itch.io

Just wanna say, I love these little icons. It's always a treat when I see an update to this pack in my notifications. Thanks for sharing!

Hey there. Not sure what you mean, but just typing into Aseprite's text tool with font size 16 works on my end.

Here's a quick screen recording I just took:

Thank you! I can certainly give it a try, but I have never exported fonts as .otb before. 

I got a pretty packed week ahead, so it's unlikely I'll have much time to look into it right away. But I'll let you know if it works out!

Sorry if my review sounded harsh! It was not at all my intention.

I like to use jam entry reviews to  directly "talk shop" dev to dev, so I might come across more blunt than I otherwise would if I were leaving a normal comment, or a steam review. Please do not take that, and the critiques I've made, as an indication that I did not enjoy your game.

I fully understand jams are hard, things end up less than complete, and that the dev team themselves are often well aware of most of the shortcomings. I am just trying to be honest and direct in my review, because I feel like there's a lot to like, and that there's stuff to refine, and I would love to play a refined version of this game.

Once again: props for the good work!

It's totally understandable, jams are always a race against the clock. Feel free to ping me when the final version drops, I'd love to see it!

Don't sweat it, jams are rough enough without trying out new tech, I totally get it. You did a great job here. Feel free to ping me if you end up pushing a post jam update at some point!

Very nice entry!

Impeccable work on the tiles and the ghoul's walk cycle. I also love how the light sources affect the scene!

Can't wait to see where  you take this one!

When you think about it, a game is just a series of convincing mockups displayed in quick succession!

Kidding aside, I really love your style. I all feels so effortlessly expressive, if that makes sense.

I'm halfways between programmer and artist myself, so if you ever wanna collab on something in the future, feel free to hit me up!

Ooh, this might be my all around favorite!

The sprites and background are stellar, the music and sfx are great, and the puzzle design is very creative! I also really love how the lighting is implemented. It's clear a lot of care went into the aesthetics, and it absolutely paid off.

The amount of polish on display make it hard to believe this is a jam game.

Huge props to the team on this one!

Ooh, this might be my all around favorite!

The sprites and background are stellar, the music and sfx are great, and the puzzle design is very creative! I also really love how the lighting is implemented. It's clear a lot of care went into the aesthetics, and it absolutely paid off.

The amount of polish on display make it hard to believe this is a jam game.

Huge props to the team on this one!

Adore the colors and the spritework!

The specter following you around was real spooky, and the music really helped elevate the tension.

Solid lesson in "less is more". Nice work!

Love the groovy soundtrack! Character and background designs also feel very full of personality.

While it is quite simple mechanically, there's a lot of little touches that I enjoyed, like being able to jump on projectiles and slap them away, or how the sign enemies actually try to create distance before firing at you.

Short but sweet. Hope the team can keep developing this!

Very cute little game! I like the spooky atmosphere, and love the main character's design - especially the small details added to the animation like the changing of expression when attacking, or the bouncy little idle, the blinking of the eyes, and the secondary motion of the hair buns when using the vacuum.

 I do think though, as other commenters pointed out, that the background can get a bit too busy at times, which distracts from the charm of the spritework. It can also get very hard to parse the UI against particularly complex background textures, like so:

Which is a shame, because there's a lot to like about the sprites.

Gameplay-wise, I feel like there's some room for improvement. Very often it seems ghosts will just pop up right in the middle of the screen, damaging me with very little I can do about it. It feels less like a test of reflexes, and more like a "gotcha" from the game, which rarely feels good.

I also feel like the vacuuming mechanic is underexplored, to the point I wonder if it's needed. As it stands, it's just a clunkier/slower way to get collectibles which I could presumably simply get by walking through. If there was more of an integration of vacuuming with the combat mechanics (like in Luigi's Mansion, for instance), I feel like this would be greatly mitigated.

As for the "meta", I liked the idea spending ghost ashes on the upgrade screen. I can imagine this being highly strategic with choosing upgrades best suited for the mission I'm going for, in a more fleshed-out, non-jam version of this game!

I enjoyed a lot about this entry, and feel there's a lot of potential here should the team chose to keep developing the game. Nice going!

Very fun concept, and very interesting use of sprite stacking. I hadn't seen it used in a game with a game boy aesthetic before, and the result is very trippy.

