Game Jam 80x45 Jam # 2

Bingdom

Googledom
The Jam has ended!

Here is the zip

Due to how busy I would be for this week, the voting duration will be extended until Saturday, 15 April. (4 Days)

PM me your votes, up to a maximum of 3 votes. Please rank your votes!
 
Last edited:

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
Reviews in alphabetical order:
Cold by @Barvix - ehhhhh, a philosophical game done right can be really interesting, but here... well, I don't feel it has been done right. Rather than giving questions for player to consider, it comes with ready answers, which are kinda getting more and more confusing later on. I feel like there might have been some idea out there, but it goes over my head.
Also, this entry wastes a perfectly fine opportunity to use Pure Is Not Good trope; e.g. by still allowing the player to advance if they answer the exact opposite of "good" answers. It takes some purity to get things completely wrong, after all.
Finally, the bar system seems wonky - at least twice I passed the level despite having seemingly too few bars. o_O'

Conundrum Castle by @K-BitCRUSH - fine little entry to play, if maybe a tad unvaried and on chaotic side (I still can't quite figure out how these disks movement work, it seemed pretty uneven quite often). I kinda forgot that "Purity" is the theme, only to be reminded at the very end; it feels a bit tacked on to me...

Darkness Wipeout by @John Andrews - that's a decent tower-defense style entry, and the music was well chosen for this one. Quite possibly it's the most advanced and varied of the entries out there. The annoying thing is the text being barely readable (some digits I couldn't make sense of at all, for example 3); it looks like it was hi-res text scaled down rather than font specifically made for this resolution. Also, I couldn't get what some upgrades do, especially the top-middle upgrade named "Upgrade". Sadly, the game gets rather monotonous later on, especially if player accumulates some cash between levels so that they can max-out firing rate and damage near the beginning. Either way, I completed the whole thing.

Dirty Sector v1.5 by @Lukan - it was somewhat fun for the first fun of the first level, the second level was a bit of a chore (and even the chilly music didn't help), I got utterly wiped out in the third level; didn't try again. One thing this game severely lacks - some sort of indicator where are the remaining planets. Without it, I had to search through all this huge, huge map to find out the last remnants and it wasn't fun at all.

Nymphonia by @Storyteller - one thing - the game tells the player to follow the stream, but the branching path on the second area actually contains a chalice I'm supposed to collect, without any indication outside of that room that I'm actually supposed to go there or that there's a chalice to be collected in the first place. Other, much more severe - the three snakes in the third stream-wise area are aligned in a way it probably takes lots of waiting, dodging and/or luck to have the road clear to the next level. The fact that the main character has significantly larger hitbox than her sprite doesn't help, either.

Purify by @Virtual Mage - this game is the very embodiment of purity, and thus deserves a very, very special ranking

Rehab by @Misu - uhhh, I don't really like some design decisions made here, such as skipping unfinished dialogue (I'd have preferred "click to show all -> click to skip" instead of "click to skip, whether fully displayed or not"), making the shooting button the same as downstairs walking (the stairs controls felt particularly wonky in general). The enemies are also unreasonably strong, even early on ("unreasonably strong" also includes ability to strike from behind a wall/door). Dunno how about others, but personally I prefer when I have very limited health (say, 3 or 5 pieces) but with sufficient skill can reliably avoid any damage keep the health full, rather than get exposed to barrage like that.
I got past the first nurse room, but got destroyed shortly afterwards and wasn't motivated to go on. Too bad, because it seems like the story could have been interesting.
Also, it's not truly 80x45, as some pixels are drawn on fractional positions...

Scrubby by @HayManMarc - the game is easy, but somewhat fun to play. The enemies are somewhat varied, there is some balancing between keeping the environment clean and keeping self healthy (granted, the more one advances through the level, the difficulty gradually drops until it becomes a final cleanup). I wouldn't mind seeing a few more enemies and a few more levels of that.

SquareSquared by @shadowspear1 - bounced around in the first level, found a semi-reliable technique to invoke purification blast, but after some wandering around I gave up, because I couldn't clean the ceiling anyhow. Also, this seems like the sort of game that would benefit from smaller levels; otherwise player may reach the point when they need to hunt for the last remaining unclean bit, and that's extremely annoying.

World Purification by @Bingdom - it's not a particularly great game, but it has a good concept and enough variety to keeps things interesting (in particular, each level introduces a new enemy). One thing I found particularly annoying were these impurifiers jumping around and regenerating all too quickly; then the boss came along with the regeneration, too (maybe you could have toned down the regeneration rate?). Aside from that, pretty good entry.

Overall, my final rankings (top 3 will be PM'd too):
  1. Darkness Wipeout by John Andrews
  2. Scrubby by HayManMarc
  3. World Purification by Bingdom (technically non-votable, but still)
  4. Dirty Sector v1.5 by Lukan
  5. Rehab by Misu
  6. Conundrum Castle by K-BitCRUSH
  7. Cold by Barvix
  8. SquareSquared by shadowspear1
  9. Nymphonia
  10. Purify by Virtual Mage
 
V

Virtual Mage

Guest
Reviews in alphabetical order:
Cold by @Barvix - ehhhhh, a philosophical game done right can be really interesting, but here... well, I don't feel it has been done right. Rather than giving questions for player to consider, it comes with ready answers, which are kinda getting more and more confusing later on. I feel like there might have been some idea out there, but it goes over my head.
Also, this entry wastes a perfectly fine opportunity to use Pure Is Not Good trope; e.g. by still allowing the player to advance if they answer the exact opposite of "good" answers. It takes some purity to get things completely wrong, after all.
Finally, the bar system seems wonky - at least twice I passed the level despite having seemingly too few bars. o_O'

Conundrum Castle by @K-BitCRUSH - fine little entry to play, if maybe a tad unvaried and on chaotic side (I still can't quite figure out how these disks movement work, it seemed pretty uneven quite often). I kinda forgot that "Purity" is the theme, only to be reminded at the very end; it feels a bit tacked on to me...

Darkness Wipeout by @John Andrews - that's a decent tower-defense style entry, and the music was well chosen for this one. Quite possibly it's the most advanced and varied of the entries out there. The annoying thing is the text being barely readable (some digits I couldn't make sense of at all, for example 3); it looks like it was hi-res text scaled down rather than font specifically made for this resolution. Also, I couldn't get what some upgrades do, especially the top-middle upgrade named "Upgrade". Sadly, the game gets rather monotonous later on, especially if player accumulates some cash between levels so that they can max-out firing rate and damage near the beginning. Either way, I completed the whole thing.

Dirty Sector v1.5 by @Lukan - it was somewhat fun for the first fun of the first level, the second level was a bit of a chore (and even the chilly music didn't help), I got utterly wiped out in the third level; didn't try again. One thing this game severely lacks - some sort of indicator where are the remaining planets. Without it, I had to search through all this huge, huge map to find out the last remnants and it wasn't fun at all.

Nymphonia by @Storyteller - one thing - the game tells the player to follow the stream, but the branching path on the second area actually contains a chalice I'm supposed to collect, without any indication outside of that room that I'm actually supposed to go there or that there's a chalice to be collected in the first place. Other, much more severe - the three snakes in the third stream-wise area are aligned in a way it probably takes lots of waiting, dodging and/or luck to have the road clear to the next level. The fact that the main character has significantly larger hitbox than her sprite doesn't help, either.

Purify by @Virtual Mage - this game is the very embodiment of purity, and thus deserves a very, very special ranking

Rehab by @Misu - uhhh, I don't really like some design decisions made here, such as skipping unfinished dialogue (I'd have preferred "click to show all -> click to skip" instead of "click to skip, whether fully displayed or not"), making the shooting button the same as downstairs walking (the stairs controls felt particularly wonky in general). The enemies are also unreasonably strong, even early on ("unreasonably strong" also includes ability to strike from behind a wall/door). Dunno how about others, but personally I prefer when I have very limited health (say, 3 or 5 pieces) but with sufficient skill can reliably avoid any damage keep the health full, rather than get exposed to barrage like that.
I got past the first nurse room, but got destroyed shortly afterwards and wasn't motivated to go on. Too bad, because it seems like the story could have been interesting.
Also, it's not truly 80x45, as some pixels are drawn on fractional positions...

Scrubby by @HayManMarc - the game is easy, but somewhat fun to play. The enemies are somewhat varied, there is some balancing between keeping the environment clean and keeping self healthy (granted, the more one advances through the level, the difficulty gradually drops until it becomes a final cleanup). I wouldn't mind seeing a few more enemies and a few more levels of that.

SquareSquared by @shadowspear1 - bounced around in the first level, found a semi-reliable technique to invoke purification blast, but after some wandering around I gave up, because I couldn't clean the ceiling anyhow. Also, this seems like the sort of game that would benefit from smaller levels; otherwise player may reach the point when they need to hunt for the last remaining unclean bit, and that's extremely annoying.

World Purification by @Bingdom - it's not a particularly great game, but it has a good concept and enough variety to keeps things interesting (in particular, each level introduces a new enemy). One thing I found particularly annoying were these impurifiers jumping around and regenerating all too quickly; then the boss came along with the regeneration, too (maybe you could have toned down the regeneration rate?). Aside from that, pretty good entry.

