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Qenari Protocol's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #8 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
I chose the theme "Genre Fusion" which is quite apparent when you play the game.
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Comments
Amazing game! Everything about it is fantastically done. The story and concept is great. The space ship exploration and combat is fun, the dungeon crawling is perfectly executed with the combat and randomized dungeons. There's lots of items and variety if things to make which encourages exploring to make new stuff I'm terrible at controlling the ship lol
I think the only bug I experienced was some of the space ship pickups remained after dying and reloading and some weirdness with the cursor full screen. It also seemed like you got more materials from attacking ships instead of exploring ships and stations which seemed to yield far less, but the crawling part was compelling enough to keep doing it!
Awesome job!
Here's my gameplay:
Game has a lot of style and a very good atmosphere to it. Dungeon crawler bit was good to play but space part of game felt too unfair for most of the time. The ui good too for the game. I think game could be very good to play once got more added to it and balance better.
It was fun to play and good work with the game overall did well with it.
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!
Very nice genre fusion. My only issue is the "early game hell" of trying to navigate without even a compass may be too hard. But overall this was a very fun and interesting game.
Nice genre fusion.
Nice UI and overall look and feel. It is probably mostly AI generated but it has a certain level of coherence so it does not fall into the uncanny valley. The upgrade/craft system has a nice touch and is a good base for even longer play times. The space shooting is solid. The crawling part feels (compared to everything else) a bit hushed together.
But where is the chicken? :P
Jokes aside, solid entry and I am glad that I am not the only one with an buggy entry.
The atmosphere and ambience is spot on. Also the visuals - regardless of AI usage.
The dungeon crawling part was fun and also liked the space shooter suff however the space part felt a bit too hard.
With the controls, the amount and strength of enemies and all the space mines it felt a bit too hardcore to dock the dungeons. I loved the space exploration part by default, even some combat cannot hurt but it felt much-much harder than the actual dungeons and I ended up destroyed by a spacemine I couldn't avoid by manouvering while shooting.
Great work!
I dig the atmosphere in the game! And it was an interesting mix of zero-g space fighting game and crawler. Loads of stuff to make and that worked great as in setting own quests. The controls were a bit hard to learn in the flying, and with enemies spawning in rather quickly and in tight formations there were some very quick deaths where my momentum gave me little chance to survive. I wished there was a quick save for that! But I did learn some after a while.
For the crawling, with the maps as limited as they were, I never reached any with substantial threat that would match my equipment after having struggled through the first one without any upgrades. So they didn’t feel like they had a sense of danger. And I think I would have liked it the other way around better. Being able to faster upgrade the ship to become very powerful but needing to do dangerous ROD exploration to get some of the critical elements that can’t be found while pew pew flying about.
Some of the AI assisted things felt like it shown through a bit more than I would have liked too. But all in all a very solid entry.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/vE3fONZaaUc
Great work, though not my favourite in comparison with other year´s entries. It shows your expertise, well done, but maybe just too much AI.
Very nice game!
The UI is simple but suites the game well. The game has lots of small details which makes it feel polished.
The module upgrade system is nice and kinda works, but there are so many different items to keep track of and for the jam version they are not really needed to survive I think. When in the construct menu there would be nice to have an indicator for what slots we already got items in and what their stats are compared to an item we plan on producing.
Initially the dungeon combat was challenging but after just a few armor items the player gets overpowered. So some balancing is needed there.
The enemy combat felt a bit basic but the swarms in ship mode still made it fun.
The game took me 1h25min to complete, but in the end I could have competed it quicker if I just understood what I needed to do. I kept looking for a warpdrive site.
Overall a very pleasant game to play!
Neat game, though I couldn't move the ship the way I expected. I included it in my compilation video series of all of the games from the Dungeon Crawler Jam.
My first game ended rather unexpectedly (ship destroyed, I guess), and I hadn't saved - would have been nice to have some flashing screen or something if I was low on ship health. I didn't have much problem with ship health after that, so I'm not quite sure what happened. Maybe there were ships hiding behind the wreck and shooting at me I didn't notice, that seemed to happen later =).
I love the secret door augment - it gives just enough info that I've still gotta be paying attention, but removed the need to smash my head into everything.
