itch.io

Great job with character designs and animations! Player controls felt pretty tight too.

1. How is the partner command/combat, is it too complicated, frustrating (especially the partner), or controls don't make sense?

I struggled to find utility in micromanaging the companion character, e.g. why would I ever leave them behind, what’s the use case for it? Why would I turn their fighting stance off? Using left/right formation seemed worse than no formation where they could respond to threats from both sides.

Other than that, they occasionally did not want to face the enemy and instead shot their gun in the wrong direction when I triggered it manually.

2. It was definitely a bare bones "tutorial", but was it good enough to understand the gameplay? Or did you need more onboarding/more specific tutorials, if you even would be interested in learning more?

For the current state of the project I think it’s fine, what mattered to me is that I could start playing pretty quickly. Note for the future: I think that most games like this start with 2, sometimes 3 moves and introduce more over time. Here I needed to learn 3 character attacks, strong attack modifiers + 2 companion attacks, it was a bit too much.

3. Did it feel like a unique system that you wanted to get better at and figure out, or did it feel like just a basic action game with a gimmick?

It was unique in terms of ‘I never played anything like this’ but I did not feel hooked by it or compelled to master it.

4. And straight to the point with this, would you rather just have a entirely self-controlled AI for the partner instead of commanding them like this?

I think I’d prefer a companion to be more capable on their own, not someone I needed to micromanage. What could work for me in terms of direct control:

• picking a target for them to lock into or move to, e.g. with the right analog (but they still fight on their own once they finish my order)
• triggering their special abilities manually IF they synergised more with the player, e.g. companion can stun a difficult enemy for me to finish off
• companion abilities could have cooldowns to force me to be more strategic, not spam them all the time
• if companion and player character where more asymmetric - they are able to do something that I can’t

But these are just my random ideas, I give no warranty they would actually work ;)

It wasn't very intuitive at first that you need to double click the monster to earn XP or that there even was XP in the first place.  Once I figured it out the puzzle of looking for monster that won't overshoot my health was quite fun. I managed to kill Cthulhu after a couple attempts. 

Unfortunately, all sfx were very noisy/glitchy on my computer to the point I had to mute the game, but from what I was able to hear they would fit well with the game and even heighten the tension.

What I did not enjoy was dying on a first move. Also I couldn't understand  before I finished the game why central location was an instant death.

Oh, it's your own cat doing VA, that's so cool! He's doing great, definitely earned a snack for his part ;)

Tbh I'm not sure about the controller. I played the game with a mouse but then I hooked up controller for another game - not sure If had taken the screenshot before or after. If you need more of a QA focused playtest with a controller I could try to do it sometime. I have both XBox one and PS DualShock.

Thanks for giving it a go! Yeah thanks to the feedback from this jam I now have a lot of momentum for adding a tutorial before any new feature :) Also great job on using traps - I feel like it's not easy to pull off!

Very stylish looking game, I liked it a lot! Played it on a Steam Deck and it worked like a charm.

Which Flippers feel/work better? Top or Bottom?

Not sure, Top seem harder to use which I thought was intentional.

Are there any elements you don't understand?

The point of the cursor - there is I think one ability interacting with it and I haven’t figured out how to use it properly.

Do you want to know more about certain elements?

Yeah, I’d be interested to know how you envision progression, character abilities (?), are there any goals beyond high score - basically I’m curious how the game develops.

What is your opinion on the weapon choice?

I didn’t think very hard about choices, I don’t think I grasped any nuance behind picking one weapon over the other. I sort of prioritized ‘ranged’ weapons, they felt a bit more effective from the start. I tried to pick a couple of different weapons, only then start upgrading - felt more powerful, the more stuff I had.

I liked the little monster who caught your balls - very cute and thematic.

What is the thing/aspect you like most?

As a 35 yo dude I found the ‘magical girl’ theme very appealing - I suppose I was brainwashed by Sailor Moon as a kid, lol.

Also as I said, I think you nailed the visual style.

Finding a ‘secret level’ was pretty cool - not sure what triggered it though.

What don't you like?