Overall, my final rankings (top 3 will be PM'd too):
  1. Darkness Wipeout by John Andrews
  2. Scrubby by HayManMarc
  3. World Purification by Bingdom (technically non-votable, but still)
  4. Dirty Sector v1.5 by Lukan
  5. Rehab by Misu
  6. Conundrum Castle by K-BitCRUSH
  7. Cold by Barvix
  8. SquareSquared by shadowspear1
  9. Nymphonia
  10. Purify by Virtual Mage
lmao. I'm 10th? o_O I thought I'd be ranked 999th out of the 10 games XD
 
Last edited by a moderator:

John Andrews

Living Enigma
GG everyone! Time to see what those games are made of! :)

Reviews in alphabetical order:
Cold by @Barvix - ehhhhh, a philosophical game done right can be really interesting, but here... well, I don't feel it has been done right. Rather than giving questions for player to consider, it comes with ready answers, which are kinda getting more and more confusing later on. I feel like there might have been some idea out there, but it goes over my head.
Also, this entry wastes a perfectly fine opportunity to use Pure Is Not Good trope; e.g. by still allowing the player to advance if they answer the exact opposite of "good" answers. It takes some purity to get things completely wrong, after all.
Finally, the bar system seems wonky - at least twice I passed the level despite having seemingly too few bars. o_O'

Conundrum Castle by @K-BitCRUSH - fine little entry to play, if maybe a tad unvaried and on chaotic side (I still can't quite figure out how these disks movement work, it seemed pretty uneven quite often). I kinda forgot that "Purity" is the theme, only to be reminded at the very end; it feels a bit tacked on to me...

Darkness Wipeout by @John Andrews - that's a decent tower-defense style entry, and the music was well chosen for this one. Quite possibly it's the most advanced and varied of the entries out there. The annoying thing is the text being barely readable (some digits I couldn't make sense of at all, for example 3); it looks like it was hi-res text scaled down rather than font specifically made for this resolution. Also, I couldn't get what some upgrades do, especially the top-middle upgrade named "Upgrade". Sadly, the game gets rather monotonous later on, especially if player accumulates some cash between levels so that they can max-out firing rate and damage near the beginning. Either way, I completed the whole thing.

Dirty Sector v1.5 by @Lukan - it was somewhat fun for the first fun of the first level, the second level was a bit of a chore (and even the chilly music didn't help), I got utterly wiped out in the third level; didn't try again. One thing this game severely lacks - some sort of indicator where are the remaining planets. Without it, I had to search through all this huge, huge map to find out the last remnants and it wasn't fun at all.

Nymphonia by @Storyteller - one thing - the game tells the player to follow the stream, but the branching path on the second area actually contains a chalice I'm supposed to collect, without any indication outside of that room that I'm actually supposed to go there or that there's a chalice to be collected in the first place. Other, much more severe - the three snakes in the third stream-wise area are aligned in a way it probably takes lots of waiting, dodging and/or luck to have the road clear to the next level. The fact that the main character has significantly larger hitbox than her sprite doesn't help, either.

Purify by @Virtual Mage - this game is the very embodiment of purity, and thus deserves a very, very special ranking

Rehab by @Misu - uhhh, I don't really like some design decisions made here, such as skipping unfinished dialogue (I'd have preferred "click to show all -> click to skip" instead of "click to skip, whether fully displayed or not"), making the shooting button the same as downstairs walking (the stairs controls felt particularly wonky in general). The enemies are also unreasonably strong, even early on ("unreasonably strong" also includes ability to strike from behind a wall/door). Dunno how about others, but personally I prefer when I have very limited health (say, 3 or 5 pieces) but with sufficient skill can reliably avoid any damage keep the health full, rather than get exposed to barrage like that.
I got past the first nurse room, but got destroyed shortly afterwards and wasn't motivated to go on. Too bad, because it seems like the story could have been interesting.
Also, it's not truly 80x45, as some pixels are drawn on fractional positions...

Scrubby by @HayManMarc - the game is easy, but somewhat fun to play. The enemies are somewhat varied, there is some balancing between keeping the environment clean and keeping self healthy (granted, the more one advances through the level, the difficulty gradually drops until it becomes a final cleanup). I wouldn't mind seeing a few more enemies and a few more levels of that.

SquareSquared by @shadowspear1 - bounced around in the first level, found a semi-reliable technique to invoke purification blast, but after some wandering around I gave up, because I couldn't clean the ceiling anyhow. Also, this seems like the sort of game that would benefit from smaller levels; otherwise player may reach the point when they need to hunt for the last remaining unclean bit, and that's extremely annoying.

World Purification by @Bingdom - it's not a particularly great game, but it has a good concept and enough variety to keeps things interesting (in particular, each level introduces a new enemy). One thing I found particularly annoying were these impurifiers jumping around and regenerating all too quickly; then the boss came along with the regeneration, too (maybe you could have toned down the regeneration rate?). Aside from that, pretty good entry.

Overall, my final rankings (top 3 will be PM'd too):
  1. Darkness Wipeout by John Andrews
  2. Scrubby by HayManMarc
  3. World Purification by Bingdom (technically non-votable, but still)
  4. Dirty Sector v1.5 by Lukan
  5. Rehab by Misu
  6. Conundrum Castle by K-BitCRUSH
  7. Cold by Barvix
  8. SquareSquared by shadowspear1
  9. Nymphonia
  10. Purify by Virtual Mage
Thank you a lot man! :D It means the world to me knowing that someone liked my 3-day game :D :D
And yeah LOL the font... And the thing of mantaining your gold after each level was because they got really really hard if you started over with 0 gold :D I wanted the game to be beatable in 1 run even if you played for the first time :)
 
Last edited:
S

Storyteller

Guest
@Alice thank you. I could have sworn I set the collision mask manually to be right even with her. Its always good to have fresh eyes on a project and show you things you missed. Good Deal. I dont think I did too bad for an afternoon's work, still have a lot to learn about GM.
As for the chalice being off to the side, the tree in the second room blocks you from following the stream directly. As for the snakes in the third room, yeah, they are pretty sneaky. I thought the eagles in the next room could be more of a hassle though. Thanks for the feedback, I'll keep it in mind if I work on this again. ;)
 
M

Misu

Guest
My Votes:

1. Scrubby by @HayManMarc
2. World of Purification by Bingdom (DONT SAY THIS DOESNT COUNT @Bingdom CUS IT DOES)
3. Conundrum Castle by @K-BitCRUSH
4. SquareSquared by @shadowspear1
5. Dirty Sector by @Lukan
6. Darkness Wipeout by @John Andrews
7. Cold by @Barvix
8. Nymphonia by @Storyteller
9. Purify by @Virtual Mage

Short Feedbacks
Scrubby
Excellent work. Very fun game and impressively made (thought out) on time as well. I was really confused on what to do with the gray things but it was a challenge and I love it.

World of Purification
Bringing back Mario Sunshine to the game world. Its great, inspiring, and fun. Could use some music though since it felt a bit dead through each level. But it is still Marvelous.

Conundrum Castle
A beautiful fun arcade game with some nice challenges. However, the theme was not entirely emphasize until almost the end. Not a good way to use the theme. But everything else looks great.

SquareSquared
This could have been better since it had great animation and mechanics. Unfortunately it has a generic level design. Each level is a massive room with millions of blocks to clean but thats it. It loses my patiency to do nothing but cleaning an entire level that will take some long time without any real challenges at all. If the elvels were smaller, and had something special challenge in each, would have been the best entry.

Dirty Sector
Lack of artwork but its seems the top-down view in a real 80x45 resolution makes it appealing. game play is simple but goal is pointless. There is no indication whether you are almost done and the moons are badly proportioned. Still, this game was fine by me.

Darkness Wipeout
I screamed for my life after seeing the artwork. Its a total mess up. Text is a bit too hard to read and the use of colours are mediocre. The gameplay was alright though, which is good but it ran so slow on my computer. It almost looks like real lag. Im not happy with it. Plus this is not my kind of game either so its not the best entry for me.

Cold
I already talked with Barvix about this on discord. This game has a wonderful artwork (aside from the wolf humping the grass at the end) and the unintentional aim for philosophy is what made me drawn a bit ... except it did not went well since most of the questions had bias answers (which in terms of philosophy, there is no answer to anything; only a matter of personal agreement). The game felt like it had an exact answer to all that and yet he questions "What is good or bad". The answer is none other than your personal perspective of reality. It can be good, it can be bad, it depends on how you see it. What I dont like about the ending was that the messages indicates that loving yourself and embrace yourself is what relieves the pain... thats not true (thats plain egocentric). According to Buddhism, your own self is the greatest enemy and the mind is too dangerous for yourself to trust. Anything that lies within your thoughts can either lead you the right path or lead you to trouble. Its all a matter of knowing what is best. Yes this feedback is long bu its a way to clarify how controversial this game was... Also the meter is broken, I could pass a 6 energy goal with only 3.

Nymphonia
Eeeeh... This game is very weird... it looks like a discarded idea of a game for Atari. I pass it very quickly without a minute to spare and it was pretty much pointless.

Purify
Oh no.... We got ourselves another Dadio...
 
D

Deleted member 467

Guest
Here are my public thoughts and rankings.

First off I would like to address my game, if I may. It's not meant to be philosophical, at all. Rather, it's more metaphorical in nature (as is my other game Teufel to an extent, I'll talk about that another time for the like, 2 fans of it). All Cold is, is a metaphor for my depression, and what my life has been like these past few months in 2017 where each day is either a new low for me in life or a day where I might feel slightly less depressed. Also, I never said pure was good. "Pure", in that universe, is basically my thoughts and ideas in general or when I feel as though I've hit a new low, which I lightly touch on in (level 2?) where I say "Answer like your creator". I know my answers for "pure" aren't "good", because I myself am not even close to a good person. Regarding the bar system that was a design flaw on my part :| The purity system goes on a scale of -100 to 100, with each question giving you 10 or -10. When messing around with manually editing the purity when first making the game I assumed each bar was on a base 10 scale, which is why the questions give 10 purity. Yeah... turns out I was wrong and the HUD sprite had more than 10 bars, and I didn't feel like doing the math to correct the sprite or how much purity each bar is really worth.

