Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Herogatchi
By alchemic, gizmolo and wiredoverload
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 545 | 3.28 | 30 | |
| Fun | 528 | 3.16 | 30 | |
| Innovation | 80 | 3.89 | 30 | |
| Theme | 781 | 2.62 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 436 | 3.55 | 30 | |
| Audio | 429 | 2.87 | 30 | |
| Humor | 418 | 2.86 | 28 | |
| Mood | 569 | 3.14 | 29 |
overall a really good game! The idea of having a tamogachi mixed with action combat in a game was a good one! Art style and music fit really well
Early on I did find fighting outside the tamogachi mode difficult, it may be good to have a way to easy players into these fights to learn the controls better.
The two different modes were a cool aspect which I enjoyed. It's been too long since I had an actual tamagotchi, so I don't remember much about them. Whenever I did training, there was no feedback from the hero if that had been a useful thing to do. The graphics and sounds were excellent. The spear weapon felt pretty slow to attack and took away from the explore mode a little for me, but maybe another weapon would have been more suited for me.
Nice game. So far I tried two heroes, one was a mage (with staff), another was ranger (with bow). Still not sure why do we need to harvest the heroes? Do their powers just disappear or are they somehow relevant to the second hero you get? The bow was good, the staff seemed very slow. I understand that it hits more enemies, but by the time it fires I already need to run again, so my blast goes wide anyway. Music is nice, chill. Pixel art heroes look cute :)
@labete Thanks for the feedback! To clarify harvesting: the stat changes caused by training and feeding are only applied to the hero in the tama. Harvesting will absorb those stats into your character. Additionally, harvesting a hero you've trained primarily in one stat will change your character and weapon type to match that stat. E.g. feeding a lot of boots or training agility will give you the archer character when you harvest.
I love this
Cool game, nice work!
This is adorable and nostalgic! I love how you expanded on the already awesome idea of raising a tamagotchi, and make it more endearing! Adorable!
Awesome game! The idea is really original, loved the tamagotchi idea was really cool how you made it work. Love the art as well, looked awesome in a 3d space. I think moving and shooting would have been better rather than having to stop but overall really enjoyed playing through it! Great Job!
@glaikunt Hint: If you feed your Herogatchi boots and then harvest it, your attack speed will increase and significantly reduce the startup and end lag time of attacks ;) Thanks for your kind words and for playing!
I love this idea! That's really cool to be adventuring in 3D and then tend to your Herogatchi occasionally and harvest their stats as you go. This could really make for a fun full-length RPG! Are you planning to expand this game after the jam? I think it definitely has some potential.
Thanks for playing @chompdev! I really enjoyed working on this game and would love to do a more fleshed out release. At the very least we have plans for a 1.2 version so we can tie off the loose ends and complete the gameplay loop. Maybe you can help me convince @wiredoverload and @alchemic to do a 2.0 version as well hehe
Cool concept! I like the graphics and how they change between gameplay scenes. I was a bit confused about what some options do, like the training didn't really seem to do anything. The attacks also had a huge windup time which made it feel a bit unsatisfying. Very nice otherwise though!
I really liked the mix of 2d sprites in 3d environment! Fun game overall)
Interesting idea! I enjoy games that have tomogatchi aspects to them like this one. It reminds me a bit of the Pokewalker from Pokemon HGSS, but if it were all in one game. I can't really tell all of the time exactly what the effects of what I'm doing are, so if there was some more visual feedback on that, it'd be really nice.
cute idea, i liked playing as the archer hero. i actually never had a tamagotchi, so i felt a bit lost in that mode. i tried doing various things, but was never sure if it actually had an impact. found several glitches where the herogatchi screen got overlayed with multiple UI elements
Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 12.31.48 PM.png
i think its cool if you wanted to implement a faithful recreation of tamagotchi, but for me personally, i think making that part of the game simpler would have been better. i understand tamagotchi is a sort of long-form experience, so its hard to adapt to a 5 minute game jam experience, but maybe something more like Hades, heheh, where you spend a bit of time upgrading / reconfiguring, then going back out to the fight.
@sakura-magika Yep that's the idea! A micro "meta-progression" game. It wasn't well explained in our description, but if you "harvest" the tamagotchi hero after you train and / or feed it items, you will control a new hero in explore mode that's stronger, faster and beefier (depending on which stat gets trained or fed the most before a harvest will determine which new hero you get to control). Thanks for playing and thanks for your feedback!
I feel like this game was created with a very large scope. And I loved a lot of things about it. It was cool to switch characters after a while and experience something completely new. The strategy part and the action part also played well together. This game surprised me in many ways and that is remarkable.
