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Thanks for playing!

I'm happy you liked the screensaver level! It's still not quite as detailed or in-depth as I would've liked but overall I'm happy with how it turned out. A fun fact is the pictures on the doors were all made by me in my youth when I was first learning Blender, feels good to finally show them to other people in some fashion lol. And I unfortunately missed it in the credits but the UI pack I used for the windows 95 theme is really well done! https://comp3interactive.itch.io/retro-windows-gui

The puzzle explanation I think needs some reworking, especially watching videos and streams of people playing through it highlights some of the design issues. I am still happy how they turned out mechanically though, it forced me to make my inventory system more interactive and I honestly don't think I've seen quite the same puzzle in a game before?

Sorry for the inventory bugs though, I'm happy they weren't breaking for you but I still have a number I already have fixed or will fix for the post-jam patch.

Thanks for playing, and all the very kind words!

I really appreciate the compliment. I like to think I do interesting stuff, though admittedly they’re usually executed in a more stripped down or janky form than I’d like.

I’m very happy to hear how much you enjoyed my silly little game, thanks again for checking it out!

Thanks for playing and the video!

Sorry I should've added instructions not to pick up multiple items while the inventory is open. It's hard to explain the full issue but I'll be fixing it in the post-jam patch.

Thanks for playing!

I'm glad you liked the matching puzzles, it was kind of an experimental goal to push me to expand my inventory systems functionality.

By any chance were you playing the downloadable build? Or did you pickup multiple of the same non-stackable item (like a sword) and drop one? Because both of those are unfortunately known bugs, I'll be fixing it with the post-jam patch!

It's a real shame you couldn't finish this game, because those graphics are gorgeous!

The UI, environment and just general atmosphere were also quite good. Though I did have some confusion with exiting the first findings menu because I needed to hit Escape to clsoe the menu, but on browser that just exited fullscreen.

Oh, and I was unable to play the downloadable version because the virus scan kept failing on chrome.

I think the initial text at the beginning went on a bit too long, or there should have been some unique graphic for the cutscene basically. Because as nice as the shore scene looked, it got tedious clicking through so many lines in silence.

The combat isn't all that fleshed out as there's no abilities and the player can only defend or attack. And the balancing should probably get a second look if you finish this. Because I got trounced by slimes and could only do 1 or 2 damage at a time while they dealt 4-8 damage. If there are going to be brutal enemy encounters at the start I think more warning should be given, depending on how old school you want to be.

The combat did prevent me from exploring more though, which is sad because the world looks really nice and varied.

I liked the party characters, though I didn't expect Arthur to be that character lol.

I think this is a really good base to work from, and I hope you get to either finish this game or reuse the art in a future game.

Good work!

This was an interesting one, very well put together and I like the art and variety of items and enemies. But to be completely honest I just didn't understand the combat at all. Any time I thought I understood it, something completely unexpected happened that threw my understanding out the window.

I was getting absolutely stomped on by enemies with lower health and damage than me, the chicken seemed to be RNG, and I did not understand the calculation of what attacks are effective or ineffective against different enemy types.

So I ultimately wasn't able to beat this game, though I did make it to the final boss at least.

This is a well made game, I just don't think it's really for me.

Good job!

It's a shame you weren't able to finish this. I think it may have been a better idea to focus on making the game completable before polishing up the town so much.

But from what is playable, the visuals are great, the town was well put together, and I liked all the unique characters.

The projectiles the player could shoot felt nice and punchy. The random spell effect was interesting, though I'm assuming that's a result of not having time to finish the combat.

The random weather events were also really neat, and the ambient AI animals wandering around were fun. But again it felt like stuff that should've been done AFTER the game could be completed.

All that being said, I think this could be a really neat cozy dungeon crawler shooter if you finish it up post-jam.

Good job!

I like the concept of a rhythm based dungeon crawler, but I think this game needed another pass of polish and tutorialization.

For starters it wasn't obvious to me that it was REQUIRED to move on the beat. I assumed it was a sort of Hellsinger situation where you need to be on beat for attacking or you don't do as much damage if you're off beat.

I also never figured out what the laser could be used for. It was referred to as a throwable though I never saw it being thrown?

The models for the turrets I think should've been made to look more obviously like a gun. I thought they were buttons on the wall that I needed to press. And the lack of a projectile or beam visibly coming out of the turrets didn't help for timing.

I thought the low poly art was nice though, and I thought the end screen was funny. And the music was good, which is important.

