itch.io

Ooh this one is really interesting, I always like the concept of selling your soul for power.

I do think sticking to the limitation this time is actually limiting your game!

Having the Demon Meter immediately game over you is a real shame, because I think there’s a lot of potential in having both playstyles? Like, imagine if you could still have a really high demon level, but instead of immediately dying, you can just get one-shot! So it’s more of a high risk and reward rather than risk (game over) vs only use the normal attack.

I also think the demon meter is way too strong for how much curse you inflict upon yourself. I did a playthrough where I only used the right click attack and won the game with a lot of demon meter left to spare. It also one-shot a lot of enemies, if that’s what you intended.

Some things I did like were the varied enemy designs! The animations were neat, I like that you had the skeleton’s melee attacks visually distinct.

One thing I can really appreciate is the absolute clarity of your levels. I can see where the enemies are, what projectiles are going where. It’s sososo important that this is clear to the player (unless intended by the designer) in this kind of game. I love how readable this game is! One veeery small thing is I had trouble knowing where to go after the one spiral enemy in the big room, but that could be fixed easily with a compass/background decorations/etc.

Fun game!

I was so shocked when cat died :O. Super cute game though, I liked that the levels were heart shaped. The shadow monster AI was a little confusing for me, but it wasn’t really bad or anything. I think you could maybe make jumping over the enemies a bit easier, but other than that the levels were well rounded.

Yup, it’s procedurally generated! Although it’s a bit shallow, since it only regenerates room layouts, enemies, and player/goal position.

This game was pretty good!

The level design was good, but I think having the camera be a little smaller by default and allowing for panning/zooming would be nice, (the default zoom level is a bit large).

The horizontal requirement to pick up the slimes made it possible to get stuck on some parts, maybe you could offload that choice to an input (like holding space opens the main slime’s mouth to absorb slimes instead of having them repel you), or you could allow for more room on the short platforms in the 4 slime ladder section.

A slime counter would be nice accessibility in addition to the scaling that you already have for the main slime. It’s pretty hard to see how large you are with the zoom as is.

One small weird thing is the double jump item, as it’s a similar to an existing mechanic (slime rocket jump) and isn’t used outside of that one time.

Other than that, the controls were good and well tuned. I had a lot of fun playing through it despite it being short.

I totally get it. It’s pretty difficult to be able to just put yourself into the player’s shoes when you put a lot of hours in making a game. And then when you release, players realize things you’ve never thought of! It’s always a learning experience.

Much deserved props for completing your game though ^^.

box.

Very cute game! It was really cheesable at a lot of points where you could just platform up by spamming knives and jumps but the puzzles were neat.

This was actually really fun!!!

The art might not be as polished as other games, but it still served it’s purpose and had a cute style! I really enjoyed the designs of the enemies. I don’t know how far I got, but you should totally add a Rat King boss if you keep working on this! (like the actual rat king phenomenon)

One thing you could improve would be the hotkey abilities section because keeping them out of cooldown was pretty hard to do. But they were satisfying and it was fun using them all.

The limitation wasn’t too impactful of the mechanics. (You could remove the “light” from Purradin and still be a vampire survivors-like) Although it made the concept pretty awesome! Cat Paladin!!!! CAT PALADIN!!!!

This was so fun. I enjoyed the concept a lot and the combat was actually challenging while satisfying. I loved the sound design of the right click attack, and I liked that it wasn’t an instant use so that isn’t strictly superior to the normal beam.

Also I totally gotta give props for light-based combat as someone who also had light-based combat :D.

The use of the limitation isn’t quite as deep or interesting, as it is just a post-processing filter + stylistic choice rather than a mechanic or something that affects the gameplay meaningfully. You could’ve had a different filter on, and it would be the same game. Maybe the idea of “three colors of light combining” could be used to reveal /hide parts of the level, or be used with the prisms to unlock puzzle-like elements?

The heavy chromatic aberration combined with the perspective camera actually made it quite infuriating to do the jumps because of the foreshortening on the platforms. The controls and collisions were also quite janky, and the wall jumps were pretty hard to time and rarely worked when intended.

Props for the escape to exit for a full screen game, though (I think this one of the only full-screen games I’ve been able to exit normally). I also did enjoy the level design a lot (they were challenging, varied, but also balanced when the physics worked right). It was pretty fun until I got stuck at the 3 corridors where the bombs chase at you straight on.

The lighting got really spotty during some parts, which made it kind of really difficult to play. I think it was when I walked onto the light bridges? I also really wish there was a way to look at the poem in-game. I also think the art styles between the menu BG and the assets were incohesive; maybe having more simplified visuals would have worked in your favor? (and make it easier to see too). I liked the sound design of picking up the stars though and the fact that the mechanics were reverse of what you expected (kind of like how light and reflecting works IRL!)

