itch.io

Good start you've got here.

Movement felt pretty good overall. I liked randomly sliding around as I was exploring (so much so that I ended up getting permastuck in a one-tile high gap when I wasn't paying close attention XD). Upgrades made sense straight away for the most part. I wasn't immediately sure what the "devil cubes" were for the combo ability, to the point I ended up damage boosting through them instead of destroying them (though I worked it out on the way back... perhaps making these graphically different from background tiles might help). I had a bit of difficulty with the combat against the boars, feeling that their speed and the character attack distance didn't quite mesh well, but it wasn't too much of a problem once I thought to just jump over them and continue on my way.

Overall, game plays pretty well and the progression flow is straightforward to get through the adventure.

Very good work here. Your team put together a really well made game for this jam.

The game was quite an enjoyable experience to play. At first, I felt that the floatiness of the jump wasn't going to feel great, but it works really well once you get the grappling ability as it gives you a good buffer to hit those grapple shots. Grapple feels good to play around with and its movement is very satisfying once you get the hang of it. 

Got some good design with the forcing of using new power-ups to escape where you get them as a form of tutorial (always a top notch design choice). Was a lot of fun finding the secrets that were hidden around the game, and having a fairly obvious "hidden area" in the Tower was a great way to introduce the concept and encourage looking for them elsewhere. 

Interesting aesthetics with the graphics. I think that it really nailed the dream world concept that was going on with the story. Lots of nice touches with having parallax scrolling and blurriness with the background layers. Was nice that each character had their own portrait and the voice acting was a really cool surprise (certainly not something I expected in a jam game).

My only real want for the was that there were more abilities and areas to explore, but that's a pretty common want after a game jam due to time constraints. Also, when the feeling left over after playing something is that you just want more of it to play, that's a good sign for the quality of it. Great work.

Very good work here. Your team put together a really well made game for this jam.

The game was quite an enjoyable experience to play. At first, I felt that the floatiness of the jump wasn't going to feel great, but it works really well once you get the grappling ability as it gives you a good buffer to hit those grapple shots. Grapple feels good to play around with and its movement is very satisfying once you get the hang of it. 

Got some good design with the forcing of using new power-ups to escape where you get them as a form of tutorial (always a top notch design choice). Was a lot of fun finding the secrets that were hidden around the game, and having a fairly obvious "hidden area" in the Tower was a great way to introduce the concept and encourage looking for them elsewhere. 

Interesting aesthetics with the graphics. I think that it really nailed the dream world concept that was going on with the story. Lots of nice touches with having parallax scrolling and blurriness with the background layers. Was nice that each character had their own portrait and the voice acting was a really cool surprise (certainly not something I expected in a jam game).

My only real want for the was that there were more abilities and areas to explore, but that's a pretty common want after a game jam due to time constraints. Also, when the feeling left over after playing something is that you just want more of it to play, that's a good sign for the quality of it. Great work.

You've got the start of an interesting game here. 

I like the concept of being able to swap out which weapons you want to hold onto, it brought to mind Castlevania sub-weapon swapping. It's an intriguing concept for a game of this style and could be interesting to see what could be done from a gameplay perspective if the idea is expanded upon.

Most of the abilities were pretty standard but worked just fine. The dash ability was pretty fun to play around with, launched the character every which way. The grab wall climbing was pretty good as well. And it was fun breaking out of bounds with them XD

So, good start here.

The game controls decently overall. I feel that they may be a bit too loose for the difficulty level that the game ended up being (I found it more difficult to move precisely through spikes or react to dangers). The ability to launch into the air with blocks was really fun and played well. The sideways launch didn't work out nearly as well though. There were some places that it was fun to play around with (namely, the downward wall slide section on the way to the grapple), but most of the time it didn't feel like it worked in a way that complimented the level design. The grapple ability was a good time to play around with though, with it being instant connection and flowing right into the swing. Wish I had gotten the chance to get to the "disassemble" ability, but I was unable to finish the game during my time with it.

Art looked pretty good overall. Environmental design was good, where the cave felt gloomy and contrasted well with the forest area. Choice of character sprite was good as their animation felt a bit stiff and sold the puppet concept. Only got a few bits of lore, which started to paint an interesting picture for the backstory that I'd be interested in searching out more bits of (though the first one I grab was a *very long* and may have benefitted from being split up). 

On world design, felt that what I got through flowed pretty well. I wasn't too confused on where to go to get to the next milestone. First ability wasn't too hard to work out, though it would be good to have an area similar to the grapple upgrade, where the player is trapped until they understand the basics. Only really comment I have on it is that the checkpoints should probably be reusable. I presumed that this was a bug or oversight, and if so, that's cool, it happens. But yeah, I died at one point exploring out in the forest and was sent all of the way back to the grapple pickup checkpoint (which is where I had to stop, since running back across the world was a bit time-consuming).

I'm definitely interested to play more at some point, once some of the wrinkles are ironed out. It was a good start and had some unique and interesting concepts that could be fun to play around with after a bit of tightening up.