@j0ye Thanks for playing and thanks for noticing the depth to the game! We all put in long hours and serious effort to try and make our vision for the game come to life. And! We even had additional heroes that didn't end up making it in the jam version! Keep an eye out for our post jam version coming soon (tm)
The hero is so cute.
Fun: Running around trying to survive and kill the goblins while collecting items was pretty fun! I liked that there were melee and ranged enemies to switch things up. Howerver, I think the Tamagotchi mode needed some more instruction / feedback as it didn't seem to matter what I did and there wasn't any feedback other than the big X, which wasn't very fun.
Innovation: I found this game idea really unique and innovative. I love the idea of raising a hero and then doing little RPG dungeons with it. Very cool! One area you could continue to innovate in is the combat system, dodging and attacking are pretty common ideas so maybe try and include some of the Tamagotchi elements like happiness and hunger in the combat system (maybe as buffs?) to change it up a little.
Graphics: Both the Tamagotchi and Exploration graphics were cute and nicely done. I would've liked to see a more consistent style, or some consistent elements between the two however.
Audio: I didn't have any sound for the Tamagotchi section, so adding some simple button press noises would really improve that part of the game! For Exploration, the song melody was nice, but on the WebGL build it sounded very loud and distorted, which too away from the experience.
Was really cool how you could run around and play as them -the graphics were great in both the virtual pet and the explore parts! Cool use of the theme and pretty fun too -definitely a unique creative game -awesome job! :D
Thanks for your comments and feedback on my game, played yours on stream today if you wanted to watch initial thoughts and feedback, it starts here: youtu.be/a12mtQSnQ2o?t=20299
Loved the different characters! Nice work!
@mika314 Aww thank you :)
@tobius Hey thanks for playing! Those are all really good ideas that I'll bring up in our next post jam meeting :) Consistency of aesthetics between the two modes is great advice, we definitely had 2 different artists going at it - so we did what we could. We actually did have audio for the Tamagotchi section but couldn't get it in due to time constraints :(
@chase-of-bass Thanks so much for playing and for your kind words! :)
@lomby I watched your whole playthrough and I was dying laughing at a few spots haha! Impressed you were able to power up your Herogatchi strong enough to beat the dragon! Don't know if anyone else has done it yet. Also you encountered a few things we want to resolve in the post-jam version. For sure dodge roll shouldn't be impacted the way it currently is by raising agility, and there needs to be more clarity around stats and how your Herogatchi is improving. Also, at one point you referred to the game as "Hero Harvest" which is interesting because that was our original name for the game! We ended up changing it to "Herogatchi" during the submission window at the last second lol. Your "compendium" idea at the 6:11:40 mark is really thoughtful and that may just be something we have to implement! Thanks again for taking the time to play and giving us such good feedback! Cheers :beer:
Finally got around to playing yours!
gama.png
Nailed it: - The progression feels good. Especially when I force-feed my wizard enough books to reach level 20 and could shoot fireballs like a machine gun. - The character art is all really nice, especially for the player characters. - The environments are also very nice. I particularly liked the water and tombstones in the swamp. - You nailed the Tamagotchi aesthetic with the goofy little animations (I'm particularly fond of the little ballet movement for agility training) - You got a good amount of scope into the game --- the Tamagotchi minigames, the wave system, melee and ranged enemies, two different areas, a "boss", and three player characters that feel different. Impressive!
Room for improvement: - I didn't really "get" the progression system at first, even after reading all the descriptions (I thought feeding your hero had immediate benefits in Explore mode). An in-game tutorial or help would have been nice, but you already had a pretty massive scope without it and game jams are always really tight on time. - Certain parts were a little tedious. I think feeding the hero had some randomness in how long it took to feed, based on the position of the hero and the position of the food, and with an unlucky roll it was a little extreme haha. - The "2D sprites in a 3D world" look is hard to get right. I think it might help wed the characters and environment better if you went all-in on 3D (like Ten Seconds to Midnight) or had higher-resolution 2D characters (like Paper Mario). That said, you played to your team's strengths and this still looks great for a game jam!
Overall, nice work for 72 hours! Looking forward to seeing what you guys make for next event.
Congratulations on the game! As others mentioned, increasing feedback on the Tamagotchi section would help make it more fun to explore by feel and easier to tell how fast your training is progressing toward a stronger hero when you harvest. I was impressed by the smooth switching between the 2 game modes, and besides a few UI overlay glitches after a death, it worked great!
I laughed to myself when I accidentally rolled off of the level, only the pits in the middle of the level seem to have invisible guard rails.