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Nope, Silent Paradise only has one ending.

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed them! ;)

Do you also have all codex entries? They count toward your total completion, just like items.

Yes, right now only Silent Paradise goes above 100% ;)

I don't think this game will receive any update because I already made an improved version/remake for PC, if you want to check it out: https://dreamnoid.itch.io/aereven-sleeping-azure (though it uses my usual ECS-based engine, as described here: https://dreamnoid.itch.io/aereven-lunar-wake/devlog/274028/postmortem-part-1-the...)

So if I get it right, you can use both the left thumbstick and D-pad to move your character and navigate in the menus, but when you're on the map screen they don't move your cursor? It won't appear until you move it out of the current room, but when you bring it close to the edges of the screen, it's supposed to scroll:

Do you remember if that used to work for you in Silent Paradise?

Thank you, I'm glad you're enjoying it! I will keep making games as long as people enjoy them ;)

The post-jam versions should fix the issues you've encountered, so thank you for bringing them to my attention ;)

I'm glad you're enjoying this one as well ;)

You should be able to pan on both maps using the left thumbstick or the D-pad (as you move your little cursor). Is it not working on your side?

The headphones can be used from the inventory menu. I should definitely add a prompt to make it more obvious.

I'm also thinking of adding markers on your map so you know how close you are to your objectives (similar to how Hollow Knight has markers for the Dreamers and the Black Egg Temple, nothing more). This way you would know you still have some exploring to do once you enter the tower.

Thank you for the feedback! :)

Yes, I double-clicked the executable and immediately grabbed my gamepad as it started, so I didn't touch the mouse until I tried to fix the camera spinning.

I completed a full circle of the map, it seems that's about it for this prototype?

I encountered an issue at the start of the game: the camera was looking at my character from below and it would spin on its own uncontrollably. At some point, moving the mouse fixed it and I could play normally. 

The initial jumps are probably the hardest part of the game because they feel very tight and if you fall you have to walk all the way back to the initial platform.

The ledge-creation ability is really the stand-out of this entry. It's quite unique and has potential, as demonstrated with the way it allows for wall jumping. It can feel  a bit buggy as it creates platforms on the ground if you're not jumping, and there's nothing telling you they only disappear once you jump off them. But once I figured out those quirks, navigation became a nice little puzzle.

There's not much to it visually but the music is relaxing and as the appropriate "chill puzzle game" vibes. The sound effects were really quiet tough, I had to go to the settings and crank up the master volume while reducing the music volume to be able to hear them.

Anyway, lot of potential there!

The first-person dungeon crawling perspective is an interesting idea, but the fact you can only move to preset waypoints (instead of a grid) is a bit confusing. For instance there was a room where a path was clearly visible on my left, but I had to move past it and turn around to select it. Not being able to look around freely is also quite frustrating.

The biggest issue for me was that the interiors are very same-y and I just couldn't mentally map the space. I had no idea if I had already seen a room or not, so I was randomly selecting exits. It worked a bit better when I got outside, at which point it reminded me of the old point-and-click adventures of my childhood like "Rendez-vous with Rama". But then I ended up inside again and got lost.

I didn't see any paths requiring upgrades to my movement abilities, but I can see how you could turn this prototype into a metroidvania with for example a grappling hook allowing you to select a differently-colored waypoint above your head.

My feedback is pretty much the same as pdil. I enjoyed the art style and the extra dimension. The combat felt pretty good, with nice animations and a variety of weapons that all felt distinct. I bet it would feel really nice with some SFX.

I got stuck for some time on the "crystal jump", and even now I'm not really sure how it's supposed to work. It seems you have to stay stationary when you jump, get the timing for the attack just right and then input a direction? It's very hard to pull of, which is a shame because I figure it could be used during combat to avoid enemies and attacks.

But just like pdil I gave up in the room with the weird blue-ish shape. I was expecting to collect an upgrade that would let me use the metroid-shaped thingies, but I just couldn't figure it out, despite pressing all the buttons on my controller. All the other abilities had a tutorial popup explaining how they worked, but sadly not this one.

