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Freg, Fregg, and Freggy: The Last Band
Freg, Fregg, and Freggy: The Last Band
By honest-dan, brainoid and spacey3d
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 104 | 4.14 | 66 | |
| Fun | 242 | 3.86 | 66 | |
| Innovation | 214 | 3.90 | 67 | |
| Theme | 902 | 3.65 | 67 | |
| Graphics | 48 | 4.59 | 67 | |
| Audio | 36 | 4.38 | 66 | |
| Humor | 106 | 4.00 | 64 | |
| Mood | 154 | 4.18 | 67 | |
Comments
zimny11
2021-04-27 18:50
I just tried your game. Yes, I read the error warning and I have not encountered any. Both the music and the art style are beautiful. The story is unique and addictive. And there are even voice actors!
Since this seems to be an AAA (Triple-A) Ludum Dare game :), let me make a few comments. Two things I missed in the game were:
- any sounds during the fight and
- what the individual cards do.
Some cards make it easy to guess their functions, but some of them are a big puzzle to me.
Another thing is that my computer was working very hard while I was playing, and it's quite new with not bad prameters, so there may be a problem somewhere with that.
On a different note, the first thing that came to my mind after reading the title was a cartoon Ed, Edd n Eddy :)
In summary. Great job with the game!
The graphics are very beautiful!
Very nice graphics (even they were somehow a bit blurry, but that can be as well my problem bc settings) and the Idea and voice acting was incredible!
just bc i am curious: what engine were you using?
We were using Unreal Engine 4! It's not the most ideal engine for game-jams, without optimisation the games can be pretty demanding on your PC! However, I work using UE4 so I try and keep my hobby projects in UE4 too so I can keep getting better! Thanks for your comments!
Also, zimny11 - I'm glad you got the Ed, Edd and Eddy reference!
noahj
2021-04-27 23:02
Really neat idea for the game! I love the artwork, it's so well stylized! The card mechanic is really cool, my suggestion would be to add visible or audible feedback when you play a card; it would add impact and make it feel like you were more active during the battle.
The environment generation and tiling is also a really cool idea, although I wasn't sure why I was choosing one location over another.
The music was great! I loved the smooth jazz, and the fact that you made it part of the story was really great.
Thanks NoahJ! That's some good feedback! A few of those things were on our stretch goal list but didn't make it in!
The environment generation was meant to be a bigger part of the game, but we had to cut back on features due to time. Essentially the quests were going to ask you to kill certain mobs in certain regions, so you'd use the card to "choose your path". Some tiles would have easier enemies, some would have loot. We also wanted the concept of placing the same type of tiles next to each other would create hard version of those tiles where the bosses could spawn. It was still fun to explore some of the ideas in the jam though for sure!
Very nice game! I was reading the comments and noticed that you addressed the issues I had with the game. (The environment system not making any sense, slightly unclear what the cards do, etc.) It was fun to play and the art and voice acting and music all felt polished and satisfying. It sounds like you had some pretty cool concepts in mind for the game. It would be awesome to see you explore them further!
I absolutely love the artwork. It's gorgeous. The music and sound design was great too. Is your music/sound designer a jazz musician? The game was also very fun to play. My only suggestion would be details on what the cards do. I was able to guess some. But I wasn't sure for most of them, so I was mostly just playing random cards. I wasn't sure what the benefit to playing location cards was either. I was able to win in any case, and enjoyed doing so. Thanks for making the game!
Very cool concept and great art. I had a couple comments about the cards but looks like others have already noted. Look forward to seeing more if you ever work on it!
I really love how the game turned out! All the art is absolutely gorgeous and I loved the cutscenes in particular. The voiceovers were great and the music was fantastic. Playing the cards felt really satisfying too and you definitely packed a lot in to this jam game.
Fantastic work as always!
Really appreciate the comments all! When you drag and hold a card over the "Play cards here" box, time slows down and a tool tip will show on the right of the card the describes what it does. The cards were too small to put a description (though we admit the tooltip isn't ideal as its easily missed!). I'll add this to the game page to try help others know for future <3
roidz
2021-04-28 03:46
It took me a while to understand the combat system, but then i noticed what Dan said: there are tooltips when you drag and don't release yet. Really cool. Amazing mood/graphics again, music is nice and suiting and fits the game.