Overall I thought this was neat, but it needs some tightening up.

Good job!

Well that was a tour de force of some dungeon crawling XCOM goodness!

Starting with possible improvements, I think the sound and visual effects for enemies being damaged is pretty weak. But considering how many plates this game already has spinning I think it's acceptable.

And while the dungeon areas are well used in combat, the exploration side I think was left lacking. There are hidden walls, but they usually contain nothing, and are revealed on the map and during combat. It felt like I would kill everything in battle, and then just walk through an empty level until the next encounter.

I'm not sure how I feel about randomized item purchases honestly. For weapons, armour, accessories and upgrades I think it's fine. With consumables I found I was gettig health items more rarely than I would've liked. Which I think could run the risk of soft locking the player since you don't regenerate health after an encounter. Maybe intentionally part of a more hardcore design, so idk.

I did notice a bug where I could heal a knocked out ally, but then they wouldn't actually rejoin the battle.

As for the length, I enjoyed it all the way through so it wasn't too bad. Though 2 hours is quite a lot to demand from players. If this game was less polished and had less variety I think it would drag quite a lot. Frankly I would think the biggest benefit of aiming for a shorter game is just less burnout lol.

Back to the positive's, there's too many positives to count. I love the artstyle, I love the writing, I love the enemy and item variety, and I REALLY love the 3D dice rolling view. I liked the rolling dice in Baldur's Gate 3 and I like it here too lol, might have to use it in one of my own games someday.

This was one of the best entries I've played this jam, and thats saying a lot for all the strong entries this year.

Excellent work!

I think I can see what this game was going for, but quite frankly I was very confused for most of it.

First of all, the game experience wasn't helped by the fact there's no full screen option. So the game and UI were very squished in my playthrough.

I didn't understand how to use cards, or if there was some difference between some of them. I assume it's a bug, but I was confsued why after using a card once I would then have to manually reassign it to the deck if there was more than 1 of the same type left.

The overlaying UI windows are also very confusing because sometimes they don't hide when they're supposed to. Like the player health and current attack screen doesn't always go away even when press the button to hide it.

I think reusing the minimap overlay for the combat isn't a horrible idea for a turn-based game, but

I honestly wish there was a less intrusive health UI that was visible when not in combat. As my runs always ended by me not knowing how low on health I am, and then getting one-shot by a surprise enemy.

I'm not crazy about the font choice either, it's already a bit weird to discern some letters. Combined with the small viewport it made reading harder than it ought to be imo. And eventually I just stopped bothering trying to read them.

Back to positives though, I love the graphics of the dungeon, and the minimap looks pretty and itself isn't confusing. I thought the movement felt nice and snappy. Though I do miss the ability to strafe, and the ability to hold the move key down when moving backwards.

You managed to add an impressive number of cards with unique art and effects, and the number of terminals scattered around is neat.

I think there's definitely something solid in here, but it's buried under a layer of confusing combat UI, and a lack of feedback.

Good work!

This was a neat experiment on the anomaly hunt genre. Though I have to admit I'm not sure if it was successful for me.

I like the idea, I've watched several playthrough videos of the I'm on Observation Duty games, and I think expanding that concept out to a map you can physically explore is interesting.

But I think "normal" difficulty is WAAAAAAAY too subtle. I played for about 40 minutes on normal and got reset to Monday so many times I lost count. I explored every room, every cubicle, and looked in all the bathroom stalls and out the windows. I even looked into the managers room and around the front desk. Saw nothing, walked into the elevator, and then got reset to Monday.

Speaking of the manager, I actually thought he was totally bugged out because I missed the line on the game page about how instant movement somehow locks the manager in place. I didn't know this during play, so I was VERY confused about the warnings about the manager. To the point I intentionally avoided looking in his office for a while because I didn't want to aggro him. If I had read that line going in I think the experience would've been much better, as it was I was just bored after a certain point.

I only saw the minigame once, when I intentionally walked into the manager to see what would happen. I thought it was cool and the graphics looked neat. I died fairly quickly though, I wasn't quick enough on the dash lol.

I will say, there were some genuinely cool anomalies, especially a couple that scared the hell out of me. But that was 2-3 days out of several dozens of attempted days.

The combination of not much happening and repeatedly missing anomalies led me to at one point just immediately running for the fire exit as soon as the day started. Which actually managed to get me up to Thursday once.

