itch.io

This is very pretty and cool. I agree with some earlier comments that the first area was rather frustrating, it’s so bright that it was really hard to see anything, and especially to orient yourself, but it gets a lot better once you get the three themed areas, both visually and structurally. I like the structure of the world quite a lot, with the three separate branches that each have their own sub-objectives that culminate in the ending. I encountered some minor glitches occasionally (flickering textures, got stuck in a corner once) and some things lack polish in a noticeable way compared to how pretty the rest of the game is (notably the bubbles disappearing) but overall this is an excellent 3D Metroidvania. Loved the ending.

I don’t think the browser build and Windows build are any different? The Windows build has a fullscreen and a quit button, but that’s about it. In both builds, you need any 1 block to get the block ability, but that’s it. And even that’s mostly because if you could skip the first block, it’d be possible to softlock yourself by having nowhere to warp to, haha.

For what it’s worth, I did add some redundant button mappings to up and down, A and B buttons should work for those without any rebinding required. Good shout on the deadzone though, I’ll be sure to adjust it a bit since the movement is at fixed speed anyway so there’s no need for it to be low.

Thanks for the detailed write-up, glad you enjoyed it!

Interesting game! I like the pixel art, but the mixels are particularly bad here, the art has such inconsistent resolutions, which is a shame. Movement felt pretty good, I liked the boss fights. I think it’s weird that enemies have iframes, but the player doesn’t, so you often end up dying instantly. I also don’t think it’s really a Metroidvania, you get your abilities right away and it’s just a linear adventure from there. Ended up beating the game with 2/5 skulls, pretty fun little platformer.

Pretty neat game! I don’t really know what a Gelava is, but Char is a very cute one. The movement feels fun, I like the kind of flow you get into, although as others have pointed out, it is a bit exploitably powerful.

The models look really nice, although I think the style doesn’t always match. The character models look polished, but the environmental textures are really low res, it stood out how stretched they were.

I didn’t really love the ranged attack. It was hard to aim because there’s no reticle, plus your target is directly behind your character. I wish the camera was a bit higher so I could see where I was aiming. What’s more, the ranged attack is really powerful. It’s extremely safe, and extremely boring, to just snipe all the enemies from a distance, which is way easier than actually engaging with them. Generally you should try to avoid giving the player the option to “optimize the fun out of the game”.

The platforming sections were fun though, I enjoyed getting to the health pickup at the start of the game, and generally zooming around doing constant flips was a fun way to backtrack. I enjoyed the bounce as well, particularly the little height puzzle at the end. I’m not sure if it needed an energy system though, since every area for the rest of the game where you will use it has energy pads everywhere, so it seems a bit pointless.

The final boss was a bit janky, he oneshot me several times, but once I got on his head I could just mash the hell out of my attack and he went down very easily, so it’s a bit too swingy of a fight for my tastes.

Overall, despite my gripes, I had a good time with this game, you definitely got the movement sauce down, which is important for a game like this. Nice work!

Ah, I see, unfortunate. If the intent is for the part up to that to be a linear introduction before the game opens up, I’m of the opinion that it’s too long and difficult for that purpose. The suit changing is interesting, but as I said, I didn’t feel much of a focus on it, so I didn’t feel particularly “hooked” by the game. It’d be better to lean into that earlier; put the cool stuff about your game up front! You spend a lot of time teaching mechanics, but it’s all pretty normal platforming stuff, I think you can trust the player to use the suits earlier.

To be clear, I do think this idea has legs if you keep working on it, so even if I found it too ambitious for a jam game, I think it could become something very cool if you keep working on it. Good luck!

That’s neat, feels very classic Metroid! I think it hits a lot of the same notes, though it also leads to some of the same problems, i.e. “oh, I thought I found progress, but it turns out it’s just another missile tank I don’t really need”. In general, combat was never challenging outside of the final boss (at which point I was so tanky that I could pretty much just facetank it), but the secrets themselves were fun to find, so I didn’t feel too bad about the rewards not being that interesting. Aside from that, I echo a lot of the sentiments of previous commenters about a lack of polish, which is understandable if you ran out of time. Hit feedback (i.e. the enemies flashing or having particles erupt from them when they get hit) would’ve made things feel a lot better for example.

Good job though, a nice amount of content for a jam game, satisfying to play!

P.S. The boss scream is so loud, holy hell, I turned the audio up cause the rest was fairly quiet and it scared the shit out of me

I bought a bunch of damage rings, died, equipped them all, and was suddenly no longer able to damage enemies. This made it rather difficult to progress, so I unfortunately wasn’t able to beat this game. It seems like a neat concept though, and while the combat is a bit jank, it is pretty funny to flail around and punch your way through life.

