itch.io

Thank you for the review the encouraging words. 
This was my first game jam, and my most successful/realest attempt at a game in about 20 years, and first foray into 3D graphics. 

This ended up with less than 1/2 the mechanics I had planned at the beginning of the week and about 5-10% of the content. Overall, I was really too ambitious. So much time was spent figuring stuff out in the Godot/Blender/Tiled and I realize I had too high of expectations for level of participation from the rest of the family. I learned so much this week that (if retained) I figure even starting completely from scratch, I could probably reproduce the current tooling and game by the end of the first weekend.  

Zooperdan has another jam planned for first week of September that he will be providing all the resources for.  I'm already planning to take part and am planning to actually take the week off of work to do so. I hope to have a contender 

Regarding the torch sconce: You are not the only one to have that problem. I had a couple friends play through it and I think only one noticed that sconce on their own, and that was with the inventory fixed where holding a torch cast some light. I have since improved the lighting and that has I feel a dramatic impact on visibility. 

I'll be posting an updated version some time tomorrow with the UI/trapdoor bugs fixed, the improved lighting (actual shadows) and a bit of polish on some other components. I know it isn't actually a clean test considering you already know the sconce is there, but if you had the time to take another quick look, I'd greatly appreciate an independent confirmation on whether the improved lighting was sufficient to remedy that particular issue. 

Best executed combat of any games I've had a chance to play in the jam (roughly a quarter of them). I really liked the fluent chaining of moves. I might have to steal it for something. 

Artwork was also great. I know you said elsewhere that you felt it was "amateurish",  but consistency of style is more important than the quality of any individual piece, and the pixel art combined with the music selection and the background effects all play off each other here to great effect.

I'm not really picking up on the duality theme. It is there a bit in the backstory (real world protagonist, with this ability to to enter a digital world, but that doesn't come into play in any interactive  manner. 

Well done.

I like the concept of creating minions out of your fallen foes. I couldn't get it to work though the game froze for me whenever I came out of the minion menu.

otherwise I have to agree with a lot of the other comments about field of view. It felt cramped not having any peripheral vision. I know this was a last second submission, I was struggling with last second bugs myself and can commiserate there. If you are planning to post an update post rating period, I'll try to take another look next week. 

Graphically, I think this may have been my favorite of the jam. The pixel art was not only great individually, but cohesive in style as well.  The risk of attack while sleeping and the enemies getting free attacks to allow you to run both felt well balanced. The dragon waking me before a full sleep was a bit of a tense moment.

The only maybe detractor that I experienced was the camera POV felt a bit low. I joked to my wife sitting here this was really a dungeon crawler cause it felt like I was looking up from the floor.

I like the look and feel, and mechanics. Overall I was having fun with this until some monsters got off center on the grid and I couldn't hit them but they could hit me.

This looks and sounds fantastic but is quite buggy.
You get elixers with the first time interacting with the green orb, subsequent times they are removed from your inventory.

elixer's description says it will revive, but you can't use it on dead people.

interacting with green orb says it restores helpers but it does not.

It feels like it is really close to something cool and fun, but when two of your helpers are killed in the first battle before they have a chance to do anything, that is immediately lost.

Not sure how/if it incorporates the theme, but was not able to get far enough to really evaluate that.

I got the note to sever my tether, but can't seem to actually do it. I tried attacking it several times but that didn't seem to have any impact.

Worked pretty well for me, I got to the end. Some nice ideas in here and was fun to blast stuff, except when you blasted through as wall and it took out the chests on the other side :)

This was pretty cool. There were some glitchyness with q and e in some spaces where you could only turn in one direction but it didn't really impact gameplay much.

I liked the different characters, and I liked the flipping between the two realms. Combat was absolutely brutal though with enemies just being able to teleport wherever they wanted. My mage was the only one capable of doing any significant damage, but she was taken out in one hit by most of the enemies I encountered. 

It also crashed on me repeatedly. 

Overall liked the concept but the brutality of the combat and the crashes brought it down in the gameplay.

yeah, that trapdoor reopening after using the keys wasn't intentional.  Thanks for sticking with it until the end.

I have a new build ready to go with the relevant bugs fixed and a lot of polish of existing mechanics (lighting is dramatically better, you can look up/down through holes to other floors, keyhole is more than just a sticker on the wall) but no significant changes to content. (you might notice a few minor differences in the test room if you return there)

I have a lot of dungeon components to add and to finish combat, and to include audio before I return to dungeon layout, but I do intend to stick with it until I have a finished game that will take more than a minute to run through :)

Wow, thanks.
This was heavily inspired by Legend of Grimrock (especially the trapdoor path). I actually played it again just the week before the jam. I really went hard with building support for that interactivity into the core of the game and I think it is the bit I'm most proud of.  Every (or nearly every) interaction you can have with the dungeon can send signals that any other object might be listening for to trigger something. 

Most of the known bugs in the this version have already been taken care of or were related to temporary shortcuts to get something submitted on time and won't make it through to the next real iteration of the game so not worth taking the time to resolve.) I will be uploading a new Jam version once we are allowed that just has bug fixes and polish, but no change to this version's short mission.

I'm not certain what comes after that as far as when/how/where stuff will be released, but I will be continuing development. It won't be at a "game jam" pace though. I have a whole bunch of puzzles I want to implement and the overall feedback I've received on it has been inspiring.

I'll be uploading a fix once the rating period for DCJam2023 ends in about 7 and a half days

very interesting with the mixed movement/inventory.

I did get stuck with one heart and then being offered a 2x2 group of potions. taking it meant no more movement (other than spinning) leaving it meant I'd die with the next enemy anyway. 