After a couple minutes of that, I realized I could change the difficulty. After about 15-20 minutes on Forgiving I eventually made it out of the office on Sunday.

There's some great stuff in this game, I like the art style, some of the anomalies were very well done, and the movement was decent enough (I only played  on instant mode). But god the RNG is just absolutely brutal to the point it felt frustrating, tedious and boring on Normal.  And I think it would've been even worse if the manager was out roaming around looking to promote me to customer. I honestly think Forgiving should be the normal mode, and Normal should be "Hardcore".

I think this game would be much better after a post-jam patch, but I definitely still applaud the attempt to experiment with the dungeon crawler control and movement with the anomaly hunt game loop.

Good work!

This was a cool short entry, the themes were implemented very well, and I think you you did well making the looting feel pressured but not insanely stressful.

I do agree with other comments mentioning it would be nice if the air meter could refill if you reach a non-filled level though. Further forcing the player to decide between sticking down and searching for loot or going back up for air.

I though the turning speed could be bumped up a little bit, but overall movement felt good.

Also is the chicken idol randomly placed? I swear the first 3 times I played through I scoured the map and couldn't find it at all.

The audio and visual effects for the rising water were good, though personally I think a few more splashing/water rushing sounds would be nice. I thought the flashlight following cursor was an interesting idea too, I think it worked well. I especially liked the Quake-like sin wave effect for being underwater.

I thought the little alien creature in the main menu running across the screenw as funny too.

Overall I liked the core loop, and I liked the atmosphere and visuals.

Good job!

I didn't have time to leave a comment yesterday so I'm writing it now!

This was AMAZING, everything was so well done and polished I genuinely don't have any real complaints! I can honestly say of the 20 entries I've played so far, this is my favourite game of the jam.

I love the look of the artstyle, the Moebius influenced hand-drawn comicbook look is fantastic! The variety of enemies, locations, and the layouts of the dungeons are all well done.

The movement feels solid, the snapping that transitions into smooth motions felt good. And I loved how non-hostile NPC's would be pushed slightly off to the side smoothly.

The autobattling is juicy and fast, and I liked how the equipment upgrades gave a bit of choice in playstyle between attack/accuracy/defence/dodge. And the changing hats looked great!

Oh and I REALLY appreciated the move-by-clicking feature, it made backtracking and grinding money much less frustrating. It was so helpful, and yet I would not have even thought of it as a suggestion lol.

The music and sound effects were also very well put together. In some other entries that ran a bit long I ended up muting the music, but I didn't do that here.

And I really liked how you integrated the fast travel minigame, where the player can manually speed up and slow down. And if the player crashes they're teleported to destination and pay a fee, until they're out of money. But then the game doesn't hardlock the player, but just makes it so they have to build that money back up. This was a GREAT anti-frustration feature, made travelling go as fast and challenging as the player wants, AND doesn't end the game if they make mistakes.

On every front, this was a top tier entry, I would unironically play a full-length version of this. I'm so happy I got to see it through and for a little while actually held the #10 spot in the hall of fame!

Excellent work!

I really liked the enemy art and variety and the overall sense of humour in this one. And there are some neat little UI details like the close dialog button showing a countdown bar underneath.

The combat was fairly straightforward, and I liked the moving numbers showing damage, but I think a bit more feedback would've been nice. And the levelling made it a bit too easy after a little while, but in a jam I always prefer too easy over too difficult.

And regarding the levelling I think it would've been good to have the + buttons be green or red or some eye catching colour to make it more obvious to the player they can level up. Also some explanation of the stats would've been nice. If just Dexterity or just Agility were present I could probably guess what they do, but when having both I personally couldn't guess what the difference is.

The enemy art is great and all the enemies look distinct, and I appreciate having the stats shown (though the same criticism from the last paragraph still applies). The dungeon art however is frankly way too limited. There's no landmarks beyond locked doors, and the layouts were more confusing than interesting.

I think the game would've been improved by some more sound effects, even a basic punch sound in combat. Having just the background ambience being a low drone I think was fine though. With some other entries I would just mute the music after a while if it was too much of the same or too distracing.

I think the game's length is good, I appreciate shorter games in a jam like this with numerous long entries.

Overall, I enjoyed playing this game, good work!

I was really impressed by this entry, the art is amazing, the dungeon layouts are great, the combat feels nice and juicy for an RPGMaker game, and there's even some neat puzzles!