Interesting concept, but it seems like you might be trying to be too many things at once. A roguelike Metroidvania with multiple characters and some kind of cryptic lore (I think?) is very ambitious for a jam. As a result, I feel like a few things ended up kinda unpolished. I didn’t really feel like the roguelike upgrades had a lot of impacts, and the suit switching rarely felt tactical. From what I’ve played, at least, it mostly felt like “when you get a new suit, change into it, and never change back”. Maybe this gets better later.

There’s a ton of content in this game, but between the huge wide-open areas and the long runbacks, I sadly wasn’t able to beat it. I’m not sure if the big stone-faced guy that melts is the final boss, but I gave it several tries before calling it quits there, getting through that alien base every time was really starting to wear on me. I really think the suit change stations should’ve acted as checkpoints as well.

Cool project for sure though, and there’s definitely potential here, but it’s very ambitious and will take a lot of hard work to get there.

This is a very cool idea, I like concept of this very dense 3×3 map, but there sure is a lot of jank. I feel like I solved most puzzles by just shaking the box around until things worked, and it was hard to tell when that was intended and when I was just janking my way through. I don’t know what the magnet does, I never managed to find a use for it. I haven’t played the post-jam version, to be fair, but I do think that the physics are the main things holding this back, so if those are improved, that’s a big plus. Nice work overall!

Cool game! Any game that doesn’t use standard upgrades like dash, doublejump, walljump at all always gets bonus points from me, and this is a very creative ability set. I also enjoyed the structure of mostly guided progression towards the end, followed by two “final boss” backtracky puzzles, that’s very fitting for a MVM jam game I’d say.

Aside from some minor graphical issues (character gets a bit blurry, some tiles don’t seem to align properly - not sure if this a web build issue) my only real gripe is that I sometimes found it hard to predict how objects would behave. Like is a moving platform going to bounce, or stop in place once it bumps into something? I’ve seen them do both but wasn’t really able to figure out when they would do what. The scales also felt like they sometimes didn’t do what I expected them to do. This made some puzzles a bit trial-and-error, but since the checkpoints were generous that wasn’t a big issue.

Impressively done though, especially for 5 days! The final thing you have to do to beat the game felt very satisfying.

There’s one room with some spikes on the ceiling where it seems like that’s the main challenge, so that’s probably fine, but the specific room I had in mind when writing that comment was the bottom half of the room with all the vertical shafts. Without the dash, it’s kind of a pain to get through there since you can’t really avoid attacks if you’re not lined up with a shaft.

Interesting base you have here, but I think it needs a lot of work if you intend to turn this into a bigger project.

I’ll echo the previous comments by saying, very cute model, but a lot of small issues with the movement that make it never really feel that cohesive and get you into that “flow”. But I think the other comments have given you plenty of feedback on that, so instead I’ll say that you should be thinking about what kind of game you want this to be.

Right now, it feels like a tech demo, just a linear series of rooms with jumps. Even saying there’s puzzles feels like a stretch. Do you want it to be all about platforming? In that case, is it even a good idea for this to be a Metroidvania? Would you be better off just making a level-based platformer? There’s no exploration showcased in this build, do you want that to be a part of this game? It doesn’t seem like you currently have a clear vision, which is fine for a MVM entry, but since it seems like you intend to develop this into something bigger, I’d definitely recommend you spend some thinking about what you imagine this game to really be about when it’s done.

Good luck if you do keep working on it, this could go somewhere if you commit to it!

This is very cool! Did not find the hidden sword, but I did manage to get to the end and the money room. The presentation is great here, I love the pixel art with the minimal palette, and there’s some very solid animation work in there for such a small timeframe and such a variety of enemies.

The core mechanic of bump-based combat is neat, even if occasionally quite difficult in tight rooms, although the rather forgiving amount of healing and save points meant that it never felt too unfair. I especially enjoyed the parts where you had to use enemies to progress.

I’m a bit less charmed by upgrades. While the dash is cool, and I like how it plays into the big bounce, I found the cockatrice feather a bit unsatisfying to use. I’m not sure what it is about the momentum, but it never felt natural, maybe if it had a very brief stall before falling or something? The wall jump felt even more “off” to me, it feels like it absolutely launches you away from the wall, when your normal walking speed is rather slow. Still, like I said, the core mechanics are good enough that this is only a minor gripe.

The overall world design is solid too. I was lost for a little bit at the start, although things started flowing nicely once I got an upgrade, I suppose I just happened to wander into the wrong part of the castle. It’s a shame you weren’t able to finish everything you wanted to do and the game ends rather abruptly, but hey, that’s gamejams for ya.

