Thank you for leaving the comment! I'm glad you noticed the focus on aesthetic and personality; ideally I would have pushed it more (more varied combat animations, etc.) but between implementing basic systems and getting the game playable there was a major lack of time. Ideally I'd like to flesh this out in the future and set up a proper gameplay loop, but i'm glad you enjoyed what i managed!
minichibis
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interesting aesthetic, i can appreciate how dialogue makes the world feel fleshed out. i think getting scrolls just slowly kills you? i haven't found any items besides potions and scrolls, and potions are the only ones that raise your stats or survivability in any way. items always seem to drop one tile away from the heretic you just killed, which feels odd to me.
mixing a traditional RL with motherload is a great idea. i wish the economic scanner actually showed your total instead of just making you multiply it in your head. the fact that there's no "carryover" for quotas is an interesting idea, but i'd kinda prefer to have a bit of leeway, especially since a lucky set of upgrades can have you able to clear out most of the money in the earlier bits for an insane over-quota score.
inspired! incredibly tasteful tileset. recipe and food mechanics are great, and provide a lot of opportunities for learning. shrines and graves provide a great element of choice. great enemy variety, the pig and frog do a lot to shake up combat at the start with their movement gimmicks (although this fell off slightly later on with floating eyes and ice golems. maybe that type of mechanic picks up again later? i didn't get overtly far, the game is very hard.) constructing and eating new recipes provides a long term goal as well as an element of risk.
very interesting concept. tile placement is fun, but also it feels oddly restrictive sometimes (for example: the "full" dungeon tile cannot be placed adjacent to anything besides dungeon tiles. sometimes it feels like enemies can stack on top of each other, making the damage any combat encounter entails a mystery until it happens. making bigger dungeons doesn't have much clear benefit i can ascertain besides maybe getting a single health potion?
great concept to distill the rougelike experience down to the essential elements of threat analysis and build construction. i didn't understand the point of "poison power", as it didnt increase the damage of my poison attack; i didn't get much use out of the element system in general, but that also might be because i only discovered the skill tree on my last run. shrines are an interesting concept in creating gradation of threats without needing excessive amounts of enemies. enemy critical hits can be brutal, and so can be getting surrounded.
thank you for the feedback!
regarding the energy system, i think ideally later in progression you'd have a balance between incredibly energy-efficient options and very powerful singular actions, although progression in general is something i'd have to do a lot of tinkering with to find a satisfying endpoint.
limited item uses is a very interesting concept, although i think that the general structure of traditional rougelikes (enemy stats, quantity, and lethality scales very quick so getting your hands on the best gear is vital) and more modern roguelikes, especially deck builders (enemy abilities scale at basically an exponential rate demanding a better and more seamless synergy the further you go) would already provide enough pressure to find something to replace that rusty shortsword. i think having a wide variety of consumables would be interesting however, not just because they provide a great way to give you more powerful abilities in the short term.
melee attack bumping is something that in my mind falls under the purview of 'UI' and if its not clear thats one of the things i kind of slapped together to get something playable out the door.
id love to do a more fleshed out iteration sometime, but i'd need to refactor the codebase slightly first. i'm sort of blueprinting how i'd do that in my head, i have all the raw bits there but i need to figure out how exactly theyd fit together...
emulates the feel of old DOS games incredibly well, not only in palette and sprites but also in gameplay concept and execution. very different from the traditional definition of a roguelike but definitely in spirit and also very interesting conceptually. you can usually bend the system in your favor pretty easily depending on anomaly luck, but the process of learning how to do that is interesting which i see as a win. building mines and labs near any natural source of energy is usually pretty powerful, especially when unlocking repairs. one time i got teleported via a one way wormhole into a dead end where i just sat and died. i got the forcefield ending and the pylon ending, which seems like a "true" ending as it were.
good tileset, the colors changing over time are a small change but do a lot to give the game a bit more progression. the equipment changing the character sprite is a nice touch.
i appreciate the classic rougelike feel. levelling up feels oddly infrequent, at least early game. ranged combat options are a nice addition. the laser sound is very loud...
the assassin chestplate is incredibly powerful, that on any build guns or not is usually enough to win the game. i appreciated getting a good stockpile of items to use, although usually the issue was having too much stuff.
Fun game! A lot of nice variety in towers and enemies, I appreciate the sound effects a lot, and the music as well. Upgraded forms having different sprites was a very nice touch, as well as the dragonfly breaking into pieces as it died. I got to wave 40, but got a game over with no chance to react during the queen fight (I was holding down spacebar to speed things up).
Very interesting concept for a game, I learned the ropes after experimenting for a minute or two. I like the graphical style, although the minecraft-style cracking may lack a certain subtlety that could go a long way in keeping a clean look. Sound design was pleasing. I never actually managed to win, the AI feels very smart.
I have a comment I made on a different webpage that I'll put here to help:
Your mouse has a small area of visibility around it at all times. Left clicking uses your flashlight. Right clicking uses your knife.