Controller bindings were hard to get into and annoyed me until the end. I think that left/right flipper should be bound to left/right trigger. With current bindings you cannot really use both flippers at the same time. Tilt would fit under left/right bumper IMO. Never really played a pinball game on a controller though, so perhaps it’s more reasonable to look how they do it than to listen to me ;)

How do you perceive the difficulty?

It was alright, I got into beating my previous high score and felt that I can improve a bit each game.

Is the game fair?

As much as pinball can be fair ;)

Do you normally enjoy other Pinball or Survivorlike Games?

I don’t really play them. One survivorlike I recently got into was Monsters are Coming - it’s a very different game though, a sort of tower defense hybrid.

Hey, here are my first impressions:

• Felt a bit weird to mine asteroids with bullets - I would expect more of a laser cutter type weapons or perhaps mining explosives.
• Movement felt quite good, I liked the amount of inertia the ship had. What I missed though was having directional thrusters for breaking or more precise manoeuvres.
• I expected to be able to aim or lock another target with right stick.
• Scrap fragments had weird trajectory sometimes.
• Screen shake felt too harsh when I attached double turret

I remember quite liking controls in this game - Jitter (has free demo), maybe it could be a useful reference for you.

Overall this looks very promising, if it turns out anywhere close to 'Dome Keeper in space' I'd definitely play it.

• How many puzzles did you get through?
  Did not count, finished on this level:
  
  

• Were there any cats that weren't clear?

  I kept confusing black cat that slapped new cats placed diagonally and orange one that yelled at already placed cats orthogonally but I think I got the hang of it eventually.

  “Blobby” cat was the hardest to figure out - first time I got it to “replicate” I did not understand why. I thought its ability triggers when adjacent cat is discarded. Maybe introduce it together with a vanilla cat to keep things simpler? Only after enabling tooltips on the next level I fully understood how it works.

  Also some levels require player to clear pre-placed cat - it made me question if the goal is to fill all the boxes or place all the cats in the supply or both.

  Some time in the game I realised level names are themselves clues - maybe they should stay visible on the screen or the player should be able to peek at them.

• What did you like most?

  Figuring out how new cats work. Sound design and overall aesthetic 

• What did you like the least?

  Orange yelling cat’s voice acting was a bit annoying, but I suppose that’s his deal.

Thank you for playing and going through the instructions! I know the game does not explain itself too well atm, a proper tutorial is in the works.

I do not plan on adding unit XP-based levelling, partly for scope reasons, and partly because I want to try something different. Units will gain additional abilities only from the gear they pick up which I hope will allow more build flexibility and experimentation for the player. Do you think a lack of XP bar may be a turn-off for rpg/roguelike players?

Thank you for trying it out! Definitely tutorial and player onboarding are my priorities now, before the next round of testing.

I know what you mean about tooltips, I've seen this issue on Pangbot's stream. I'll definitely look more into round structure / unit coordination, I get a lot of comments about it.

Glad you liked the audio-visual stuff. Even though I did not make these assets myself, I'm kind of proud of how consistent it turned out and seeing people respond to it well is super rewarding!

I finally did a whole run in Fame or Folly 🙌 here is my silent playthrough video, hope you’ll find it useful:

I played on a higher difficulty (faster target score scaling) and I found it adequately challenging throughout the mid-game. Early game I was mostly fishing for good cards/banners, which I think is fine, deckbuilders need some setup. Starting from around 12k target score I felt that I need to actually work for it, I started buying and using props and paying attention a bit more. This part of the game I liked best, unfortunately it did not last until the end.

It took me 1.5 hour to beat the game and I felt like it was way too long. I felt ready to wrap things up more or less 40 minutes in. After 1 hour mark I don’t think I made any changes to my banners and core 6 cards, I kept using the same gimmicks until the end and they worked.

QoL suggestion: add “Draw all” button - there were multiple occasions when I wanted to draw my whole deck because I knew I fired enough miscreants to not worry about the outrage. Drawing cards one by one felt a bit tedious at this point.

Overall my biggest issue at this point is game length - I think it could really shine at shorter playtime, I could see myself playing it for 30-40 minutes to chill out, but as it is right now I feel it drags out.

Cool, I'd like to check it out! Probably after the jam ends though, I'd like to see some more games and give feedback before the deadline.

Very charming game! Really liked the art, music and general vibes. Travel animation was super cute.