I really like the idea of running over a bunch of pumpkins! Although I feel like the audio could have benefited from a more "squelchy" sfx for this. The pure white noise crash sound works fine for hitting obstacles, but can get quite grating when smashing multiple pumpkins at once or in quick succession.

I'm also not sure I grasp how to deal with the final boss, I kept getting stuck in a sea of gourd and running out of fuel.

In general: love the art, the vibes and the little narrative; found the controls a bit fiddly, but ultimate fun to master; and enjoyed the industrial, metallic texture of the music, but feel like it could be toned it down for some of the sfx.

Very unique entry, good job!

Very cute first game!

I love how you make the jump feel floaty to emphasize we're on the moon, but also give the player some control over the height. You seem to have accomplished that by tweaking the gravity values, based on whether the jump button is help down, right? It felt a bit counter-intuitive the first few times around, but I got the hang of it.

I usually go for cutting the upwards velocity in half or so when the button is released for some finer control when ascending, so I'd advise giving that a try and seeing how you like it, but I have never made a platformer with literal moon physics, so ymmv.

I also really like the visuals here - in particular the little sprite used for when Perona falls into a hole! There's a lot of attention to detail on display: the flopping of the ears, the little blinking animation, the way she looks downwards when falling.

A critique I would make is to make sure to have a clear distinction between foreground and background. There's a part on the hill where there's an invisible "step up", which could have more obvious borders, or be made into a gentler slope. While that's not a problem in this tiny demo, it could easily be if there were more complex platforming or enemies to avoid.

All in all, very promising work here. Keep it up!

By far one of my favorites from the jam! Incredibly complete package, and really evokes the feeling of the old portable Zeldas. The graphics, audio and gameplay are very well executed.

I think I might unfortunately have run into a bug that's blocking my progress: I've blown up a wall, but it seems the collision is still there and won't let me through:

Aside from that, there's also a few couple bugs with screen transitions triggering twice and such, but I bet you're aware of those, and these kinds of things are to be expected in jam games, so they didn't  hinder my enjoyment in the least.

Had a whole lot of fun with this one, keep up the good work!

Following up here: just uploaded it over there!

https://godotshaders.com/shader/game-boy-palette-overlay/

Thank you! Yeah, I have shared some of my shader code with folks in the jam's discord, and have been looking for a more  persistent place to upload it, so the Godot Shaders website looks like a great option! I'll look into it later today, for sure.

One of my favorites of the jam, no doubt! Had a lot of fun experiment with team combinations and placements around the board. Love how you integrated Halloween staples and made each creature type feel unique.

Graphics are just the right balance of simple enough to be read at a glance and detailed enough to give each creature its own distinct look.

As for gameboy-ish-ness, this feels right at home in the format. Even though it's emulating a more modern genre (autochess), it brought me right back to playing Pokemon TCG on the gameboy, or the casino minigames of the mainline Pokemon series.

Incredible job!

EDIT: forgot to post my winning team:  "whoops, all ghosts"

Great entry! In particular, love the choice of colors. They work really well both to emphasize the "spooky" vibe and to call attention to important in-game objects.

The combat mechanics are really fluid, and fell squarely in that sweet spot of "easy to grasp but hard to master" for me. I also really like the idea of representing entities that take more than one hit to kill (both you and the enemies) by having their extra hit-points float behind them, really creative! I did find it a bit confusing at first when seeing it on an enemy, because it seemed like it would drop a heart when killed, (maybe enemies could use a slightly different sprite for their hit points?) but once it clicked I found it very clever.

Unfortunately the boss of the final stage seemed to get stuck outside the level for me, so I couldn't complete the game. But I really liked what I saw! Nice work!

Love it! Didn't feel much like a gameboy game at all, but it was fun on charm in its own right.

I was caught by surprise by the fact I could even trigger a game over in this game. It felt so lighthearted up to that point, that it didn't even occur to me that the pit was dangerous to fall down at all.

There was a bit of stuttering when loading some areas, which is a pity in a game this music-focused, but it's nothing major.

Love the soundtrack and the skeleton animations. So much personality in them that it truly made it feel like meeting up with old friends. "Here comes old Boney Tony, always strumming his guitar"

Great work!

Very fun entry!

I really like the idea of the "reveal spell" being used to trigger turn-based battles in rooms with ghosts. Very unique design.