* Conundrum Castle - I think this was more difficult than Bingdom's game, took a while to beat, mainly because that last level was tricky. I did beat all the levels, and I loved it. Though I did nearly quit quite a few times

* Darkness Wipeout - I didn't really get too far in this game mainly because I had no idea what I was doing except shooting what appeared to be zombies. The main turnoff and reason I didn't know what I was doing was because of the text. Like Alice said it looked like text that was being scaled down.

* Dirty Sector - A nice, fun, arcade feeling game. I managed to clear out a few sectors. I must say, the laser is kinda OP at times, not sure if that's good or bad.

*Nymphonia - This one I never got far in. I got to the room where the 3 snakes are and at that point it basically became a game of waiting for the snakes to move out of the way. A minute went by: "Okay, anytime now. I'll get a clear shot"
Five minutes: "O...kay?"
After ten minutes I had to stop playing as there was no way to progress.

* Purify - what...I was interested in this the most as soon as I saw that nostalgic GM8 or GM7 loading screen.

* Rehab - Though I didn't manage to get far in this game the few times I tried I enjoyed it for the most part. My biggest issue was at some points you couldn't help but take damage, which means you're set up to fail. Another issue was when you hit enter while text was still going it skipped to the next slide of text, rather than auto-finishing the one you're on :|

* Scrubby - This has to be my favorite one :) I just love the levels and character design of Scrubby, even though it's simple. More speficially, the face he makes when hurt, and in the credits. I think I would like to see this developed further, with as fun as it is. But that's up to HayManMarc.

*Square Squared - it seems nice but I wasn't really sure what I was doing except changing the colors of blocks, sometimes making rainbows. Never got to clear all the blocks, partly because the jumping was weird. Like Alice said, smaller levels might be better for this, and imo smoother jumping.

Public ranking:
Not available, but I will post after Bingdom announces the winner.
 
@Alice and @Misu, thanks for the feedback! I wish I had more time, that way I could've actually focused on level design and made the game fun/challenging. The only stages that made it into the game were test levels, so that explains why they were boring and tedious.
I'm curious, does anyone know of a game that uses the 'purify' mechanic like I have? Because I'm pretty satisfied with how it works, and (although I say this every time) might want to develop it further, polish it up, and try to make it into a real game.

I'll play and review the games and put my list here when I'm done:
 

DukeSoft

Member
My quick reviews of the games:

COLD [2/10]
Love the initial aesthetics and the music! Was hoping this would be something nice. Turns out its just walk and answer questions? Some questions are even heavily opinion based and this game's telling me that my opinion is wrong... Sorry, I dont like this. At all. It actually made me frown. I wouldn't dare call it a "game". 2 points for the graphics though.


Conundrum Castle [7/10]
Like the graphics! Too bad theres no sound. Took a while to figure out that i had to press enter, as i'm used to Z / X on these type of games. Not a problem anyway.

Its a challenging game, fun little puzzle with some timing involved. It feels random, but its not. The enemies are not really predictable, allthough they do do the same thing in every level. Level 6 was a bit tricky, level 7 felt like you rushed to get some more levels, just like 8 and 9. I gave up on 9 because it started to feel more like luck than a puzzle game. My tips would be to add some more "rewards" to help me stay interested in the game. I didn't really "feel" the need to get to the next level, you know?

Even though its not really a game type I enjoy, I'm giving you a 7/10 because it feels like a complete, working, balanced game.

Darkness Wipeout [7/10]
I like the looks of the game! It was REALLY hard to read the intro so i skipped after a few lines. Started shooting the enemies, nice! I like these kind of "tower defence" games. Didn't take me too long to realize there was an upgrade bar up top since I lost so quickly. I like the music and the gameplay was allright, but you dropped the ball on some bits;

1) (minor) I think there's a bug when starting the game over and over again - I feel like i got to some end bosses / enemies out of other "realms"? Also, the bow man seems to be a gunman with a light bullet at random? It confused me;
https://snag.gy/5RnXwg.jpg

2) Graphics! You could have added a bit more work into the graphics. Enemies, buildings, the grass, everything would look so much better if you used just a tiny bit of shading. Some different shades, a but more wood-like structure in the tower - it would add a LOT to the game.

3) Sound effects.
The constant sound of enemies dying and getting hit really satisfies me in games like these.

4) THE FONT. MY GOD! Its unreadable! Couldn't read the gold, the story, the upgrades were reaaaly hard to read as well. This was a major annoyance.

Without those lower points this would probably be a 9/10, but for now I'm sticking with 7/10. It might very well be worth fixing up the points and putting it out again! I know i would definately try to beat all levels. let me know if you do :)


Dirty Sector V1.5 [3/10]
Hmm... Whats there to say? Feels more like a game than COLD but still, it feels like nothing. I fly around, hold left mouse button to see a spray of red coming out of my ship, I hold the left mouse button on some planets (with wrong collision boxes) and thats it? The sound was annoying and seemed random. No menu, no name, no score.. just a goal in the readme file. Can't give it more than a 3/10. This could have been a lot more, it looks like its really unfinished.

Nymphonia - Storyteller [4/10]
Okay... Starts off fine. Graphics seem okay. Lets see.. I have to move down, I'm using the arrow keys. Next up - I see squirming Z's (I'm guessing snakes?). Lets see what that is. I hit one and the game restarts. The music (oh god the music) starts again. I try to avoid the snakes this time.

I come in the 3rd room, and there is only 1 way, which is blocked by a snake, moving in random directions. Sorry, but i'm not going to wait forever until its gone. I'm hoping I'm missing out on 90% of the game, but I cant tell. Hence the low score.


Purify - Virtual Mage [5/10]
Hahahah! Okay, it gave me a smile. I like this kind of humour. I'm sticking with a 5/10 because you made me laugh. You're not getting the score because its any good, but well, you made me smile and its better than the frown I got from some other games.

Rehab - Misu [6/10]
Nice! Graphics are good. Story is weird, but okay, its a story, and effort went into this! I'm not a big fan of story driven games so this didn't really do much for me. Not being able to read fast didn't help either (enter skipped the story, instead of showing it all). Room for improvement there. I liked the graphics! Too bad it lacked sound. Overall gameplay seemed a bit simple, allthough I liked the stairs idea. Didn't see it before.

Overall, room for some small UX improvements (like different controls - arrow keys and enter are a bad combination), but feels like a fun little game to try. I quit because it seemed to get a little "flat" / simple, and I couldn't find out how to use the gun, and then I died.


Scrubby - HeyManMarc [8/10]

Love it! Simply love it. It feels clean, crisp, smooth, clear, in-style, loved the sound effects, like the gameplay, an overall pleasant experience. Its a satisfying game to play. I feel like something like upgrades would have been nice, because the gameplay seems to not advance after a while. At least there was a nice message on the end! Overall, a short, fun and pleasant experience. And thats what games are for, right? The only remark I have - check out something about chords, harmony and progression in the music. It wasn't bad, but it just sounded a bit off.

SquareSquared [5/10]
Is this not finished? Because it really has potential. The controls, movement and graphics are lovely! It feels really natural to jump around and just feels satisfying. So far I just didn't come further than running through 3 doors. Too bad its unfinished. Really has potential to be something fun!

World Purification [7/10] (not votable?)
Nice! This looks good! Sound effects are neat. Controls were intuitive. At first I thought the floors were just a little visual extra but quickly figured out I had to cleanse everything. Good use of the limited space by going into depth with the millions of colours you have at hand. Most people tend to go for the old, retro, paletteish looks (which are nice) but this works really well as well.

Gameplay was smooth, felt nice. Allthough a bit unbalanced at some points - slow walking enemies were easy to kill, and fast, flying enemies were harder. The running enemies were very hard to see coming and sometimes i'd get hit twice or even 3 times by the same enemy. I also got stuck every now and then trying to walk and jump away. Still, pretty good and pretty fun!


So, without furher ado my top 3:

1) Scrubby

2) Darkness Wipeout

3) Conundrum Castle


Congratulations and thanks everyone for joining :)
 

John Andrews

Living Enigma
Then I shall review since everyone is doing it and I really want to say my opinion :)

Score system:
Poop, Worst, Bad, What?, Ok, Good-ish, Good, Great!, Best!, Awesome!, Wonderful!!, Epic!!, Mighty!!, Perfect!!!.

Cold by @Barvix
Cool art man! When I started the questions I had to answer to advance were ok, then when I got to level 3 the questions were giving me some mixed emotions, and when the background went black and the text said that it was getting cold and all made me feel a bit bad, if you say you put your touch into this game and wanted people to feel weirded out, then you achieved it with me.

Score: Good.

Conundrum Castle by @K-BitCRUSH
Wow! The art is splendid, the gameplay is smooth, good ideas, and when I got to the 6th level I couldn't continue :( I thought there was going to be more things, like more enemies or weapons or something like that, but anyway it was great!

Score: Great!

Dirty Sector by @Lukan
The objective of the game is clear, the enemies are dumb and easy to kill, the same with the planets, something annoying was that I had to fly all around the level to search for planets. I cleared sector 1 and sector 2 and when I got to sector 3 I said: "The same thing again?", I mean to say that there could have been more enemies variations or something, I imagine a light blue giant ship that drops out red ships or something, It's not bad! it's just not as good as I thought it would be, in short: much potential for a game.

Score: Good-ish.

Nymphonia by @Storyteller

Let's get this done... Graphics aren't the best, but they are not bad, they are retro and have some style, the enemies well... no comments, I got the chalice that didn't affect the gameplay at all (maybe you could have thrown it to a snake), since I couldn't finish it, I didn't see the entirety of this game, but it's an OK game.

Score: Ok.

Purify by @Virtual Mage

really?

Score: What?

Scrubby by @HayManMarc

Wow this is gonna get 1st place for sure! Clean gameplay and graphics, fast to learn gameplay, challenging on later levels, and good audio, the only counter was that I expected more levels, but hey! It's still da best! :D

Score: Awesome!

