tinker1175 2024-04-16 02:39
The gameplay itself was fun and the mechanics weren't difficult to use, but the change between 2D art that seemed to be AI generated to 3D top down was a jarring transition
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Thalatta's Grand Heist
By silas-reinagel, Noah Reinagel, jordan-neff, 113hz, Amerigo Gazaway, Gordy Keene, rexoberk, night on mars, HardlyQuinn, Ryan McGrorty, danielyxie, Ryder25 and Joel Prinz
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 644 | 3.51 | 47 | |
| Fun | 910 | 3.11 | 47 | |
| Innovation | 762 | 3.18 | 46 | |
| Theme | 547 | 3.72 | 47 | |
| Graphics | 817 | 3.35 | 47 | |
| Audio | 502 | 3.35 | 44 | |
| Humor | 772 | 2.69 | 41 | |
| Mood | 555 | 3.58 | 45 |
The gameplay itself was fun and the mechanics weren't difficult to use, but the change between 2D art that seemed to be AI generated to 3D top down was a jarring transition
It has a lot of good stuff going for it. I found myself unsure what to do sometimes and the summoning inputs seemed a little long to do so often. I can see how something like this could really be great with more time. Thanks for sharing
Game looked promising but I couldn't figure out how to get to any further after the second room. Very nice intro, thumbs up for making the voice acting !
There's some good puzzles here. I like the underwater temple theme and the summon minigame (although I agree maybe a 4-5 arrow code would have been less taxing on my fingers). However I found myself twice being unable to solve the puzzle two rooms after learning about mechanical advantage (hopefully that's vague enough to avoid being a spoiler). Being able to slide along walls instead of getting stuck would have also been some great QOL.
edit: Also a huge fan of puns. Fin-tastic.
fun puzzle level design, needed more hints though
Great settings for the story! I too would welcome more hints for my smooth brain. Otherwise this looks pretty great and I think that with some extra work, you could make a pretty interesting full game out of it!
Really cool art and story! I got stuck pretty quick and it took me a little while to figure out you could push the boxes. Overall great job.
amazing!!!!!!
Interesting ideas an puzzles... a bit more on the fence regarding intro illustrations feeling a bit AI-made and completely disconnected from the rest.
very beautiful game And also I liked the level design, something reminiscent of a metroidvania
Really one of my fav' so far !! Introduction maybe a bit long but I really loved it !!! Really good job :D
I ended up getting stuck (I think early on with just the torch). The puzzles up to that point felt a bit guess-and-check. Especially with the torches, as you can't see where the correct locations are without making light nearby randomly.
It was an impressive production though to even have voice acting!
Fun little puzzle game! I enjoyed the puzzles towards the end a little more than the early ones, but perhaps that's because I'd learned the mechanics by then. Voice acting was a fun adddition, especially the little quips during gameplay!
Great job on the level design, the mechanics and puzzles really are well thought! Feels like an incredible amount of work was done.
In terms of gameplay, I feel it is a little too dark and having to "spam" the torches is annoying. Happily they don't disappear ^^'
Overall really good job on every aspect!
Screenshot 2024-04-20 231115.png
:(
Overall pretty engaging and good story telling. The main character in game kinda looked like a squid from top down though.
Love the voice acting and trailer!
The game played really well, and I felt compelled to go for a second run after my first one ended in me running out of time (I blame the fake treasure room, lol). The unreadable text was a nice bit of foreshadowing that got me excited for the thing I'd eventually unlock to read them.
My one complaint would probably be that the doors felt a bit too small, and I was regularly just a bit off-center when trying to go through, which was pretty frustrating given the time constraints.
It's quite unfun to fail an exploration puzzle game based on time limit and be forced to fully start again. Did manage to beat it on a second try though.
The movement was annoyingly clunky. Getting stuck at walls and doorways was constant and the turning speed was slow so making adjustments to aim at the correct spot for a spell was very fiddly. Turning the blocks made the camera jitter annoyingly too.
Summoning with key combos felt kinda unnecessary. It works in Helldivers as it's more hectic and having to input the combos in the mids of action is a risk/reward and makes it feel even more hectic. But in this game there is no pressure (except that kinda dumb time limit) or any reason for the inputs to exist really so it just felt like an unnecessary step.
The 2D art looked nice but I have a sneaky suspicion that it was AI generated. If so, you probably should mention it somewhere? I think using AI generated content is a bit of a gray area on the rules. I remember seeing somewhere that it might be allowed now but you might need to opt-out if a category was mainly AI. Still very grey area though but I'd say it'd be at least worth mentioning if so.
The 3D was ok too but it wasn't very clear to look at and tell what was what. The doorways were hard to see. Different blocks like pressure plates and those time pickup plates (after having picked it up) were easy to confuse. Even the pushable blocks and some wall segments looked a bit too similar.
Having two locked doors (and the correct one even being less easily spottable) and then saying you need to summon three books by it was mean.
Screenshot 2024-04-21 at 12.58.15.png
The small delay between correct solution and doors activating didn't feel great. Especially earlier in the room where those pressure plates were hidden beneath the pushable blocks. Of course after getting to know the fact it became less of an issue.