The combat itself is a bit on the basic side. I feel like the addition of a "light attack" at all feels superfluous. Maybe, since you get to position yourself in relation to the ghosts before combat starts, some spells could take that positioning into account? Something like a targeted heavy attack, and a weaker light attack that affects a small radius around the enemy. Enabling the player to "end" the reveal spell early to reposition could also make for some cool strategic decisions.

As for the aesthetics, this looks and sounds really good! It feels like a complete package in that front, and that's hard to achieve in the span of a jam.

Good work here. Keep it up!

This one gets easy top marks for "gameboy soul". I feel like I could have played it way back when.

Love your take on the classic platformer format. Being able to cook enemies into spells is a very nice idea, and once you get the hang of summoning and throwing your cauldron around, it becomes very fluid. All the monsters have very distinct visual designs and movement patterns, which is great to make them quickly recognizable, enabling the player to be strategic about how to engage them, and also give them personality of their own - the little glove hand guy, for instance, is a huge jerk, as far as I'm concerned.

One thing I'd recommend is adding an explanation of the controls into the game itself. I had to keep checking the itch page for which button did what at first (which isn't all that unlike having to reference a game's manual back in the day!), and that took me away from the flow of things at times.

All in all, very good job here! Cheers!

Aw dang, wish this was really playable. Looks like it would have been really cute!

Really solid combat mechanics! Loved how the goblins kept running into the fight then back away, made them look far more intelligent than if they simply rushed in. Also really enjoyed the upgrade system, where you chose the reward you'll get at the end of the next level. Made it for an engaging system where I was always considering what would be helpful a couple of steps ahead.

I'm conflicted on the graphics a bit. I find the high contrast palette very striking and effective most of the time, but the game did get a bit noisy with the random bits of high-saturation reds splashed about the otherwise dark environment. But in general, the aesthetics really worked for the general vibe of the game.

I'm also going to echo the feedback from the other comment about working on the camera a bit. A bit more of a deadzone and some easing would go a great way in making it less disorienting when flipping around trying to fight enemies from both sides.

Overall, great work. Your team should be proud!

It's a nice concept. In particular, I really like the visuals which, while not strictly gameboy-ish, were effective in evoking the feeling of being lost in a vast forest.

I do feel like the horror potential gets hindered by showing the monster too much, though. At some point, it becomes more annoying than scary to wait for the grim reaper to leave so I can collect a gas can. An it stops being tense and starts to veer into goofy when a whole in the ground can have 17 grim reapers inside of it.

Solid work overall though, keep it up!

Very cute little game!

Really like the spin on the  "haunted cartridge" trope, from a more loving standpoint with the idea of fixing a broken forgotten game.

Like the other commenters, I had a few gameplay issues, particularly with the dispaly/resolution. I ran this on a 4k monitor and had to fiddle with the size of the game window quite a bit to both be able to read the text and see the sprites. At the end the choices to fix or throw away the game completely overlapped one another, and selecting one was very difficult. At the end, choosing to "fix the game" caused the screen to continually fade to black then fade back in, with nothing new happening, so I don't know if there's any content beyond that point. I also experienced a few collision issues, but those were more minor.

The game also deviated quite a bit from GB restrictions, but you know that by now. For what it is, I really liked the tone and delivery of the narrative, and found that to be the clear strong suit of this project. The core mechanics could use some work to make the moment to memento a bit more engaging, and maybe drive the point of fighting against the cartridge's corruption a bit harder.

Good work here, keep it up!

Nice scares! I found the monster very effective, but very fair. It made me scramble a bit whenever I saw it, but it never felt like an instant-lose scenario where I couldn't do anything. I also found that it showed up just enough to build tension without becoming silly. Very well executed on the horror front.

One critique I have is that I found that there were maybe one too many chests. At the end I found myself looping around the same spots trying to find the one last chest, and the tension was bordering on becoming annoyance, but I don't think it ever actually reached that point.

I'm gonna echo the comment that said to avoid installers. A game this small doesn't need to create star menu items, desktop shortcuts or a user-space data folder. It's an extra step that may cause less people to play your game than otherwise would.

Great job overall!

Really enjoyed the aesthetics. Good choice of colors, very nice music, and very well done animatics, particularly in the ending sequence.