Rehab by @Misu
GrayscaleD! I like it, when I read what the nurse did to a patient wow I got impressed, I get that this guy must be punished to be purified, but it didn't seem like that, but still the theme is clear there, so I liked it, some sound would have been nice tho :)

Score: Great!

SquareSquared by @shadowspear1
Absolutely great graphics, gameplay is boring, since I didn't understood what to do, or how, but well, still good! And as @DukeSoft said, it has lot's of potential :)

Score: Good-ish.

World of Purification by @Bingdom

Wow the graphics dude!!! awesome! the gameplay was ok, it's easy to learn but at the same time you have the challenge of knowing how each enemy behaves, very good! I got to the hypopotamus bossfight and after a loooot of water, I won! :D So gg! :)

Score: Great!



And these are my votings:

1st place: Scrubby
2nd: Conundrum Castle
3rd: Rehab (and World Purification)
4th: Dirty Sector
5th: Cold
6th: SquareSquared
7th: Nimphonia
8th: Purify

Also, the bow man seems to be a gunman with a light bullet at random? It confused me;
https://snag.gy/5RnXwg.jpg
Yeah there's a chance of getting a gunman instead of a bowman. it just affects visuals, same with swordman, you can get a spearman :)
And wow you got swarmed XD, logical since you have 4000+ points and the more score you have, the tougher them enemies become, you could have upgraded the tower and have more hp :)
 
Last edited:

HayManMarc

Member
Wow! Second place by Alice? I must've done something right! :p Thanks for that. Thanks for your suggestions, too. I would've implemented some of your ideas (as I felt the same), but time was not permitting. And a few of your thoughts have given me ideas that I hadn't thought of yet. So thanks for the review!

I'll check the other reviews soon!
 

HayManMarc

Member
Holy cow! Thank you everyone for the rave reviews!! I'm beside myself! I would have said so earlier in my previous post if I had read thru. I had replied to Alice with my phone then failed to post it. When I noticed it on my break (I'm at work), I just went ahead and posted it. I'm on my last break now, 2 more hours, then home to play and review all of YOUR games!!
 
Last edited:

Micah_DS

Member
Just downloaded the zip and I'm about to play everyone's games, but first I wanted to say thanks to everyone for all the reviews so far on Conundrum Castle. :) I'll definitely take everything everyone says into consideration when moving forward with my post-jam version. If anyone is interested, here is my to-do list for the post-jam version:
  • Minor bug: Fix 'flicker' that happens sometimes when transitioning between levels and menu (it's due to my camera code - easy fix)
  • Add option to scale resolution
  • Allow 'X' and 'Space bar' to be used as confirmation buttons
  • Fix up the story and information sections (possibly overhaul the entire menu)
  • Add music and sounds
  • Create more content (buttons to control a new door type, new wall and ground types, enemies, etc.)
  • Scrap existing puzzles in the favor of new and more proper puzzles
  • Modify existing enemy behavior (see my reply to Alice)
  • Add things like a hint of particle trails on fire enemies, sparkles on gems and keys, add transitions between menu and levels as opposed to the current 'dry cuts', etc. (a.k.a. "juice")

- REPLYING TO ALICE ABOUT THE MONSTER MOVEMENT -
(snip )a tad unvaried and on chaotic side (I still can't quite figure out how these disks movement work, it seemed pretty uneven quite often). (snip)
Ah! Allow me to explain, because uneven, yes, but the monsters do move exactly the same every time and there are never any collision oddities - there is no random element. I assume the chaotic feels were mostly due to my terribly designed levels at the end which contained a ton of enemies to dodge, but that still leaves the explanation for the 'uneven' aspect, so I'll explain:

- How the red and blue enemies currently work -
When they hit an obstacle, the only action they take that step is to turn 90 degrees. But if they don't hit an obstacle, they simply move a step in their direction. The red ones always turn clockwise upon collision and the blue ones turn counter-clockwise.
- The change I'm planning to make to those enemies in my post-jam version -
When an enemy hits an obstacle, a 'for' loop will have them rotate until they can move or until it's determined that they are trapped. In this way, there will be no delay since the rotation and movement happen at the same time. I almost liked that they had a delay when they hit a wall, sort of adding some weight to their hit, but yeah, it's not a good design choice for this kind of game.
As you can see, things obviously move in pixels - they don't jump tile by tile, yet the positions they occupy are viewed as if tiles and not pixels, and collisions are determined on a tile level, not a pixel level. This tile data is stored in a DS grid.

Here's a gif showing what it looks like when I turn on drawing of the DS grid data alongside the entities:


The reason I did this was to easily ensure no two or more entities would be able to occupy the same space.
Each entity basically 'reserves' its spot as soon as it has decided it can move there. Without this, entities could easily see the same open spot and begin movement, only to later find they chose the same spot. The DS grid way offers an immediate 'spot taken' or 'spot free', so it avoids this problem.

Not sure if this will be news to anyone, but there it is in case it is.

- EXPLAINING CONUNDRUM CASTLE'S THEME USAGE -

I feel the need to say the following for anyone who doesn't see a strong enough use of the theme in my game:
Theme: "Purification"
Application: The gems are cursed. Purify the curse on all the gems.
How: You are a wizard with the power of purification. Whatever you touch is purified.
Why: The curse has spawned monsters in the castle treasury, making the treasury too dangerous to use. Monsters live because of the dark energy of the curse.
What about..: Nope, you can't purify monsters by touching them because the gems are the source of their power.

I have completed games for 3 jams so far, but every time I've had people say the theme wasn't strong or even sometimes claiming the theme wasn't even there at all. :( My problem is, yes, each time my theme usage has not been extremely strong, however, it's not nearly as non-existent as people usually claim. But what is non-existent is my ability to let the player know exactly what it is they are seeing, so I'll have to work on that.

In other words, I'm never ignoring the theme. I just have trouble conveying the theme. Also, I feel it was the most fun idea I had out of my other ones. Perhaps I'll get better at this after a few more jams.


- MY OTHER THEME-RELATED GAME IDEAS THAT I REJECTED -

It may be true that I could've had a stronger theme using one of these ideas, but as I said above, I felt the one I went with offered the most fun.
  • Water Purification Simulator 2017:
    Fill up a water purifier and watch the water get purified.... wow, it's so cool!
    (The title of this idea was actually given by a friend at my work, and yes, it was just a joke, not a serious suggestion)
  • Some puzzle game:
    Somewhat like Lights Out (sort of). You're a scientist working to separate two samples which contaminated each other, thus purifying them. Here's a conceptual pic I made during the jam:

    And no, I had no idea how it would work, which is the main reason I scrapped it. :p
  • Orderly for the Elderly: (rejected because it was too rude)
    In a nursing home for the elderly, the elderly have great trouble refraining from passing gas, so it's your job to use your mighty air freshening spray bottle on the menacing green clouds they emit, purifying the air.
    (Note that I was very close to doing this one, but it was just too disgusting, I couldn't bring myself to do it)
  • Making Amends:
    Play the role of someone with a criminal past, looking to purify themselves of their past by helping people in some way.
  • Company Network Virus:
    There's a virus spreading and contaminating all the computers in a massive company building! Quickly, take drastic measures and rip out the infected computers and smash them to bits! Can you stop the spread? How many computers can you save?
 
S

Storyteller

Guest
@Barvix - Cold
I got through the first two levels, but on the third it seems to be reversed from what most would think are 'correct'. It is an interesting and philosophical experiment. It reminds me of the start of "tactics ogre: let us cling together", that it could be part of character development fora larger game. I do hope you feel better.

@K-BitCRUSH - Conundrum Castle
this is an interesting sokoban mutation. pretty nifty, though at level 5 I could not get past the entry way. Im sure there is some trick there, but I couldn't find it. Pretty neat overall.

@John Andrews - Darkness Wipeout
interesting, Im apparently terrible, I could not get past the first level, lol. some good art in there, you used the canvas well with the colors you used.

@Lukan - Dirty Sector
played this for a fat minute!
very nice. cleared sector 1. Game got a lot easier after I switched to full screen. Simple, direct, nice arcade/asteroids feel. Would have liked this on an old-school knob type control like Tempest had. Well done.

@Virtual Mage - Purify
ok then. you deserve an internet. a dark, dismal and put upon internet full of social justice warriors and candy that burns your mouth and is sour. still, I have beaten your game.

@Misu - Rehab
trippy. I died after I ran out of bullets. enemies were hitting me from the other side of the wall. I think I did something in the wrong order, I ran out of keys. There was a note floating in the air I couldn't quite reach though. Interesting concept.

@HayManMarc - Scrubby
I never realized you could have so much fun playing a dish sponge. Very well done. I beat this and had a good time doing so. Only a couple of things Id change, maybe make the clean-up pad go a little bit quicker and possibly add a score or game progress indicator.
This game is Good Clean Fun!

@shadowspear1 - SquareSquared
Interesting. very fluid but I had trouble keeping control of the guy. might have something there.

My votes

#1 Scrubby
#2 Dirty Sector
#3 Conundrum Castle


Notes on Nymphonia
Thank you guys for the feedback. Im happy to have earned my "I participated' badge, lol. I did better than I expected. Its been awhile since I really used GM and this gave me a chance to do something.. with purpose, not just experiment. I only had 1 day free to work on this, but I got a few pieces of code put together I can use later. Namely room gates that carry you from room to room. I also got to try out the new tile map system a bit, I learned a lot.

About the snakes in room 3, you can leave and come back in the room to get the snake to move where you want, it takes... about 2 minutes or so for me usually. There are only two rooms after that, and one is the final room you take the chalice to. I was going for an 'atari' feel, ET or Adventure. I think I captured that.

