Promethean Legacy: Fan the Flames by quill18 2020-04-20T15:09:23Z
Fun game! Pretty easy to ensure you never lose, but challenging to try to win in as few turns as possible. Well balanced and enjoyable.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → PolyPickle
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 46 | Keep it alive | Guardian Angel | compo | 422 | 3.53 | 3.65 | 3.86 | 4.24 | 3.05 | 3.51 | 3.08 |
Fun game! Pretty easy to ensure you never lose, but challenging to try to win in as few turns as possible. Well balanced and enjoyable.
Good one, love the PICO-8 and you worked well under its contraints. Upgrades are satisfying.
Biggest problem is that much of your time is spent waiting for the cat to come back down. Takes a very long time at high combo, made me wish there was an upgrade to make it heavier, not lighter. Also, if it lands on you but your not jumping you lose :(
Black screened on my mac after the prince picked a flower, didnt get to the core gameplay.
Movement and jumping feels good, I like how the map gets painted. Seems a little slow paced, I never felt in danger after ~3 minutes most of the evil orbs didnt get close to my tree. and I couldn't figure out what the counters at the top were counting.
A real hidden gem, a metroidvania with a wonderful artstyle. Looks great and snoo is well animated and cute, hope this gets more ratings soon!
Enjoyable to play, and challenging. Fun with numbers ramping up, and pretty humerous. Good job! Your work on the fire shows.
Cute little game, and I love PICO-8. Hope you had fun working with it! I think the crashed plan in the beginning looks great.
Core gameplay itself was not that enjoyable for me, finding nothing but still having to check every door, slowy walking across every screen.
Also, it doesn't particularly resonate with the jams theme to me.
Wait, why is this game linked directly from /games/zero/all? Is this a routing issue?
Fun one, and the voice over is great too. Well done!
Uh oh! Looks like a permission issue on the google drive link!
Good: Music is probably the best thing ever. Everything has a solid, consistant, good looking retro aesthetic. Bad: The core gameplay loop was veryyyy boring. Because meditate spam heals you faster than any enemy in the game can damage you, if you mash it while at half health you cant lose.
Nerd stuff: Without any abilities or effects to play against, there are only two numbers that matter: 'How many turns will it take for the enemy to kill me' and 'How many turns will it take for me to kill them'. The players objective is to find a strategy that makes the second of those two numbers lower than the first. The question for the player is 'How do these abilities impact those numbers'
Meditate basically gives you more than one extra turn for the price of one, even against the game boss, so the first of those two numbers is infinity, and the worst case scenario becomes stalemate. Meditate is OP!
Defence is useless if it lasts a single turn: 3/4 times you add one to your enemies 'timer' and have no impact on your own timer. Even if you block a full attack, which it doesnt seem like it does, you are spending a turn to save less than half a turn. Defence in this state is unusable! If it does something else than what I suspect, maby it is good, but meditate is already a perfect tool. Boosting defence is obviously horrible.
Finally, boost and attack. There were no instructions for how to use these optimally, and boost seemed to stack logarithmically. I found a good balance with two boosts per attack, but hard to tell exactly whats best. This seems like the best way to optimize damage, our second objective
So the core gameplay is: - If health < 50%, meditate - If we have < 2 boosts, boost - Attack
To be fair, this optimization problem of ensuring every ability has a niche and player options are trully dynamic is really difficult to avoid in a JRPG system.
Very funny concept. Well polished and executed as well, with snappy menus and nice sounds. Nice potential in this concept!
The main issue I can point out is the level design. With only one way to die on the left side, there isn't much of a point for the buisnessman to go there. The only possible 'juke' in the game is on the right side, so every round always plays the same way with the buisnessman dancing around the top right corner jump.
Your game looks fun from the screenshots and I would love to try it, but you uploaded the .exe by itself alongside some other files that can't be worked with. Since your using unity and distributing on itchio like me, here is my reccomendation:
In 'Build' Change the target platform to WebGL. Click 'Switch platform' then 'Build' and select a folder with nothing in it. That folder should have some folders in it, and a file called 'index.html'. Zip EVERYTHING here into a zip file, this is your built game!
Now on itch, instead of uploading a windows executable, you can select 'HTML' in 'Kind of project'. Just upload the zip file from the previous step, and you should be good!
I had viewport issues, which you can adjust in build settings. Make sure you tell itchio to detect viewport size automatically. Respond to this with @polypickle and ill help more if needed!
@Shootboots Works now, reviewing it
Good: Love the opening and end sequences, definetly the highlight for this one! I actually would love to play around as that fish from the beginning, the water looked cool. The flag effect on the ship was nice. The theme is a good match as well.
It felt a little unresponsive to pickup the pollutions. It might be more fun if you can pick them up instantly, but increase the spawnrate to compensate. The requirment to hold spacebar was pointless, it might be better if the pollution was automatically picked up without an input, its not really an 'active' proccess and there is no reason not to hold spacebar all game.
Also, I think there is a technical issue with the dimmensions, pollution was spawning partly offscreen and I think the healthbar was cutoff as the game lasted some time after it seemed to be empty, and it was touching the edge. Might be worth googling around to avoid the issue in future projects.