I really liked this game! It’s really relaxing and cozy and the color choices really evoke that nostalgic “early morning” feeling rather than a “spooky” pitch-black night.

Despite the art being simple, it was really expressive in the important parts. Some things I can appreciate are: the running back animation(it’s cute), and how the light sprites slowly pulsed. The aliased borders of light overlays give it an aura-like feeling; was that intended? It serves it’s job really well~

One thing I think you could do that would be interesting is, since the concept centers around you taking them back home, maybe you could have a drawn paper map the player could reference?

Nice job!

Ah!

This is a really good example of a finished jam game. Well polished, playable, and balanced. Super creative use of the limitation.

Cute art! I love the concept, and I do think that the game is pretty cohesive.

The biggest thing I don't like is the camera system, it's pretty disorienting (there's some good examples online of when to switch and move camera positions, such as a 2/3rds threshold. I also know GDC has some good videos of camerawork as well). I think there are some issues with the platforming. The control scheme is questionable due to the following,

• Lack of coyote time (causes some moments where you feel like you only have one jump)
• Easy to produce wall-sticking.
• If you try to jump/dash/shoot, the animations are buffered so that they don't happen immediately but are chained. This makes the platforming controls really unresponsive to immediate changes and reactions, which are pretty important to the feel of this kind of game.

I do appreciate the pause menu and sliders (the ambience slider is missing which is the loudest sound though). Other than the controls, I think the rest looks very polished.

Alright! I managed to completely swap out the inefficient Scene Tile instantiation system with a GridMap implementation.

I had to completely remodel the floor and wall tiles. I also deleted some faces that weren't being used.

Here is the new specs! The upper Godot instance is actually the editor. I can't think of much else I can do at the moment so I'll just upload the build as soon as I can.

Although the memory is still at 200~ MB...

I definitely have some ideas for what's causing this (shitty game jam code related to the map generation)! I'll work on some optimizations, thank you.

Super cool game!

The death screen is really cool! I like how the enemies are dormant until you fight them, and that the next wave is telegraphed, super neat mechanic. The camera zooming out is also really nice. It allows the player to be aware during the important combat sections and the exploration part of the game becomes more immersive.

One thing is when the normal shot shakes the screen; it makes the screen hard to look at and especially with the low contrast red background. The enemy projectiles are also super hard to see since they're red, with the red BG + camera shakes. And with the high fire rate setting making the screen shake even more.

Some ideas you can use to take this game even further would maybe make the player's appearance change on your upgrade path?

It's pretty funny (the monkey sounds especially)! It's a unique take on the memory game mechanic, and I like the use of the limitation.

The parallax effect is pretty sweet. The controls are pretty responsive and they aren't sluggish at all. This is pretty for your first game in Godot! I hope you have a fun time learning more about the engine(even if you don't stick with it!)

One thing is the sound effects of the enemies dying are pretty loud in comparison to the normal shot, so when you're killing a lot of them in a moment, it's actually pretty harsh on sensitive ears. The enemies are also cute, but they are pretty similar looking, so maybe some variety would be nice, in both the style and the behaviors.

Good job on implementing this side scroller!

The death sprite is funny, good job on implementing the main mechanic! I also like the character sprites and that they're little blorbo animals.  

The music is a little bit loud on my end so you may want to look into making an easy volume slider for future games. 

For the last level with all of the vampires in a party, I assume you wanted it to be easy for the player as a celebration right? Maybe having a one-way mirror object would be useful for that level because I died a lot of times trying to get past it.

Fun game!

Ah, it's probably the web version you're trying then? I've been looking into that recently. Apparently a lot of Godot 4 web games have this issue and it's due to browser + web standard shenanigans(to put ineloquently). I can't do much about it at the moment, and porting the game over to Godot 3 would be quite difficult. If you want to give this game another chance, try the standalone builds!

If it's not the web version you're having issues with but the downloaded one, if you could share some info about where the issues come up (whether it's the start of the game, or hitting enemies, or etc.), that would be helpful!

The parkour and drill mechanic were fun and interesting. I did find a weird tech you can do on some of the blocks were you can just climb up the side of a wall by drilling up! The upper level with the staircase formation does have some glitchy spots, but I got through it none the less.

One thing you could look into is maybe making the dirt and metal more distinct from each other (the palette is pretty low contrast). The borders and value change are good, but maybe some texturing in the dirt?  Or a clank when you hit a metal part? I had no issues with playing it however.

Neat game!

Art style is suuuuper cute! The gameplay is interesting, and the idea of having more gems/power making you less agile is interesting, almost like a glass(or crystal) cannon!

A couple things I think you could look into.

