paulsams 2019-10-10 23:34
It was fun to play. Cool graphics, but the most important thing is the attack animations. They are simply divine, true). I advise you to develop this game and wish you good luck in this)!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD45 → Nocero
By empty-set
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 295 | 3.70 | 39 | |
| Fun | 391 | 3.48 | 39 | |
| Innovation | 446 | 3.35 | 39 | |
| Theme | 415 | 3.51 | 39 | |
| Graphics | 256 | 4.01 | 39 | |
| Audio | 188 | 3.70 | 39 | |
| Humor | 343 | 3.16 | 36 | |
| Mood | 330 | 3.63 | 36 |
It was fun to play. Cool graphics, but the most important thing is the attack animations. They are simply divine, true). I advise you to develop this game and wish you good luck in this)!
Cool graphics, inventive mechanics, but it crashes if you try to 'Think' if you've already learned everything.
@paulsams Thanks for the feedback and encouragement! I do intend to develop this further.
@finalforeach Thanks for the bug report - pretty careless oversight on my part. On the bright side, easy to fix.
The readme helped, this was fun. Played as good as it looked, wish there could've been more.
Humble beginnings maybe?
Nice job. Could be a real charmer if fleshed out more.
If you developed this more, I'd like to see you lean into the "thinking up moves" mechanic a lot more. I think there is potential there that could elevate this up above the standard rpg fare out there. Great job for the jam! :)
I love the style of this! The characters are super cute!
I like the combat too, it's nice and simple, and the differences between enemy types adds a good amount of strategy.
I'd absolutely love to see a more complete version of this.
Very good game, love the style, music and art fit well together. Innovative use of the theme as well.
After learning about 6-7 skills, I clicked on “Think” and the game crashed
The game was confusing at first to me, especially with how to time the attacks. I wish there was more of a visual indicator, kind of like the combat system in Undertale. I think that was pretty much my only issue with the game. As a whole, it is well put together and the controls are responsive. I quite liked the look of the game and the two audio tracks had enough contrast to distinguish them but still fit within the game environment. With the waltz feeling of the main world track, it almost feels like I'm in a castle.
I enjoyed the idea of starting with no attacks and having to learn them along the way. It would be cool if you had to learn the attacks from other enemies who had attacked you rather than just going through the menu, because the current system feels like just a more elaborate way of selecting an attack and I think it might have connected more in regards to how Nocero thinks of the attacks (rather than just thinking of them out of nowhere). It's a good entry overall; I enjoyed learning how all the moves worked against the enemies. I like their appearances a lot, particularly the surprise ones that aren't even in the main overworld.
@xakkar Thanks for the bug report. If I had been more proactive, I could've fixed it before you got to it due to another user mentioning it. Oh well. I've uploaded a 1.1 version which fixes this crash for new players or anyone who wants to play again. The crash occurred due to there being no more moves to learn, though, so if you got to the point where it crashed there may be little more to experience.
@random-storykeeper
Thank you for your in-depth feedback! I'm still mulling over the best way to deal with visual indicators on damage - I want to find the right balance between "feeling around in the dark" and "being told exactly what to do" so that players can learn and master the timings at a fair pace. It's hard to know if a timing will "make sense" when I'm the one who programmed it, so feedback on this issue is particularly valuable to me. I'm definitely considering some sort of visual indicator on at least some moves in the future.
Expanding the system for thinking of attacks and making it more dynamic and fun is one of the biggest things I want to do - I had a TON of ideas for it that unfortunately never came to pass due to time constraints. Attacks taking inspiration from enemy moves is one that would definitely be cool to include.
Took a while to figure out how to 'time the attacks' but got some comments in the comments sectio that helped me out. I also liked the concept of starting out with nothing and made it fit really well into the game! Keep on creating games. Great submission!
Great game, the art/music are good, love the animation in the background of the fights. I encountered the balloon enemy before learning any attacks that could hit it so I got stuck in a fight where all I could do was Do Nothing! Aside form that issue a fantastic effort, and a lot of potential!
This game has really sweet art, music and sounds. I personally very enjoyed the battle background. The other thing I really liked is finding out how to fight specific enemies. I didn't have much problems with "goal" in the game, killing all enemies is a decent goal. I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't understand timing attacks. I was able to manage like half of them, but after completing the game I'm still not sure whether I understand when exactly I should press a button. The other thing I didn't understand at the very beginning is "IP: N+P%" notation. The last frustrating thing is number of enemies and their kinds in a party. But maybe I'm missing something in this one.
had so much fun trying to kill them thanks
Interesting mechanics you implement there! I'm not a fan of turn-based combat game, but with the timed-attack here is actually make the combat more fun. Great job!
this stands out among rpgs I've played that remind me of pokemon because of its graphics, animations and balance, I think once you know what monsters are in each party the game is great on its own as a challenging but fairly balanced dungeon
Had a lot of fun trying to win! 4.0!
This is really cool! I love the music and the graphics! All move/attack animations are so amazing! Love the mechanics of starting with no attack and learning them one by one
The game was pretty addicting and it got me to go all the way and kill everything. The game is balanced quite well as others said, I basically ended the game with 3 hp left or so. I thought the game was fairly intuitive. Once I realized the lips monster had armor, you can generally deduce if future enemies had armor or not just by looking at them so well done on that front. Even though the RPG-ness of the game was just a small adjustment, I thought you hit the theme well and again, it was engaging trying to collect more think points. Also, great job on the BG, very Earthbound-like!
Very well made little game. It took me a little while to get used to it and the +40% IP bit kind of confused me because I though that it was some passive generation of IP. I didn't quite get to an end, I got a few fights in and had learnt three or four attacks but then I ran out of stats. Because as far as I understood the game you get IP from defeating enemies and the other two stats from sucking statues? First time I played I tried to be sneaky and avoid all fights and got pretty far, was just about to reach the third statue but then a fight triggered and I had no attack that could hurt the enemy so I had to let it play out before the game restarted. So perhaps there should be some sort of restart/surrender option too.
Thanks to everyone who has given feedback and encouragement!
@psiv I was worried about the balloon enemy - I wanted to include him because there was otherwise no specific use for the moves which specifically targeted flying enemies, but due to time constraints all I was able to do was try and make it more likely that you'd encounter him late enough that you'd be likely to have a move to hit him. Looks like my fears were correct - sorry I was so careless and you had to watch Nocero get slowly whittled down by a balloon with no recourse.
@suvrik You make a good point with your comment on enemy formations - looking back, the average enemy party size was too large, and fights have a tendency to become battles of attrition.
@peachtreeoath It's quite encouraging to me that you were able to figure out the armor mechanic intuitively - it means implementing it didn't go to waste. I really wanted to include an in-game explanation of the armor and pierce mechanic, as well as a straightforward indicator of how much armor an enemy had, but I wasn't able to do so in the end.
A fun spin on turn-based JRPG battles, and Nocero is a true character that I'd love to see a full game built around. Got stuck in a battle with a balloon because I couldn't use the vault attack and couldn't escape the battle, but other than that I can't flaw the game.
Hahaha so much fun that remminds me of the old days playing GameBoy with my classmates！
Manually thinking up new attacks as you go along seems like a long-overdo JRPG mechanic, and I'm surprised it hasn't been used before, at least like this. I wish health replenishing points were a little more prevalent, though.
Cute art, amazing animations and some nice little mechanics create such a great game! Awesome job!