I think you might be missing some information, if you pay attention to the layouts of the enemies when you die you may be able to discern some helpful patterns…
XenoZane
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Wow, really enjoyed this one.
The writing and characters were fairly simple but I was surprised at how much the branching paths were fleshed out over the course of a jam. I only had time to get 3/4(?) endings, but was surprised to see even that many. The different endings actually give some meaning to the power struggle theme, where different characters having power leads to drastically different story outcomes.
The mood of the game was really good. It was very ominous and quiet. The lack of music makes the music in the ending scenarios really striking, and the songs chosen for them were evocative and well-fitting. The way the environment changes over the course of the game gives some physicality to the relations between the characters and the characters' personalities. Great job doing a lot with a little there.
The character sprites were nice too. Something about billboarded characters in 3D environments always evokes Danganronpa for me, especially when you have a cast of visually distinct characters like this.
Pretty nice style. I really enjoyed the synthwave soundtrack (especially the way it doesn't cut when you retry, keeps me in the zone and makes me want to play again).
I did find that going for 1 parry -> ultimate was so powerful that dodging, attacking, etc were just entirely irrelevant, which is a little bit lame. The resource management aspect of attacks using your power is a fun idea, but in practice there's almost no reason to ever attack BECAUSE it drains your power. The dodge roll also feels pretty poor to use. It would be nice if it sent you a larger, fixed distance away (as a safer, but more committal option?), rather than just adding I-frames to your regular movement (isn't this what parry does already, for more benefit?). Generally, I would have liked to see more viable playstyles.
Also (I'm only nitpicking here because the aesthetics are otherwise quite solid) I would make sure that pixellated fonts like the one you chose do not render with antialiasing (those blurry edges). Usually just picking the right font size eliminates this problem. Nice work on the game!
Great style, great sense of humor. I wonder if you could've conveyed the difference in acceleration from a dive vs just merely gliding more strongly, maybe with some visual effects overlaid and an FoV change (but that could also be nauseating...). There are some visual effects for a fast enough velocity, but conveying the difference in acceleration somehow would be nice for new players. I'm not sure where I need to touch the [TIMECUBES] to pick them up, since it seemed to be a little inconsistent. Either way, I had a lot of fun with this very funny and cute game.
Neat game, would be cool to see such a thing with an actual physical crank. The slow rate of fire and clunky reload gave a lot of importance to careful play and cover, which I appreciated. It has a very different feel to, say, the fast action of a game like Factory Reset. Some might see this clunkiness as bad, but the slow pace of it and needing to fumble with awkward UI in the heat of battle is very compelling, and it would be fun to explore this more, with even more elaborate ways to reload or swap weapons or whatever. I do think the accidental firing when trying to crank is a little bit sloppy, and it'd be nice if there was some obvious screen area where I could only interact with the crank and not accidentally fire my gun.
I hope you keep making games and, like you said, this ends up being your worst one.
I like the interpretation of the theme, but found it very hard to control my player, and hard to judge how far the jump was. Maybe having some gradient across the background would help me understand how high my jump was, which would really help me feel the exponential growth. Also, since the game is very vertical, it may be fun to run it in a narrower, taller aspect ratio like a portrait mode phone might use.
Cool use of GB Studio, if I had a flash cart I'd give it a spin on my actual GB. The puzzles worked well, but it would be nice to subtly visualize the flow of electricity on the actual wires a bit. I would've liked to see some more complex puzzles at the end that combine multiple pieces from the previous ones. Most of the puzzles had such a small possibility space that it was trivial enough to reach the solution by just trying every option available to you, which doesn't make for a super rewarding puzzle. The visuals are very clean though, and there are some great ideas here. I particularly enjoy the sokoban-esque batteries. The limitation on how far you can push them from their charging spot could make for some compelling challenges.