Incredible how some teams seem to be able to make such amazing quality of games during a jam.
vrerabek
2021-04-28 10:10
This is solid 5/5 for me. Fantastic game, love every piece of it. Good job!
lakea
2021-04-28 13:36
fantastic game, really enjoyed playing it
The art and the sound is very cool ! great game
kaminos
2021-04-28 13:59
Cool game guys! Solid gameplay nothing bad to mention.. i totally enjoyed playing :) oh! Most of all I loved the art style, characters and environment! Top notch
The audio and visuals are stunning. I don't know how much you already had before the jam, but it's quite incredible. Please, make a full game out of this.
Only possible improvement for me: the volume of the voices was a bit low, compared to the music.
The audio and visuals were all made during the jam! Spacey3d is a talented 3d modeller and 2d artist! And BrainoidGames's house mate Barlas is the musician who made two tracks for the game. Spacey and I made did the voice overs. Thanks for the volume feedback and for playing it!
Thanks for feedback everyone too, glad the crashes aren't preventing people from enjoying the game.
justcamh
2021-04-28 16:23
Hey matey, thanks for submitting your game to the stream! I hope my feedback is helpful, I really enjoyed the game! Here's the twitch vod if you wanna rewatch:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003703630
jonah
2021-04-28 16:39
Sadly could not play it on my mac but I have watched both a stream and your own playthrough: the visual and audio are absolutely amazing. great job! I also love the deck building elements and would love to see this grow into a full game where you can implement everything that you couldn't implement yet because of the scope of the jam
Thanks jonah for taking the time to write despite not having a mac build! Unfortunately making a mac build in UE4 isn't as nice as Unity where just click Mac as a target platform! We are still looking to expand on our LD47 game (Cattenburg, also a card game), so we don't plan to push this one much further - too many projects to juggle otherwise!
hotpaw
2021-04-28 18:37
I loved this game, fantastic, you must make this into a full game, it was so fun! can't believe it was done so quick! 5/5 best so far i have played
jaoel
2021-04-28 18:53
This is a really nice looking game! I'm impressed by the amount of content you managed to add in such short amount of time, and the art looks amazing! Great soundtrack as well!
I enjoyed the card mechanics, but I didn't really understand the point of the zone cards?
The game initially launched Steam VR and played through my VR-headset. This seems to be a common problem with games made with unreal, does the engine default to launching in VR-mode or something? For anyone experiencing that issue, the workaround is to launch the game with the `-nohmd` command line argument.
Sadly I couldn't finish the game because of the random crashing. The furthest I got was to lantern level 3, but I would have loved to continue playing to the end.
Technical issues aside, overall a great entry, well done!
sigill
2021-04-28 19:19
This is a great entry! Unfortunately I got a crash on my way to the canyon boss, but I think I got a good impression of the game. The music is really nice.. and so is the art! Your game got me excited to play during the intro, and it kept me excited during the game because it's just so much fun to look at and listen to. I'll definitely give this a try again if/when you release a fixed version. Congratulations on your LD48 entry!
janures
2021-04-28 19:49
10/10 would jam with the band
thanks @jaoel for the help for those having the steam VR issue. We unchecked the option in Unreal for VR intentionally, but seems like there must be another setting hidden somewhere to turn it off!
@janures you may enter Pogona's next reality music star competition to earn a spot as a fourth freg! You must become a frog and rename to something that includes Freg though. May I suggest Fregrick or Freginald?
thanks all for the lovely feedback! Part of us would like to make a nice post jam version - but to get the game as deep / strategic as we'd like, it'd take quite a lot of more time - which is something we're all short of! But yeah - we'll see... maybe we'll use what we learned from this and develop it in a future game jam!
crazybot
2021-04-29 07:36
I normally mostly play games with fewer ratings but this one just looked too good
I honestly really liked it, as you said I was able to see what the cards did by holding them over the "use card" region and the descriptions were very clear. Everything felt insanely polished for a LD game and the illustrations and models were beautiful!
The only slightly negative thing I have to say is that it was a bit easy in my opinion, but that's such a small critique that it doesn't even really matter
I completed your game! The graphic looks great! Music is really good but for me it's too repetitiv for a jazz genre (jazz is about improvisation guys c'mon!) only one track plays the same and the same. But whole concept is awesome!
The concept is super original, and there must've been a ton of work in the visual artwork and music, you're getting 5 stars in those ratings!
(I tried to play the game under Wine on Linux and it ran completely fine until a freeze at one point. Obviously I'm not taking that in account in the ratings, I choose to run it on an unsupported platform.)
Thanks for the feedback all! We appreciate you taking the time to play the game!