As mentioned the visuals are very well done, and makes the game feel nice and oddly cozy. Though the fireball enemy sprites are fittingly threatening in combat (which was a cool twist imo).

The boulder moving puzzles were interesting, was more environmental interaction than I expected which was cool.

The verticality in the dungeons was something I definitely didn't expect but really loved! Made the levels much more interesting while having a fairly small pallette of world textures compared to some other entries. And just generally navigating the levels wasn't too confusing, the minimap certainly helped but it didn't feel like a crutch.

Having experience gained only by collecting chickens was an interesting change of pace that I liked. Reduced the need to grind, but I will come back to the combat. And I especially loved the detail of the one chicken spinning in place so much it dug a ditch on its tile lol.

There's some good quality of life features in this entry I appreciated. Like the unlimited use teleport potion, and the ability to teleport to individual floors. The boulder reset signs were also used multiple times in my playthrough, and the hint signs were useful.

Regarding the combat, I think the actual battles felt good, though the number of random encounters was too much. It was especially noticeable when trying to complete the boulder puzzles. I don't think the random encounters should be removed, but I think should be reduced. And I don't know if it's just because there were so many battles, but as time went on I wished the attack animations could be skipped or sped up.

I don't know if it's an issue with me or the game, but I was definitely overlevelled by the time I started fighting the fireball enemies. The first time I fought one I didn't get to attack with all my characters because I killed it too quickly. Of course, I did go and buy the high end weapons by this point, so maybe I was just overcautious. But from that moment forward those enemies just became mobile piggy banks. And this extended to the boss fight, whom I beat with barely a scratch. To be honest though, I'd prefer a game like this be too easy over being too hard.

Oh and speaking of buying equipment, some of the items didn't have any stat bonuses listed in the store, like the armour and shields. I never bothered buying them because I assumed that meant they were bugged or worse than my current equipment.

Back to the positives, the sense of humour is solid too. That ending with the recipe reveal was hilarious!

Overall this was one of my favourite entries, great work!

This was VERY impressive! I know it uses a lot of AI generated art but it's consistent and blends together well.

I unfortunately didn't get to finish the game, as I died about an hour in and nearly unlocking the drive, but my last save was WAY earlier in the game. And since I still have multiple other lengthy entries to playthrough I have to just move on.

I was amazed just how many mechanics and how much content you fit into this thing. A multi-slot inventory system, craftable upgrades, ranged and melee combat, dungeon crawling AND shoot-em-up space combat, and even a save system.

I did have some issues though, some of them I think stem from the hardcore design ethos of the game. So they may not be "issues", but it's what I noticed.

The difficulty jump from fighting aliens to fighting drones was rough. The second ship I scavenged had drones and I was nearly dead and out of energy after fighting just one of them. I didn't have any weapons or armour upgrades as it was only my second ship so I had to flee. If I didn't notice the recall button I'd have been screwed.

I think it would be good to make the save game option more accessible either by adding it to the toolbar in the ship view, or adding a quicksave key. Depending how far you'd want to go with holding the players hand maybe even an autosave after exiting a wreck. Would help for people like me who forget to save since it isn't an option in 95%+ of jam games lol.

Controlling the ship prior to the inertia upgrade is a bit too unwieldy, I accidentally rammed into mines and enemy ships quite a lot. And turning with Q and E felt a bit too stiff, personally I would've liked if I could use the mouse to aim.

I didn't notice any form of hint or indications if a wall was a false wall or not. I don't think it needed what my game had with an explicit tutorial and noticeable colour difference, but some point of reference would've been nice. As it was I was just ramming into the end of every hallway.

Again, most of that may be suggestions that aren't useful as I'm assuming you wanted the game to feel unforgiving like old-school dungeon crawlers.

Back to the positives, if the dungeons were randomly generated the generation worked pretty well I think.

The perspective and movement in dungeons felt quite nice, and I like that you had the on-screen movement controls.

Having the map and compass be an optional upgrade I think was a decent idea, same with ranged weapons.

The ambient sound was great, reminded me of Fallout 1 & 2 which is good.

Overall, this was an outstanding entry, and one of my favourites of the entries I've played.

Excellent work!

I'm going to echo the other comments and say while the visuals can be quite nice, the movement really needs some fine tuning. At some points turning becomes impossible, and the only fix I've found for it is moving my player into an obstacle, and THEN I can turn.