It's awesome to hear that the level design and flow worked out in the end, it was the part that I was the most concerned with since I didn't really have a basis for designing fall distance based levels. On the art and sound fronts, I had plans to do more with it but ended up running up to the deadline, so what it ended up as was all additions in, like, the last day so that it wasn't just solid colored boxes XD Would love to revisit and polish it up a bit when I have the time some day.

Also, when I read the comment about launching into the void, I suddenly remembered that I completely forgot to add a floor to that void to land on and reset the player to the checkpoint. Quite glad I left the debug commands in, in case a player falls in while playing (would hate for someone to get that far and not be able to complete the game!).

Thanks for the feedback!

Glad that you thought the fall height upgrade things was a cool idea. It was a fun concept to play around with and I think it could play well in an expanded setting (though I think it may need supplmenting with something else, like basic combat or far more interesting platforming design). Took a bit of thinking to get my head around when I started designing, but it's good to hear that the level design worked out in the end. 

I'll definitely have to consider iterating on this in the future to see what it can end up being with a bit more time and thought into a more expansive design. I think that this version got the ideas I wanted across, but I do have more ideas that I think would fit it well.

Thanks for the feedback! 

I know this has been a *looooooong* time coming, but I have finally been able to make the source code for this game available. The repository is at the following location:

https://github.com/TheGreatGallus/Cavern-GB

Sorry for the incredibly long delay. Life got crazy, then my desktop was in storage for over two years and I had no access to the code until a short while ago, and I just got around to getting it set up with a repository. 

Hopefully someone will find it useful (even if it may be a bit outdated at this point...)!

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it!

Fifty times? Wow, I definitely think you’ve played this even more than I have! That's awesome! Thanks so much for playing so much and thanks even more for giving feedback! 

• I’m glad that someone found this bug and played around with it in exploration! I noticed it near the end of the jam limitations, and since it wasn’t actively detrimental to normal gameplay, I opted to leave it in rather than spend precious time fixing it. Besides, I love speedrunning tricks and I thought it was pretty entertaining, just mashing the jump button into the ceiling XD
• Thanks for giving me the heads up on this. I took a look at it, and then poked around a bit with it, and have since discovered that this is a pretty major bug that happens in a lot of places! It seems like any time that you are in the “shrink” state, you are able to trigger the scene transition on the left side of a room if the left wall is only one tile thick. I’m kinda surprised that no one ran into this (or at least reported it), because it can easily get you permastuck. I’ll note it in the description above.
• Yeah, the heart power-ups are a bit messed up. As far as I can tell, I made an error in the pointer math when trying to save/load the heart states, so picking up the hearts can accidentally flag another as already picked up. You are supposed to be able to collect all of them (and I believe there might be a pick up order that still lets you, as I thought I had done so in testing?), but in practice, they don’t spawn correctly unfortunately.

On the matter of updates, I do want to get back around to this someday as this version was incomplete from my original vision. I had to cut some content due to limitations I ran into, such as sprite table limits, that I imagine I can fix or find workarounds for if I have the time to do so (which, with it being a jam, I did not back then). I really would like to make a ‘DX’ version with the additional content, maybe even a GBC mode, but unfortunately at the moment, the original project files are on a computer stuck in storage across the country so I am unable to until I can get my hands on it again (which is also part of the reason I never got the source code up on GitHub like I told Zalo I would try to do). Hopefully that day is someday soon though.

On the dev room comment, yes, this is a dev room! It was used to work out the jump heights and distance when I first started working on the project. The reason that you are entering it here with the clipping glitch you found is that it is the default room that the engine loads if it cannot find any other room to load. Since there is no room overlapping the space left from the top screen of this room (unlike further down, where you ended up out of bounds), it loads this room instead. At this location, you are restricted to the left half because the engine tracks where you are in the world and, if I recall correctly, this room is loaded in such a way that the left half is always on either the odd or even column in the world, so once you cross back over the half, it reloads into the room you came from. If you are interested in checking out the full room, you can head to the vertical room to the right of the starting room, then use the shrink clip to go through the left wall at the top of it. That will load you on the right half and since it overlaps no rooms, you’ll be able to see the whole thing (fair warning though, that means you might be stuck there, though I have managed to escape using that shrink clip again as well as some awkward out of bounds movement). There’s not much to it, but I figured I'd let you know in case you were curious to see the full thing.

Thanks again for playing the game and giving feedback. It’s always nice to hear that someone has enjoyed something I’ve made enough to put so much time into it. I will be sure to let you know if I manage to get around to making any updates to it in the future, or do anything else with the project. Take care!

Glad that you had a good time with it! 

You are supposed to start off with a magic shot (the one that fires horizontally), so that was working as intended (though plans in future involve all spells spending MP once I fix the melee attack, so it won't be infinitely spammable as it currently is). The new spell in the desert dungeon (which is selectable with Shift/Select, and should change the spell number on your HUD at the bottom) is an upward angled shot to hit higher targets (it is intended to be an arcing attack, similar to Castlevania's Axe, but I was unable to get that working in time in the engine).