Ghosts can be stunned with the flashlight, which leaves them vulnerable to the knife. When hit with the knife in this state, they die. If hit with the knife while not stunned, they dodge.
Ghosts left alone long enough will start to laugh. If left laughing, they will kill you. This can be interrupted with the flashlight or knife.
The sleeper is a special ghost that looks like the other ghosts, except with closed eyes. When hit with the knife or stunned with the flashlight, it begins to bend itself out of shape. It must be sliced with the knife to prevent its transformation, once per stage of transformation. If it fully transforms, you die. If you slice it when its in its least bent shape, it dies.
I'm not the best at visual tutorials and the resolution was too small for me to consider words, so I knew there might be some issues with this. I probably should have split it into more pages...
Insane amount of polish in all the little graphical touches, be it the chips' VFX or the beautiful hallway encounters. So much unique content too, with a clever board and set of chips for each enemy. All the music you found and implemented also added a lot to the game. I wish there was a way to restart a battle without just placing all your pieces, but otherwise the gameplay was polished to a mirror sheen.
Satisfying controls, bouncing from wall to wall was intuitive. Graphics and music captured a classic-gameboy vibe quite well. Graphics were quite readable, but I thought the buzzsaws were some sort of collectible until I touched them. The player and all obstacles had fairly large hitboxes, which combined with random level generation could often result in scenarios that are extremely difficult to weave through, especially in later levels.
Nice little slide puzzle, although I was never the best at these things. Everything works as you'd expect, and the music is nice to listen to. I like the first two puzzles the best. The hidden puzzles are a very clever little addition. In the grid-based puzzles there is a minor issue where the tiles are split in a way that leaves the outline half-pixel thickness compared to the rest of the tile's resolution, although all other puzzles perfectly follow the resolution.
Lovely! Great graphics, the cutscenes have a lot of charm and the enemies are great. The environments are also pleasant to look at. Flame physics were very nice and never felt weird. Watching enemies burn to crisps as flames surrounded their corpses was very entertaining. The music choice is very nice, and I had no issues with the sound effects. Gameplay was simple but extremely solid, all the bosses were nice additions and the levels were fun to navigate. I will say I was wandering around the first level for a while until I realized you could go right to go past your spaceship. Last note: mad respect for creating a segmented enemy under the constraints of a jam, especially one with such a variety of movement patterns.
Interesting twist on the true rougelike formula, having some impetus to rush helps make the game exciting in a way most games in the genre aren't. The tutorial was a very nice addition. It would be nice if there were more healing options available, there were red things in some walls but digging them up didn't really do anything. Enemies had a lot of variety and seeing them lurk around corners was great. The sounds were also a good addition. One thing that might count as a bug: In the final stage, the compass should probably point towards the actual end rather than the top left corner.
Fun concept, very chaotic! Lots of meters but I mostly pay attention to the timer. Pushing boxes into grinders is fun when you get the hang of it. Very hard to handle all of the enemies; I had the best luck doing what I could with them while mainly focusing on scrap collection. The graphics are very simple, but are very appealing. Some sound effects would have been a nice addition.
Interesting take on the Vampire Survivors formula, these games often don't have a traversal goal. Decent enemy variety and I like how they freely mix together. Upgrades are nice and feel useful, having a lot of speed really helps. The way certain elements move and rotate takes them off a strict 64x grid, although all the spritework is within that resolution.
Nice little game. Walking around and avoiding the eggs presents an interesting challenge, and the key-hunt element means that you can't just go around willy-nilly. The game seems biased towards being easier if you start out going to the right (as it means you don't have to backtrack a key to a gate). The NPCS add some goofy charm, as does the text in some rooms. The music gives a nice somber feeling through the main track, and changes as needed. Only real issue I found was the fact that sometimes the monster would kill you if you stepped on an egg walking out of the room from the top entrance.
The physics on the pinballs are very nice, it's satisfying to watch them whiz around the screen. The score bonus and accompanying music are super satisfying. The mouse controls are a bit unintuitive and slow, the game got better when shifting to A and D instead. The only gameplay problem I ran into was a nasty tendency for the right flipper to launch the pinball straight up vertically, repeatedly. This happened often with the bonus ball. The graphics are a touch plain, although the visual effects on the pinballs help and the sound effects and music go a long way in adding charm.
Quite a clever concept, with a lot of interesting choices to make throughout the 30 day game. Almost nothing is truly explained but the game doesn't suffer from that at all, the discovery process is quite rewarding. The graphics are extremely pleasing while remaining readable, and the music and sound effects are on point. The polish here is to an absurd degree.
Very fun game, with that simple but addictive motherload style gameplay loop. The lack of upgrades I originally saw as a negative, but it drove me to explore to the end of the planet (and find a fun little ending sequence). Enemy variety made combat rather interesting. Mobility upgrades were endlessly helpful and I felt like a sack of potatoes without them (without the jump boost shoveling became a troublesome proposition). Sound design was great, especially the propellers of the ship. Graphics were also very good.