From reading the description I get an impression that the game is leaning more towards story/exploration. If that's the case then combat is ok, entirely functional as an interlude. If it's meant to be more combat heavy I'd consider iterating on mechanics some more, adding more decision making to the grid map movement.

Two things that bugged me in combat UI:

• Run 60% - thought it was movement speed setting at first :)
• Combat log too short - I found it hard to evaluate my action's effectiveness

You were right, I sort of fixed it with CSS ;) 

If anyone else runs into this: a workaround is to set this div element 640x360px and zooming in in the browser.

1. What round did you get to before quitting?

   Finished the whole thing.

2. What was your strategy, if any?

   Used the knowledge of upcoming rounds upon retry. Early rounds I needed to roll high, later it was better to roll low on most dice so I tried to adjust my dice accordingly.

3. What did you most like?

   The tradeoff in spending points to buy cards.

4. What was frustrating?

   Having to click exactly on a tiny checkbox/radio drove me nuts. Hint: use <label for=”$inputId”> to make the label text clickable ;)

   I felt that carryover coins had too much of an impact - I had a much easier time if I rolled high in the first two rounds.

5. What did you wish you could do?

   Pay more for the cards but be able to choose one from 2-3.

I hate to be the whining mac user, I really wanted to try out the game but on my computer it's barely legible - just letting you know bc maybe there is some easy way to fix the build. If I manage to find and resurrect an old windows laptop over the weekend, I'll definitely check it out :)

A huge thanks for this detailed response and the recordings!

I think what you wrote is 100% valid, the frustration you felt with coordinating units is super important feedback and doesn't come across as nagging to me. You are right that the goal of the game (as it is now) is map traversal and combat is an obstacle along the way so I think that some friction around movement and positioning is necessary for this to work and offer any challange. I just need to find a sweet spot where I don't piss off people too much ;) I may also introduce more varied objectives or change the goal structure completely, I don't rule out any options yet.

Also thanks for some fun ideas there - I will definitely try longer ranged attacks or some abilities that shoot over obstacles. I'd like to experiment with round structure as well but I'd first need to level up enemy AI so they don't get stomped by player coordinating their moves perfectly ;)

I'm glad that despite the frustration and criticism you still found the game fun and even seem quite enthusiastic about it. This quote "hoping that the game gets developed into my next obsession game" made my day!

Maybe its an expectations thing - since its occupying such a prominent chunk of the screen, I'd expect it to be more relevant. While learning the game it made me question - "am I missing something, what should I use all this information for?"

Thank you! Do you remember which level did you reach? Also if you could you explain what was your working theory after playing on how these systems work (Prevail, Yield, retreat)?

Thanks for elaborating on these pain points, this is really helpful!

Thanks for trying it out! Yeah, tutorial is definitely something I regret neglecting. I wanted to get some feedback on the gameplay first, but without a robust way to teach the game this may be hard ;)

You mentioned the fear system - can you elaborate how do you think it works after playing or what do you find unclear? Also, do you remember how far into the game you got?

Hey, you wanted to focus on the onboarding, so I took a sort of stream of consciousness notes about things that confused me during and after the tutorial, hope this is helpful ;) 

1. First panel

• What are Acts in gameplay terms?
• “Bring opponent’s HP down to 0”, ok, seems obvious.
• Why do I need to know about status effects right now?

2. Second panel

• Seems superfluous at this point, I can figure out character differences when I start playing for real

3. Third (?) panel

• Drop “Unless otherwise specified”, e.g. “Most attacks can only hit opponent right in front of you”

4. Got a bit lost/overwhelmed on a screen introducing timeline, then I clicked a card and shit started happening, I didn't really register what was going on.

5. What is this big sword in between characters? Is it enemy's intent to attack?

6. I still don't get this timeline thing

• There is much going on the screen, it took me a while to realise actions are previewed on a timeline when I hover over a card
• I also failed to understand at first which part of the timeline is mine and which is the opponent's 
• Why are past actions in the timeline displayed? What is their relevance now?
• Tooltips on a timeline introduce new terms, not covered by the tutorial. It seems it's a very convoluted description of an alternating turn order?