That said, you guys made some awesome little games. very very cool! thanks for letting me jam with you guys!
 

HayManMarc

Member
Apologies. I wasn't able to get to playing and reviewing tonight. Too much family stuff. Hopefully tomorrow.

I also want to respond to the comments I've received so far. I can't say enough how ecstatic I feel to the response "Scrubby" received. It's wonderful - thank you so much!!
 

Bingdom

Googledom
If anyone wants to vote for my game, you can if you want. I wasn't sure if the host was even allowed to post on their own Jam. It seems like everyone is cool with that. :)

Sorry for the confusion guys!
 

Micah_DS

Member
~ RANKING ~
1st - Scrubby by @HayManMarc
2nd - World Purification by @Bingdom
3rd - SquareSquared by @shadowspear1
4th - Rehab by @Misu
5th - Cold by @Barvix
6th - Dirty Sector by @Lukan
7th - Nymphonia by @Storyteller
8th - Darkness Wipeout by @John Andrews
9th - Purify by @Virtual Mage


~ REVIEWS ~
COLD by Barvix

"For here, you need at least 7 bars.."
*gets 4*
"You have 4 bars, excellent!"
*game continues*

"You need at least 10 bars.."
*gets 4 again*
"You have 4 bars, excellent!"
*wins game*

GG! BEAST GAEM! (see what I did there? Beast? Wolf? This is where you laugh...)

Bad jokes (and bug) aside, it has all-around good presentation, fitting music, fairly intriguing dialogue, and a satisfying conclusion. The gameplay is very minimal, but it was still interesting enough to be entertaining. Your wolf animations are also nice. I like how the wolf actually does slow down later when saying it's so cold that it's getting harder to move. Also, as you progress, the appearances of everything around the wolf grows darker and the questions become darker as well, so it seems like some thought went into it. It is a short journey of self-purification from dark things which can loom deep inside a person from an unforgiving world, and on that note, I'm very glad of the ending. Nice job!
DARKNESS WIPEOUT by John Andrews
Prepare for some negative criticisms. Even though they might not sound nice, I hope they are helpful.

First off, the game really needs to pause when the upgrade tab is open, so you can have some time to look around, see what the options are, and decide what you want. Also, it should've been a button press to open/close the upgrade tab, because when you move up for the upgrades, so does your turret. The text is often almost impossible to read due to the background. A fix for this would be to have a textbox of sorts which goes behind the text to make it more readable.

With the negative out of the way, it was pretty fun, though very hard. I made it past zone 1 but couldn't get past the desert. I like the transitions for the story, how the fire begins to show through. I dig your music choice.
DIRTY SECTOR by Lukan
I beat sector 1 and 2 with ease and then BOOM, sector 3 kicked it up a bunch of notches with new enemy ships and a TON of them. Despite my greatest efforts, I died, then I realized it reset the game, not just the sector. It was at that point that I lost all will to continue playing, haha. A proper "game over" notification would have been good.

But being able to destroy planets is a plus in my book, and the planets looked cool and it was a nice touch with the orbiting moons and such. Also, enemy AI did the job well enough. Though I didn't find it as fun as I expected I would, it was still fun enough for a short play.
NYMPHONIA by Storyteller
Don't take this wrongly, but it feels like a troll game. You tell the player to follow the stream, but you need the chalice which is not obtained if you follow the directions. Thankfully, being the explorer that I am, I went off to see what was over there, so that was no issue, but that snake was a different story. Oh man that snake really didn't want to get out of the way. Had to wait for luck to be on my side so I could get through. Thankfully, the game only has 6 game screens (I think), so I beat it shortly after getting past that snake.

Collisions are pretty rough with the "sticky walls" issue. Better collisions would've gone a long way. I gotta say though, I love the graphics. The game gives faint Zelda feels, and I love Zelda something hardcore. And the story is very minimal but it goes with the theme well.
PURIFY by Virtual Mage
A glorious work of art. Beauty in black and white. Perfect simplicity. 2-bit graphics cleverly saying, "two-bit game". What genius hilarity! The amazing power I felt from a single click, saving the world. What immense power! Mwa ha hah haa!

*world became corrupt again.. some power-thirsty jerk clicked another button*

Dag nab!!
EDIT: Oh, realized it's 1-bit graphics and my joke is ruined.... aw well.
REHAB by Misu
Unfortunately, I didn't have the patience to beat the entire thing. I got to the huge boss thing and had a mini rage quit moment, LOL. BTW, when you jump, it's obvious you made the mistake of not properly setting the resolution to actual 80x45. I took a screenshot just to be sure my eyes weren't lying to me, and the pixel alignment proved I was correct. But since your graphics follow the 80x45 rule, just not your view resolution, I think it's fine and not a big deal, but just giving a heads up to let you know.

Moving on, I'm so used to buttons making text finish immediately or to at least go faster, but with yours it skips to the next part without even finishing. This was a bit annoying, as I had to wait for the lines to appear, and I wanted to read everything because I found it quite interesting. You're very strong in your story bits. Good work on that.

It was also a pretty fun challenge, even though the end was overkill. Your take on purification was unique and I liked it.
SCRUBBY by HayManMarc
Exceptional!

Even the intro stuff was presented super nicely! I think it's genius that the help file showed the bottom text cut off, giving a signal without any arrow pointing or anything, letting the player know they need to press down to see more, and boom, yep, help starts scrolling. And this made me wonder why in the world didn't I think to have scrolling help or text in my game? That would've helped my game A LOT. I could've put my entire story in there. So anyway, just saying that's a simple but seriously great idea there! Good use of space, which is largely what this jam is all about, and it feels just fine.

And that's just my praise for the menu, haha. The gameplay is really good! The concept is imo the best out of all of the games, fitting well with the theme of purification and also being very enjoyable and fleshed out nicely. My only gripe is you move so fast it can be a little annoying trying to line up with some enemies to scrub them out of existence without feeling too much pain. Still, it was a lot of fun and challenging enough that I died once and had some very close calls on the final level.

00001010 / 00001010 - would scrub again!
SQUARESQUARED by shadowspear1
Alright, let's start off with the error you get if you try to use the exit door, LOL:
___________________________________________
###############################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object oTitleDoor:
Unexisting room number: -1
at gml_Object_oTitleDoor_Step_0
###############################################

But anyway, for roughly 12 hours of work, this is seriously nice! First I played the main thing (or what seemed to be the main game) and thought it was kinda okay, but then I pressed END to play around in the test level and I had so much fun bouncing around purifying all the blocks!

Too bad you didn't have the time to make this more complete. I love the use of colors. The nice fades and tones were very pleasing in the backgrounds and the purification blasts were pretty pretty. The juice is definitely here, which is certainly more than I can say for my dry-as-a-desert game, haha (definitely going to fix that on post-jam version though).

I also noticed you took the time to make a secret passage (not in the test level). I'd love to play a more fleshed out version of this game. The engine feels solid and the mechanics are great.
WORLD PURIFICATION by Bingdom
Wow, bold enough to go full screen! You're literally the only one to do this, and the game still looks great! I had both fun and frustration here, but it was mostly good frustration. I died an embarrassing amount of times. Some of those enemies were quick to appear and fast to smack me a good one.

Maybe a stupid question, but did you make this during the jam time? It's really nice! The game has some great flare, nice style. The camera moves very nicely with the mouse scope thingy. The purification mechanic was pretty cool, and the way you introduced new enemies and spikes along the way was very spot on game design. I hope everyone else gave your game a shot too! And if not a shot, maybe at least a spray..? (Uh, sometimes I think I'm clever and funny, so I say stupid stuff like this...)

Cheers everyone! I hope to see you all (and more) in the 80x45 Jam #3? :p
And lastly, I know it's too late, but I want to say that I really hope @Nocturne will still post his game?? :)

EDIT:
If anyone wants to vote for my game, you can if you want. I wasn't sure if the host was even allowed to post on their own Jam. It seems everyone is cool with that. :)
Ah.. I literally posted right when you did... shoot, uh, maybe I should edit to change my votes then?...
Uh, I really feel conflicted, because it would change my top 3... I probably won't change anything and I hope that's okay.. feeling so conflicted
:confused:

In the end, I decided to modify my votes to accommodate Bingdom's game (PM'd votes again).
 
Last edited:
D

Deleted member 467

Guest
@K-BitCRUSH Thank you for the review, which has led me to find a bug. Before when people said they could pass levels with less bars than needed I thought they meant that in the sense of the purity not being aligned right with the bars on top.

Apparently it was because I was using a scale based on 100, and using a base scale of 10 per bar on top (even though there was more than 10 :| )

On level 5 I accidentally told my game that you need 10 purity to pass the level, which translates to 1 bar :|
On level 4 it was 8 (not even a bar!)
Level 3 is 5 (half a bar)
Level 2 is 4...

Apparently the only level where the purity works... is the first level where I say you need 30 purity (or 3 bars)...

K-bitCRUSH, had your example been something different I might not have even looked into this. I think just because you said you passed Level 5 with 4 bars is the moment I realized I may have actually messed up something. Like I said before, I thought they meant the bars on top weren't aligned or something :| I apologize for my confusion in understanding the issue, and for this bug being present.

Will it be fixed? Probably not. :| I have another game right now that needs way more attention to make up for the lack of work in the past 6 months.
 
V

Virtual Mage

Guest
@Virtual Mage - Purify
ok then. you deserve an internet. a dark, dismal and put upon internet full of social justice warriors and candy that burns your mouth and is sour. still, I have beaten your game.
Meh. I guess I won't join another jam :T It just made the whole community hate me. literally.
 

