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(+1)

Visually the game is great, I like how it looks and the mood it can have, the songs are very quiet while the sfx are loud, it can feel like the game doesn’t have bgm and for me is a little unmotivating to keep playing
I don’t know why pressing esc freezes the game and the song in the main screen doesn’t seem to loop once it finishes

About the gameplay, I think can be fun for more time if there are more variety of enemies and a goal, endless rooms can get stale after some minutes despite the layout or the room changes and that’s maybe because it doesn’t affect much the gameplay, even if there are holes, the melee enemy can towards me directly and most of shoots from the enemy still reach me while I feel at disadvantage for a little bit while I kill the melee enemies
The enemies are ok, I just feel the skull one shoots a little faster than it should, maybe having a variant that shoots fast and another that shoots slow could be fun. The melee ones are ok and the red ball I like you can prevent it from shooting by hitting it. A boss or having an end to the game would be nice.

The room system can make you enter the main screen room again from another side that isn’t up, you only need to go around the 1st room and it’s kind of funny to be able to do it
I like how you can see the power ups on the staff of the mage but I would like that the power up gets preserved once you enter to a new room and maybe implement another way to get those powers because it doesn’t feel punishing when you misuse them or it can feel irrelevant since you know the next room you can get new powers, but at the same time, those spawn a little late, I don’t need them because I almost complete the room once those appear, so most of the time I didn’t use them, but the effects are cool
Also, when a bullet hits the player, that bullet should disappear to avoid a double hit from the same bullet

About the game's potential, I can say it can be a good game and also I can say it doesn’t have potential, at the end it depends if you liked to work on the game or not, or the answer it’s more if you want to keep working or not on the game. Maybe the game has a great potential but if you don’t want to keep working on it, it will be bad and maybe you will burn out
I have seen games that I thought had potential but the creator didn’t want to work on the game again and I have seen games that I thought was just ok for a jam but because the creator liked to work on the game, they pushed and somehow expanded the game to be nice
In my opinion, the flow of the game needs some changes but I liked what I played here and I think it would be nice to see a more developed version since I can see this being a fun game. That said, it depends on what you want to do with the game, haha

I had a small fun time, thanks for sharing :)


(+1)

Really appreciate all of the feedback here - I don't think my reply will fully capture all of the insights I got out of it but please know that I got a lot of takeaways from it that will hopefully make my next game that much better - to touch on a few:

- I hadn't thought of the small, but in-hindsight, really simple/powerful approach of varying the existing enemies (things like varying skeleton projectiles). I was struggling with "I want way more enemies but this skeleton took me half a day to draw/animate, no way I can add much more within the timeline" - I think this would help that immensely and hits the nail on the head of "low effort, high payoff"

- Elements were one area that I was really struggling on "these don't feel good, I don't know how to get them to feel good though" - I think I was focusing too much on the element itself vs looking outward at things like carrying over, spawning sooner, etc like you mentioned. I expect that you're right about attacking that problem from a map/general mechanics standpoint.

- Looks like you caught a couple bugs, I had hooks in place to pause using esc and decided a pause screen was an easy scope-cut choice - clearly I should've removed those hooks haha. Also seems like I should've spent some more time on cleaning up audio; I'll need to be better about leaving a spare day for little cleanups in my next jam. I also hadn't thought of / caught the 'backdoor to starting room' trick - that's a funny oops that I hadn't thought about.

- Appreciate the commentary on potential; I'm waffling a bit on the game concept: I think there are some solid parts but also some core flaws that would be hard to get around - at a minimum I did really enjoy the art style / tone so I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed it because I think I do want to keep exploring that for sure!

(+1)

Also you can get more inspirations from JRPGs enemies, usually those games do a color palette swap, change a few stats and you have a new enemy that feels good haha.

About cleaning up the game, I usually see that people give the last day to just polish on small things or make the misc stuff like audio and more. I try to follow that but I can’t most of the time because the game main loop is still unfinished xD

And one thing once the jam ends, you can "redo" your game outside the theme limitation or you can grab your systems or what you liked from your game and put those on other ideas, so not everything is a loss once the jam ends :)