Combat has little to no feedback, so that could be improved as well. Unless I'm mistaken I don't believe it's even possible to be hurt at the moment.

Also the built-in post-processing for Unreal really seemed to make the game chug for me. That's been a constant with all Unreal engine entries this jam, and my computer isn't exactly cheap or old. And the light adjustment is weird, in some areas it makes the game annoyingly dark.

If you can fix the movement, I think you'll have a much more enjoyable game here. And a much better base for future games.

Good work!

Right off the bat, this is one of the few entries I've played with voice acting, so props for that!

I also love the look of the game, with the 3D MS paint aesthetic. The perspective and movement feel good, and I appreciate the tooltip text when hovering over things.

I also liked the little teleporter puzzles, tempted the player to try all angles to look for treasures which was neat.

As for the combat, I admit I'm not a big fan of Vampire Survivors, so I don't think I was ever gonna love it. I did appreciate how much nicer the upgrades made the battles feel though, as enemies died faster.

I didn't get all the treasures sadly, only got 9/12, if I had more time left in the ratings period I might have gone back to find all of them.

But I enjoyed the game overall, great work!

I think this game managed to capture the silliness of being spotted and chased in stealth games in a way I don't often see jam games do. Especially not dungeon crawler stealth games!

This was fun, it has a good dark sense of humour (I especially love the death screen) and parodying some of the MGS staples like the cardboard box, and it manages to introduce a number of mechanics. I also thought the attempts to capture the PS1 look were good, and I love the title card lol.

I wish I was able to hold down the movement keys though, and I wish turning was a bit faster. It wasn't excruciating though, and I managed to escape.

I think there should've been a "suspicious" stage of awareness to enemies though. Like a little "arooo?" sound effect with a question mark over the head. Just to make the stealth a little bit more forgiving.

And I agree with commetns saying feedback on the combat could be better. Though frankly so could the combat in my entry lol.

Good work!

I think this game has a really neat concept for the battle system, and I like how it ties into a sort of rhythm game. But I also genuinely think it needed a bit more time in the oven.

I know from reading the other comments that the big issues are clear to you now, but to summarize my thoughts briefly:

There's not enough enough spells and far too many runes currently, and the system is not explained all that well in-game. I appreciate that you uploaded a video example on the game page to explain it, and even actually gave the first spell as an example in the game menu. But even with that it took some time to fully understand what was going on.

Beyond that, the performance isn't great, or at least wasn't for me. This seems to be a common theme with Unreal jam games especially, and I can see from the video you posted it's not an issue for yourself. But I bring it up because I think it caused issues with click detection on the runes. I would click the rune while it was highlighted and the game wouldn't detect it as being a valid click.

As for suggestions for improvements, I think the position of the healthbars and their colours should be changed. The players focus during combat is largely on the runes along the bottom-center of the screen, but to check the enemy's health the player has to look to the top-left. Since the rhythm game doesn't have breaks between cycling rounds, there's very little time to look away, especially in the last couple battles.

And with the healthbars transitioning from red to black, on a black background, it can be harder to tell what percentage health an enemy has left as the fight goes. Without focusing on the healthbar at least. And the players healthbar had the same issue, especially because the player healthbar goes from right-to-left, despite being in the top-left corner.

I would recommend moving the health bars to be just above the runes, and changing the colours to be either solid, or simply make them brighter, or make the transition green-yellow-red instead of red-dark red. Just my 2 cents.

Back to the positives, the visuals are nice, overall the game feels quite cozy, and I liked the dungeon inside the chicken coop with all the stereotypical dungeon traps. There's some solid work here, but the combat system needs some fixing.

Good work!

Thanks for playing!

I’m happy to hear you liked the puzzles! They were a kinda experimental idea I had to make the inventory a bit more interactive in-game.

Yeah the boss AI I think is getting stuck between states where it thinks it’s attacking but isn’t. Likely caused by switching between melee and ranged. I’ll definitely be fixing that post-jam.

Thanks again for the feedback!

I admit I didn't have time to finish this one, I encountered a bug in the web build where the final heist was inaccessible. I had a similar issue in my downloaded version though so I can't criticize too harshly. I watched a couple other videos of people playing the final heist and it seemed fun!

First of all I like that the level selection is clicking on heist plans in the Fox's den, a nice immersive menu imo.

The game feels very cozy, and the level design and simple stealth mechanics are neat!

Having to collect eggs as both a health item and optional health upgrade was a good way to encourage exploration. I might actually snag that idea for a future game lol.