 The intro comic is actually well sectioned into "pages", so I think instead of having an eased scroll over the entire sequence, maybe one that pauses on each page section(for reading sections and not slowly peeking into them), with a quicker transition would be interesting (similar to a page turn). 

The game asset art is of high quality, but I think they are just a little bit unreadable(as in the shapes and outlines) with the current browser resolution, even more so with the full screen resolution. (Maybe thicker outlines, or simplifying would help with that?)

I also died a lot, mostly due to me not keeping track of the crystal amount. Maybe you could have an audio/visual cue for when you're low on crystals.

Other than that, cool game, I loved the story and it was pretty funny! The characters were nicely designed too.

Very fun game! I do think the font and typography choice is kind of unreadable especially during play. The post-processing and game design + upgrades make it very fun and satisfying to get more upgrades and kill things but after a certain point I just clicked the colored ones and I didn't have to put too much thought into it. I also do think you could experiment with making it more difficult like with more enemies(enemy types), difficulty modifiers, snowballing mechanics, etc.

Nice game!

I'm so glad you figured out how to fight the shadow knight! (I actually pictured just an animated suit of armor being puppeteered by shadows but calling it a knight is cooler ^^.) I was really worried no-one would progress to that point.

I spent a bit too much time on the character render(I don't draw characters very often,,,) and when I placed it on the HUD, it felt slightly off at first. It's nice that you appreciated it! There's a couple more enemies unimplemented but the Living Armor and the Lighteater(Bird) were the ones I focused on the most because they seemed the coolest.

Thank you for playing my game and experiencing it!

You're right, the controls of the light magic wasn't very intuitive... It was a bit of a last minute implementation to have a "personal" hovering light that you hit, so the controls are very all-in on the right click; I can see why you'd have a bit of trouble figuring it out. Thanks for the comment and playing!

This game has pretty fun system! Although, I was at first confused at the difference between mana generation and amount, and between the LMB and RMB attacks, but I got used to it! I think one thing that would make this game a lot more fun would be different enemy types, or ways to gather solar energy! Like an enemy that drops energy, or maybe different stats.

One small thing is I think you swapped the normal and special attacks though since the description says RMB for a special AOE attack but LMB does the "big arc" projectile with half as cost as the other one. One term you could change would be "spell cost" which at a glance, I was thinking "Hmm, why would I want to increase my spell cost?" so just a slight tweak there.

The graphic style is pretty good, and cohesive. The gameplay does feel a little slow at the start due to the player's movement speed but does get hectic over time.

Hi!

I created a pretty extensive dev log about my experiences working on my game in this game jam! Feel free if you'd like to read it or just look at the funny screencaps I put. If you weren't able to do as much as you wanted in a game jam, it's always a good thing to remember that you are always learning. Even if you can't make a version up to your standards, there are lessons to be learned. If any of you have some good comments or things you've found out during the jam, please share them!

Ah... the coffee you can't drink :s. I didn't realize the stamp wasn't as intuitive to use. You just drag either the top or bottom of it up or down  quickly and if the stamp is pressed it will stamp onto papers! Thank you for the review! I think adding a right/double click to stamp is a good idea.

Thank you for all your effort! To be honest, it's been incredibly painful trying to get the multi-window card system to work. I originally was gonna do it because I was gonna have a whole anatomy thing as a secondary window and have the cards transfer between the main window and status window seamlessly but honestly that's just a bit out of scope at the moment. The strobing issue is just one thing, but there are an endless amount of exception cases where the game crashes especially during the card animations. The multi-window card system also is terrible to try to implement to multiple platforms/OS's.

Maybe in the future, I will complete the game outside of a jam context, but I've been preoccupied with some life stuff and another game I am working on. But right now I'm just gonna stick with the reviews I have so far. I do appreciate all the people that tried to review and notify me of the errors in my game though. It means a lot! and thank you again. I hope the game jam works out for your game too ^^.

I wasn't "taking it down", just making sure no one else gets the scary strobing effect ^^.  Someone with sensitivity to these kinds of things could get hurt playing if it was still up while that issue stays! Interesting, I thought it would have to do with multiple monitors, I have a 4k monitor as well and I'm using Windows 10 so I'm actually really unsure of what happened. I'll keep looking into it if I can fix it.

Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry that happened to you. I'm going to take down the download of this game so this doesn't happen to anyone else. Is it okay if you could tell me what OS you were using and how many monitors you were using when you were playing the game? I'm going to figure this out as soon as I can.

Also, it's all good! No worries about reviewing my game or not, immense thanks to you for pointing out this serious issue.

