To Be Social

I really liked the idea of battling your personal demons with deep breath, calm mind and positive thinking 😁. Battle could have used some sound effects. Also, I died and the playing the game second time around I really wanted a button to fast-track through the dialogue and the spell animations. "Binge watching videos" a nice touch.

@bradur Hey! Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed!

I agree that a skip button was necessary and will be noted for future projects.

I always put sounds at the end of my list :( I really should move it up before I run out of time.

Binge Watching Videos is my favorite effect :).

Thanks again for playing and commenting!

Certainly a heavy topic, but an effective one. The mental foes are well though out and this kind of psychological theme has a lot of expansion potential. I actually forgot about the discussion framing while in battle, so the abrupt change back to it, accompanied by sappy music, worked well for me. Now then, some suggestions and issues.

One versus many, turn-based combat tends to result in very simplistic tactics: buff stats, debuff enemies, take them out starting with the one with least HP. The problem is that every enemy is always targeting the hero, so reducing their numbers is key. There are many ways around this issue, for instance combo abilities (requires planning ahead and knowing the enemy for maximal damage) or randomness (managing chance to gain an advantage over the random enemies), but let's stick to the theme.

In this case I would go with summoning mental allies. Rather than increasing a generic defense stat (which in excess makes the hero invincible at the moment, by the way), the calm mind ability would summon a defensive wall (or some sort of mental creature) which the enemies would then target instead of the hero. Similarly some abilities would summon offensive allies or support allies. If regaining WP is slow, then calculating which allies and how many of them to spawn at any given time becomes crucial.

That's a bit much for a jam, of course. To technical issues:

• Menu music breaks off when opening submenus. The whole menu could be in the same scene, or the music player could be a persistent DontDestroyOnLoad object.

• Certain textures are blurry, namely the mobile phone. Maybe you drew the assets at a low resolution or Unity is mushing them for the html5 build, they don't look good nonetheless.

• The GUI doesn't scale to fullscreen well, the bottom is cut off. This is solved by changing the Canvas Scaler screen match mode to Expand, or by changing the Match Width or Height setting to 1.

• There is a lack of backgrounds. Anything beats the default Unity blue, even another color. It is little effort for much gain.

Functional project about an important topic, without taking it too seriously, and very simple too, as you've said. Once you learn the engine well, you won't have to compromise the design and vision. Keep at it!

Wow, this is definitely one of the darkest games I've ever played in a game jam, coping with a very real issue. Please expand on this.

I'm lost for words.

The idea behind this game is very nice, being social can indeed be hard, especially when talking to people you find important and that you want to be friends/in good light with/be. Now for the gameplay, the gameplay itself was to limited and hard, the only viable strategy was have as much armor as possible and hope you don't die while you chip away the enemies HP, more varied gameplay would be welcome but good, for a jam game, well done! As HoovaKoodia said though, Unity Blue indeed makes the game look so much worse, changing it isn't that hard and would make the game more pretty, but well done!

@HuvaaKoodia Thanks for playing! And thank you for the in depth critique! The "MusicBox" was an issue that I had. I did end up creating a Singleton pattern for it with DontDestroyOnLoad, but I think I messed up and had one of the buttons programmed to destroy it. Whoops.

I agree the phone was a bit rushed. I drew it on a smaller resolution and blew it up when I realized it was too small but wanted to move on (jam pressure am I right?)

The concept of full screen has never crossed my mind until now, and I look forward to fiddling with that next time.

And yes…The blue screen of default is a real eyesore. I was pretty tired when I uploaded the final version, just happy the code was working well enough. Looking back on it now I realize it could have been fixed pretty easily. Something to consider next time.

I actually fiddled with the idea of mental allies, but just didn't have the time to make them. I really like some of the ideas you've recommended.

Thanks again for playing! I hope you enjoyed.

@maartene Hey! Thanks for playing! I'm really glad the theme of the game stuck with you. This is definitley a game I'd consider expansion.

@Lemur Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed the theme!

I agree the gameplay is rather simplistic, and the method of winning you have described seems to be the only way to do so, haha. I feel like I need to do more RPG research to find a balance here.

And yes, I completly agree with the Big Bad Blue Screen. It looks very tacky and I have no idea why I kept it that way :(

I don't know about the personality stuff so I'll just comment on the gameplay. It seems there are three actions: gain WP, turn WP into defense, and turn WP into offense. So the winning strategy is to get some WP, upgrade your defense until you are immune, then attack at your leisure.

@thomastc

Yeah, it's pretty basic. I need to do more research into RPGs to really make a more balanced game. This was more of a tech demo.