Bingdom

Googledom
Ah.. I literally posted right when you did... shoot, uh, maybe I should edit to change my votes then?...
Uh, I really feel conflicted, because it would change my top 3... I probably won't change anything and I hope that's okay.. feeling so conflicted :confused:
You still got plenty of time to vote. Feel free to make adjustments. I'll announce that voting has ended and I'll start counting at that point.

Edit: I'm having a quick read through the reviews and I'm really surprised to see that people enjoy my graphics (I thought I was bad). :p
 
Last edited:
M

Misu

Guest
Meh. I guess I won't join another jam :T It just made the whole community hate me. literally.
I dont think thats hate. Plus most criticism can be harsh but its not personally to you, its just your game and thats the way how you learn to improve your game development; by learning from your mistakes
 
D

dj_midknight

Guest
Cold - 5/10
Well I think it accomplished its design goal. I didnt particularly agree with the ranking of the questions they do not reflect my feelings and that is what it is. Didnt seem fun though. Given the resolution limits the graphics were acceptable.

Conundrum Castle - 8/10
Lv 1-4 play as expected, lv5 did not expect that monster to flip around and get me. Ok I am officially stuck on lv5, graphics were done well. Game mechanics made sense. Levels are more challenging than expected. Feels like an old GBC game. Nice.

Darkness wipeout - 5/10
Font very hard to read. Music is way too loud. Id probably set it so that holding down mouse button automatically fires.

Dirty Sector - 6/10
Gameplay simple enough. Graphics and sounds were fine. Adding a score or win condition would have made a big difference here.

Nymphonia - 4/10
Nymph way too big, graphics are poor even at this resolution. Couldnt get past 3rd room the one snake just wouldn't move far enough to sneak past it.

Purify - ???
Looks like a potato...

Rehab - 7/10
Interesting shading. Challenging. Enemies can shoot through walls. Dont think that was intended.

Scrubby - 9/10
Frantically running around chasing brown dots. Gotta watch that S bar or you die. Silly game and that look in scrubbys face when he gets hit is EPIC. Adding time based score would probably push this to a 10.

Square Squared - 6/10
General concept is ok. Couldnt quite figure out the timing on the jump special, but I did get it a few times. Collisions were accourate, add some other objectives and this could be really fun.
 
D

Deleted member 467

Guest
@dj_midknight On level 5 (I'm assuming this is the part you're stuck at, if not I can help out with others) you have to get the timing down and basically do this twice in the level

 
D

dj_midknight

Guest
Yes that was the spot. Not getting to the latter levels didn't hurt my opinion of the game though. Well done sir.
 
M

Misu

Guest
@dj_midknight The bullets dont go through walls. They get destroyed as they go touch it but just a fun note that the collision mask is set to very small just to make it easier for the character to dodge them.

As for the bullet stick, it is tended to go through walls. Just so you know
 
S

Storyteller

Guest
Meh. I guess I won't join another jam :T It just made the whole community hate me. literally.
I was really just poking fun at you.no worries, sometimes you come in late and dont have much time to work. no need to be so serious ok?
 

HayManMarc

Member
My pre-review disclaimer:

I review games subjectively. I can't help it. I'm not a professional reviewer. I like what I like, and I don't like what I don't like. That's just how people are.
I want to give my honest opinion, whether good or bad, light or heavy, because I feel that a developer needs to be aware of all criticisms. Personally, I find it very important to hear what people didn't like about the things I've tried to make. By listening critically with an open mind, I've been able to improve my own design and development processes over the years. I think, and you may agree if you've seen any of my previous Jam entries, that Scrubby may be a testament to that.
I also have a tendency to give advice, when I probably don't really know what I'm talking about. I don't play games enough to be anywhere close to even kinda knowing anything about games. All my game playing was had 20 years ago. --sigh-- With that knowledge, I hope you understand my low level of patience and high tendency for rage quit. The reason for rage quit is mostly me, not you.
And I'm only halfway an intermediate programmer of GML, which is the only language that I sorta halfway know this side of American English.
So, please, don't read these reviews as lectures or scoldings. I try to make jokes, and sometimes I just end up biting my foot. If you read something in your review that seems mean, it's meant as a joke, a prod, a poke, as you would among friends.
You are my peers and I respect you all.

This was a nice event. I liked the smallish amount of entries – what was it, ten games? It makes playing and reviewing much more enjoyable, in my opinion.


The Reviews ---


Cold by Barvix
Personally, I don't care much for these types of games, but for what it's worth, I'll try to review it. It's a nice gesture, to try to spread words and thoughts of encouragement, and I commend you on that. However, you should probably better inform the player that they should try to answer the questions as they think a depressed person would, not answer them honestly as yourself. I figured it out on my own when I got some obvious answers incorrect and had to replay the level. Then the next level questions were similar, and it dawned on me.
Aesthetically, the gfx were pretty nice, but the non-stop bobbing of the wolf was a bit distracting. Also, I felt that user input for moving to the next question was pointless – it could've been automatic without taking anything away from the experience, imo. The points for answering the questions didn't seem to line up with the meter boxes – sometimes they were half-filled. Not sure if that was intentional. Other than that, everything seemed technically sound and worked well. The music fit well with the game, too. Also, nice touch at the end with the change of atmosphere, visually.
Depression is a real and serious condition. If you are feeling depressed, you have my sympathies. When depression is severe and hinders your everyday, normal life, it's important to seek out professional medical attention. I've been there (to a minor degree), and it helped me.


Conundrum Castle by K-BitCRUSH
Okay – right off the bat, this game pushed my pet-peeve button. I don't read lightning fast and I like to look things over. When the screen has text and then changes too quickly, I end up not being able to read everything. That is extremely annoying to me. (No offense, just letting you know. I can't be the only one like this, right?)
Anyway, level 5 was way harder than level 4, then level 6 was when I rage quit. :p
The gfx were great, totally understood what things were.
I understood the puzzle-y gameplay for the most part, but I couldn't quite get a grip on what to expect from the fireball's movement. Sometimes they went around corners, sometimes they didn't. It was a little confusing. It boiled down to too much trial and error, which becomes not-so-fun to me. After dying so many times in level 6, I just couldn't take it anymore, sorry.
Too bad there was no sound, but understandable in a 72 hour jam. It's hard to get everything done.
I really liked the grid-based player movement. It was very smooth and seemed flawless.
This game has a lot of potential, in my opinion. I think you should continue developing it.


Darkness Wipeout by John Andrews
Nice idea, but it was too time consuming to keep opening up the upgrades tab to get something and keep fighting off enemies. Also, not knowing what you could get (as there were no costs or bank amounts that I noticed) and whether you actually got what you clicked (no audio or visual feedback when making a selection), it felt like too much of a crap shoot.
The gfx seemed okay, but could've used some polishing here and there. I had a hard time reading the text font, even moreso when there were busy graphics behind it. Something I like to do is throw an easy, draw_rectangle with some alpha behind text to make it easier to see.
Despite this criticism, I can appreciate the large amount of work that must have been put into this. All the upgrades, the music, the artwork. It seems the short timeframe got the best of the game's scope, if you catch my meaning. Scope is something I've struggled with for many, many, MANY jams.


Dirty Sector v1.5 by Lukan the Spell Weaver
Is this the “Highway to the Danger Storm”? (Dumb 80's reference, sorry.)
Those pesky planets with their alien species and stuff cluttering up my space! How dare they!! Don't they know it's MY personal space? Sheesh.
I liked this and was jealous of the idea the first second I saw it. (Though, the whole genocide thing was kinda iffy.) Then, I played an early test version and I still liked it. But I'm kind of a sucker for space shoot 'em ups.
This has an ironic, adorable cuteness to it with the cartoony effects of non-floaty movement, the screenshake while thrusting, and the light, bippy music juxtaposed against the premise of galactic genocide. That screenshake!-- It was like space was a big, bumpy road! Lol
The graphics were great, reminicient of the old space games like Galaga. I liked the use of grid lines – making the game feel more like 'sectors'. Some alpha on those lines would've been nice, I think. The planets looked really cool for how small they were (pixels), and having orbiting moons was a nice, added bonus to the visuals. It's amazing what one little, simple animation can do for a game. Weapons fire wasn't as great as I would have liked. When close to a planet, the stream of bullets lacked movement, visually.
I made it to Sector 3 and was quickly dispatched by the purples. When the game resumed, I think it must have started over because the baddies were back to being red. That's when I stopped playing.
Mouse control was a little weird, but I felt it added another level of quirkiness to an already ridiculous premise. (I say this in a good way, just to be clear.) All in all, it was really fun to play, but in the end, felt a bit pointless with no scoreboard (or something) to refer to.


Nymphonia by Storyteller
Waiting for some snakes to randomly choose to leave the pathway isn't fun to me. There was nothing I could do except wait and hope it got out of the way. This sort of thing gives the player an annoying lack of control and will kill any game's gameplay.
When I finally made it past (I was so close to rage quit), I easily avoided the eagles and made it to the... castle? (I can't remember) where they told me I needed a chalice. Wasn't sure what to do, so I decided to go back the way I came. When I left the screen, I ended up back where the game started... huh? I was too confused at this point. Did I die and have to start over? Did I time warp? Or was this the next level?
There was no way I was going to sit through the aimless snakes again, so this was where I quit playing. The music wasn't quite to my liking, either, unfortunately.
I do appreciate the time and effort put into the game. The graphics all represented themselves well enough, I thought, tho the player character seemed like it was too long (tall), making it feel inconsistent with the rest of the sprites.


Purify by Virtual Mage
GG HP! WORLD SAVED!


Rehab by Misu the White, Calico Cat
Nice job with the dialogue and it's implementation. That worked well.
I'm not a big fan of the control scheme. It seemed a little unintuitive, if that's even a word.
I liked how things kept referencing the nurse. Good humor work, there.
Gfx were pretty good, but no color was an interesting choice.
The hell of bullets was probably too much. Made the game less enjoyable, imo, since I couldn't get past any of the baddies. Thus, rage quit. --sad face--
No sounds, either. Too bad.

