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Thanks for playing, and double thanks for the feedback and ideas!

I also felt that the defensive options were somewhat over-tuned, but I figured that for a game-jam situation it's probably better to aim for "too completable" than "intractably difficult." In retrospect, I think the "physical attacks can be blocked, magic attacks cannot" (a design idea picked while developing at high speed) contributes to the underlying problem. It's not a totally bad system, but during design, I had the feeling that the player character was pretty fragile, especially if players had bad luck or misunderstood the value of their healing units. 

The counterplay it allows is just pretty narrow, I guess. It's probably not too bad when we don't have tons of mechanics to begin with: it could have a fun, delayed impact on decision making if you're trying to stay topped-off and it was an easy lever to turn up to make bad guys scary. In a bigger game I think it'd be more appropriate as a smaller, special corner of the design.

If we do go for more word-making fun I'd love to pick your brain for layout ideas. In my head I was imagining that we'd have little scrabble slates or boggle-esque trays of letters, but I can see what you're saying about the distance being non-ideal.

Very nice work!

I like how the different dishes had certain patterns to them, like the popsicle that always ended in 63, or how frozen fruit usually (but not always) ended in dip. Ice cream that makes you choose cup / cone at the start was nice, swapping the position of the "reliable" step.

I think the scope was probably just right for a game jam, but if you wanted to do more I'd definitely would like also having 2-stage recipes you have to revisit after a delay (one of the big mechanics from CSD games). Having that extra layer of prioritization added to gameplay adds some really fun decision-making that I like.

This jam has some crazy harsh restrictions to work within, and I think you did a solid job of working within them. The layered images for different foods was fun and it gave good feedback to me as I built the orders.  There is an unfortunate bug with the display of dishes if you did a multiple matching types in a row, but I (eventually) realized that it was only visual - not an obstacle to me plowing toward a high score.

I do think that the way the a game that throws a bunch of text at you in a super-low-res font makes it harder to get into, though. After playing it a few times it didn't bother me, but it's a lot to figure out all at once (and is probably even harder to manage if you're not familiar with the CSD-style gameplay loop

Overall, cool stuff! Capturing the core structure of food-assembly gameplay with intense limitations is definitely a feat on its own, and I think that the way you fit in different fun gameplay touches with your theming and dish selection was very fun.

I like the setting you created quite a bit! The design of the mechanics fundamentals are solid (like you mention, it has clear similarities to the tried-and-true PtbA engine) which make it easy to imagine running this game.

I like the details of how honor and wealth progression look in this game. There's plenty of straightforward sources of character motivations and potential adventure hooks build from them. Details about how the players might interact with the world through a fiefdom can give structure to early adventures too - an NPC's area can operate under the same sorts of rules that players can eventually take advantage of when they have lands of their own.

Nice work, just reading it got me excited to play!

Hey there, nice work!

I didn't have the chance to actually run the game, but I read through the PDFs. Coming up with a full RPG system is a challenge, and clearly communicating all of the details is even tougher (in my opinion, anyway). I think you did a great job on both fronts.

The structure of the game helps players pick up and play (especially on the GM's side). I would've liked to have some more examples of play / scenarios that you're imagining too, though - examples of the situations that you're excited about is a great way to jump-start my imagination too as I'm reading it.

The formatting and presentation of the rules PDFs was also very nice. I was very impressed by how cleanly sections managed to break on the half-page-column boundaries.

If you'd like to have a dump of stream-of-consciousness feedback, I typed up some notes as I read over it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ttTFpgfRbTOJBc_jeV8P_IfZVUpDsLChkbEkj0-IKmI/...

I hope your plans to continue working on it go well, I think tabletop RPG design is a super cool thing to do!

Yeah, you got it! It's not particularly well-communicated (no tutorial, no in-game text, etc.) but enemies that have been hit can't counter-attack - at least, not until they recover from their invulnerability. 

It's a mechanic that I saw in an SNES game, ActRaiser 2, which I thought was a really cool concept. That game has a lot of other things going on (lots of different character actions and movement options) which makes for some interesting decision-making. It was tuned to be fairly difficult and character movement was very slow (from what I've seen, anyway) so I don't know how fondly it's remembered. I know I think it's pretty neat, though!

I really liked the character art and the whole opening cutscene sequence! I really liked the look of the characters, especially the smirk on the bad guy's face. I think it shows his personality very well.