Yeah, we really wanted to make it more difficult - but essentially we know that most people will give an LD game one or two attempts, and we'd rather people experience all of the content in those attempts. The balance of game would be different if it were not a gamejam entry :)
Haha, indeed - if we had our musician for more than one day, who knows - maybe we would have had more music! Glad you liked the two tracks though, I loved them!
Great to hear it ran on Wine - unfortunately making Linux builds in Unreal isn't as straight forward as it is in things like Unity!
Really cool. I loved the artwork and the jazzy atmosphere, and a neat card mechanic with the different freggs getting cards in different ways! Some things I missed: - A way to get rid of cards (e.g. when I was wanting to be on cliff tiles for the one quest, I got forest and meadows cards that were essentially useless). In general, I wasn't really using the environment cards very much. - Some form of control; to me it felt a bit too random at times. I.e. if you come up against a boss and just get a bunch of forest or healing march cards, you essentially have no control over whether or not you die. I managed to scrape by by the skin of Freggy's teeth in the final fight, but would have liked to have some tactical input. - Some way to see how long things last and whether they are active. The stun one had an effect icon, but e.g. the reflecting of damage one didn't, as far as I could tell.
Anyway, overall, very very cool. Enjoyed it a lot.
First of all, loved the presentation and music. You know I appreciate intro sequences :wink: You also know I am trying to make LD voice acting a thing so I appreciate the solidarity on that front :laughing:
The art, especially the hand drawn images were gorgeous. The sound effects during fights were fun and charming; hearing each note, strum and bump of instruments go along with the animation was well conceived and executed.
The music was so good that I sat on the menu screen long enough to find out it didn't loop :sweat_smile: So I restarted the game to keep listening. I love jazz!
The gameplay was intriguing. The approach of having the player not directly control, but rather influence the Freg brothers on their journey was an interesting one. I understand it may not be exactly how you planned it out but honestly, the idea shines through. If a post jam version is in the pipeline, let me know! :D
laurari
2021-04-29 19:06
Nice game!! I got a crash in mid level 2, but I liked a lot the art and the music! great job!!
Graphics, story, music, voice acting, all great. Really good work and concept, would be great to see more work on developing the strategy.
I did notice that one Feed the Fire card in my hand had the text on 3 lines, the rest has text on 2 lines.
elendow
2021-04-29 21:01
The visuals and the audio of the game are simply perfect, beautiful. In the gameplay part I would liked a little more feedback for some of the cards, because I wasn't sure if the card worked or not. But the gameplay itself is fun and engaging and the story is really well blended with everything.
I liked it a lot.
brainoid
2021-04-29 22:02
@elendow Thanks for the lovely words ^^. We agree with the card feedbacks, unfortunately we didn't have time to add feedback to all of them. Once again, we enjoyed drowning in the huge scope waters.
Really fun concept. I wanted to go further but fatal crashes seem to still be in version. Nonetheless I saw a lot of things I liked.
Using light as a dodge/crit mechanic was really interesting, along with using lantern fire as a resource. I think this could be explored even further as I haven't quite seen a game like this regarding light management.
I also liked the concept of saving your card hand between battles, so there was a sense of hand management there, such as saving your heals for out of combat or saving the big hit card for the boss. That's pretty novel to me as I normally see games like Slay the Spire where your hand/deck resets every match. This added an interesting layer to playing my cards.
I enjoyed the experience, I could tell you had quite a lot to do as the game is very ambitious. I'm always impressed with what you accomplish in these jams and this game is no different!
P.S. we actually ended up with mildly similar games in concept. Auto movement to the upper right and auto-ish party-based combat. I TOO wanted environment generation to be a thing but that didn't happen :P
This game seems like it took months not days. The card battling system is complex enough that there is room for deep thinking but simple enough to learn on your first play-through. The art is all professional quality. The music is superb and somehow manages to make lizards, frogs, and jazz match. If there were more levels of this game, I would definitely play them all. Thank you so much for bringing this by my stream. Here's a link to the VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1005666495?t=3h0m35s
kuviman
2021-04-30 11:42
Unfortunately could not get to the last boss because of the bug, but it was a great experience!
geo3d
2021-04-30 13:52
Very well made. Awesome voice work and immersive. I think there's a bug when all the characters die, nothing happened afterwards, I needed to manually restart the game. The 2D art look amazing and the 3d graphics look good. I can really see this becoming a full polished game! Awesome work fun to play.
A nice little frog/jazz game. The music and the story are nicely done, the card battle mechanics are interesting.
