Funky Trip

Cool
had a liitle bit of difficulty at first knowing if space was doing any damage or not to the crystals

Good job

Lots of areas to explore and many enemies to vanquish. Like @nicso it took me a while to learn how to defeat enemies — it wasn't clear that space is the key. I was able to make some progress and get some power-ups, but never figured out how to increase my health (aside from spending experience points) — I could not get the heal spell to work, even after it was equipped. One way to improve this game is by scattering items throughout the environment that will let the player heal (e.g. health potions). I think that having weaker crystals (ones that do less damage) would also help.

I agree with what was said before.
I also didn't get the heal spell to work, which made it hard to progress. Also, while trying to figure it out, I thought I'd try putting it into a different spell slot, but couldn't remove it from the first one I put it in.

• Like others have noted, it is hard to see whether you are doing damage and when exactly. Is it at the start of the animation or at the end? This lead to me always being damaged whenever I attacked an enemy.

• I didn't know at first that I got a new spell. I think it would have been helpful to show a message that a new spell is availabe.

The graphics are nice and the music is funky! Thanks for creating the game :)

Almost everything that's been said by everyone are good suggestions. For my suggestion, I would love to have a mini-map on the lower-right of the screen. You can add markers to it to pinpoint important areas once the player is near them. Overall, this game has great music and replayability!

Ambitious entry. A large map and lots of different enemies and spells and character progression.

What an interesting idea to have crystals as enemies. In Zelda games you collect them as currency. Here they fight back!

The user experience is a little lacking, possibly due to the wide scope of the game. It is very hard to know at first how to progress. By trial and error you can find that you need to spend experience points on the character sheet and equip spells with the spellbook and then use them. The heal spell comes in quite handy!

Combat is clunky because it's hard to confidently deal damage without getting hit yourself. Dashing is cool but it felt like just an escape ability to me. Best tactic I had was horizontally kiting the enemies, hitting once then dashing away. Vertically fighting was harder somehow, perhaps due to hit boxes.

The fact that after you die you need to start from the beginning makes the experience quite frustrating, especially because the combat doesn't feel fair at times. There are some bugs like the xp bubble flying inside the walls out of reach and where if you die but use the heal spell before the dying animation you survive.

The sounds and graphics fit well together and I like the music track technically but it gets very repetitive fast. I applaud you guys for making such a large game for a jam!

Impressed at the size of the game, the world map is quite large and fun to explore. It took me a few attempts but I was eventually able to beat it, though I think some checkpoints would have been nice. I also think some polish on the projectiles would have been nice, since their origin seemed a bit broken. I liked the spellbook collection aspect but I think it makes the game get easier as it goes on instead of more difficult. Still though, nice job overall

That's a lot of game for one weekend, well done. I like the feel with the funky soundtrack and dancing mushroom sprite. Took me a while to get the hang of the basic attack which is hard to judge / a little frustrating to use.

There is a lot going on in the UI and controls for a simple game. It also took me a while to work out you spend money on the gems. I found the game a bit grindy, which I think comes down to the basic attack feeling a bit frustrating to use rather than fun.

Very impressed with the scope of the game and how much you accomplished with a large maps, spells, upgrade systems, etc.

After playing for a few hours (jk, probably 10 minutes or so) I found the following:

• Each "friendly guy" can only teach you one spell, and you have to discover many (if not all?) of them.
• There's a large cache of exp orbs in the northwest.
• Spellcasting consumes a lot of exp (e.g. heal: 30) and there's no sound effect or anything when it works. When there's not enough exp, it does nothing. The UI was pretty confusing (also buggy).