I found the mechanics to be really hard to understand, though. I liked the idea of fishing for new cards, but it felt a bit arbitrary at points, with me having little control over the result. There were some battles that felt downright impossible, with me losing even after getting every coinflip right, which is particularly frustrating since any defeat results in losing all my progress.

I feel like there's a lot of potential here, and the biggest bottleneck right now is the conveyance of the mechanics that are already in place, but not very easy to parse.

Really cute game!

I think the concept shines the most in the second level, where the palette really brings the collectibles and hazards to attention. In levels where the palette is more subdued, stages can get a bit busy and hard to read, which can impact players' reaction times.

I found the mixed resolution between different assets to be a bit distracting, and think it detracts a bit from the otherwise very well drawn art.

Love this entry! I feel like it's definitely fighting against the spirit of the jam a bit, but the surreal aesthetics and unsettling themes really make it work.

I agree with the previous comment that stylizing the FMV sections to look like they were shot in the GB Camera would have taken it to the next level, but there's so much effort on display here already that I don't feel like that's a reasonable ask.

The puzzle gameplay was a bit on the simplistic side, but it's clear that they weren't really the focus. I did run into a few situations where the puzzle claimed it had been solved, but I didn't feel like I really made things fit correctly (in particular in the "shaped like the need to escape" one), so maybe those were bugs.

The Game Boy feels like it was included more as a framing device here than as direct aesthetic inspiration, but that seemed to fit what the game was going for. It had an underlying creepy-pasta-haunted-cartridge vibe to it, since those also frequently broke with the traditional limitations of the format they were emulating, when it served their stories.

Narrative, themes, dialog, characters were the easy stand outs to me. Curious to see what you work on next!

It's a tiny game, but there's some good stuff in here.

I like the main character's walk cycle, and find most of the assets are very clean and readable. Going for simplicity rather than noise and clutter really worked in your favor here.

The fact that there's not a lot of mechanics implemented actually enhanced the spooky atmosphere a bit for me at the start, so I'd suggest you build on that. For instance, finding a battery or realizing you can hide in lockers far before any of those mechanics are actually useful made me wonder whether I should be memorizing where lockers are for when I need to run back to them, or consider if filling up my item slots was wise, or whether I oughta leave room in case I need to pick something up and then make a run for it.

There's clearly a lot left to add until you have a complete core loop, but I feel like this is a promising start. Keep it up!

Had a lot of fun with this one!

I was a little stumped at first because I assumed the directionals acted more like tank controls (like, A would always rotate you 90 degrees counter-clockwise from you current orientation). Took me a while to realize how it actually worked.

I feel like a first screen fully lit up where the player could freely get to grips with the movement mechanics, before going into the dark levels would help alleviate that confusion.

I also feel like there's a bit too much information, too scattered and presented too quickly at the start of a level. I need to memorize the screen layout, read the hints at the top, read the step counter at the bottom corner, all in a very short amount of time. The little text blurb also obscures parts of the screen (sometimes hiding the exit), making this extra tricky. Maybe giving the player a little more time before turning off the lights (or maybe even waiting for a button confirmation) could help a lot. Also, maybe keeping the step counter visible even in the dark might help players understand when why their input doesn't work sometimes.

All in all, I feel like this game is really well-rounded. Well-though out puzzles, great use of audio feedback, clean, readable visuals and a solid integration of the secondary theme. One of my favorites from what I have played so far!

Had a lot of fun with this one!

I was a little stumped at first because I assumed the directionals acted more like tank controls (like, A would always rotate you 90 degrees counter-clockwise from you current orientation). Took me a while to realize how it actually worked.

I feel like a first screen fully lit up where the player could freely get to grips with the movement mechanics, before going into the dark levels would help alleviate that confusion.

I also feel like there's a bit too much information, too scattered and presented too quickly at the start of a level. I need to memorize the screen layout, read the hints at the top, read the step counter at the bottom corner, all in a very short amount of time. The little text blurb also obscures parts of the screen (sometimes hiding the exit), making this extra tricky. Maybe giving the player a little more time before turning off the lights (or maybe even waiting for a button confirmation) could help a lot. Also, maybe keeping the step counter visible even in the dark might help players understand when why their input doesn't work sometimes.

All in all, I feel like this game is really well-rounded. Well-though out puzzles, great use of audio feedback, clean, readable visuals and a solid integration of the secondary theme. One of my favorites from what I have played so far!