Very rarely do I have trouble with motion sickness from games, but this one did it for me and I had to give it up. I think it was part the levitation and part the disparity between turn/sidestep. (I kept hitting the wrong key QE vs AD for my intended motion and when something else happened than I was expecting my brain couldn't take it)

I did like the mixing and matching of runes, though having to keep doing just the sun/moon before being able to do a combination with them I feel was a detractor. (want to levitate in the area with spikes? cast sun, cast float, recast moon shield. Do this again 10 steps later. In my opinion it would have been better to just be able to cast float)

Fantastic integration with the theme.

upon startup, I got a popup telling me there was a known bug in my graphic driver and that I should update it or switch to a different rendering API. It even gave a specific version of the driver that was recommended. 
I'm assuming this is driven by the engine you are using, but NVidia doesn't list that driver for my card...

I found your cheat code for instant leveling :)

Thank you for the encouragement. Yes, I do plan to continue.
I'm not really familiar with how itch works (this was my first jam), but I think you can either follow me or follow the game itself to get updates if you are really interested. 

I quite enjoyed this aside from the bugs.
Web version combat didn't work for me at all. I would swing, mummy guy would swing, it was a whole party, but nobody ever made contact.
I then tried the download. combat with the first guy worked (I assume as it was supposed to) the second guy I came up to I think died, but then I reentered combat with him being gone and was stuck.

Would have liked to play more and get to the teleportation part but...

The movement controls felt sluggish and "combat" was somehow both too slow and too fast (the delay in being able to enter my shot felt long, and the responses cleared faster than it took my eyes to refocus and read some of the messages.
It also seems the final holy spell to get out eluded me.  I found the symbols for all three on the walls, and collected every paper I found, but the three circles never lit up on the mirror.
All that said. I enjoyed this more than I feel I should have. 

"I don't have object permanence." 

I liked the the moves/abilities had the ability to flip to chose the effect (If I'm understanding correctly)

I liked the audio. Was there more to this than an empty dungeon?

good job. music and visuals worked well together. It was a bit difficult for me ( I got one stick on my most successful attempt)

liked the look and gameplay of this. I appreciated that it had music, but it became a little painful pretty quickly. Movement seemed off compared to my expectations for dungeon crawlers (camera always seemed like half a grid square ahead of where you actually were. I tried it twice but was unable to win I kept getting killed. :)

Overall 2nd best submission of this rating session so far(I think I'm at 10 or 11 tonight)

how are you supposed to attack? is it automatic or is there some key I'm supposed to press?
The field of view is too narrow, and the camera is too far forward. (if you compare movement to most games in this genre, this looks like you are standing one square ahead of where you actually are) 

ok L charges up your sword, still can't seem to swing though.

Loved what I saw. disappointed there wasn't more

looked great, but couldn't play. movement was very sluggish, attack/shield didn't ever trigger.

I tried buying bullets in the shop and my money went down but I didn't receive the item making the gun nonfunctional and making it impossible to help people so I just stabbed everyone I found in the dungeon instead.

interesting, that is not what I was anticipating. The only time during game play any objects are instantiated or destroyed are when an item is dropped/thrown with the right mouse button(instantiated) or a dropped item is picked up (destroyed) otherwise stuff is just moved around. The keyhole doesn't even actually destroy the key. it is just another container like the alcoves or sconces...

Thanks for playing and the encouragement.
Perspective was easy. I just believe it was Korandor that commented on discord fairly early in the week with with a couple simple images and what FOV would be used to produce each. I just selected the one I liked most :)

I do intend to continue development on it. I'll share my progress on the discord server.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback. 
Inventory issue was caused by my lack of experience with Godot and how it determines what resources should be included.
Explicitly load a specific file? yep, we'll include that.
Load all resources in a particular folder? Nope not in... 
I actually had it resolved within a few minutes of the submission deadline.

If you don't mind taking the time sharing... which interactions caused a lag spike for you? 

I'm going to focus on playing/rating the other submissions for now, but I do intend to continue working on this. Adding combat, a dozen more types of interactives (levers, buttons, pressure plates, etc.) and  sound...

that trapdoor reopening was actually a bug, the default behavior for trapdoors is to automatically reopen after a delay. there is a setting to make that happen only on demand, but that particular property didn't get imported from my layout tool. 

Lack of music and sound effects is my biggest regret with it. (Even more so than having to cut combat) 

This was very fun. The second to last level was brutal. had Par 3, took me over 100 rolls 

took me 330 turns to clear. the movement die were quite frustrating early on, not sure if it was just bad luck but got repeated 0 movements in a row. pretty cool overall.

sounded really interesting, but the exe by itself isn't sufficient to play it. :(

pretty neat concept, mad frustrating for me though.  instructions on what key is jump(space) and which is dash(shift) would have been helpful. I actually came back to rate after not seeing how to get from the 5 to 3 platform in level two assuming there was an omission and noticed the "dash by 2" in the description here was able to figure out shift to dash on a second try. Still didn't get much further though

very nice. Simple concept but challenging. Would like to see where this could go with varied board shapes.

very cool game and quite addictive, there are a few things though...
1. The game doesn't seem to properly track the count of the free dice gained from the orange die. The counts only update (presumably correctly) when you purchase a new die. 
2. The dice hit a critical mass where a round keeps going indefinitely. Had one go for like 20 minutes raising my score from about 2k and 100 coins to 6k and 9k coins. It seems to taper off when we hit a limit of how many dice the game can reliably track, this leads to the third issue.
3. The dice hit a super critical mass (somewhere between 1000 and 1500 total dice) where they end up 2 or three deep in the box and it seems few are considered at rest.  Many rolls between the 9k pot and when I could no longer afford to roll  resulted in 0 points/coins despite rolling over 1000 die and being able to see with my eyes what appear to be dozens of medals and 10 coin faces.