Oh, and the staircase is buggy, btw. :p But kudos to the effort. Stairs are a pain to code, from my experience.


SquareSquared by shadowspear1
Obviously an unfinished concept, but a pretty good concept, nonetheless. I liked the color effects going on and the character animations. But there's really not enough here to know how the gameplay would be like. If you're going for a Sonic-ish speed type of thing, my advice is to take special care in your level design. Don't make too many traps that bring the player too much, frequent grief. Games are for fun, not frustration, imo.
BTW, check your collisions. I found myself inside a wall when I jumped into it off a ledge. I couldn't get out and had to close and restart the game. (Only happened once, tho.) Also, not sure what happened, but for some reason I would just suddenly be in a completely different room/level. It was strange. The game concept and potential is great, tho.


World Purification by Bingdom
Cool idea! I like the color change as the cleaning mechanism. I kinda wished there was some kind of feedback letting me know that a piece of land was all the way cleaned so I wouldn't have to guess and risk needing to come back for it, searching for the one or two strays that are hard to distinguish from clean land.
Punishment for failure was a bit harsh, imo. Falling started the level completely over. Being able to maintain the progress made (such as the cleaned land and baddies), or having checkpoints, or respawning at the place of death, would have alleviated that a bit.
The gfx were really great. Loved all the colors – the way the land and the baddies 'cleaned up'. The player character was quirky, but in a good way, and animated pretty well.
I made it to the flying baddies, but sadly I was no match to their evil ways. They forced me to rage quit. They forced me. Honest.


Submarine Game by The Nocturne
Oh, such sadness. I was so looking forward to seeing this. I had started something similar long ago, but mine was over-scoped for my own skill level. Hopefully, someday, I will get back to that one.
Will this game get to “playable demo” status soon, or at all? Please don't discard the idea and its progress. I love me some arcade-ish, submarine, side-view action! [[ @Nocturne :) ]]


Scrubby by HayManMarc
Cool game, brah. Seriously though, I will respond to your comments about Scrubby tomorrow or the next day, and maybe write up a little post-mortem, if anyone is interested in that. I think it would be fun to write. Hell, I'll probably just do it anyway. :)

Cheers!

(EDIT: Whoops. I forgot to include my rankings...)

Rankings:

1st Place: Conundrum Castle by K-BitCRUSH
2nd Place: World Purification by Bingdom
3rd Place: Rehab by Misu

4. Darkness Wipeout by John Andrews
5. Dirty Sector v1.5 by Lukan
6. Cold by Barvix
7. SquareSquared by shadowspear1
8. Nymphonia by Storyteller
9. Submarine Game by Nocturne

999. Purify by Virtual Mage

:duck:&:pickle:
 
Last edited:

John Andrews

Living Enigma
I had a hard time reading the text font
Oh YES! THAT FONt! (well at least it's better than my penmanship :p)
All the upgrades, the music, the artwork. It seems the short timeframe got the best of the game's scope
Yes that was the whole point of the game, content, but almost nobody goes after the desert so they dont see even 20% of the game o_O but still! The point of this is having fun making and playing games, and thanks I really liked the honesty in your reviews :) pretty unique.
999. Purify by Virtual Mage
Most accurate position for now @Virtual Mage ;)
 

Micah_DS

Member
Okay – right off the bat, this game pushed my pet-peeve button. I don't read lightning fast and I like to look things over. When the screen has text and then changes too quickly, I end up not being able to read everything. That is extremely annoying to me. (No offense, just letting you know. I can't be the only one like this, right?)
Anyway, level 5 was way harder than level 4, then level 6 was when I rage quit. :p
The gfx were great, totally understood what things were.
I understood the puzzle-y gameplay for the most part, but I couldn't quite get a grip on what to expect from the fireball's movement. Sometimes they went around corners, sometimes they didn't. It was a little confusing. It boiled down to too much trial and error, which becomes not-so-fun to me. After dying so many times in level 6, I just couldn't take it anymore, sorry.
Too bad there was no sound, but understandable in a 72 hour jam. It's hard to get everything done.
I really liked the grid-based player movement. It was very smooth and seemed flawless.
This game has a lot of potential, in my opinion. I think you should continue developing it.
I'm very glad for your honest feedback. I agree that the intro text goes by too fast. Sorry. I'll plan on fixing that in my post-jam version. And the 'win' and 'fail' level messages will change slightly as well, allowing the player to skip past them by pressing a button, so I can make them stay longer as well. I realize I didn't give the player proper control to take things at their own pace.

And thanks to multiple feedbacks, I also realized that I should have designed the enemies differently in a way that shows a faced direction instead of always spinning, so I'm planning to change their design. They actually have very simple and predictable movements though: When the red one hits a wall, it rotates clockwise 90 degrees until the way is clear. Likewise, the blue one rotates counter-clockwise. But it appears it was confusing because of my oversight on showing a faced direction.
I had hoped that the first level would introduce players to see and understand their movements, but again, an oversight on my part, because how would the player know it was important to watch the enemies? I bet most everyone just focused on the gems and ignored the enemies, and rightly so.

BTW, on level 6, there is one way to win and basically four things to try with the blocks. In my code, I have hint titles for the first seven levels. The title for level 6 was "don't trap them".
EDIT: Oh wow, just discovered there's more than one way to win level 6..
 
Last edited:

HayManMarc

Member
I felt I should reply to your comments about Scrubby, so here we go. I really appreciate all the kind words and suggestions you've given. I look back at my reviews of the games now and feel like I was too blunt and negative. I hope they were okay and I didn't offend anyone.

I was thinking about making a Post Mortem of Scrubby, but this ended up being the post mortem, too, in a way. So, read on and listen to me tell on myself while I point out the flaws in my game! :p

Replies to comments:
Replying to Alice:
“the game is easy...” “...the more one advances through the level, the difficulty gradually drops until it becomes a final cleanup.”
In a way, I like the cooldown effect the player gets from that. It's a relaxing, building sense of triumph before the win. But perhaps in higher levels a last-minute toxin monster spontaneously showing up might be a good difficulty punch. Good observation, I'll have to test some ideas if/when development continues.
Replying to Misu:
“Very fun game and impressively made (thought out) on time as well.”
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. Thankfully, Bingdom extended the time frame of the Jam. Otherwise, it would not have been finished. The bulk of the level designs, message screens, and sound effects were created during that extended time.

“I was really confused on what to do with the gray things but it was a challenge and I love it.”
I assume you are referring to the Wall Huggers. To destroy them, you must position Scrubby to be directly adjacent to its path. When the Wall hugger passes by, Scrubby is able to cause damage. 5 hits will destroy the Wall Hugger.
My original thought, when I began the game design, I was thinking of having the character shoot something. SpaceBar was the weapons key. As the design progressed, I didn't want to have to aim at anything, so by being next to something, you could hit it by hitting the SpaceBar. It was also the way I was using the Scrubber (health regeneration). When I got it to a playable/testable state, I realized I was constantly holding the SpaceBar down the entire time I was playing it, which made me think, “why even have that input?” So I made the attacking be an automatic function when Scrubby was right next to the object you wanted to attack. If the other object overlapped Scrubby, then Scrubby would get attacked. It worked well, but the way I coded it is slightly hacky/buggy, and will get a refinement if/when development continues.
Replying to Barvix:
“I think I would like to see this developed further, with as fun as it is. But that's up to HayManMarc.”
I'm glad you enjoyed it. I do plan to develop this further, but I think I should finish the project I'm currently working on first. :) However, in the past, I've said that I was going to keep working on stuff, only to then drop it into the “Someday” file a few months down the road. (I'm sure you all know how that goes.) So, we shall see. With the amazing response Scrubby garnered here, I'm pretty inclined to continue with it.
Replying to DukeSoft:
“I feel like something like upgrades would have been nice, because the gameplay seems to not advance after a while.”
I was thinking the same. It's tricky because I don't want any other user input besides movement and one button (enter/spacebar). I would really like to restrict the gameplay user input to movement only.

“The only remark I have - check out something about chords, harmony and progression in the music. It wasn't bad, but it just sounded a bit off.”
Well, I made the tune on the final day of the Jam. After approaching 2 hours working on it, I decided it was good enough. However, when I listen back to it now, I'm not hearing too much in the way of it being 'off'. There's a place in the first part of the tune where the notes sound a bit jumbled, perhaps staggered in rhythm, but I tried to take care to maintain harmony. It's quirky, as I intended, so perhaps it's just something you're not used to? I will definitely be refining the tune if/when I continue development.

Also, thanks for the heads up about the port display issue during the jam. (Luckily I posted a gif!) I don't think my old, hobbyist brain would have caught that on it's own. :)
Replying to John Andrews:
“...the only counter was that I expected more levels...”
I would have loved to create more levels, but there was simply no time. I really wanted to make at least one rather big level, but I felt it would have taken a lot of testing. By the time I got everything working, it was well after 1 AM and I had to work early the next morning. I was fighting my eyelids as it was! lol
Replying to Storyteller:
“I never realized you could have so much fun playing a dish sponge.”
A dish sponge! The thought never even entered my mind. In fact, I was thinking more along the lines of a CO2 scrubber on a spaceship. That's where I got the name “Scrubby” from. At first, I was going back and forth between “Scrubby” and “Scrubber”. I think I chose correctly.

“Only a couple of things Id change, maybe make the clean-up pad go a little bit quicker...”
Funny thing about that. I actually made it 4 times quicker than I originally had it! lol! Need to be careful here – if it's too quick, it will affect the game balance. I had thought that this would make a good “power up” item if/when I continue development.

