

- The moving floor at the bottom of the screen is incredibly distracting in my opinion
- It's possible to fly above the entire level and skip sections, which doesn't net you points but still seems to be an issue
- There seems to be a few issues with controlling the bat, the movement feels a little inprecise, maybe test it more and tighten some of the variables controlling movement

Unfortunately this isn't playable if you don't have GameMaker  installed, which is a shame! Next time you should export it as an executable, and maybe add a covering image to the submission too.

Really glad I saw the comment about downloading the data.win file, as I would've marked this as unplayable if not. The vehicles spawn in a little too far into the screen which makes judging jumping times slightly difficult. Overall though, it works and it's enjoyable!

Probably one of my favourite submissions i've tried - controls really well and I actually quite like the art. If you wanted to add more to this maybe you could add some kind of upgrade system, or varying difficulties of enemies in a wave style system, which could then open up a leaderboard. 
I'm not particularly sure why but at some point I tabbed in and out of the game and the space bar stopped being registered - this could be an issue on either end but overall I thought it was worth mentioning in case other people struggled with this also. Nice job Elliot!

Good submission overall, you've managed to make a flappy bird style game really successfully! As noted by others, the art is fairly compressed, and it's possible to fly above the screen to avoid hazards. The controls are super responsive and it was obvious that any failures were due to my lack of skill rather than the game cheating me, so if you expanded this and polished it more you'd have a really great piece!

Unfortunately I wasn't able to play this game as it seemed to be a .yyz file, which I can't open without having GameMaker2 installed. If you could eventually export this into an executable I'd love to give it a try, but as of now it's sadly unplayable.