Thanks for the feedback all π·πΈ π₯πΈ πΈπΈ
Especially those who battle through the fatal crashes. We have tried fixing them but unfortunately they are hard to track down to the source, as it seems rooted in our tweening library.
@jaco-van-hemert some great feedback. We wanted to add a burn card mechanic, where you can drag them to the lantern to get 1% fuel back. We also had bigger plans for environments and path ahead - but weren't able to deliver on it. Agree regarding the RNG nature of it. Ideally, since frogs earn cards in different ways - we would have liked if you could re-order your party in order to utilise their card drop triggers (freg for example gets a card when delivering a final blow). If we tied the category of cards you get to specific frogs, it could have lead to the idea of giving some control and strategising.
@peachtreeoath I will play your game then, will be interesting to see the parallels! Thanks for the detailed feedback. I think we had some good design ideas, but for them to truly shine they need to be implemented correctly and the game have a bit more depth than we were able to get done in 3 days.
I was getting a crash in the canyons with a previous version but no problems for me in 1.0.5! It took me a while to understand the tile order stack on the right and I had a hard to visually telling which biome I currently was in due to the darkness, but by the end of the game I got it. All it took for me was to make use of the mouse overs. Art was amazing, of course. Despite my initial confusion, I started getting into the possibilities of the game mechanics of balancing lantern brightness and stacking easier biomes to get more cards after exhausting them. Might be nice to have a way to throw cards away instead of not useful cards just scrolling off. The music at the title screen and into story felt great. Steller job overall as usual. (Also super happy to see frogs in the game, I was going to add a frog somewhere in my game but didn't get to it)
Super experiment, great music, the art looks very polished. I like how you could just jump in into playing and everything was very intuitive. Unfortunately got "Fatal Error" crash while searching for 3rd ingredient. Nice job!
pomo
2021-05-01 12:30
Plz make work thanks <3
lex
2021-05-01 19:04
Too bad it's crashing for me, I want to see the ending so bad!!! I'll keep checking for newer versions and replay until I can beat it.
@lex here is a video (SPOILERS) with a full play through you're welcome to watch if the crashes are stopping you seeing the end. Thanks for your kind words and patience https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHf9F08qig
Jazzy! Music is great all around, and I loved listening to it. Made with a lot of attention to detail. I also love the cartoon graphics and I wish that they were used everywhere (read: also instead of the 3D). Shading work on them is exquisite.
Gameplay I didn't like so much. Froggies walk on their own, fight on their own. Playing cards is all good, but not complicated enough to require any strategic thought or much attention (no interactions between the cards themselves, no need to deeply analyze the situation on the battlefield and so on). As a result, it feels like the game plays itself, it's not engaging. But because it is not engaging, I had a lot of time for observations, analysis and noting stuff down while I played. So here it is (lucky you ;)):
* Nothing epic happens when Lantern charge drops to 0%. Froggies (I imagine that's the name of the band ;)) just continue on their quest like it's all fine. With how focused the story is on the lantern, I'd expect at least something to happen. Well, to be honest, I expected to just fail. But barring that, at least something would be nice :). * You can use Healing Hymn even when your lantern charge is 0. * Feed the Fire fuels the lantern by 10%, except it will never fuel it to 100%. Not sure if that's a bug, or it's by choice because 100% would not fit nicely on the UI space allotted for the lantern charge number ;) * Second Dazzling Solo you cast always stuns the same 'random' enemy as the first one. 'Always' means I tested 3 times. So you can stun and already stunned guy. That severely decreases usability of multiple copies. * I'm not sure how you spawn the quest boss exactly (I speculate it's in the next suitable area after enough enemies were killed, or just in a random suitable area) but it seems that the Safety Dance can totally bug the quest. I used it on a Canyon while on the Canyon quest (had a healing march on and wanted it to work a bit longer) and I think it's possible that I used it on a Canyon in which the boss was supposed to be. Cause afterwards I was traveling for 45 minutes and met no boss. I finally gave up and restarted. On the restarted game it all went fine and met a boss within a few minutes. * Would be nice if card description were more specific on their numbers - how long are durations etc. I calculated about 20 seconds on the Bounce Back and Lantern Scorch (is that about right?), but it's not so easy with all the cards (like Igniting Flourish).
I had two crashes to desktop with 'Fatal Error'. But I saw that those you already have in known bugs. The story itself was simple and pleasant. Charming even, I'd say :). And all of Pagona rejoiced!
