itch.io

I'm sorry to hear that. How far did you get?

Animation is a little stiff. Bats often ignored the sword after one hit and would pile up on top of me before hitting me all at once, instantly killing me. Could not complete the game.

Art and music was great.

The wall jumping definitely needs some input buffering. I struggled with it a lot.

Feedback:

The game is lacking feedback and communication. Please don't require people to read documentation to play your game. It's an immediate bad impression that can be easily avoided. Well designed games teach you how to have fun playing them.

I have no clue what my goal is. I don't know if it's good to be smaller or bigger. I see numbers when moussing over sections of the fractal but I have no idea how to use that information? My resources are bouncing all over the place and I have no idea why other than that it has something to do with where I'm standing and my size. As a consequence, I don't really understand how to gain resources and actually interact with the trade system. Enemies often get caught in small corners where the player can't shoot them since the player's shots are bound to 4 directions.  Enemies are overly hard. There's a lot of visual noise on screen and it can be hard to figure out what exactly is being interacted with and why; I get that's kind of the nature of a fractal but it's true nonetheless. The T)rade/F)ight text did not read as key bindings to me, it just looks like you made a typo. Shooting on all sides does not share a cd so the best strategy is to just spam all 4 keys at all times, removing any kind of thought in your aim.

It feels to me that this is trying to be a mix between a territory control game and a twin stick shooter. Typically in twin stick shooters, the WASD keys are used for movement and arrow keys are used for shooting. Remember your affordances, people who are used to this kind of game can have an easier time interacting with your game if you stick to genre conventions.

It's stylish. It just really struggles to communicate itself. I hope you can use this info and make your future games even better.

Bugs:

Got pretty small in my last life by just spamming the shrink button and got 5/6 enemies to spawn at the same time and crashed the game. Several instances of the fractal layers being highlighted over UI elements. If you get small enough inside of a single color, eventually the flashing effect for hovering over that color will completely cover everything on screen except for the player/enemies and make combat impossible. 

Yeah, I got the same vibe while making it. The weird janky open nature of it reminds me a lot of botw shrines too.

Me too man, me too. I'm so glad you liked it though. <3

Yeah lol, doing a non-physics version might be better but at least this makes for kinda comedic moments. You can also get the orange blocks stuck in the map geo so they'll stay in place which opens even more solutions xD

I love the visuals.

I'm kinda confused what the difference between the reset and stop buttons is, both of them remove all your notes. The controls feel a bit clunky for someone not used to playing keyboard.

As a general rule of thumb, remember that in games, the difficultly should be figuring out a solution, not inputting it. Making it difficult to input solutions once found makes the game significantly less accessible to the disabled and frustrating to everyone.

The player just kind of gets dropped in without any idea what to do. There definitely needs to be some level of tutorialization.

I think it might help  if you had a record mode where you could just input notes as it loops so you could do part of the arrangement every loop, the reset button would clear all of your notes, and a play mode where your character is actually spawned in. Something that invites the player to actually start moving.

Fantastic art. Cool concept. The UX is just a little rough. Overall, good job.

-Tooltips while mousing over cards, there's no way to tell what any of the cards do.

-You need some level of differentiation between monster/spell cards based on card visual.

-"Starting actions" is a bit unclear when selecting a character, might want to call it starting cards or just deck.

-Some kind of indicator as to which targets are able to be hit by certain spells.

-Any rule as to ordering? Enemy seems to always attack first before playing cards.

-You need an indicator for when the ai is finished and your turn has started.

-Mana amount never increases? Maybe this is what you're going for but I think that needs explained to some degree because it goes against typical tcg affordances.

-No real choice to be made. Since you have infinite copies of all your cards, you basically just kill units > hit face until you get lethal.

-Coins exist but what do they do?

-End turn button collider is far larger than the button visual.

Managed to play the game. For those getting fps issues, make sure you have hardware acceleration turned on in your browser. An FMV style game for a week long game jam is incredibly impressive, especially being as polished as this one is. As some others have said, I think the running sequence could definitely be replaced. It stand out as a little strange when compared with the other content you have in the game.

You should be proud.

I could tell the audio was good but it was clipping a lot while I was playing, making it a little difficult to enjoy. Movement was fun and engaging. As many others have said, I do wish that there was a game over screen but I did find it a little funny how I just began bouncing wildly through the underwater caverns once I died.

Thank you very much Lugia. <3

To an extent, the hard to digest tutorial was an intentional decision. We wanted to create the feeling of being dropped into this escape situation without prior training. However, even though that was our intention, many people have voiced this complaint and it's something we need to rework.

Thank you for the kind words, our art team and our audio engineer worked really hard crafting the feel of the game. After the jam we're definitely planning on coming back and making some gameplay changes to make it more palatable.

Great suggestion. The maximum number of systems is a setting in the backend. In the future we could easily add difficulty modes that changed the number of systems you could use so people can choose how they want to play. We had made the decision to drop to 2 systems instead of 3 max because we found that the overloading mechanic never really got a chance to put pressure on the player.

Thank you for playing and for the kind words. :D

That would be cool, maybe give a certain "danger zone" at the top of the meter and if you pass it the tank will explode. 

Thank you for playing and for the feedback. <3

Browser version is basically unplayable. However, I liked the downloadable version a lot. It's an interesting take on pool, you really make use of those 3-dimensions. It made me realize that it's a little funny how there are many "3D Pool" games but none of them actually make use of another dimension. Theming is nice and very calming. This is unironically one of the most engaging versions of 8-ball I've played.  