Still, a nice-looking entry that would make for a pretty interesting game with more polish. Keep at it! :)

I'm not really sure what to think of this game.

I really liked the animation and sound design for the whip. The visuals and sound are otherwise pretty unsettling, which is kind of interesting.

Throwing knives on a wall and then jumping on them to climb is a great idea. I fell to my death in the segment where you're taught how to throw knives repeatedly to stay in the air. Again, this is a very interesting idea, but dying there sends you all the way back to the start, which feels really punitive and discouraged me from retrying.

But so far I failed to see the 'metroidvania' part. To me, it played more like a Sonic game. You're going so fast that you zoom through the levels and it seems impossible to mentally map or explore this world (though they were a few places where I suspected an alternate route to be). Also, it felt really strange for the jump to stop all running momentum. It makes the character quite "sticky" instead of fluid like Sonic.

There may be something here, but I'm not sure the metroidvania formula is a good fit for this game.

I gave it a try but there was no clear instruction and I quickly found myself playing a different game-inside-the-game...? It was all pretty confusing to be honest.

There may be some interesting ideas under all this, but I think some player onboarding would help them to shine.

It's a really good looking entry, with very nice pixel art (especially the parallax background at the start!) and animations. Kudos on that! Strong Blasphemous vibes too!

Sadly I didn't get very far into the castle because the controls really weren't working for me and it didn't seem like I could change them. I expected to be able to move with the arrow keys, but couldn't. I had to switch my keyboard layout to QWERTY to be able to move correctly with WASD and using the other side of the keyboard to attack was not natural to me at all.

This means I really struggled to fight enemies. I started to explore the castle but did not find any checkpoint. I died after fighting a few enemies (all different and cool-looking!) and was sent back to the title screen, so I gave up.

Gamepad support would go a long way in making this entry more approachable. As it is, it looks really good and is quite intriguing. With more input mapping choices and some player onboarding (tutorials and such) it would surely make for a nice little game! Keep at it ;)

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it! ;)

And yes, it was very important to me to block out an alpha as quickly as possible and then dedicate the remaining time to polish. In this case it was 3 weeks to get that first version up and running and the final week for polish. My custom engine and tools are a definitely the reason why I can manage that.

And thanks for reporting this bug, I fixed it for the post-jam version (as well as making sure resting writes the save file to the disk, so you don't lose too much progress after a crash). You didn't miss much though: after that prompt was only a final fade to black and then the credits. ;)

I'm really glad you liked it!

If you play with a gamepad, you can use the right thumbstick to orient the camera a bit and better see where you're going. Sadly there's nothing in-game telling you that, and I have no idea how I could have the same feature with the keyboard controls (I'm open to suggestions if you have any!)

An interesting entry, with strong Portal 2 vibes!

Sadly I did not finish it.

I found the controls to be very slippery, both moving on the ground (probably because you can move very fast, but the animation doesn't match) and while jumping. I kept overshooting platforms, or not jumping far enough. I wrote a note that shadows projected on the ground would help evaluate where I would land, and shadows did appear after the tutorial (why not before?), but jumping was still very difficult.

It took me forever to escape the blue-paint room with dashing. Same for the very next room. And sadly I gave up in the wall jumping tutorial room. It was very hard to wall jump and keep the camera from going weird places.

Combat was also a bit difficult. I liked the idea that you can only stun and push enemies around and you have to create pools of the appropriate color to defeat them. It was an interesting setup. But I kept taking damage while I tried to push enemies around.

Thankfully I could absorb green paint to heal. It was an interesting feature but I didn't understand what absorbing blue paint did? I'm a bit sad I never reached the red paint, but I struggled to reach the wall jumping room and it seemed to me the platforming difficulty was ramping up from there, so I gave up.

Something I really liked was the doors opening to an outdoor city after the tutorial. It was a nice moment!

With tighter controls, I could see this game becoming a very interesting puzzle-platformer! ;)

I finished the game!

It was pretty enjoyable, despite a few usability issues, like the lack of gamepad support and the textbox being difficult to read because the text moves during the typewritter animation (and pressing the button doesn't simply complete the animation, it directly jumps to the next textbox, so I missed quite a few instructions this way). 