After this, I gave up. The game has a potential, but I felt that it was a bit too ambitious. The documentation could be improved.

yeah…basically agree with what everyone else has said an ambitious project but too many little annoyances got in the way of it really being fun..it took me quite a while to figure out what was going on.. if my SPACE attack was doing damage, was I meant to use spells, but wait I don't have any , how do interact with the friendly guy.. oh ok I have mysteriously acquired a new spell without any real feedback to let me know that it happened.. I didn't really like that there was one currency (experience for everything, spell points, levelling up etc.) .. then when i die I am all the way back to the beginning again… main issue for me was just that the main thing I was doing all the time which was combat fel too clunky and didn't feel fun… sorry guys, I liked the concept/characters and setting and appreciate the effort and ambition with a large scope and a custom C++ engine, but just sort of bounced off this one as it is..

thank you so much for the great feedback already. our entry had quite a big scope and we are aware of the shortcomings.

haha, i like the pace of the game and music both. I feel like I'm playing an early 90s Action RPG or some NES game. The main character has lots of .. character but the crystal enemies are a little uninspired, which is a pity because I really dig the MOOD here. Hoping for a post jam update of this one!

I spent more time on this than I expected to from the first impression. At first I tried to do a pacifist run I didn't have patience to read through the controls carefully. I guess a more TL;DR for the controls and then you can write a longer text to explain the mechanics, if "L for spellbook. C for character sheet" isn't clear enough. But after my first run I managed to read more and figured how to attack. Then I started really exploring until I died. But wait! I healed at the same exact time and it turned me into undead fungi! Then I kept going and I noticed that every attack seemed to issue the attack multiple times instantly. That made killing everything really easy. The effect seemed to cause a glitch that eventually dropped my framerate below playable levels. Couldn't find an ending, but I had fun. One of the biggest gripes were that I wasn't always sure what art was background and what was foreground. Maybe use clearly different palettes for each or for example drop the staturation on the ground tiles a lot. Another was that the attack seemed to do damage to the direction you were facing. Which is fine, even though the animation/graphics don't indicate that. However, what was annoying is that the player defaults to pointing down, when no direction is pressed. Because of that you always had to press towards the direction you were attacking. That was annoying :(
The sounds and musics were good. I was surprised that the short music loop didn't start to annoy me at all.
Thanks for the game!
Edit: The fungi butt was awesome

The music is great! This is going to stick in my head for a while… I'm totally loving the graphics too, especially the fact that our wonderfully animated mushroom protagonist appears to be butt-naked :D

I'm having some trouble with the difficulty curve though. I can kill maybe 3 crystals before I turn into mushroom soup. Even after I figured out that I can heal (C is mostly advertised as read-only so I didn't try it at first), those few kills didn't give me enough XP to get back onto my shroomy feet. Maybe there's a trick that I'm missing…

The combat took a while to get used to. Mechanically I think it works fine with the game, but the visuals are showing something very different from what's actually happening. The visuals show a circular attack while the actual attack is something like a line coming out from where the player is facing. I might be misinterpreting what I'm seeing, but I think it's easiest to attack enemies below you since the rotation of the player automatically resets to looking down when stationary. Attacking in the other directions is difficult since it takes a while to rotate (and quick rotations are necessary to kite the enemies). Similar to the combat mechanics, the spells could use a bit of improvement in terms of visual indicators. I didn't figure out how healing worked until I read euske's comment. Unfortunately I wasn't able to play through the whole game since I seemed to have found a memory leak while exploring on the left side of the map. The game slowly dropped to around 1 fps (while continuing to slow down) and became unplayable.

Creating an RPG in a 2 day game jam is impressive though. Considering the scope of a game jam, I think it would have been very beneficial if a bit of time were taken away from level design and put towards visual indicators since the map seemed very large.

Good work.

The game looks and sounds nice. Nice use of dear imgui too! However as a non-fan of dark souls I find the combat very frustrating. It's unclear whether the attacks hit or not, and it looks like the crystals can get as many hits as the player from the very start.

Unfortunately I don't have enough patience to power through the difficutly :( The game looks quite impressive overall.

Last but not least:
The VOD to our Game.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1423581480?t=1h30m25s I'm sorry, that I complained a lot about our game.
But you already knew that I was not entirely happy about our result and that I'm really looking forward to our post jam version! :D