Explore lush, handpainted environments as you fight your way through forests, fortesses and swamps, to defeat the evil, that has invaded your dimension. Collect keys to unlock doors, throw lighning at enemies, dodge their hurtful profectiles, all while navigating through deadly traps.
History always repeats itself...
Controls:<br /> arrow keys for walking and spacebar for attacking<br /> or<br /> gamepad dpad and the A button<br />
More Info for the curious: All sprites are handpainted with PS and the wacom intuos 4, animations were done in Spine2D. Sounds were recorded with a Shure SM57 and Audacity, as was the background music, which was played an a Hapi handdrum and bongos. Some sounds were generated with bfxr.
I really had a hard time finding a nice concept for the theme. At the end of the jam, when I was finally happy with what the game should become, there was nearly no time left, and I somehow submitted a hopefully playable and not bug-ridden game! I didn't get to do all I wanted with it, which is probably the case with every dev in every gamejam ever... Because of all of this, the ending might seem a bit rushed, and the game is fairly short. Nonetheless, I really hope you enjoy my game as it is! Please leave me some feedback, positive or negative, so I can improve further!
Thanks!
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Lv. 67Hello there!
- This might be unusual, but I kinda feel like sharing my thoughts on your description page: As it's nice to have screenshots right away, the way it's placed with the text is rather unbalanced. It's usually great to have an equal amount of which. One trick to that is to have the text bigger, or to have all the informative text into one place. Fragmenting it too much kinda loses our attention. Another idea would be to have the information on the picture, in free areas
- Please, never start a game in full screen if you don't leave in the default alt+enter to switch to window (additionally, give us a way to escape, rather than forcing us to alt+f4)
- The movement felt restrictive. In action games, it's generally better to be able to freely move in any direction. Being locked in the <^>v pattern felt rather frustrating in my opinion
- The key elements (like the... well... keys) could be a bit more obvious (with an outline, for example, or for the silver key, a different color from the spikes)
- As for the story loop, I assume it's because of time limits, but a text at the end saying "and thus, you became the great evil, making the reign of terror repeat once again" would have been just enough to at least incorporate the theme. (but yeah, I assume you didn't have the time to)
- The boss fight got a chuckle out of me. I didn't expected to beat him in one hit!
- Game looks rather lovely, although I'm not so convinced by the water tiles
EDIT: The fullscreen start simply isn't appropriate for a game jam, but it's fine for full releases!
SubmittedNight Fuss
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Lv. 17
Thanks for your feedback! :)
Yes, my presentation could be a lot better, will work something out for this beforehand, at least layout wise :) Or maybe just correct it after some sleep the next day x)
I never realized this was a thing that bothered people, since all "commercial" games usually start in full screen, I just figured it would seem "professional", and myself am not bothered by it, because i'd like to be fully focused on the games I play. Maybe a small window beforehand, with the options "start in fullscreen" or "start windowed" would be a more elegant way to solve this. And I didn't know alt+enter can be disabled/enabled, will look into this! But yeah of course, ESC to exit should have been in the game!
I always liked the grid movement, even for action games, but I see know not a lot of people share this with me :D
Yes, important elements should be more obvious!
You're right, the ending is a bit of a letdown because of the time limit, I had to do the last few rooms and story explanations in the last 30 minutes, and it didn't turn out great, unfortunaltely. Same goes for the boss fight! I love bossfights, but couldn't pull a real one off in the last minutes of the jam, sadly. The one hit kill is a bug :/ hit detection had no cool down, so he got 60 hits per second when you attacked him :D
And thanks! Glad you liked the art :) Water would have been a lot prettier when animated, i thing :/
Thanks you for playing and for the valuable feedback :)
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Patron
- WASD controls in addition to arrow key movement would be welcoming to players of both keyboard layout styles!