Nice little game, very simple but satisfying! Very easy to understand, with graphics that are very readable (a tile pattern on the floor might have helped navigation a little bit, but that could be part of the challenge). Sound design is very nice for such a small game, lots of satisfying bloops and jingles.
Fun little game! Fits perfectly within the resolution, with readable gameplay and graphics. The clouds on a few levels move quite quick. The sounds helped add a bit of extra feedback to actions. One thing I wish is that you were able to use the jump button to restart levels, switching to the other key always takes an extra half-second.
Interesting game, from the full intro I can see a lot of love went into it. Art has a lot of charm to it, although the backgrounds could have used more detail to fit with the love that went into the tiles. The spikes in the earlier desert levels could have stood to be a darker color to stand out better. I can appreciate the philosophy that went into sticking with a limited resolution, even if the resolution you chose wasn't 64x (honest misunderstanding). Game could have used a lot more tutorialization, I didn't know that it was "press an orthogonal direction and X simultaneously to dash" until the area where I was left with literally no other option than to figure that out (by looking at the gif). Even if music was out of scope a few sound effects would have helped.
Super cute little game, cutscenes and music added a lot of charm. Desert terrain was well made, although some areas could have used some more detailing with corner and floor tiles (caves for example). All the character animations worked well for the game. Platforming was simple but pleasant, and the game was the perfect length. Never felt like I was making blind jumps despite the low resolution either.
This gives me nostalgia for that one minigame on the nintendo DS port of mario 64 where you protect the flowers with a slingshot. Interesting resource management that I didn't notice until I started running out of ammo, seems like a good way to balance out the ability to take out enemies. I wasn't expecting the boss. All the spritework was faithful to the 64x constraints, although several elements left the 64x64 grid while moving, resulting in some minor subpixel movement.
Interesting combination of elements for theming a clicker game. Volume slider aesthetic is very nice, menus in general work very well (although I didn't notice the shop scrollbar until later). Text is perfectly readable despite resolution limits. A bit small scale but for the last two days of the jam this is perfectly scoped.
Interesting little game. The idea of having a tutorial even without a menu is a neat way to get around time constraints, but a text tutorial on the game page might have served the same purpose more ergonomically. The music does a lot to add to the high-seas feeling of the game, but the other sounds are a bit electronic to fit. Graphics work well but the amount of lines and tilted pixels can be a bit harsh on the eyes (somewhat unavoidable when using rotations at this resolution, and I know Unity is painful to wrangle at small resolutions). Following the arrow was fun, although I didn't ever get far due to the amount of enemies and lack of options dealing with them. If you could have fired while stopping that would have at least given you a tool to deal with those heat-seeking missle viking longboats. The enemy variety helped the game, and I liked being able to see your progress through a bar at all times.
Your mouse has a small area of visibility around it at all times. Left clicking uses your flashlight. Right clicking uses your knife.
Ghosts can be stunned with the flashlight, which leaves them vulnerable to the knife. When hit with the knife in this state, they die. If hit with the knife while not stunned, they dodge.
Ghosts left alone long enough will start to laugh. If left laughing, they will kill you. This can be interrupted with the flashlight or knife.
The sleeper is a special ghost that looks like the other ghosts, except with closed eyes. When hit with the knife or stunned with the flashlight, it begins to bend itself out of shape. It must be sliced with the knife to prevent its transformation, once per stage of transformation. If it fully transforms, you die. If you slice it when its in its least bent shape, it dies.
I'm not the best at visual tutorials and the resolution was too small for me to consider words, so I knew there might be some issues with this. I probably should have split it into more pages...
There's such a wide variety of mechanics here, all introduced in a manner that I can tell took a lot of thought, and mixed in very interesting ways. Some of the puzzles didn't require a lot of thought but a good chunk of them did, especially later game. They were fun to tinker with too, none of them felt long enough that redoing small pieces of them was annoying. The graphics were very charming and the main character's design was fun. I liked all the tiles. The sound effects were very fitting and the music was also good, although the game was long enough that I started to actively notice how there was only one song (which is not a bad problem to have at all within the context of a gamejam)
This one has a very intriguing concept that's fleshed out in a way that feels very full despite the time constraints of the jam. I had a bit of trouble understanding the controls inside the solar system at first. The music choice is great, and the graphics do exactly what they need to when they need to, with the planets being an especially nice graphical touch.
I originally saw an iteration of this game from during the jam with only one level, so seeing the game completed with a logo and menu and even a boss is wonderful. There's a lot of charm to the basic movement, and the level design gives a lot of interesting geometry to use it in. The graphics are very nice and the sound design / music is some of the best in the jam in my opinion. I do wish there was a bit more time on your invulnerability frames though, especially on the stage with several blind falls.