7. Now I'm supposed to learn about Stunning but I still don’t understand all the previous stuff 😅 (actually I didn't figure out stun mechanics until the end)

8. Card UI

• tooltips on top of the screen are hard to connect with what they refer to on the card
• I think I'd like to have an individual tooltip for every icon on a card or maybe a text description of what exactly the card does.
• I don't think that tutorial covered stamina costs and how is it replenished (maybe I missed it though)

9. I sort of got the gist of how the game plays in the free play part of the tutorial by playing random cards and seeing what happens. I liked parrying mechanic, but I still didn't figure out how stunning works.

My suggestions:

• allow replaying the tutorial
• I'd use some LLM to proofread tutorial content, simplify language, try to reorder and reframe things
• start with smaller, curated set of simpler cards. You start alright with 2 cards in hand that allow forward and backward movement but then jump straight to 6 with a variety of effects.
•  player and enemy sides of the timeline should be more visually obvious

Overall, the game looks really interesting, I was drawn to a novelty factor of mechanics, though I still don't get it 100%. Its great that you've put so much work into the tutorial, I think with some iteration it can work well.

sorry, posted it on Discord
password: igc

you can also use this link https://cometopuli.itch.io/curses-and-catacombs?password=igc

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not really into puzzle games and this was the first Sokoban-style game I played so I have no reference at all to compare it to.

• Is the core puzzle idea fun?
  I’d say so, I got into it by the end.

• Are the rules easy to understand?
  I had no problem understanding them.

• What was the most frustrating moment in what you experienced?
  Getting stuck on level 8

• What was your favorite moment?
  Clearing level 8 :)

• Was there anything you wanted to do, but the game didn’t let you?
  After reading the game description I wanted to interact with more kinds of entities, see what they do, any unique mechanics they might have.

• If you had a magic wand where you could change any part of the game, regardless of cost or complexity, what would you add/change/remove?
  This probably goes against puzzle game principles but I’d like to have more than 1 solution to a puzzle or some side objectives to allow for some degrees of success, e.g. I did not clear the level 100% but I can still progress in the game. Also I’d like to be able to cheat :) What I mean is e.g. spend a resource to blow up a wall or teleport a unit so that I can come up with my own solution instead of feeling stuck. Remember I said I’m not a puzzle gamer? ;)

• What would you say you were doing in the game?
  Ordering robots to move boxes to clear a way for other robots.

• How would you describe the game to friends and family?
  It’s a puzzle game where you order robots to interact with stuff on a map to clear a path to an exit. You need to figure out an order in which the robots should move so they don’t block each other or clear obstacles for other robots.

I gave it a go, clearly with my carpal tunnel syndrome I'm not the target audience for this 😅 I did a bit better playing on a touchpad - perhaps this could work well on touch devices? Then I played a little with only RMB (queued actions) and liked it a bit more (more precision/prioritising, less frantic clicking), but still the pace was too fast for me. I think I'd prefer most actions to take longer - I felt a brief relief only when washing dishes or making trips to deliver food. 

As for gameplay, I always died before I could make a hamburger, so I felt there was little variety. I think I'd prefer to start with 2 recipes with some ingredient overlap.

Also in the early game I feel that there is little decision making or possibilities for optimisation - I suppose it changes when buying more equipment/recipes but I did not get that far.

Hey everyone, thanks for checking out my prototype!

This game is designed as a roguelike, though currently it features mostly static content (only rewards are randomized). This prototype is meant to test the core mechanics and help me decide how much work and polish I should put into it before I move to the next thing ;)

None of the art assets are mine, I used mostly free stuff from itch.io. I'll include full credits in the game description when I do a public playtest.

My core questions are:

1. Does the core loop work for you? Is it FUN? If the game had more content and polish do you see yourself playing it for 10+ hrs?

2. Are mechanics easy to grasp and work with? If not, what did you find unclear/confusing?

Beyond that, I'd like to know:

1. How far did you get before you stopped playing?

2. What did you like the most?

3. What was most frustrating?

4. What would you change about this game to work better for you?

Thank you for still updating 32rogues! I started using it in my game prototype because I liked your style and it had a nice variety of monsters and characters. Now it has a great selection of everything! I’d like to see even more „utility” items and terrain features like portals, bridges, chasms/sinkholes, traps etc. Nevertheless amazing work, thank you for sharing it :)