Competently made (I didn't encounter any major bugs) and well-animated. I liked the mechanic of planning a route and running to a power source in the 3 seconds before power runs out. Some of the vertical wall climbs felt janky, and it would be nice to see the path that moving platforms follow (easier to time a jump if I can see where it will stop). You have a good amount of levels here, and it's easy to imagine how you might add new mechanisms to power/depower to expand on the idea.
Really good and polished visuals. I loved the creepy little portraits for each level, and appreciated the unique mechanics for each level. I'm not sure how much the "roguelite" items actually affect gameplay (maybe I just chose bad items :P). Actually, I'm not sure I'd define this game as rogue-like in any capacity (no permadeath, very little procedural generation), but that's just semantics. The game is a neat little puzzle, and the visual work really impressed me.
Unfortunately I encountered a lot of bugs with this game. You can get softlocked when you defeat the slime vase, and it seems like you can also interact with them again as the fight is starting, which makes the dialogue overlap with the actual battle (and then softlock at the end of the fight). These bugs made it nearly impossible to play the game for me. It was kind of an interesting puzzle to solve how to defeat the boss, but as an RPG it was very shallow, having just 2 rooms with 2 enemy types total. Overall, this is a fine start for a game but you should be careful with the way you check inputs on your next game. I think you might be using an is_key_pressed or is_action_pressed when you really want is_action_just_pressed.
Super fun and polished! The visual work is excellent, and the game was immediately snappy and fun. I love throwing enemies and watching them burst into shrapnel, although I wish it was a little more clear when an enemy will burst into shrapnel, especially since the different enemy types seem to have different health? I didn't notice a single bug or performance hitch, even on the web build, which is very impressive for a game jam. The short length was great. I think ideally an expanded version of this game might have 2-3 additional levels with new enemy types, but I love the amount of polish packed into this single level. The inclusion of a timer and rank is really fun. I'm not actually sure what the pads I stepped on do. I assume they're checkpoints for if you die, but I didn't die once so I didn't get to confirm that.
Neat game! I really like the posterized visuals, that color palette reminded me of Hylics. I do think that TRANS_BACK, EASE_IN_OUT(?) effect on the movement (and especially turning) is a little nauseating, I would've just eased out and maybe opted for a different transition. A very distracting bug involved any interactable screen opening back up immediately when I close it. This happened on the web build (firefox, windows) so I tried the downloadable one but it still happened, I think it's an issue with the way you're reading input. Aside of that frustration though, the logic puzzles themselves were solid and the mood was tense. I will say if there was some significance to the symbols like the motorcycle, the tree, the "I went in" phrase, beyond just being surreal and kinda interesting, I couldn't figure anything out. (Not that a game's meaning needs to be "solvable", but I didn't understand why these symbols were there at all. Maybe that's just a skill issue?)
I was surprised when I realized I could actually move my character in 3D. I wish it was a little easier to perceive depth in the play area, maybe more prominent shadows on everything and a slightly more top-down camera angle would help. The visuals leave a bit to be desired but the game is decently fun. The momentum of the swing mattering is pretty interesting, I had to play a few rounds to get the hang of that.
Fun game! Wasn't expecting a whole second level. I agree that it's a little tough on that first level, but it was very enjoyable once you start snowballing and sucking up bigger and bigger things. I would maybe make the early sizes take less to grow and the middle-larger sizes take a little more. The art was very cute, and I really enjoyed the jungle tune. Really sets you in the mood to go fast. Congrats on finishing your first jam!
Great game! I had some really intense moments getting out of situations where I was cornered. I ended up finding a paralyse strat that I could cheese most levels with, but even that wasn't guaranteed because it could get disabled by a hacker before I can ready it up at the start. I think some of the upgrades are better than others (+1 health seems pretty useless when most enemies deal 3 damage). I also found the upgrade screen a little confusing at first, and wish I could undo my choice to take a module or upgrade. It would at least be nice to see my current loadout while I'm choosing to take a module or upgrade. The variety of enemies are really interesting (especially the hacker), but I do think the Rogue's invisibility can be a little cheap. Very fun though, and very playable! I didn't notice a single bug while playing.