The jump was also difficult to control as I would sometimes automatically roll off platforms. 1-tile large platforms were very difficult to jump on, even with the double jump.

The bat has a really short range, making it hard to fight the shadows. It got a bit better once I found the sword, but in the end I mostly avoided them. I really liked the slide though! The Metroid-style ceiling-climbing was nice as well.

The music is good, the graphics and animations get the job done. I liked how some shadow devils were sitting and balancing their legs, like children. It made the reveal from the second spider boss more impactful.

With more time to polish it, I can see it becoming a pretty nice game. Keep it up! ;)

You can rebind all controls in the settings menu. Based on another of your comments, it seems you're using the keyboard; I highly recommend using a gamepad if possible.

With the current jam version, the file is only written when you exit the game or go back to the title screen. I changed it for the first post-jam patch to write the file every time you rest at a bench.

There is indeed a bug, thanks for reporting it. It's not exclusive to the Vengeful Talisman: if you equip a talisman, save and reload, you can't unequip it afterward.

Problem is: I can't submit bugfixes during the jam's voting period. But in the meantime, if it really hinders your progression, I can upload the patched version on Google Drive.

It's strange, I haven't seen Windows Defender trip on it on any of the other computers I tried it on. Is your Windows Defender up to date? The "ml" at the end stands for "machine learning" (meaning AI detection) which is a nest of false positives, but they usually fix it pretty quickly. Anyway, the game doesn't do anything my other games don't. I hope you will be able to enjoy it soon! ;)

Your comment really made my day! Thank you!

As for metroidvanias, stay tuned because I will release a new one very soon ;)

I'm glad you're enjoying it!

For the fourth tablet, you may want to revisit the oasis once you can swim ;)

Hello everyone!

I recently released a brand-new action-adventure game, a new entry in my series inspired by The Legend of Zelda.

Aereven Sleeping Azure is a free action-adventure game for PC/SteamDeck.

I hope it sounds as exciting to you as it did to me when I made it!

Again, it's free, so check it out!

Legends of Aereven: Sleeping Azure 

See you around the Sofore Islands! ;)

The first bit of direction you get is in the temple just east of the starting town. I should probably have put some dialog right at the start to lead you toward it. Audio was a bit of a last minute thing so yeah, I'm probably missing a track or two and reuse some where it doesn't make much sense :p

Thanks! The initial plan was actually to make a Zelda 2-like! (But it kinda meant making 2 games in 1, so I decided to reduce the scope and go full top-down, haha).

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it! ;)

I'm really glad you liked it!

Those are all very good feedback! I had to finish the jam early due to scheduling but I will have a couple of hours before the deadline. I'm hopeful I can address some of those issue. If not, it will definitely be for the improved and extended PC version I'm planning later down the road.

If you have more feedback after playing the rest of the game, I would love to hear about it! That's really useful, so thanks! ;)

Great! I'm really glad it fixed the issue, considering how painful creating this patch from my phone was, haha. Thanks a lot for the assistance, I really appreciate it! ;)

Thanks for reporting this issue to me. I'm currently not at home so there's little I can do (including installing No$GBA...), but I still published a new version with what may be a fix. Do you think you could download it and check if the issue's still there? Thanks! (And no problem if you can't, I may still get one day at home before the end of the jam to check it out myself.)

You made me doubt the build I uploaded, haha. I had to download it again to make sure being pushed into pits don't cost you any extra damage: you do have an invincibility period when you're hit that extends to pits. It's the very last thing I implemented into the game. :p

I'm glad you liked it! I plan to make an extended and improved PC version down the line, so check it out if you were yearning for more ;)

Either 'Escape' on a keyboard or 'Start' on a gamepad. You can rebind all controls either from the title screen or at any point during gameplay.

Thanks! I would like to make a second Aereven game this year, we will see how that goes.