Very impressive job overall, especially for a solo project, the polish on this is great. Excellent work!

A very cool and cleverly unique Metroidvania, although I would say one that is in real need of polish.

The concept of being stuck in a painting is obviously cool, there’s some really good pixel art on display for the character, and I was impressed that the powerups you get are rather unique, even your double jump has a unique gimmick to it. The map functions very well too.

The audio and the music are a bit grating (I was on the download version). The jump, dash, the bouncing sounds, they’re all so shrill and loud, which I read in an earlier comment may be due to your hearing problems. Definitely good to get a second opinion on this earlier in development, haha. Aside from that, I also think the character controller could’ve used some work. It feels a bit stiff, perhaps some buffers and a variable jump would’ve helped a lot.

Still, a neat little Metroidvania with plenty of unique stuff to it, good work!

I’ll have to echo what most of the other comments are saying, this is a very confusing control scheme. After finally getting up the elevator and trying to jump off of it, the camera helpfully decided to shift 180 degrees and make me fall all the way back down again. Difficult to judge depth too, I don’t think the fixed perspective is really doing the game many favours here. The style you got down is very good, everything looks very nice. I managed to beat the game, although I might’ve skipped something, not sure if I’m supposed to be able to just jump over the door to the final boss? An interesting entry for sure, there’s potential here but it’s held back by the jank.

Now this is a cool game! The vibes are on point, this kind of moody grayscale world feels quite inspiring, and really highlighted the red/blue blocks. I occasionally had issues not parsing the difference between a wall and a background, but overall I think it works well.

The core mechanic is neat too, you squeezed quite a bit out of it. I think it could work well for some more puzzly levels too, there’s some potential here if you’re interested in working on this project more. I felt a bit disappointed there wasn’t a sort of final test of the mechanics, but perhaps it’s for the best those mechanics were relegated to optional content. I did manage to find all the cats, pretty neat how many secrets you managed to squeeze in. Nice work!

You can change the volume for sound effects (🔊) and music (🎵) separately in the main menu and pause menu, but with the lack of text on-screen, I can’t blame you for missing that one. And yeah, I definitely had to cut down on the amount of player freedom (a lot of truncation, very limited branching, etc) in order to keep everything palatable, which does hurt the “Metroidvania” of it all. Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the feedback!

This is certainly a unique game. I enjoyed the addition of the walking table guys, but found that they often got in my way while I was trying to feed the big mouth, which ended up getting me killed. They probably should get lower target priority. Very novel and interesting take on a Metroidvania.

Unfortunate technical issue about the permanent pausing, which I didn’t see in the comments up front, so I lost a bit of progress, oops. I also noticed the game still is marked (DEBUG) in its release which is also not intended I imagine?

Cool concept though! You really committed to the aesthetic, even using square waves for the music. The shape abilities mostly felt pretty intuitive, although I didn’t even get the circle, but found Poly anyway. There’s definitely a few issues conveying new abilities, I liked the little bits of text written on the ground at the start, but it would’ve been nice to also add stuff like “Use left mouse button to grapple!” at the pentagon area, as I wasted some time wondering why I couldn’t attach myself to the ceiling by just jumping into it.

I also think the camera could’ve been zoomed out a bit more. Seeing so little of the screen at any point made it hard for me to really orient myself in the minimalist world. But I managed to get through it, so it wasn’t too big of an issue. Fun take!

What an incredibly strange and surreal game. Feels like the kind of thing I’d hear about through a Jacob Geller video or something, not just find in a MVM. Those are all compliments, by the way!

Is there an actual ending, or is the “thank you for playing” note about as far as you can get? If so, I got there, though I was missing a few collectables.

Technically, this is a marvel. This has great animation work for the size, with the dynamic way it adjusts to slopes and speed changes, and details like the character’s hand touching the walls, the smear frames on the dash. And 320 kB! I can’t even imagine how this was possible.

I did get stuck trying to find the first item (had to look at another comment where you explained it, haha) and then spent quite some time looking for progress once I got the dash on the roof. It can be very easy to miss things due to all the darkness, it is a very confusing little world, but in a way, that only adds to the strange dream-like atmosphere.

One of the most interesting applications of “minimalist” I’ve seen, very impressive!

I like the protagonist, very cute design. I echo a lot of the sentiments of other commenters though, I think it would’ve served you well to polish the core character controller some more, adding things like coyote time, jump buffers, and making the ledge grab work more consistently. When the jumps get tight, like in the final long jump gauntlet, these kind of things help a lot in terms of gamefeel.