Really well polished game. I enjoyed the random upgrades a lot. It picks up a bit later but for the first whole half it feels kinda slow. The way charging up the fist lowers your speed is really clever, it adds some fun risk to trying to sock a whole group of guys. Definitely gets harder/more interesting when the enemies start firing projectiles and such. Really cute art also. Bummer about some of the lag issues on the web build, but I assume those aren't present on the downloadable version.
Thank you for the feedback! Really appreciate you taking the time to think through our game's design like this. Reflecting on these points is making me consider it more deeply as well. Not necessarily disagreeing with your points, but some design justification for some of these decisions:
- I agree, the tips are an imperfect solution to our game's inability to convey itself. Much (but not all) of the tips hopefully convey themselves over a long enough time playing the game, but most of the pro tips are not at all easy or possible to intuit. Some, like the ability to place limbs in empty spaces or the increasing chance of ambush in the shop, could have been conveyed in-game.
I agree that most players will not read the tips, so I hope that the most important information from them can be discerned through enough play time. - The lack of detailed information in the shop was a deliberate design decision, and definitely one that I can understand taking issue with. We made this decision for a number of good reasons
- We do not want to overload the player with information. Generally, players (especially new ones) will prefer simpler effects over complex ones that require too much reading and understanding. By leaving every effect as a one sentence summary rather than detailed stats, we hope we have given them enough to make an informed decision on whether they want to purchase the item without overwhelming them. For example, "Critical laser blasts" (hopefully) conveys that the laser vision eye attacks with increased critical hit chance, whereas the detailed (~8 line) description might just cause someone to move past it without understanding. However, your mileage may vary on how accurate or descriptive these descriptions are. With more time, they definitely could've used a second or third pass to make their effects more clear.
- There is also (hopefully) a fun novelty in the discovery of learning what a limb does. We want players to experiment with limbs early on and see their effects in battle, so needing to buy them first forces you to bring them into battle. Needing to learn the effects of 40+ items may cause friction for new players, but we hope that this discovery makes their effects stick in your head.
- For aesthetic reasons, we like that you don't actually know precisely what something does until you stick it onto your body. This fits nicely with the sketchy black market theme. Also, we think its fun when games are a little bit mean.
- While I do not want to explicitly show the exact probability of a successful reroll, we definitely could have done more to convey the relative chance of danger increasing with each subsequent roll.
- I agree with your point about starting in the shop. We start in the shop because starting in a battle would have no meaningful decisions to make, and would be a hindrance for returning players. On reflection however, showing a battle early would immediately introduce the combat system, which would help contextualize the shop purchases. It could also be used as an impetus for an actual plot, which the game sort of lacks at the moment.
- It would be interesting to show the upcoming opponent to prepare. I'm not sure how much that would actually influence shop decisions, but it's an idea worth testing should we expand this game.
Sorry for my giant wall of text, you inspired me to think more about our design though, so thanks! I'm very glad you enjoyed the game.
Excellent audio and visual work. The gameplay was also more fun than I was expecting, the flipping and trying to perceive depth gets very frantic near the end. Excellent shape rotation type game. I was disappointed at first when I died on (effectively) the final enemy, but continuing as the person you fought is clever and felt cool.
Cool game! I feel like some of the puzzles I accidentally solved through trial and error, rather than working through the logic, but the puzzle logic was there and was sound. The boss objects were fun and each had unique character. I really liked the presentation of everything on one connected screen that the camera pans around on as you play, and of course the reveal at the end was very charming. The audio work was great too.
I enjoyed it. The timing to hit the ball was a little awkward at first but I was able to adjust to it, it feels like I need to swing earlier than I would expect. The sound was a little quiet and sometimes broken. I was very pleased to see the modeled parking lot though, and that kept me going to see what else was modeled outside the stadium itself.