Gameplay-wise, I can definitely see similarities to Punch-Out!!! There's a lot of potential to these mechanics, for sure, so I think you can grow what you have now into a very fun game! 

I have a couple notes feedback about how it's working right now; I also saw your note that you had a bigger plans, though, so my ideas might already be a bit out-of-date.

• Player / enemy attack windup: In this kind of game, I think I'd prefer my character's attacks to be very quick and responsive. No (or almost no) windup (making the attack hit the enemy in less than a 10th of a second, or something) would make my character feel responsive and make it easy to react to what my opponent's doing.
  
  On the other hand, I'd like the enemy to have more windup. The enemy does change stance when preparing for a low swing, but the high swing hits immediately. In a punch-out style game, I'll probably be watching the enemy 90% or more. Figuring out how they broadcast their attacks (maybe with a big animation, maybe with something subtle) is a lot of the fun. Making the animation isn't easy, though, so I definitely understand the time limit in the jam could've limited what you wanted to do.
  
• Player idle animation: Since my attention should probably be on the opponent most of the time (watching for tells, getting ready to dodge and counter-attack) I think I'd probably prefer having the player character have a calmer or more subtle idle animation. Art is not my area of expertise, so I could be totally wrong about this, but my instinct is that we probably want the bad guy's movements to be the most eye-catching thing by default.
  
  I can imagine this might also be part of the game jam constraints, your plans for the enemy's animation might have also been more expansive. 
  
  I could also see the player character's bobbing animation being really good if it matched the beat of some kind of background song - then it might help get me a better sense of timing or something cool like that.

Overall, nice work on your game! Getting the whole thing together with starting menus, a cutscene, and gameplay is not an easy thing. I'm interested to see how your ideas develop in future versions.

Really awesome presentation! I was very impressed with both visuals and sound. Having a full-blown cutscene at the start was super cool too! The game lived up to the promise I saw in the preview - I will chop down that tower and make them rue the day they captured me and left me unattended in their camp!

To get into some chunkier feedback: The gameplay had plenty of positives, but overall I didn't feel too deeply engaged during play. Chopping down objects was fun to look at and visually satisfying, but I didn't feel much push or pull to engage with it from a mechanics perspective. Most obstacles didn't offer too much decision-making - chop the trees when they present themselves, jump over obstacles, and enemies were both (mostly) safe to ignore and simple to dispatch if not. 

I don't think that a game's gotta be chock-full of complicated moments and decisions, but some mechanical tension (having a couple game elements that offer conflicting threats & incentives) does a lot to get me engaged. 

I thought the archer in the tower near a tree was a nice moment like that - ignoring the tower meant I was in danger of getting shot while caught in my sword-swing animation. Chopping down the tower meant I could attack them, but it also meant their angle would be poor enough that I could safely run past. Or, when I was really optimizing, I could just stutter my movement slightly to bait the shot early and then run past to the chopping tree.

It was a fun little puzzle for me to play around with, and I'm glad it was in the game!

A different angle of engagement could be having a flow that's satisfying to execute, and I think there were some moments like that in the game for me:

• The spot where you run across gaps down a slope and then get caught by the start of the broken bridge was cool, it was satisfying to recognize I could just hold right and press jump and the end while looking dangerous and death-defying
• Similarly, jumping across the broken bridge over the shallow spike pit felt cool too. It felt good to time my jump with when I caught the edge of the bridge, and the way it held me at the edge meant I wasn't actually in terrible danger.

I think the fact that the character has to stop to perform the sword swing makes sense from a practical perspective (it's a simpler state to manage and you don't have to animate a running swing and a standing swing) but it does hamper that flowing feeling for me. The animation itself is really nice, but the feeling of my movement seizing up on ground and air made me feel like I wanted to avoid using it whenever possible.

The "chop trees to cross gaps" thing caused similar kinds of flow-interruptions for me. The look of it is very nice (and the implementation details behind the scene are equally cool, I bet!) but the fact that I couldn't jump forward into the trees easily before chopping, had to stop to chop, then wait for the tree to drop meant every tree represented a chunk of downtime.

Not that the downtime has to be bad - it led to the cool moment with the tower for me - but I feel like it's a bit at odds with the idea of a flowing movement game as-is.