Screenshot_1.jpg
As usual, your team did a great job. The idea of the game is great, as well as gameplay; however, card games isn't my cup of tea.
pnkvrt
2021-05-02 15:54
How did you make this in 3 days?? I love it! The visuals are wonderful, the music is splendid, the voice acting is great! The game itself is really fun to play despite the bugs. I would love to see a this made into a full game. Amazing entry! Well done!
chrissx2
2021-05-02 22:51
For a 3 days jam, this is impressive amount of work! The art, music and voice overs are great! UI is clean, has the right amount of options (having any options is already a big thing). You even had a time to change the cursour icon - something I completly forgot to do in our game, and it's something that helps you ground yourself in the game world. Two things that i wish worked differently are : - tooltip to be on the cards, not during draging them into the middle of screen - having the option to just click the card rather than dragging it. (unless you can drag it onto specific frog - which is something i didn't notice being possible?)
I really liked how you can affect the biom generation, tho i had no information what were the pros and cons of each of them (i take different monster spawn?). Frog's crawling back after being defeted was a really nice touch! :)
Now i encountered only two bugs. One of them was an app crash when starting new game. The other one wasn't exacly a bug, but Unreal Engine turned on my VR with the game (i guess it's some UE option that can be disabled?)
I would really like to see an update to the game with more cards and better tooltip! :)
itooh
2021-05-03 18:43
Good thing there is a graphics quality setting, my machine had trouble running it even on medium! ^^'
I really like the presentation! A whole intro that presents a universe, characters, with dialogs It's charming, and gives a lot of personality to the game. Alos, _Jazz!_
The game itself is also nice! I didn't figure out immediately that I had to drag'n drop the cards (maybe there could be some sort of indication at the beginning?). But once that was figured out, it was fun to play! Maybe a bit too random though: at some point I was ignoring all destination cards, and immediately placing every card that was relevant for combat. Maybe the system can be adjusted to presents an interesting difficulty. But it has very solid foundations!
dans17
2021-05-03 22:17
I loved the art and music! We also made a realtime card game for the jam, so it was interesting to see how we arrived at similar concepts but implemented them very differently. I really liked how the gameplay was built around a music theme, but I feel like you are missing some opportunities with this theme. For example, I found the drawing/discarding of cards to be unintuitive, and it seemed to happen at arbitrary times; it would be cool if you drew a card at the start of each measure of music (for example), so that the progression of the game feels more rhythmic and intuitive. I also liked how a note was played on each attack, but they often felt like they were being cut off or played at sort of weird times; again, I think the attacks could be synced better to the music so that it feels rhythmic and sounds more interesting. Overall, it was fun to play through, and it captured its mood very well, but I feel like a lot of balance changes are needed for the cards. I understand that it is difficult to balance a card game for a jam though (we struggled with this as well).
the way melophobia shrivels up and shrinks away when defeated is amazing :laughing: I'm also a big fan of the way the sound plays during combat, are you unmuting/muting a different track for each character during their attack animation? As always, top notch art (the 2d illustrations & the 3d models & animations!) & quality voice acting. I'm a big sucker for puns, as far as I'm concerned Sister Anolga is the pinnacle of comedy. Nice work you guys! :thumbsup:
[Glad we were able to make this happen on stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1015845981?t=04h18m45s)
Once again, y'all's games have an undeniable charm. The unique mechanics, wonderful art, and bumpin' music all tie this together into a wonderful little package. I think given a little more time you could tighten up the player onboarding/tutorial (making the tooltips appear on hover instead of drag, for example), but that's just a minor complaint compared to the overall experience.
Looking forward to seeing where you guys take this if you decide to expand on it!
(PS: Congrats on being the only Unreal game that I was able to successfully run on my dumpy computer! :pray: )
itsboats
2021-05-17 20:28
Mel dead
I played in my stream last night but my videos don't save! I had a lot of fun with this there's so much charm in the music, art, gameplay, and story <3
Nice game! Great story, and the graphics were great (though I thought the change between the 2D graphics of the town and the 3D of the world was a bit jarring -- I think I preferred the 2D!). The music was really nice. I first thought the jazz didn't fit with the fantasy world, but once the story was explained, it made perfect sense. And the card mechanic fits really well into the game.
The tooltips for the cards are a good idea, though I feel they would be better if they appeared while hovering over the cards in the player's "hand" rather than making the player drag them into the drop area to see it; also, it's not always clear what effect the card is going to have, and when an effect is in play, some kind of timer showing how much longer the effect will last would go a long way :smiley_cat:
Great entry, well done!