I also think you could’ve given out the first upgrade a bit earlier, because to be honest, just jumping from platform to platform with no frills got old rather quickly. It feels a lot better late game, I had fun making big leaps over things once I got my full set. I also really liked the wall graffiti way of explaining powerups, that’s a cool way to “minimalistically” teach the player how to do stuff.

Congrats on making your first 3D game, it gets easier from here!

Yeah, with a bit more polish this would be a game I wouldn’t have minded paying for! Definitely give it a shot if you feel that ambition.

Wow, this is awesome! Shoutouts to Cammy, the Vault theme is gonna be in my head for a while. I love the retro aesthetic of it all, very convincing, really feels like a forgotten game from the late 90s, like an alternate universe DK64.

The marbles themselves feel really satisfying and tactile. The sound design and the subtly different physics for them are great. I love the wooden one especially, it feels super satisfying to just barrel it around.

The main thing I think could be improved is the overall structure of the world. There’s quite a few ways to softlock yourself (luckily none I found that couldn’t be fixed with a reload; the funniest one was dropping into a frozen part of cistern as Glass, causing a permanent loop of deaths), I found a ton of difficult to reach unlocks that didn’t seem to do anything (especially in the Cistern, lots of bars opening, checkpoints appearing, that I didn’t need at all to progress) that just obfuscated the real progress, which was at times hard to find. Finding out where to go for the 5th marble was a bit of a frustration point, but from there on out it was smooth sailing to the end.

Still, this was a super satisfying entry that I enjoyed a lot. Impressive amount of content for a jam game too! Really great work.

This is so dang stylish! Lots of little touches that went above and beyond, like the seagulls scattering, the cool-ass skybox, the animated billboards. No notes presentation-wise.

I sometimes found the movement a bit janky, especially when half-pipes were involved, but once I got the jump things started to flow a lot better. The final section was very satisfying. Definitely a lot of potential here, great work!

This is a very pretty little game. I like the main character’s unbothered way of sliding everywhere. I thought the parry on the shield enemy was a bit awkward. The first time I got the parry, I immediately went there to parry it (I’ve played Nine Sols) but it didn’t seem to work, so I thought I had to look elsewhere. Perhaps that enemy in particular needs a longer wind-up.

Overall, pretty cool, I enjoyed the final boss especially. Very cute graphics!

If I had a nickel for every game in this jam where I had to fight a chochin-obake, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

There’s potential here for sure! I see you’ve already done a lot of self-reflection about things you could’ve done better, and your thoughts actually align with mine pretty well. It’s good to think about what kind of game you want this to be, if you do want to keep working on it.

One thing I noticed at some point in the game, was that there’s very little point to actually fighting enemies. They are quite slow, and the rooms are huge, so it’s easy to run past them, and there’s no reward for fighting them. It might be good to have HP drop from enemies (and at save points?) instead of regenerating, or maybe just having some locked arena rooms to force the player to engage with them. I also got lost a bit at the start, as I mentioned in the Discord, because there’s quite a few immediately interesting places (the rocks, the cave, the spider web, the path back) put onto the player’s mental stack before you get to interact with them, making the only actual intended progress path (the well) easy to miss.

Very stylish and cohesive game for sure though, could be something special with more polish and content!

What a polished game, I’m impressed! The game is gorgeous, and the idea of the world being filled in as you get more colours is inspired. I like the idea of the colours being used as indicators for where you can use your new abilities, though sometimes perhaps done a bit too blatantly.

The healing system is simple but effective, I like it, it works quite well at rewarding consistency. It did make the platforming sections feel a lot harder than the enemy sections, but perhaps that’s intended. I found the room with the moving horizontal pillars the hardest section of the game, but not in a frustrating way, it was a fun challenge to learn to overcome.

If I were to deliver some criticism, I’d say that aside from the stellar presentation, the game itself is good, but a bit standard. I’d have liked to see a more novel upgrade rather than the standard dash, wall cling, double jump, maybe something tying into the colour theme? But perhaps that’s needlessly lofty. Overall, you both did an excellent job, great work!

Congrats on your first game. It gets easier from here!

I echo the sentiments of some other commenters that it’s better to keep your scope small, and polish that scope as much as you can. But on the other hand, I also get the appeal of being a new dev and just wanting to keep adding stuff as you get ideas.

Hope this was educational, and that you find a flow that works for you!

I like the boss design, they both felt pretty fair yet appropriately challenging, and it was fun to try to optimize their damage windows, like by running ahead of them and holding up. I also appreciate that you can hold the attack button, no mashing required!