Sorry for rambling on for so long. I definitely want to emphasize that I was very impressed with your game and thought you did a great job!

Balancing time during a game jam is a difficult thing. Deciding where to invest your time is important, and I think you did a great job of make a cohesive game with some cool features and really above-and-beyond presentation.

Thank you for the feedback!

I also feel that the gameplay's not really locked into an effective groove. There are elements of the mechanics and design that I'm happy with, but it's not particularly cohesive. Platformers that really emphasize melee combat tend to have a pretty different feeling to them, I think - castlevania-style games (as an example) are much more grounded, attacks are (generally) longer reaching and more committal, etc.

I was interested in this game having a different focus - more emphasis on finding the right moment to strike so you could move through damaged enemies and get through safely, not so much focus on sustained combat. Under this idea, enemy health is most impactful in determining how many times you might have to interact with an enemy before leaving it in the dust (or bubbles, I guess) but rushing ahead presents dangers. Especially when *somebody* (it was me) made crabs explode out of every nook and cranny of the level.

So yeah, I don't think the ideas necessarily came across the best, but I think there's a workable idea here that's focused on making movement through and around enemies fluid and fun. 

Thanks again, I appreciate you taking the time to give feedback. Thanks especially for noting the things that didn't work for you. New ideas and different perspectives will help us make stronger games.

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!

I think the game definitely would've benefitted from several more iterations on the whole feeling of movement. Little things like getting caught on ledges, or lacking that "snappiness" you described when getting back to a grounded state definitely stood out to me in my rounds of testing.

To be honest, I'm not totally sure what the game's movement identity should be (which is maaaybe a little questionable, given it's a platformer). Approaching it with some fresh eyes after some time away probably wouldn't be a bad idea, and it'd help pin down how the movement and combat elements of the game should align with each other.  I like poking enemies and running through them, but there's a lot to refine (in both mechanics and design) if that's where it's going to go.

I appreciate you taking the time to share the design that worked out for you. If you have a link to that game, I'd love to check it out! It's always great to see more ideas and broaden my horizons.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm happy and grateful you played our game.

I got excited thinking about game design stuff, so sorry for rambling on below. 😅

There was an old platformer on the SNES, ActRaiser 2, that I thought of with the whole "enemies don't hurt you while in post-damage invulnerability" idea. That game has very interesting movement and player action variety that gives a lot of depth to your decisions while progressing through levels and fighting bosses.

I don't think the gameplay here lives up to the full potential of the mechanics, but I think it did lead to some of the interesting decisions I wanted. 

One of my goals was to have the enemies present different kinds of challenges within this system:

• Fish can be tricky to hit, especially as they oscillate upward (esp. because the player's jumping attack reaches diagonally downward). They're supposed to  challenge your ability to line up with them (or avoid them), but they don't present a persisting threat.
• Crabs move in a pretty predictable way. Since they're ground-bound (outside of silly air spawning shenanigans) they're mostly positioned to be in easier reach of both ground and air attacks. I considered destroying them after 1 hit (which would really make them goomba-like enemies), but I think making them survive (and pushing the player engage with the invuln system) gives a significantly different challenge compared to the fish:
  
  Fish challenge you to position well before attacking, but crabs mostly challenge you to move effectively after the hit - hopefully by just running or jumping past to whatever's next, or by lining up a second attack (poor crab!)
• The Octo-Samurai is supposed to be the big test of your enemy-invuln-managing mastery: having the health to survive lots of hits & movement that chases you means you may have to engage with them a few times, even if you're trying to speed through the level.

I do think that the way I organized the levels don't always make the most of these traits (seeing crabs fly all over the screen makes them lose some appeal, probably). I also think it would be nice to have some more "basic" obstacles too. Levels that are a little less compressed might be a good way to give more pacing, maybe?

It's all fun stuff to think about. I've been going on for too long, so I'll stop here. Thanks again for playing!

Thanks for the feedback!
I totally agree about the lack of clarity, and the fact that it just drops you in without any sort of advance warning certainly doesn't help. 

I did have the thought early on that making games best-of-X (and having some resource carry over between rounds, probably?) would help make a full match feel more substantial. I'm still interested in keeping each round within the 10 second time limit (it really forces the game to cut out the fat, focus on interaction) but it's hard to get into a good flow when it all ends so abruptly.