 Some bugs and fiddly things I found: 

 When the player gets close to the ground, it can be very difficult to see where you're trying to shoot, it'd be nice if the ball was rendered over the ground or if the ground lost alpha when it intersected the camera. The pool cue trident sometimes would spin wildly out of control as I pulled it back and sometimes not even hit the ball. I assume it's because it has a rigidbody that is not constrained? Sometimes you want to aim straight upwards but the camera does not allow you to do so.  

 Where could you go from here:

I think it'd be cool if the pockets had some depth and waited until after the end of the players turn to remove the balls, it doesn't feel very good to have them pop out of existence when they get close to a hole. I think it'd be cool if the number remaining balls for the enemy player was also displayed on screen. It'd help build some tension. I think that an options menu with at least options for music/sound effects would be nice. I also think that adding the ability for the player to hold shift to slow camera speed/power selection would be a nice QOL feature. 

 Overall, you did a good job and made something innovative and fun to play. You should be proud.

I was a little confused right at the start because I could drag the draw cards out but had to drag the persuade cards directly to the enemies. I think it'd be cool if I could just treat both of them like the draw cards and choose the targets after playing the card.

I really loved the music, kind of reminded me of the mii channel music. The upgrades are really satisfying. The game reminded of Dicey Dungeons. I think there's real promise here, I'd like to see the game expanded a little bit and you may have a steam release!

I think the texturing on the ground could use a little bit of work. The brown areas indicated to me that you could walk on them, but that wasn't true in all cases. Sometimes there were brown areas you couldn't walk on and sometimes there were grey areas you had to walk on. I think it might be worth rethinking the system where low oxygen restricts your field of view because it creates a negative feedback loop where not getting oxygen makes it harder to find oxygen. I think it'd be cool if the cable minigame had the cables follow the mouse while you were holding onto them. I found it kind of difficult to tell why they weren't connecting when I was clicking between their endpoints.

I liked the color pallet and perspective choice, it really gives the world a sense of depth. The shine effect on the bolts gave me a throwback to the GameCube SpongeBob games, which is fitting for the theme. I always appreciate settings menus in jam games as well, so thank you for including that as an option.

All together, I enjoyed my time with your game. Good job!

Definitely an oversight on our part. We're thinking that it'll probably be better to make the monster squint as it's "health" goes down.

Wow, I'm a little shocked you think it's the best one you've played so far. Everyone in the jam was super talented and I'm glad I could be part of it. Thank you so much! I'm really proud of how much we got done. <3

I've been talking to the artist that worked with me on the game and a producer friend of ours about how we could expand it for a steam release and our consciences lined up with your feelings. Needs more buildings, scaling costs based on the number you own, and interaction between them. Needs more staples of the idle genre with upgrades/ascension/transcension, etc. We're also looking at adding the ability to basically add more plots/expand your island, and being able to move the camera would be a cool addition. Point taken on the pop sound, should be a pretty quick fix. 

You can check out my itch profile to see some finished projects. I'm looking for an artist and maybe a sound engineer to team up with to hopefully knock out a great game.  My discord is: Wafflegasm#7144, pm me through the juice jam server. :D

If you're interested in forming a group I'm a unity programmer and pixel artist. I loved your work, especially the multi-resolution rabbit. lol My discord is: Wafflegasm#7144 if you want to team up.

It feels really satisfying. I think it'd be cool if there was a really juicy sound when you hit the fish as well as some screen shake or something. Very cool.

The movement felt a little rough. Otherwise, a cute little game. I liked the splash effect when the rain hits the sprites.

I kind of wish there was a separate collider for clicking on the planks that was a little less finicky but it's great. I love the feel of the game.

Thank you for playing. :D 

If I were to do this again, I definitely would want to make it 3D. Not being able to blow the rings off of the posts by accident does take away an amount of interactivity.

Thank you! :D

Honestly I did a ton of that too. I'm so happy with how the rings came out.

Thank you. I'm glad I'm not the only boomer that decided to join this jam. :

I don't get anything after I do. Just a brown rectangle where the game ought to be. /shrug 

Lol. Nice voice acting. I would have loved to seen more. :D

It's serene, I love the look of the whole thing, audio felt good. A little more ambience above the water at the beginning may have been nice as well. Great job. :D Btw, I'd put definitely recommend people try out downloadable version of the game. The browser one is very choppy.

He's literally under, water, gotcha. Alright yeah, I can see those themes now.  I don't think I'd mind the combat at all if I didn't play a ton of souls-like games. Idk if that's what you were going for but that's how it read to me. If you were going for a salt and sanctuary/dead souls kinda combat,  just try to remember genre conventions. It can be very interesting when you twist or break them, but people familiar with that genre may feel like the game doesn't fit in if it's missing something. Picture JRPGs without stat/equipment management.

What a madlad, that has to be the highest score anyone will ever get. :v I'm glad you liked it lol.

Sort of like a rhythm game later on. Great music. You two did great.

Very cute. I was wondering how you were going to make a battle royal but it came out great.  I love how the meatballs spawn faster the longer you're alive and that the fish move faster.

Unable to start the game.

Thank you. <3 I feel like the rings being a pretty uncontrollable lends itself to feeling more like the real thing. Certainly not my thesis on game design, but it's a faithful recreation of a very simple nostalgic game. :p

Absolutely beautiful but sadly lacking in a few other areas. The combat feels pretty stiff and the non-existance of a dodge-roll makes it kind of feel like I'm playing an idle game. Just clicking mushrooms to get currency until I die to a lanky boi pounding my head in. I'm also a little unsure how either of the themes were being applied here.