And yeah, it definitely needs more polish. I have plans to add polish, music, and a lot more content in the future, so I hope you'll come check out any future releases! ^___^

Glad that the game brought to mind Zelda 2, as that was one of the major influences. The end objective with that towns is to do something similar to how Shantae's towns are on the GBC, though it is currently just a basic version to figure out how to get it working with GB Studio.

Oh geez, I'm terribly sorry about the issue you ran into in the desert dungeon. That is the correct room for the Fragment of Fire, but I just took a look at the project and it looks like I messed up the flag check on it. There is code that makes the Fragments not appear when you've already collected them, but I apparently put the wrong flag on the Fire check, so it's currently checking for if you've collected the Fragment of Air =___= 

Thank you for letting me know about this bug. I've updated it in my project and added a warning to the game page, but I don't think I can update the jam version to fix it here. On the bright side, you basically made it to the end of this version, as that next upgrade is the last part I was able to add in time (and there's no where really to use it yet). 

Thank you very much for taking the time to give the game a play! And sorry again for the game-breaking bug that you ran into

Yeah, I'm unsure when I managed to break damage outside of the initial hit (damage and death with a barebones game over screen was working a few days ago) but I was unfortunately unable to get it fixed before the jam deadline. 

Thank you very much for playing! Glad that you had a good time with it!

That appears to be a bug. I had an issue earlier on in the design that caused the hearts to vanish when reloading a save file as I was saving/reading the wrong flags to indicated which had been picked up. Thought I'd squashed it, but apparently I didn't quite get it! Thanks for the heads up, I'll be sure to look into it for any future updates.

Sorry for a bit of a delay, been a busy month. Sure, I can get a repository set up with the source code sometime soon and let you know when it is up. Should I include the ZGB files in the repository as well, as I believe that I made some adjustments to it for things like transition effects?

I ended up figuring out this bug and it is fixed in the updated version if you are interested in checking it out. Thanks again for letting me know about the bug!

Thanks!

Thank you for checking it out!

Yes, it is an actual Game Boy game! The gb file is available to download and should run with any emu (though I've only extensively tested it with BGB as that is part of my dev environment). If you do give it a try on one and run into any problems, please let me know so I can look into it.

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it and like the art! I would have loved to have had a map system, but unfortunately didn't have time to get around to it. Perhaps in an updated future version though!

Thank you much for checking it out! 

The jam definitely put a time crunch on getting polish in there, so there were plenty of things I didn't get around to doing in this version. If you are interested, I have since submitted an upgraded version to Metroidvania Month 9 with a lot more content and visual polish. I also have plans to eventually develop it further and I can let you know when I get around to that, if you'd like!

Thanks much for the encouragement!

As a heads up, I have submitted an updated version to Metroidvania Month 9 with more content and upgraded graphics. If you are interested in checking it out, it's over here. I plan to do even more with the project in the future, though now that it's out of the jams, I don't have a projected time frame for when that might be. I'll be sure to let you know, if you'd like!

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it and thank you much for the feedback!

A map is definitely a feature I would have loved to have been able to work on, but sadly I ran short on time so I had to dedicate most of it to getting the core content done (which is also why there are unfortunately no bosses in this version). If I do get around to making an updated non-jam version in the future, you can be sure that a mapping system will be on the list of features to add.

On the topic of changes since the original version, the original only had one enemy (fly), very few background tiles (and no animated ones), only the first three upgrades, no player character animation, a different jumping arc (only three tiles and no short hops), and no saving system. Lots of new content and visual upgrades went into this version.

Thanks much for playing!

So, my brain just registered why your name and icon looked familiar when I responded earlier, and I just wanted to say thank you so much for making ZGB! It's a really cool engine and I certainly wouldn't have been able to do something quite like this in the span of a game jam without it (and honestly possibly at all). 

It's been a fascinating experience working with it so far and it's been a blast working out new things to do with it (like animating tiles). I'm excited to see what all I can do with it once I've really familiarized myself with how it works. I'll be sure to share anything I end up finishing with it here ^_^

Alrighty, I'll take a look at it and see what caused it to glitch out for you. Thanks for letting me know!

By the way, I just hopped onto the Discord, and I saw that you streamed playing some of the games so I decided to check it out. It looks like you may have accidentally ended up on my submission's page when trying to rate "Gamejammin", so I figured I should give you a heads up

Thanks for checking it out! Glad that you enjoyed

Thanks for checking it out!

There isn't much animation to it yet, just the fly enemies (and one other enemy type). I actually only got around to throwing in those animations right before submitting, so I plan to expand on it (and enemy variety in general) in the future. If I can figure out how to animate the background tiles, I'd like to do that with the waterfalls and such as well.

The glitched screen is likely the result of a bug dealing with room positioning when trying to respawn at a checkpoint (I haven't had much time to bug test outside of a quick run through to the  end screen). Do you by chance know which statue you had last visited when you died?

Thanks for checking it out and glad that you liked the concept!

I'm hoping to add actual music to it in the future, and also plan on tightening up the platforming controls (they are functional, but they don't quite feel how I want them to yet).