The music was nice and overall the sound effects were quite good. The pickup sound to the time pellets was way too loud compared to everything else. And I think overall the volume level was rather low. The summon code key press sounds only happened when pressing with arrow keys and not when using WASD.
The stream ends quite often glitched out on me an looked like this...
Screenshot 2024-04-21 at 12.57.26.png
Anyways, good job! 👍 And wow what a big team...
**edit:** Just saw someone mention the fake treasure room and yeah, it was super mean. I guess I might have also beat it on my first if I didn't check it out and then proceed to desperately try to open a wrong door with the books. Having a time limit which results in a full game restart and actively tricking the players to wasting time is not a great choice.
Overall a very good puzzle game. I enjoyed it and appreciate all the work that went behind that. I found some puzzles were a bit hard, maybe some hints would have been nice ? I just ended doing random summoning and moving in order to find what to do. I had a lot of troubles going through the doors, if I was not perfectly aligned I just couldn't go through. The sound was also a bit confusing ? The music was not very loud at all but some sounds (like collecting the added time) was very loud.
Wow those were some intense motivational speeches :laughing: I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of content, but I guess that's because of the large team, well done to all of you! :)
Nice game, nice mechanics and simple puzzles. I think that the time mechanics does not bring a lot to the game as I finished with more than 2 minutes I think, and maybe the ending was quite abrupt :) otherwise I enjoyed the experience and it kept me until the end.
Very cool core mechanic of "dialing" the spells, although maybe rebinding them to something that doesnt involve a pinky holding a button would be nice :) Like, just having the player memorise the sequences (maybe making them shorter and also keeping the cheat sheet on Shift for example) and putting them on IJKL to play with two hands on WASD and IJKL. Then even some simple attacking spells could be usable in fast situations, perhaps.
Including a timer was probably not the best idea, because 1) sometimes I just wanted to slow down and appreciate the art and level design and study it a bit, but also 2) the controls weren't the most responsive and I spent a lot of time just trying to get to places or aiming at doors because the player wouldn't "lick" corners. Also, the gear in the wall was just plain hard to see and I saw it too late, so when the time ran out I just honestly didn't want to start it all over.
But I just have to acknowledge the sheer amount of content in this game. All the puzzles, all the level design and planning, effects, sounds for almost everything, screen transitions, little UI touches (I love how the object gradually appears as you dial in the spell), voice acting, jokes, a full-blown story (illustrated with AI art, but I have zero problems with that, most of the art in the game itself is not AI, and you cleverly used a tool to provide a more full experience in short time... except mentioning it somewhere would probably be more wholesome).
The whole thing is just impressive for how complete of a package it is. Great job!
The puzzles are fantastic, but smoother movements and more consistent graphics would have enhance my experience.
Really fun puzzles! I feel like a lot of similar puzzle games don't have the ability to add/remove objects from the puzzles, and that definitely made it feel really unique. I definitely agree with a lot of other comments about the timer, a full restart is really harsh, and I personally am not interested in going back and completing the puzzle after failing the first time, and the helldivers-style inputs didn't really fit the puzzle, I felt like they held me back from being able to actually experiment with the solutions. Overall a lot of fun, I would want to finish the game, it just feels daunting to restart.
Also, if you did use AI to make the initial images, you should probably mention it in the description/opt out of any categories you used AI on, a lot of people are making their own assets from scratch in this jam and they won't get as good of feedback on the art they put jam time into creating if the categories get filled with AI content
Cool story! looks awesome. I liked the puzzles.
impressed with the amount of VO you got in. Top down perspective feels unfortunate for the character, would of liked perhaps more of an angled view. I think the room tech was pretty nice with the rooms outside darkening, and a game where I actually used light as a mechanic. I don't prefer ai art, so it would have been nice if you found some other solution, though the style was mostly consistent-ish - its kind of always a toss up with ai art for consistency.
This was great but at a certain point after I got the unsummon ability, the puzzle became extremely unclear. I just meandered until time ran out.
Overall the art and music were enjoyable, and I liked the VO barks as the antagonist taunted you. The game was very stable and functioned as intended- the puzzle design just became too esoteric at a point.
Great job!
Great atmosphere, voice-overs and puzzles! I liked all the details in the UI and summoning screen, and the mood of the audio. Ran out of time while summoning books to open the door which didn't respond... not clear what went wrong there, so that's a pity. Solid entry overall!
Such an incredibly clean build and huge scope and progressions! You must have all been working really hard! Was so close to the end (I think..!(a couple of statue puzzle stages in)) and ran out of time but really loved the progressions and iterations on the move system and mechanism interactions. Interesting choice with the arrow patterns, but really worked for me. Great work on getting all the dialogue in too! Not just the cutscenes but the constant triggers throughout, it really kept the atmosphere personal and feeling in the middle of something. All the puzzle design was great. Really helped having the audio cues, especially for the room openings which kept the game grounded to be able to follow along when the challenging moments came along to get the feedback, and I liked the cross between the magical eplorative, and reward puzzle feel. Overall a really cohesive game from all departments. Fab job and really well executed!
I really like the game but there was no audio in HTML5 version=(