It’s a bit lacking in polish (stuff like no HP bar and lack of feedback, like other comments have pointed out) and with the lack of actual character upgrades, it’s not much of a Metroidvania, but it’s a solid action platformer.

Neat little game! It’s very cleanly scoped, which is quite a challenge for a gamejam, especially when you’re new. I quite enjoyed the final boss, and the way the level developed to get there. Hope making this was an educational experience for you!

This was a delightful little treat! What a unique concept, and extremely polished to boot. The character is so silly, I love him, and all the animations add so much charm.

This isn’t really criticism per se, more of an idea, but I think this could’ve been even more interesting if the powerups weren’t obvious from the start, but you had to learn about them from the world somehow. I hit the point of “oh, okay, so that’s what I have to do” fairly quickly once I got my first powerup, and the game does become a bit more of a transparent checklist after that. Could’ve been interesting to leave the player wondering for a while. Doing that definitely would’ve made it harder to implement and test everything properly in the jam period though, so maybe it’s for the best you kept your ambitions realistic, haha.

Aside from theorizing about things that could’ve been, I have very little to complain about in this game, great work!

Haha, yeah, it’s very understandable, fine-tuning is difficult and time consuming, so it’s easy to get it wrong on a jam. I didn’t know the double jump was optional, that’s interesting. Bonus minimalist points there!

Oh also, now that you mention it, minor gripe: I thought I was supposed to beat the mimic boss by baiting it into jumping the spikes, and I was a bit disappointed when it didn’t work.

This is a cute little Metroidvania. It’s definitely a bit rough around the edges in terms of physics and lack of UI, but I made it to the end. Props for avoiding the standard suite of powerups (i.e. double jump, wall jump) and going with something more unique. One thing that stood out to me was that the controller movement seemed to have little (or no?) deadzone, so I’d often end up slightly sliding when my stick wasn’t completely idle. The music was very catchy, although the arena music was so much louder than the overworld music, which was a bit jarring. Nice work overall!

Checked this out while it was in progress, and I liked it, and yeah, playing it again during the rating period, still like it! Doing a lot with a little for sure. I really enjoyed moving around with the full kit, I felt very powerful, with the notable exception of the ceiling run, which I mostly found finicky. You managed to squeeze a very expressive movement system out of those 3 buttons. I only wish I was tested a bit more once I had all that power, because it feels like the lategame isn’t really equipped to deal with how powerful the player becomes, making the difficulty curve a bit odd, I felt the early-game was harder than the lategame. I respect the commitment of sticking to every enemy having 1 HP, even (kind of) Daimyo Dracula, which, by the way, is an extremely funny name for a villain.

Overall, very neat take on minimalism, impressive work by you two!

I’m not a big precision platformer guy, but I made it to the top anyway, woohoo! Pretty neat concept, and I quite like the low res pixel art style.

The spike hitboxes definitely feel a bit off. It was noticeable that sometimes when you’re falling down right besides a wall, with a spike on the bottom, that spike ends up killing you, which just feels wrong.

I also didn’t really understand the… vignette mechanic? Dying of cold maybe? It felt really inconsistent, and idk why going to the next room, which looks equally cold, would help anything? I’m not sure if it was bugged or if I just didn’t get it.

Aside from that and some little level design nitpicks (i.e. falling into a new room and immediately dying) this is quite well-crafted, the core mechanics feel good. Nice work!

Bald kids are the scariest force in the universe

What a cute main character! But I found this one really hard to control and get around. Due to how small you are, and how much time you spend crawling through little shafts, everything looks very samey. That combined with the wall jump making you frequently change direction made me constantly get turned around and confused, so I didn’t end up getting very far. Being a tiny rat in a vampire’s castle is a really fun idea, but you set quite a challenge for yourselves making it work.

A nicely-themed little game. The world design is solid, packing a small Metroidvania into a pleasant underwater package without ever leaving the player feeling lost at sea. It’s a bit lacking in polish, however. There’s some graphical jitter (tiles don’t align right), the artstyle, while very cute, is inconsistent at times, and the character controller doesn’t feel super satisfying. But being such a cute little crab makes up for a lot. Good work, all of you!

This is neat! An autorunner Metroidvania is a cool idea. It was a bit annoying at first, but getting the wall bounce helps a lot, which is a nice feeling of progression. It helped a lot in subverting my Metroidvania expectations and keeping things feeling fresh, especially with the high upgrade density. There is a bit of jank (sometimes sliding can get you stuck in walls, walljumping off of one-ways feels a bit odd, overall kind of a lack of polish) but the core concept is solid, and I had fun getting all 7 enlightenments. Feeling more zen already…

Nice work!