“...and possibly add a score or game progress indicator.”
Absolutely. Again – lack of time in a 72 hour jam forces you to cut some features. Luckily, the game worked without it, for Jam purposes, by advancing the player to the next level. Though, I'm still kinda on the fence about having a score.
Replying to K-BitCRUSH
“I think it's genius that the help file showed the bottom text cut off, giving a signal without any arrow pointing or anything, letting the player know they need to press down to see more, and boom, yep, help starts scrolling.”
Genius? More like luck. I had used this method before – the help page wasn't text, it was an image. The whole thing was a sprite, 80 x 800, made in GIMP. The fact the words were cut in half at the bottom of the display signaling that there was more if you scrolled down did not dawn on me until you pointed it out! lol! I had pondered trying to put in a scroll bar of sorts, then skipped the idea because of time constraints (besides not wanting to have mouse input whatsoever). I totally spaced off including any instructions for using the help. Yeah, I got lucky. Had the wording aligned with the bottom of the page, would it still have worked? Possibly.

“My only gripe is you move so fast it can be a little annoying trying to line up with some enemies to scrub them out of existence without feeling too much pain.”
Yeah, this was one of my gripes, as well. I wanted the room_speed to be 60, and I wanted collisions to be perfect, so a movement speed of 1 was as slow as I could go (that I knew how to do). It seemed too fast and hard to control, but did add to the difficulty a bit, so I just went with it. That will be changed and smoothed out if/when development continues.
This is what caused the little weirdness with lining up with the Green Blobs. I made the blobs' base speed at 0.25, so sometimes it's position would be part of a pixel off, I guess?? That's why that sometimes even when it looked like you were right next to the blob, Scrubby wouldn't hit it. Or, the blob would sometimes hit Scrubby when it was adjacent but not overlapping. I really hate the way this is and I can't wait to fix it. :p

“...it was a lot of fun and challenging enough that I died once and had some very close calls on the final level.”
Since you mention dying once... I had intended for there to be 3 lives TOTAL for the whole game, not for each level. I hadn't noticed that until after the jam was over.
Replying to dj_midknight:
“Adding time based score would probably push this to a 10.”
Good idea for scoring. The quicker you clean the level, the higher your score. Altho, I find it tempting to leave it as a scoreless game and just track the levels. I'll have to ponder this.
 

Bingdom

Googledom
Guys, you were meant to PM me your votes so it's all in one spot >.>

Anyways, doesn't matter. I've counted the votes and here are the results:
1st: Scrubby by HayManMarc - 29 Points
Winner HeyManMarc.png

2nd: Conundrum Castle by K-BitCRUSH - 14 Points
Winner.png

3rd: World Purification by Bingdom - 9 Points
Third Place.png
Total Score
Scrubby - 29
Conundrum Castle - 14
World Purification - 9
Darkness Wipeout - 5
Rehab - 4
Dirty Sector - 3
SquareSquared - 2

Well done everyone! :D
 

John Andrews

Living Enigma
Guys, you were meant to PM me your votes so it's all in one spot >.>

Anyways, doesn't matter. I've counted the votes and here are the results:
1st: Scrubby by HayManMarc - 29 Points
View attachment 8814

2nd: Conundrum Castle by K-BitCRUSH - 14 Points
View attachment 8812

3rd: World Purification by Bingdom - 9 Points
View attachment 8813
Total Score
Scrubby - 29
Conundrum Castle - 14
World Purification - 9
Darkness Wipeout - 5
Rehab - 4
Dirty Sector - 3
SquareSquared - 2

Well done everyone! :D
Yayy! I predicted 4th place for me :D
 

Micah_DS

Member
Whoo~ 2nd place! Thanks everyone! :lemsmile: Glad I finally made something for a jam that's actually worth playing (unlike my first 2 jam games).

Congrats to all! Regardless of placement, I honestly feel EVERY game was worth playing. Yes, ALL, because @Virtual Mage's joke game was extremely short, so I thought it was kind of funny and I wasn't annoyed at all. If you're going to do a joke game, that's the way to go - done in 2 seconds. :p

BTW, if anyone is interested, I've already started working to polish up Conundrum Castle and to take it further, making it a more proper and fully-featured puzzle/action game.
I haven't gotten a chance to really do a lot just yet, but here's a log of what I've done thus far:
  • BUGFIX: Fixed 'transition flicker' that happens sometimes when transitioning between levels and menu.
    It only happened because I allowed a frame of drawing before updating my camera position. Thus, it was an easy fix.
  • OPTIMIZATION: Make objects only draw when in view. (Tiles already worked this way, just not objects)
    Since I'm not using built in views or cameras in this game, this was a necessary optimization.
  • BUGFIX: Enemies did not always sync with player movement, creating at times a very off-putting blur effect on them while the camera moved.
    To fix, I implemented a sort of global pixel sync timing, and - based on this - the player and enemies move in a way which keeps all things synced perfectly for sub-pixels to end up equaling whole pixels at the same time... and I just made it sound way more confusing than it really is...
  • OTHER: I used the wrong colors for two pixels on the PICO-8 logo! Tragedyyy~!!
    I changed the two pixels, and done! The reason it was wrong in the first place was because I had to recreate the logo due to not finding a proper png of the logo, so I referenced a jpeg of the logo and drew it myself...
  • CURRENTLY DOING: Reprogramming enemy movement. Long story short, the enemies were predictable, yes, but they still worked incorrectly on multiple levels, giving only circumstantial predictability and not absolute predictability. Making proper enemy movement for this game is way more involved than my initial code and I'm excited to take on the challenge of programming it well.
In the near future, I expect I'll be making a game topic for the post-jam version in the 'Work In Progress' forum.
 

Bingdom

Googledom
Just want to make clear that some of you had slightly different responses in the PM's.

Some of you said that you "would" vote for my game instead of "x". I counted my game instead.
 
Last edited:
Lol how did I end up in last :D
Thanks for another 80x45 jam! Sorry I forgot to vote on other's games, I didn't have much time until today. Glad to see you all participating
 
D

Deleted member 467

Guest
Even though I didn't make the top 7 I had a nice time in this jam, next jam I will make a real game instead of another COLD.
 

HayManMarc

Member
Woot woo!! 1st place! What a shock! I never would have guessed from looking at the way everyone voted. lol :p

I've said it so much already, but I'll say it again, now that it's official. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR VOTES! It may not be a big thing to some to rank 1st among 10 entries, but it's a big confidence booster for me. And I'm glad I finally made a game that's actually worth playing (unlike my first 20 jam games). :eek:

And good job to everyone. Every game entered was at least playable and had potential even if it wasn't perfect. Even if you don't continue working on your jam game, never give up and keep at it! This is my first solo win (and placement above 70%) since GMC Jam #5. My advice: it's all about scope and limiting features. Keep it simple and code only what is needed. Allow some time for simple polish. And hope the Jam host gives a time extension. :p
I had a good, stressful :p time with this jam, thanks Bingdom! You hosted well, mate. Eventually, I'll make a post in the wip topic or start blogging about Scrubby. Oh, and if I forgot to mention it, THANKS AGAIN!
 

Lukan

Gay Wizard Freak
Bumparino.
I've made a few changes to Dirty Sector.
The Player Lazer has been balanced, and now adjusts to the difficulty of the current level.
I fixed a bug that caused Sector 3 to be unwinnable due to purple enemies spawning endlessly.
I add 2 new planets and fixed the grid opacity.
There is now also a planet locator! It will point you to the nearest planet to the ship.

https://lukanspellweaver.gamejolt.io/Dirty-Sector/
https://lukanspellweaver.itch.io/dirty-sector
Hope you enjoy, I may continue updating in the future.
 

Hyomoto

Member
Well, damn. I wasn't available for this! I would have liked to participate nonetheless! Looks like the turn out was better this time too, I really regret missing it! MUST>CONTRIBUTE>NEXT>TIME.
 

Micah_DS

Member
So, regarding Conundrum Castle (my game entry)... long story short, I got the enemy movements working almost exactly as desired in my post-jam version, but I'm still going to have to reprogram them entirely from scratch because of certain unwanted behaviors that are due to the enemy system I have.
Because of this, I've unfortunately had to place this project on the "I'll come back to it again someday.. maybe" shelf :(, but only because I've got more fun and important projects to work towards, so it's not a bad thing. :) Gotta know when to let a project die.

Here's the latest enemy movement - still not perfect, but it's way better than the jam version's movement:


BTW, thanks to this jam, I've taken what I learned from making my game and I've expanded on it, which led to this:

Explaining how in the world Conundrum Castle led to this:
Conundrum Castle uses a single room at 80x45 and the game does not use actual cameras or views, even though some levels scroll and can be much larger than the room itself. It's all done via DS grid data for 'tiles' and arrays for 'entities', and custom drawing routines read that data and draw accordingly.
Now I've taken this to overworld-sized proportions. Basically, I'm taking steps toward my desired Zelda-ish/Metroid-ish world data structure which divides the game world into groups of screens/tiles and it also allows me crazy freedom to modify the world in any way I want to during runtime - stuff you can't do with pre-made rooms (hence my unorthodox GM usage).
Everything in the gif takes place in a single room sized at 128x72 (16:9 aspect ratio). The gif only shows what I did in my free time during a week though, so that's why the player character is only acting as a position to test world movement and area transitioning. I'm just getting started.;)

So I just wanted to say thanks again to @Bingdom and @Misu (for the first 80x45 jam), because game jams like this one really help me take steps forward as a game developer, better-faster-stronger than I would on my own. I hope this jam has helped everyone else in a similar fashion, and I hope everyone had as much fun as I've had.
I haven't made anything amazing yet, but I will. Ohh yes, I will ! ... And you can too! Yes you! .... MOTIVATIIIOOOOOONNNNNALLLL~!!
 
Top