Very polished and fun! Some puzzles seem too hard, but felt very good when I figured them out. Maybe the levels aren’t exactly sorted by difficulty, since the one with a single wooden box was very easy. I would have ended the game sooner, after entering the castle, since that level was final-level worthy. I gave up on the one with goo and boulders ‘cause it’s late here, but I think I will replay this later! The footstep sounds were very lovely, and so were the little touches and animations. Great game and idea.
Very stylish palette! The performance was a bit straining for me in my desktop pc, especially during particle effects, maybe you should improve it a bit. Good concept and use of the limitation, and nice sound effects. I got to the second or third checkpoint and got to possess one of the big guys, but then I died and lost all progress.
I wanted to have NPCs that would fight for you, and whenever they died you would bury them and they would come back to life, maybe stronger. Also, use the bodies of enemies (or maybe allies too?) to overcome pressure plates and open doors. With stronger enemies to push players to use the allies. Let’s make an effort to scale our stuff better next time! :)
Not a bad strategy, I do the same myself! I didn’t balance it much since I didn’t add the main mechanic I wanted… Also there’s UI that I didn’t scale correctly, which shows the controls. I will add it after the voting period. Thanks!
I am aware, thanks! I didn’t have time to fix it and forgot to remove the control in time, haha. Will fix after the voting period. Thank you very much!
It definitely needs more polish, I rushed it out the door to meet the deadline. Once the voting period is over I will fix the UI and add stuff from my TODOs. I appreciate your comment, maybe I will rework the base systems into a short commercial game :)
The wands really should be switched with 1234 as well, I felt a bit trolled when I found out it was the mouse wheel (yeah, I didn’t stop to read the text). It made it harder for me, as my mouse wheel is very sensitive. In any case I didn’t switch too often, as the ice wand feels like an extra step, only useful for conserving some ammo.
Starting a level is usually dangerous in my experience, because of having no ammo and usually a couple of enemies with an interest in you.
I died twice on the first level, managed to beat it (huge level btw, maybe shrink it down a bit) and immediately died in the catacombs to two zombies and two ghosts.
Very good job with the sound effects (love the pick-up one) and the ambient rain was lovely too.
Good concept, but it got too crazy too fast for me. Enemies eat your carrots, kill your mercenaries and rush the house, so that’s three things you have to worry about… Also, carrots should be easier to pick up.
I managed to buy two soldiers and one mage and my score was 2110.
Very interesting idea, of a statue or knight that comes to life in different eras to fight calamities.
There is maybe some imbalance in that the goons with guns are a bit too strong, and the penalty of restarting the whole game made me think of stopping, but I managed to beat it the second time through.
Also, most of the assets are a bit blurry, so you should probably check your sprite import settings and turn off Bilinear filtering and set compression to None, as these are the Unity defaults.
Again, very good concept for a game, it comes across even with minimal text.
I got the 3rd ending, actually paid attention to the controls dialog, and then got the 4th ending :)
There are a lot of actions we can do, maybe too many to introduce at once… I get that the interspersed buzzing is better for flavor, but the text that teaches these actions could be better spaced.
Also, the way to advance the menus should be uniform (click for starting the game and E for advancing text later on is confusing).
Still, good little game and I love the idea of multiple endings (I was going to do it if I had finished mine!).
Simple, but solid.
There is a small problem with the tiling of the life gauge, and there were two levels that were too simple, but I would like to see an extended version with more content.
Amazing game, super-polished! Love the tween of the music themes and the town-building aspect, I always love to build a base and send off some characters to explore.
Interesting to see that other people used Hunters, because I beat it with just Mages in 23 days. I improved armor in the forge, and attack in the wizard pyramid, which lead to some pretty OP wizards. Maybe the wizards should have a nerf to defense, because otherwise they grow twice as fast as warriors, and can heal and area attack, too.
Admittedly, I cheated a little bit: in the desert I found out that you can spam click to attack several times(!), at least with the mages.
All in all, very polished game, I’m glad that you made this and that I got to play it :)
Amazing scope and depth for a 72 hour game. I thought the game would end at the end of the first level (I was very wrong). Nice nod at Blaster Master, although in this case everybody stays inside the fortress. Liked the little touch in the upgrade screen where the soldiers must all go inside the castle before continuing on to the next level.
There should be in-game text explaining the controls at first, not just in the itch.io page as some people may miss that. Same for the story: The starting cutscene was confusing to me as I thought they were rival kingdoms (some hearts would have cleared everything up!) and they gave chase in a different direction to that of the dragon.
The “fortress mode” text overlaps itself if done repeatedly, so you should clear it. I wish that the upgrades were explained (or given a name at least), and that the upgrade buttons were bigger or we didn’t need to click the small circles. I was able to jump infinitely on the later stages, and I’m not sure that was intended (this circles back to upgrade descriptions).
While this is a good game, the jam restriction is not really there, since you control a single castle (you could say the soldiers are doing the work, but that’s like saying you’re controlling muscles or cells, haha). I read what you said about the griffon and other upgrades, but they are basically automatic.
Despite this, this was one of the most solid and elaborate games I’ve played this jam, great job.
The concept is good, and the WASD + Mouse control scheme is perfect, but the difficulty could be higher for the basket dude. I’m not sure what happens if you don’t pick up the ivy, but it hardly ever happens, because the basket dude is super fast and easy to control.
I got to around 90 ivy in the basket (1 out of basket) and had 6 or so vines growing. Sadly, I could not read the Game Over screen because I pressed space at that moment to cut some more ivy (a timer would be good).
On the plus side, it has buttons for pausing the game and muting the music, which are nice little pluses. Maybe the Esc should pause the game too, to avoid moving the basket over to the right.
Overall, well done, especially for a one-person team.
This game was a blast, good graphics, pretty genre-savvy jokes (I liked the Adventure Zone reference) yet small and contained as jam games should be. The music is good, in and out of the shop, and the initial dialog has the full game exposition while still being a light read. In my case, I beat it with 4 minutes to spare, so it’s a bit on the lenient side.
If I had to complain: While technically you control a party of adventurers, there is no gameplay features that arise from this. The HP is shared and everybody moves and attacks the same. In fact, the few tiny differences that exist between characters are cancelled out by buying stuff in the shop (I did not notice the Priestess didn’t attack, but it was kind of irrelevant).
It’s still one of the most fun games in this jam… but it could do a better job at following the restriction.
Fun little game, I lost to a level with a lot of yellow snakes.
There are a couple of bugs to fix: arrows still show up when changing level, and snakes get stuck in very tight spaces (which was helpful for me, haha).
Also, I found out that the small bones don’t block you, only the skulls… maybe you should put small bones in a darker color? Or, let the player figure it out by experimenting like I did.
Also, good job on the logo and title screen music.
Good jazzy music and I liked the graphic assets used. I’ve tried Phaser but never gotten too far… I like that it went fullscreen on startup.
Very interesting restriction… I only got to level 5, but I feel like I could go much farther if I always kept the two ogres together and got used to the movement. But it would feel like cheating, probably.
You could use some of the free space outside the fortress to explain the pickup effects. Overall, good job.
The art is pretty good, and the music fits well. Very unique concept, although hard to control at first. It was a good idea to add the controls in a poster on the wall, I noticed them a little later on. Adding a pause menu would be good too.
My laptop is not very powerful so I had a bit of lag, especially on Game Over.
I lasted 1:16 on my first try.
I am very happy that you stuck through to the ending, thanks! It was a last-second addition, to have some closure to it… I will try to make it more obvious that it exists.
