The Good: Game polish and mechanics are very good, and the final levels are very good build up to your final boss, very good learning curve, and levels are put in very good order in my opinion, the hardest being final one
Art is very good, and Dipper turning into berserk is pretty funny
The Bad: Nothing, for what the game stands, It's pretty good, my only minus is that the enemies can't pick up the potions, I had idea to lure dragon into one and it didn't work, overall pretty good
The Ugly: I personally dislike the dragon sprite, It feels different compared to the rest, but overall as artist myself I'm gonna say the game is pretty :3
Overall: Very good and well thought out game, and very original execution
(My first idea for this game jam was similliar, but not so good and well planned as yours puzzle game)
Play game
Little Dipper's Big Adventure's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #191 | 4.012 | 4.012 |
| Overall | #273 | 4.024 | 4.024 |
| Style | #463 | 4.182 | 4.182 |
| Creativity | #753 | 3.879 | 3.879 |
Ranked from 165 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Little Dipper changes his size between Small, Medium, and Large to take on enemies at different scales!
Development Time
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Michael Grubb on Music
Comments
The Ugly: I personally dislike the dragon sprite, It feels different compared to the rest, but overall as artist myself I'm gonna say the game is pretty :3
The only sprite made by me and not our team artist. We were running a bit short on time, so we had to have something for the dragon and Aspen was feeling exhausted, so we sacrificed the dragon sprite for better quality on everything else.
Really fun game. The only thing I didn't like was the offbeat mechanic, as it was both a bit annoying, and also made little sense. Why can't I attack the enemy, I must literally pass it in order for what I see on screen to happen.
It's kind of funny to see how divisive the mechanic is, as some people either love it and think its a genius trap, whilst others hate it and want it exiled to the shadow realms. Design wise I think it's a readability issue, since the actual purpose of the beat mechanic is to make the player think about kill order; and the reason why that's important is because it gives another layer of depth to being small.
A potential solution we've been floating around for the post jam update is to make the skellies that you cannot kill have a different sprite to the ones you can, and said sprite changes when you share a beat with them. This allows players to see both what beat they are on, and what beat the skeleton is, without having to walk all the way there to check.
Do you think that would improve it?
I like how the rules of the puzzle are simple to understand but increasingly get more difficult to navigate. The main struggle of making a puzzle game is designing the levels and I think you knocked it out of the park.
Great game! I love how you can change the beat using the potions otherwise you can't kill the skellies, this is such an amazing idea with huge potential! Congrats!
Whenever I died it made me sad because I thought of the little doggy on the itch page.
Great game!
This was a super super crisp gameplay experience. The 3 of us on our team had a ton of fun playing through the levels and figuring out the solutions together. Also love that it's an ode to a real life little dog. We also have a little dog who is a chihuahua dauschund and have made games about him as well. Awesome entry we loved it
so this took the "player changes size" mechanic and made it... really fucking clever, wow. Puzzle challenge was perfect for a jam game - I could feel my brain cells getting a workout without ever really getting properly stuck - I'd die a few times and then have the "aha" moment pretty quickly, which made me keep playing!
I have a few minor issues:
- being off-beat wasn't particularly intuitive, and I felt like that sort of puzzle was mostly solved by accident or because I just used the potions in the correct order by chance, rather than feeling like I had solved it.
- manual reset gets a little tiring, I'm not too sure why it's included but it may be a genre thing that I don't have experience with 😂
- always forward-facing character feels a bit jank
To be clear these are very minor nitpicks that would be expected from a jam game it's... it's just that the game is so good that they are the only thing I really have to talk about!
This isn't necessarily my favourite type of game, I'm not good at the thinky stuff, but I can see that people that enjoy this sort of thing would have a great time with it. It's a really polished entry, great job!
being off-beat wasn't particularly intuitive, and I felt like that sort of puzzle was mostly solved by accident or because I just used the potions in the correct order by chance, rather than feeling like I had solved it.
A lot of other players have reported frustration with this mechanic. Our current plan is to indicate which skeletons you can with a sprite change between skeletons you can or cannot currently hit. What do you think of this design solution?
manual reset gets a little tiring, I'm not too sure why it's included but it may be a genre thing that I don't have experience with 😂
This is a bit of a genre thing, but we're planning to add an undo button, which should potentially ease the issues you were having. The manual resets are there to allow players to think about 'ok what just happened?', but I get the frustration.
always forward-facing character feels a bit jank
This one's the only one which we won't be changing all that much, due to it being a reference to a lot of old style DoS games which had the player always facing forward. It's a stylistic choice.