- I'm not sure if I missed anything, but I feel like the theme isn't implemented into the game outside of the game just restarting when you win. I feel like the justification for the game restarting fell a bit flat and it doesn't really feel like I've finished the game at the end
- You have a lot of good sounding, realistic sounds in the game (picking up keys, unlocking a door), but the enemies' attack sounds and the player's attack sound are a bit unfitting and too harsh due to their chiptune-ish nature, if you ask me.
SubmittedNight Fuss
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Lv. 17
Hi, thank you for your feedback!
Of course, having WASD as an alternative is a good idea and pretty easy to implement in this case! I'm also thinking stick-movement for controllers would be a good addition. Will definately add this the next time!
So the loop theme was implemented solely through story. Yes, sadly I was running out of time at the end really quick, so I couldn't implement my idea very well. The idea was, that the "evil" invades your world, in order to defeat the evil you have to use the amulet, which then in the end turns you evil and makes you invade another world, thus making YOU the "evil entity" in the next parallel world, and the cycle continues.
First of all, thanks for the praise of my "realistic-y" sounds, I had really fun experimenting and feeling like a real sound designer :D But since I'm so unexperienced in this field, I didn't know how to make the more "strange" sounds like energy attacks etc. so I resorted to the chip-y sounds. But I will definately look further into this field and play with it a lot:)
So thanks for playing and the valuable critique!
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Lv. 4
Fun game you have, I really like the graphics and the subtle ways you hide secrets off the edge of you levels. One thing i found annoying is how easy it is to bump into those spike piles as its hard to tell were your collision mask is.
Ps. Thanks for testing my game.
SubmittedDeJa Vu X10
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Lv. 17
Thanks for playing and for providing praise and criticism! Yes, I never really did such a topdown style game, so I didn't really get the hitboxes done well (well, it's grid based, but the sprites are too vague as to where you can and can't walk etc).
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Lv. 5
The game is really really good, don't quite understand where "A Loop" is implemented but i really had fun with this apart from the boss, for me it was a little anticlimactic
SubmittedJump Skip Jump
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Lv. 17
Thanks for this feedback! The loop is in the story, the game repeating itself because you become the evil entity invading another dimension in the end. Because of not so perfect time management, I couldn't get this message communicated any better. Same goes for the boss fight..But I'm glad you had fun regardless! Thanks so much for playing and the kind words!
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Lv. 2
My favourite bit is the art, looks lovely. I've always liked the look of Spine animation.
There were some issues with the gameplay, however, which made it less enjoyable to play.
The character cannot move diagonally. This makes the controls feel unresponsive, and along with that, it seems like there's a "minimum distance" that the player can travel, no matter how quickly I tap the movement key. This leads to sections where the player avoids spikes and enemies feeling quite janky.
I'm not exactly sure how the game uses the theme? I played through a few times, but it seems to be exactly the same every time.
Good job on finishing the game though, with a bit of polish it could be a really fun game!
SubmittedOn Thin Ice
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Lv. 17
Hi, and thanks for playing my entry!
I was really hoping people would like the art, so reading this put a smile on my face :)
The movement is actually grid based. Each time you press a button you move 64 pixels in one direction. In retrospective, this seems to work a lot better with pixelgraphics that are strictly created inside the grids boundries, not so much for more "organic" sprites.
The game and story repeating itself, so, "looping", is supposed to be the implementation of the theme. You defeat evil, corrupting yourself in the process and becoming the evil you just defeated, traveling to yet another universe where this continues on and on. I know I didn't do a great job at delivering this x)
So, thanks for your feedback!
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Lv. 17
I really like the painted style of the art!
I was a bit confused by the story/looping, though. The dialogue seemed to suggest that the second time through would be different, but I didn't notice anything...
SubmittedA Familiar Rhythm
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Lv. 17
Thanks for your feedback! I'm glad you liked the art.
Yes, sadly the story had to be implemented really fast at the end of the Jam and I couldn't really set the scene with some more "cinematic" stuff. The point is, that exactly nothing changes, and the loop of the corruption goes on forever (or if they run out of parallel universes). It should have been explained or hinted better, maybe with more monolog of the hero/villain or him visually changing appearence in the end.
Thanks for playing!
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