Thank you for letting me know! Although I probably won't be fixing it for the jam, I was spending way too much time trying to fix the bugs and I was really stuck on issues with crashing. I lost a bit of motivation because a bunch of real-life events came up, and I had a lot more planned, (there were supposed to be more encounters like traps and items and you were supposed to find a key to unlock the hatch. The assets are there but unused cause I could not figure out how to integrate them), but I never really managed to complete it and I was pretty disappointed in my progress this jam. I'm just glad I got the maze generation to work as that's the first time I've ever done anything like that as well as taking the time to implement sound in this jam game.

Otherwise, thank you for the effort to play my game!

Very interesting game! I really like the concept, and I think the case/mystery was well-crafted. The only thing I would say needs improvement is just some general accessibility features for playing back and viewing the evidence. I think a way to skim the video evidence, or just pause, or maybe skim per section of subtitles would be better since it was a bit difficult to read some of the sections that went by too fast. The fonts overlaying some of the video footage are a little unreadable, you could add an outline or two to help with that. 

Some of the text evidence was a little unintuitive to read, I had to organize my evidence so that some articles weren't fully obscured. Also, it took me a bit or two to figure out how to actually open up the case file. Maybe you could have a small bit of text/instructions to show at the start, or maybe allow it to be dragged with the mouse.

The final thing is it was pretty confusing to select which evidence was for the murder weapon, because the police report and autopsy report both tied into the murder weapon, (one of them also literally said "Murder weapon: "), so I think that part of the evidence was both shallow or confusing depending on the correct evidence.

I did like the assets and the art style of the game. It was fun trying to figure out who the killer was, and It had a very simple and close-knit concept that worked really well in this jam's theme and limitation. All in all, great job!

Good job designing this fun little platformer! My only complaint about it is when you die, it doesn't really feel like anything happens. You just teleport, and that's it! I feel like an animation, or at least a sound effect and a slight pause in player input would make the deaths less just teleporting back to the start, and more of an actual reset. It does make it easier to get back into platforming immediately, but the lack of any pause, feedback, or any user agency in the movement and input do make the platforming experience a little worse for wear.

Well done on the level design; however, and the assets if you made them too!  The levels were well-made and well-paced.

I like how you designed around the limitation by using the NPCs' dialogue and only one item limit. The idea of choosing a gift for a wizard to fix your house without knowing the consequences is neat! Something that you might want to consider adding would be a time limit, so that the player has some tension to decide which item to pick, making their choice a little bit more hectic and chaotic. Also maybe a way to track all the endings you've accomplished out of all of them would be a nice quality of life addition.

Thank you for playing! I'm glad you appreciated the transparent background, I thought it might have been tacky at first instead of a solid color background but I just decided to go with it. The game is pretty confusing I'll admit that, but I'm glad you were able to enjoy it and understand after a bit. Thanks for the review! : D

I'm thinking of releasing a complete version with sound in the future too because it totally lacks the card thwip sound that every card game needs.

Ah yes, the classic skinner box, the ol' clicker game! This game was pretty fun to play, I think my favorite part was listening to the music : D. I didn't expect the laugh either so I cracked up too when I was singing along. Fun game, cute sprites. I will and always love pixel art. 

However, the clicking should be instantaneous and synchronous with the mochi animation. With player characters, or characters that you control directly, having animations immediately represent the player's input makes for a much more tighter feel of the animation and player's controls. Plus, if I'm going to be spamming the clicking animation, I want those mochi bunnies to be rapidly and hilariously switching sprites. 

Other than that, the only thing would be the text color and it's background's color. The text color is kinda difficult to read against it's background. The pixel art would benefit from unified pixel scale but it doesn't really matter to me since this is a game jam and you make do with what assets you have :P so I understand.

 I think the concept really shone through though. It was a functioning clicker game with hilarious animations and upgrades and audio too! The fixes I suggested are just tweaks and not inherent design flaws, or critiques of the stylistic choices, so I think you should still be proud of completing the jam! Good job!

THIS GAME MAKES ME SO MAD. I WANT TO DESTROY THAT LITTLE SKRUNKLIE SO BAD YOU DONT UNDERSTAND.

okay but for real! This game is lovely. The theme is amazing. Intro sequence is hilarious. Concept is perfect. The use of the limitation is simple but its executed so well and implemented in such a hilarious way. I swear, the gravity on the tilt is so infuriating but its so hilarious how bad I am at destroying the moon. I was struggling to not laugh, but when I finally reached the Moon's smallest stage I broke and I could not finish the game. That little graphic of the moon is so pathetic. I love this game. My favorite detail is making the moon tremble as you aim your tipsy little rocket straight towards its doom. But then I overshoot and send the rocket at full thrust 90 degrees to the side.

Fantastic job.

Since the timeline is a major part of your input and game-loop, it shouldn't be such a small area confined to the top left. It would be better if the timeline was more prominent UI feature just for accessibility since you have to click specific bars to place cards into actions.