The minigame for capturing chickens is simple, but to be honest for such a small, short game it works well. I like the UI for the quicktime event, not too flashy but has some variance to shake things up each time.

Great work!

Well this was really interesting to play!

It feels like a narrowed down, refined version of Dungeon of Dreams 1. Where the first was more kinda Minecraft like with almost every block being destructible and there being multiple enemies scattered all around the map. This was far more laid back, less grindy, and more focused on an almost puzzle-like exploration. And frankly I think it was a good direction to go in!

It felt very chill, but I still had to keep track of my items, and I liked that the map was an item that had to be picked up first. The exception to this vibe of course being the unexpected boss fight. Where I decided against buying bombs and got wiped instantly lol. Fortunately you added a respawn point which is nice.

I also really appreciate the addition of a speed upgrade. And I like how the player is rewarded for being inquisitive in the first stage of the game and exploring, but without being told that they were actively prepared for a boss battle. I assumed it was going to be a score of how much loot I found before escaping.

As for the fight itself I thought it was a bit rough at first with the attacks doing damage over time to the player. But once I figured out the boss's move set I think it actually balances out quite well.

Also as an extra note, the main menu is surprisingly polished!

Overall I thought this was great, and I applaud you reusing stuff in the sequel to your last entry, but using them for a game with a completely different feel!

Excellent work!

This was an interesting one, I liked the combination of dungeon crawler and FPS with System Shock style free-aim shooting.

The weapon variety was neat and felt satisfying enough. I especially liked the addition of the Boomer that could shoot around corners, an interesting tactical choice for these types of games.

I did notice some issues though, for starters it seemed almost like my blaster projectiles were colliding mid-air with enemy projectiles. Because me and a robot would be standing in a hallyway looking directly at each other, firing away and it seemed like impact effects were spawning at some point in between. Neither of us would be taking damage, or at least the robot didn't seem to. Might be something to look into.

There also seemed to be a range limit to projectiles, trying to fire at the 3 elites near the end game from the end of the room wouldn't deal any damage. Don't know if that was intentional or not.

Also the performance for me was just AWFUL. My PC isn't exactly old or low end, so I assume it's just a facet of having an Unreal game and not enough time to optimize. It caused me to turn or move further than I meant to a few times.

Speaking of the movement, I have to echo other comments about Q+E being strafe instead of turn. I think some games have used it in the past, but quite frankly it just does NOT feel good in my opinion. Especially in a game trying to lean into the FPS genre a bit, not having WASD was very disorienting. Combined with the performance issues it lead to me taking a few more hits than I think was warranted.

Back to the positives, I like how the enemies stand out due to the lights on their heads turning from blue to red when aggroed. The chickens clucking when  the player is near is a nice way to make finding them easier. And I REALLY appreciate having a checkpoint system in a jam game!

Oh and finally I like that this game sticks to a 10 minute time limit. I know this jam has some entries that can last over an hour so having a short but sweet entry is a nice treat!

Good work!

Thanks for playing!

Yeah I was aiming for more windows 95/98 but looking it up it does resemble 3.11 as well lol. I just like the look of it, for all of its brutalist utilitarianism there’s an odd childlike wonder to it. Or maybe I’m just nostalgic lol.

I’m happy you liked the changing art style. Ive always wanted a game where the graphics evolve alongside the mechanics, and this is the closest I’ve gotten so far at least.

It’s good to hear you liked the difficulty, though frankly I feel like there’s a good amount of unintentional difficulty due to AI bugs and UI issues.

I did have the inventory pre-jam, I’ve been working on it since last summer as more of a Deus Ex/Resident Evil 4 grid inventory. But it’s only ever been used for a released game now, so it definitely has some growing pains I’ll need to sort out post jam. But I’m really happy you approve of the effort!

Thanks again for all the feedback!

This was genuinely one of my favourite games from this jam. After watching it on Captain Coders stream I knew I had to play it!

First of all the art style is amazing and feels like it came right out of the classics!

The dungeon layouts are interesting, and I especially like the mansion with the hedge maze!

The one kinda sore spot I found was the pirate island level, while I LOVE the look and feel of it (I forget if I said it on stream but it felt like if Monkey Island was rendered in Dungeon Master or something), it was very confusing trying to find the treasure and I ended up dying to Captain Carrion.