The multitasking fast paced gameplay and music combine to make a really hectic and chaotic mood, and the cannon adds a little bit of fun to the mix. Very challenging, I can only win on easy.
I did enjoy trying to speed read through the prompts and responses and pick out the important information. Some very funny 'slip of the tounges' hidden in there
Fun little game! - Fun to slowly fill the forest with more allies and trees - Menus were sick, especially the title! Very cool.
Here is some feedback: - Is there a benefit to charging up your arrows? Rapidly clicking seemed more effective. - Not being able to use WASD controls was odd, you usually want to include both arrow key and WASD for controls. - The shop menu was clunky to close, especially since you open/close it so often. Maby a shortcut key would be nice. - You should probably not be able to move while the shop is open! It lets you effectively teleport by pausing time and makes speed/needle upgrades purely quality of life.
Overall a fun little game!
Loved this! The two major secrets were great, and its very fun running around town and figuring out all the things you can interact with​
Simple and good attention to detail, I liked the opening and closing sequences. I didnt recieve any score or drops until I was getting overwhelmed towards the end, bug maby?
The game doesnt really get fun until you are forced to use the lighthouse to power up your shots as you start getting overwhelemed, as it is pretty easy to land most shots at maximum fire rate, a hard-limit on your damage output, and there isnt much to do. Once things heat up though, it becomes fun trying to aim while keeping yourself in position.
@itsarjunsinh Fun little game, great first step into game dev! Hope its the beginning of an enjoyable! Here are some fun improvements you can consider: - The number of balls doesnt really matter since they all hit at the same place/time. Maby throw in a random ball at a random location for more difficulty?
Feel like the game didn't start until 500m, after quite some time with very little difficulty. Took a while to reaslize you could swipe, but felt good once I figured that out. Some enemies can be very tricky to see. I like the mechanic where you pop your own balloon, adds some risk to letting enemies even get to close.
Game is cute, fun, and simple. The backgrounds looked nice and gave a sense of progression, though I believe it starts to loop after ~2000 meters and turning very dark, making it harder to see.
Game ramps up slowly, and diffuclty seems to hit all at once. I think the optimal strategy is just to mash 1+2+3 together and block everything if your trying to survive as long as possible. The inclusion of an online leaderboard is sick!
The parrallaxed background was great for the sense of movement and frantic-ness you seemed to be shooting for. The sprites were all cute! The music and sound matched the theme well, perfect for the game.
The problem with this one in my mind is that its just not that fun, with most of the game being spent waiting for the cat to fall back down. Levels also took a long time
Controls were odd, WASD + space would make it very easy to play with one hand. My entire left hand was dedicated to one button.
Also, it didnt seem to make a difference whether you caught it or not. Bug?
Super fun, innovative, and well balanced. I won on my second try with my battery nearly dead, the lights out, my sisters hand all the way across the screen, and dad yelling about music by shutting everything off and just letting the AI score 1-2 rounds since my battery was nearly dead and it was my only 'out'.
Really enjoyable, and looks and sounds good too! Theme was on point and very humerous, my favorite entry so far.
Cute little game! Interesting core mechanic, and the last two levels start getting interesting. I liked the dogs head bobbing.
The sound was a little loud, jarring, and dissonant. Just needs a little polish probably, something to keep in mind for next time.
The ending blurb got a chuckle out of me.
Oh, also, you need to change the name of the game in the unity build settings, right now its 'Pet Game' in the bottom bar.
@spaceguy99 I was able to run it without installing gamejolt using the itchio download.
@developers Great one! Looks and sounds good, and the camera is pretty sweet. Overall, one of the most aesthetically pleasant games from the jam in terms of look and feel.
A few places where the path forward was not very obvious, like when you go right at the two arches and the wall explodes I was very confused and the camera did not work well in that location. Just past this point, you have to go off to your right breaking through a fruit stand, but I thought you could go down the stairs if you go slow enough. I get that that was meant to be a mini-puzzle, but maby thats not the best core gameplay.
Often, you have to go slow and steady, but I feel like a more fast pace with more focus on destruction would be a better match for a rat causing chaos in the bazaar, and just be more fun to play. I don't think difficulty is important when the main appeal of the game is the sweet aesthetic.
The palace approach is also super sick by the way. Overall great job!
@CharlieGray thanks for letting me know, I forgot to publish! Ill fix this now.
@MrFluffySheep That was the main bit of feedback I got from my brother playtesting it, so I added those indicators so you at least know they are there lol. Maby adding the number as well would have been good, I thought about it but was already content with the amount of time I put in.
Glad you enjoyed it!
@gus-the-shark @incd021 If I put more work into this one the aura CD is probably the first thing ill fix.
@charliegray Im actually kicking myself for not thinking of that, I can imagine it now, seems like a great idea
Glad your all having fun!
Very tricky game, the city on top (communications) was permanently ??? which seemed like a bug and made it very difficult. I kept the other two under control fairly well and was a bit more aggressive with the unknown city, but I think it eventually got out of hand and started 'exporting' to my other two. Overall was decently fun.