And no, my engine isn't publicly available. I don't plan to open it to others, mostly for two reasons:
1) I don't have the time to properly document it or help users
2) It's made for me first and foremost, to support my way of working and conform to my strengths. Opening it up to others would mean changing it to also support their use-cases and workflows, which would defeat the purpose

Basically, it works for me because it isn't general-purpose like Unity/Unreal/Godot. Even a specialized engine like RPG Maker requires a ton of effort to make it suitable for a large userbase (and RPG Maker absolutely excels at this, they've been doing it for 30 years now). Trying to turn my engine into that would be a job in an of itself, and I would prefer to dedicate the time to make new games instead :)

But that's why I write those postmortem, so other people can learn and build their own engines that are similarly suited to them!

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful feedback, it's always welcome and very useful to me!

Your feeling of the game is certainly valid, and I think a big part of it comes from the setting I chose, even more than the scope or timeframe. A sense of place is very important to me and I've built this world to make sense, which imposes hard constraints. A deserted submarine station just couldn't get as weird as my previous games. I still tried to have as many cool details as possible, as you're right it's something I value highly, but it was almost exclusively left to the codex entries and a few secret areas. Even when expending the jam version later I felt a bit restricted by that setting, both in term of space and narrative.

I'm a bit sad you felt the aliens come "out of nowhere", considering all the foreshadowing I tried to add, but again it's almost exclusively in the codex and I can totally imagine players not thinking too hard about it at this point of the game. That's something I tried to reinforce with the few dialogs I added in 1.0.3. A way to encourage players to stop and read back the entries they've collected to try to piece the twist together before it actually happens on screen.

Other than that, I did nerf the health drops from the lights and other props in recent versions. It was a way to make the Whisky Flasks more useful. But in the end I'm fine with players being able to farm health if they want. I don't really enjoy the trend of Metroidvanias embracing Dark Souls' difficulty (I love those games but they have a different focus) so I'm aiming for something closer to Metroid or Zelda, where health is relatively easy to come by.

I'm not sure how I could address your feeling that many of the abilities are just differently colored guns as it only accounts for two upgrades, both optional. The game still have dashing, sliding, double jumping, diving, a grappling hook, homing missiles, waterfall climbing and heat resistance. They should feel relatively memorable and it's a problem if they don't. I feel like they're all used extensively, so if you have more feedback on that front, I would like to hear it :)

About the jam itself, I talk about it in my postmortem but the short of it is that I'm not really interested in game jams as pure design exercises. I wanted to see if I could make a fully-fledged Dreamnoid game in a month and change. It was more of a one-off 'production' exercise and I've no plan to join more jams in the future.

My next game will probably be a sequel to both The Lightkeeper and The Trespasser and I will definitely keep your feedback in mind while I make it ;)

The post-jam updates (1.0.1 and 1.0.2) addressed most of the issues I was aware of, so if you see more I'm absolutely interested in that extended feedback!

For the aiming, can I ask which version you played? Aiming up was introduced 2 days ago in version 1.0.2. Did you have that during your playthrough? My hope was that aiming-up + the Spreadshot upgrade would cover most of the space.

I'm still hesitant to add diagonal aiming, either only when you're moving (instead of keeping straight up) or with an extra button press. It would complicate the controls (especially on a keyboard) and require a lot of extra animations, so I'm on the fence. Full-freedom cursor-aiming is something I'm pretty sure I won't do, though. It would require either 3D or procedural animations and force players to stop while they're aiming.

I dedicated the last week of the jam to polish. Other than that, I used my usual game engine which provides most generic menus. It's also not my first Metroidvania by any stretch. I plan to publish a detailed postmortem in January, if you're interested in the 'how'.

Thanks for the feedback!

The jump will change, no question. For the crouch, I will see to add some input buffering, but I don't think I will change the toggle, as it would make activating the morphball harder.

Thanks for the feedback! The jump and crouch are going to change for the post-jam version, you're not alone feeling it's too abrupt.

I see what platform you're talking about, and while it's technically different from those you can fall from, you're right it's certainly too subtle a difference for players to notice. I will probably change it or make the difference more obvious.

Map markers were a really late addition, like a few hours before the submission, haha. And it's nice to hear you liked the music as it's the first time I'm using exclusively my own and I was a bit worried it wouldn't be good enough.

The jump will be less abrupt in the post-jam build ;)

Thank you for playing and I'm glad you liked it!