Thank you so much for playing my game! The feedback we got was really good, and well worth the wait :P
sprite change between skeletons
That's a pretty good solution, yeah! 😁 so long as you make it super obvious.
we're planning to add an undo button
I probably wouldn't ever use an undo button tbh, and definitely didn't stop to think about what I'd done. I just dive in and try things, but I'm certainly not the target market here - I don't ever play this sort of game xD
It's a stylistic choice.
Ah I assumed the sprite was just because jam time got away from you, if it's a stylistic choice that's fine. Again, more target market/actual player mismatch xD
Very cool game! It has nice puzzles that got me thinking for a while especially in what order to move the player in. Something that would be nice to add is making it so that you can hold down to move continuously, other than that great job!
Pretty cool puzzle game premise! I felt the difficulty of the puzzles was perfect for a game jam, though if you add the ability to skip puzzles, you can definitely increase the difficulty of some puzzles without any risk of players getting stuck and giving up on the game. On the final puzzle, I found it a bit confusing how I was able to turn into super Dipper...I didn't really get why if I drank the big potions in a certain order, I'd turn into super Dipper and otherwise I'd die. I didn't feel like there was a clear indicator for that, and that it contradicted prior game logic which was confusing. Maybe I missed something, if so please tell me. Overall, this was a really fun game, great job!
Neat idea! I liked how you added the second dimension to the puzzles by making the player think how it affects their movement pattern parity, would love to see that explored more. Good job!
Great puzzle game! I had so much fun trying to figure out the correct order of actions.
Just a note: I wish there was an "undo" button, and not just a "restart" button. Sometimes I had the level pretty much figured out but for a little mistake I had to restart everything (Maybe that might be added after the voting period is over if you want to polish it more).
That said this is a 10/10 submission, I love this kind of puzzles
Very cool game, only suggestion i have is that i would like the be able to hold down a button to be able to move multiple spaces
Amazing game! The puzzles were tricky enough to make me replay the levels, but not so tricky I couldn't figure them out. Very funny to use your doggy as the protagonist. Fun credits as well! Overall I enjoyed this very much. Thankfully my controls never glitched, so had no problem there.
Only observation I have is that I wish I could keep a key pressed for the hero to keep moving in a direction instead of having to click for every step, but it wasn't too annoying of a mechanic
The game was super fun! I put together a lil list of stuff I really liked and things that I think could be improved upon while I was playing.
Likes
-Huge sparks flying on kill is a really fun effect
-I really liked how some of the early learning puzzles let you learn by failing the first time. It created a meaningful connection to those specific applications of the mechanic
-Puzzles felt very thought out and deliberate. They weren't annoyingly difficult, but a few of them made me stop and think for a bit which is perfect for a puzzle game IMO
-Art looks great and the sprinkle of background tiles like stones & sewer grates really sells the dingy feel
-Sfx are really satisfying and feel very responsive to player actions
Possible Improvements
-I love the enlarged player sprites, but it feels a bit weird moving around as them due to them being forward facing.
-Off-beat skeletons would feel a lot better for the player if they had some kind of visual indicator that they were currently off-beat. I felt like it was almost impossible to tell until I went up to one and realized. The mechanic itself is really interesting, but there should be more information for the player.
-Having to manually reset on death is probably intentional so the player can think about how to improve, but it feels off the first couple times when you're expecting to be put back at the start of the level, but nothing happens
All in all the game was really great and it's super impressive how much polish and content the game. It would be a serious effort for an entire team, let alone a single dev!
Haha. Thank you so much.
-I love the enlarged player sprites, but it feels a bit weird moving around as them due to them being forward facing.
This is actually a stylistic choice, which references a lot of old DoS games which inspired this game.
It would be a serious effort for an entire team, let alone a single dev!
Actually, we're a team of two! 1 programmer/designer/project manager with OCD, and 1 ADHD artist. Together we . . . get tired. :P
Actually! Sleep was not lost, neither was food! We planned the day out with breaks and everything, given we're both a bit like that.
I just happen to be relatively experienced as far as devs go and I code things fast. We were done with the basics of the game within the first 24 hours, which left the rest of the time for level design and testing.
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