Aside from that, I really don't have any complaints, this was an amazing entry, and while I would enjoy a full-length version of it, I really appreciate how short and sweet you kept it. Better to have some game that's all good, than a lot of game that's boring!

Oustanding work!

Well it's a shame you couldn't finish this because I really liked what I saw!

The writing was solid, the art is beautiful, and the movement feels nice and snappy. Even the combat was kinda interesting with having to point and shoot like System Shock or an arcade shooter.

And maybe it's just me but the inventory management and the look of the UI feels kinda reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid, which is a positive imo.

I know the pain of not finishing an entry on time, my submission in 2023 only had a tutorial level and a couple cutscenes. So I don't know if you plan to finish this post-jam or not, but I think you have a solid base for either finishing this game or a future one!

Good work!

This was really cool, I like how the heist actually had some buildup to it with gathering weapons, supplies and assembling the squad.

The opening was great too with how it was a chill interactable house followed by a small charming city block with all the NPCs to talk to and the ambient sounds. It was very well done!

Also unless I'm mistaken, the mech you fight behind the lab is a secret boss you can only fight if you have the wire cutters? And also, can you simply smash keypads if you don't have the hammer? And finally, what does the crowbar do? I just kinda bought everything, since I sometimes couldn't see my current money due to the known issue of UI showing the variable name instead of the stat.

And obviously, some of the bugs were a bit annoying. Like interaction sometimes being weird, or having to click on something multiple times in order for the "It's Empty" text to show up. But frankly it's bound to happen in a jam, I know I had several. Though admittedly it's never a good sign when the debug menu pops up a couple times lol.

(For my next bit of feedback I wrote it before realizing the camera issues were due to RPG in a Box, but it still reflects my experience. Just putting that disclaimer out there lol)

As for more design level issues, I found the camera was way too close to the walls. I don't know if the camera FOV is too large, or the tile size is too small, but it feels weird to be literally pressed up against a door. And I found it made interaction odd because it was hard to tell how close I needed to be sometimes.

Also I agree with another comment where I found the Arcade kinda by accident. I expected it to be out front like the other stores. I mean I found it eventually so it wasn't too bad, but it's the sort of thing that could disorient some players.

I wish there was an explanation for what each stat does, and if there is some explanation I completely missed it.

Bringing it back to the positives though, this is an ASTOUNDING amount of content for a jam entry. The friendly NPC's, the optional items and routes, the interactables (I especially appreciated the resting bench in the data center), the enemies, the levelling and shops, etc. Just a lot of things that to be honest work pretty damn well all things considered.

Excellent work!

I admit I didn't finish this game, but aside from the bugs I enjoyed what I played.

I like the low poly visuals, and the UI was very well put together. And I like the overall concept of getting your ship up and running on a hostile planet.

The scripted scare at the beginning was neat, and I love how the lights turn on one at a time with a big heavy clunk switch sound.

The minigame I didn't totally get at first, but after playing it for a couple minutes I started to understand it. Though unfortunately it seemed to break after I left the ship and came back. Coming back to the ship also broke the first jump scare sequence.

The combat wasn't amazing but it worked, though the cursor detection on the bigger alien bodies could be a bit off. I was also surprised how far away I could interact with corpses from, but frankly I prefer that to having to be right up close to them.

It is unfortunate you weren't able to finish this game the way you wanted to, but I feel like the biggest issues are bugs and lack of polish rather than the core of the game being broken. So it could be far, far worse.

Good work!

It took me multiple save reloads, but I finally managed to escape!

This was very cool, I love how it looks like an old school DOS dungeon crawler and the switching between first-person exploration and top-down tactical battles is really neat.

I also like the breadth of options for combat, once I discovered how to switch weapons and use grenades it became much more interesting lol.

The different characters were neat too, of course I HAD to bring the chicken with my party.

I feel a bit dumb after watching other videos of the game though, I never encountered the plants or the map! I was actually going to say a map is the one thing missing because the dungeon environment is very samey. Turns out I just didn't explore hard enough lol.

I think the sounds are a bit sparse but that's fitting with the aesthetic. So no points off there for me.

The pixel art visuals are very well done, especially that labratory screen which I'm sad I never encountered.

Excellent work!

Thanks for playing!

I'm glad you liked the puzzles! I had them in mind before the jam as an incentive to make my inventory system more robust, and I thought it would be a fun unique way of interacting with the world. I do plan on fixing up the inventory system to make swapping items easier, just something I didn't have time to do during the jam.

