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Unthemed Unfinished Metroidvania's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Metroidvania | #18 | 2.985 | 3.500 |
| Execution | #24 | 2.452 | 2.875 |
| Enjoyment | #24 | 2.452 | 2.875 |
| Overall | #26 | 2.319 | 2.719 |
| Sensory | #33 | 1.386 | 1.625 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Godot
Team/Developer
SuperbPangolin
External assets
None
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Comments
Super cool game, what a surprise! Alternate title: “Thomas was definitely not alone”. The save room decoration was great, I really appreciated it. I know your time was low but having enemies have something more distinct would have been great, esp the ones that are similar sized, after getting hit, I’d sometimes get confused who was who from the intense knockback. Also, using something like https://sfxr.me/ for a few blips and bloops for cues during boss fights would have been sooooo nice.
Most jams, in my experience, allow some amount of generic template code, I highly recommend checking them out so you can get things like easily remappable controls essentially for free. Dragonforge has one which is very nice in it’s modularity so you can pick and choose what you like: https://github.com/dragonforge-dev/dragonforge-game-template. Another popular one is https://github.com/Maaack/Godot-Game-Template and I recently released my own https://github.com/paco-orwin/godot-starter-cookiecutter. I had to use antimircox to remap to a gamepad, on my keyboard the left/right arrows are under c and v and it’s totally unplayable as is.
Overall, loved the design, everything felt really good. I can’t remember if it was after the first or second boss that you had more freedom and could choose which to fight next but I liked that you could get first swimming to make the next boss easier, felt kinda megaman-style. The last boss was a lot of fun BUT when you go to the right, I initially struggled climbing up, looked at the controls and saw there was an updash I didn’t have so went back and the boss triggered again (and I died)! Went through the world again, beat the boss a second time and managed to jump my way up to the end without ever finding the dash.
Again, great work, esp given the time!
I won't lie, I entered this with very low expectatives, but I left extremelly pleasantly surprised!
You might think there's not a lot to comment about art here, but actually, this game's visuals are quite very well put togheter. I actually never felt lost at any point in the game because the shapes of the level design are very good, and I could even make out to understand there are 3 whole distinct areas here, the starting cave, the water zone and the maze downwell, despite they all sharing the exact same (lack of) assets!
Also, those are NOT just some random squares and rectangles made for game mechanics, this is clearly a living world in disguise! I can tell there is something going on here... from the giant maze-like structure hid behind a laser door to the weird rectangles with orange lines on them that moves quite erratically... there is a reason they are all locked up on dead ends, isn't there? That fact alone already gives them such an eerie vibe, and I love them for it!!
Also, I really like how you used the outlined tiles to guide us into safe points, that's something very important in Metroidvanias and most people kinda overlook when placing down their rest zones.
The bosses are all fun, altought I will admit they can be a little nuisance to deal with sometimes. The I-frames when you get hit are way too little so it's quite common to get comboed by the bosses without a real way of escaping their grasp, and for the water pond boss in specific, the game doesn't make you stop moving after you fall onto the water, so it happened a lot of me falling down, then respawning on the middle platform and immediately falling down again because I was still holding the key.
Also, This will sound very couterintuitive, but I actually felt kinda cheated on by the hitboxes, despite them being exactly what I was seeing lol. It might just be a me being too used to it thing, but I will never find hitboxes that are exactly your size to feel like they're right, it just feels wrong to me not being able to phase a tiny bit into enemies or their attacks before actually getting hurt, everything just feels so big!!
Lastly, the control scheme is a little weird.... I looked it up and it doesn't seem to match neither AZERTY nor QWERTZ, so I really have no idea where the hell you got DX-spacebar from x)
I personally really hate jumping with the spacebar on 2D games, it's always nice to just let the player jump with the "up" input if it's not used for anything else. And... unless your keyboard have D and X side by side, why did you choose two keys that are on top of each other instead of just ZX or DF? That makes such a weird shape on my hand and it's not quite the comfiest thing on the world </3
Great game tho! I missed having some music, but the reason there's none is understandable. (Also, spoiler alert, but I actually giggled when the final boss turned into a pickup and tricked me into running into it, that was a genius second phase x3 )
Thanks for playing my game! I'm glad it was more enjoyable than you expected.
I am very happy to hear that the rooms were generally readable! I spent about the first day and a half that I worked on the jam just designing the map, and multiple more of the days on turning those into playable rooms. It's great that some of that early work translated into a feeling of different areas of the world. I did a lot of updates to the color palette on the last day (it was mostly greys because I hadn't bothered to think about it), and I think that helps a lot with the overall atmosphere too.
I absolutely agree with you about I-frames. I was going to lengthen them to about 1.5 the length or so but changing that led to other issues such as being able to go through the laser barrier blocking you from the maze, and I didn't have time to fix those issues so I just decided to leave them as is for the time being. If I continue working on this game post jam, one of the top things on my list would be to deal with that (and yeah the water should stop you from moving immediately after respawning).
I probably ought slow down some of the bosses as well, I can't disagree that sometimes they pull off completely unfair combos on the player.
I actually was also planning on rendering hitboxes larger than they were but never got the time (although now that I think of it it probably would have been like three lines of code, so maybe should have just added it but oh well).
You're right about the control scheme, I have no clue what I was doing there in hindsight. I think I just didn't think much about it , and then got used to it playtesting. My keyboard is a standard QWERTY keyboard and I have zero idea how I didn't notice how uncomfortable hitting x is, which is really is now that I think about it. I think some of it came from expecting to have more abilities that needed button mappings when I started the project but really who knows. I appreciate your suggestions for other ways to lay it out!
I'm glad the final boss twist was an amusing surprise!I was hoping that it would be a funny way to keep the final boss a little more memorable, which it sounds like it has succeeded at.
Having a boss right at the start before you have gotten to practice the mechanics or invest yourself in the game at all is pretty frustrating. Attempted it a few times but ended up giving up. If this was a bit later and I had already gotten going in the game I might have felt compelled to try harder but it was literally the first room.
Kudos for still getting something done in half the time though. Also "skill issue" is a fair response to my comments hehe.
I totally agree, unfortunately I didn't have time to design much content in between bosses and still have the number of bosses I was trying to create. Thanks for attempting it anyway!
Boss was aggressive. I did my best but in the end he won the day. :D
Aptly named! Good job knocking out that much code in the time you had. I'm having a hard time with the boss that moves slow in air then does rapid diagonal strikes. I find the pattern unclear / hard to recognize, so it's difficult for me to learn.
I love seeing games in Godot in game jams! I did like the controls. I thought the jumping and movement felt natural. Not too slow, not too fast. It was also easy to see when you were hitting.
I could not get past the first boss. Its movement was erratic, and kept slowing down. I couldn't find the pattern. After the third death I gave up.
Keep it up! I've learned stuff from every game jam I've entered.