I've seen the boss either work fine or completely break, and it seems the cause is it gets stuck in a state where it thinks its still attacking but it isn't. I'm assuming it's because it screws up when switching between attack types.

I'm happy to hear you liked the change in style, I wanted to portray a sort of evolution in complexity and difficulty. I don't think I totally nailed it here, so I'm hoping to experiment more with that in the future.

Thanks for all the feedback!

Ah, then yeah I am aware there's a few issues with the tooltip. I didn't list them because they aren't game breaking or really confusing issues, but they will be fixed in the post-jam update.

Thanks for playing, and for the stream and video!

Thanks for playing!

Oh sorry about that, yeah the sword dropping is a known issue others have encountered but I forgot to update the game page. It's listed there now. What happens is when you have multiple items of the same type, and your drop one, the inventory code just returns the first item of that type. Which results in an instance of the item being deleted, but not removed from the items array. And if you try to pick up another item afterwards, the inventory will error out on that null array index when it iterates through every item in inventory to check for available space. Thus, blocking you from picking up anything else.

Yeah I thought of adding movement queueing, but put it out of scope early on because I knew I had a bunch of other systems to add/update. Maybe next year! I did intentionally speed up the movement after feedback from last year, so I'm glad you liked it. This game isn't intended to be atmospheric or spooky, so slower movement would've just been torturing the player.

Yeah another player mentioned having to circle around a couple of times to find the first game. In hindsight I probably should've started with one of the bigger box models for the first puzzle, but I thought it would be fun to have my previous DC Jam entry be the first key item.

Yeah there's a number of fixes and improvements I have noted to add to the inventory post-jam, some I've already added in the git repo like the item dropping bug. The items not showing up is likely due to the known bug of items not being snapped to their grid position, currently that SHOULD be fixed by a workaround of opening and closing the inventory. As for visual improvements, I like the Windows 95 style so I don't plan to change that in future updates. By "legend" do you mean the tooltip?

Well I gotta say I didn't expect that ending.

The first area is great at feeling peacful and I like the voxel art chickens. The tonal shift to the second area is definitely a surprise.

I found the sprite rooster enemies with the rubber chicken noises funny, so good job on that!

As for the movement, I think it needs a lot of work. It's slow, requires individual keyboard presses which gets tiring especially with how slow the movement speed is. I also got off the grid in the first level, I think the code for turning or checking if the turn is complete needs to be looked over.

The combat is actually a little interesting, having the block mechanic does make combat a little more involved than just clicking until an enemy is dead. I genuinely don't know what the blue bar under the health is supposed to be, I'm assuming it was meant for the players block ability?

Also I think there's an opportunity for greater tonal shift in the second area by having some eerie music or ambience playing in the background.

Overall there's definitly areas for improvement, but ultimately I thought this was neat. Good work!

I really liked this!

The overall concept of the sinking ship was very well executed, and the artstyle is great, the music is good, and I dig the sense of humour. Oh and the ending sequence is fun, reminds me of the pirate level from Sly 3.

The only kinda quibble I have is barrels taking maybe a half second longer than they feel like they should to be destroyed. But that's such a minor point that I'm really just looking for ANY possible area the game can be improved.

Overall the game gives Monkey Island vibes which is awesome, I think we need more pirate dungeon crawlers!

Great work!

Oh for the second level it might be a known bug? Try playing the browser build if possible.

And yes please send me the vid on discord, can either post it in the dungeon crawler jam discord and @ me, or just send directly to me. My discord username is EnigmaticCynic.

Thanks for playing!

Yeah I like fitting in gamebox models for my old games when I can, this is just the most prominent example. I'm glad you liked that too!

I'm curious about this inventory issue you encountered, because I haven't encountered that and haven't seen it mentioned before. There is a known issue where picked up items don't snap to the inventory grid on first open. But were you not even able to move the new items when you had the inventory screen open? And were the items you clicked on not disappearing from the game world?

Oh ok, yeah I have those issues all noted, thanks!

Thanks for playing!

The statue/mannequin puzzles is something I wanted to force me to polish up my inventory scripting, and was something I personally hadn't seen that often in other games. So it's good to hear you enjoyed it!

The enemies definitely need another polish pass but I'm happy I was able to actually add different enemy types lol.

And I'm glad you enjoyed the final boss, that one was fun to put together, just a shame I didn't time to fix all the AI bugs.

Thanks again for all the feedback!