I completed the game in about 1.5 hours, with a few reloads. The wrecks mostly seemed very easy, except one wreck where I just got wrecked :D. There I expended all of my energy shooting out from behind a secret door at a drone, and still didn't kill it... I just turned around and went to a different wreck and was fine for the rest of the game.
The ship combat was nice, I'm apparently 100% unable to know which way strafing is going to move me when flying any direction other than straight up :D. Wasn't too hard, but definitely wasn't easy (although I never upgraded my ship stats because that seemed like a waste since it could be compensated with skill).
Nice game! I, however, never saw a chicken. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask the judge to disqualify this one.
Excellent game! I really like how it had a full slot-based inventory, lots of stuff to buy, secrets to discover, and some serious "skill issue" flying around. Currently I'm parked in front of a dreadnought with a drone inside that I cannot kill since my hand does no damage to it and my gun runs out of energy before it dies - time to grind for more stuff to get a better weapon I guess.
I like so much about this game I want to put a lot more time into it, currently I'm at 33 minutes and I want more! So that's a very good sign for jam games for sure.
I blew up mines and took the resource they dropped but I don't know what that resource was - maybe seeing a "you got +4 iron" or something would be nice. Oh, I really like the use of 2 places after the decimal for everything - it really made it feel the sci-fi environment. I would have like more variation in wall tiles, or at least horizontally flipping every other one. I walked into a secret 1x1 room where I was surrounded by walls and as I turned around nothing seemed to be happening so I thought the game was frozen briefly.
Great entry Dan, really well done.
Excellent game! I really like how it had a full slot-based inventory, lots of stuff to buy, secrets to discover, and some serious "skill issue" flying around. Currently I'm parked in front of a dreadnought with a drone inside that I cannot kill since my hand does no damage to it and my gun runs out of energy before it dies - time to grind for more stuff to get a better weapon I guess.
I like so much about this game I want to put a lot more time into it, currently I'm at 33 minutes and I want more! So that's a very good sign for jam games for sure.
I blew up mines and took the resource they dropped but I don't know what that resource was - maybe seeing a "you got +4 iron" or something would be nice. Oh, I really like the use of 2 places after the decimal for everything - it really made it feel the sci-fi environment. I would have like more variation in wall tiles, or at least horizontally flipping every other one. I walked into a secret 1x1 room where I was surrounded by walls and as I turned around nothing seemed to be happening so I thought the game was frozen briefly.
Great entry Dan, really well done.
As you know about the save issue, I should say it was fine when I closed the game and started a New Game afterwards. After that I tried a couple more runs, but it crashed once when I exited a dungeon, and then again when I died. So unfortunately I wasn't able to play much of it.
Form what I played, the flight minigame connecting the dungeons is cool. There's a little bit of a learning curve with the drift. especially since the parallax and lack of level assets makes it hard to be aware of how fast you're going before you're crashing right into trouble.
The movement is nice and snappy. There was one bit where it was hard to tell if I was turning or not due to the layout and the single tile asset.
Playthroughs: (May be some slight audio desync in the video.)
Thank you for checking it out, but sorry for all the bugs and that you had a bad experience.
The way I intended it to be played is to "sneak" up to new locations on the star map. Since the ship is rather vulnerable and certain locations can be crowded with mines and drones. I guess I could've mentioned something about "Playing strategies" on the project page.
Thanks for the feedback and the video!
Against all odds, I restored the jump drive.
The game is super cool.
Both parts control very well, although each time I started to spot ships I wanted to shoot using mouse buttons before switching my second hand to the keyboard again, and possibly mashing the sword button might bypass having to wait for the opponents' animation inside dungeons.
The overall pacing is good, the upgrade system is super fun to deal with because having to choose between upgrading your ship or robot is already fun but they're even a bunch of wildly different things to buy with all the utility ones available. I like that it hints at illusionary walls that you can't see in the dungeon, bumping into every wall is fun yet can be disappointing if there was never any point in the end.
I love the wall textures and I love the instant movement inside dungeons. The actual dungeons sure are small and not super elaborate but combat is fun, inside as outside of dungeons.
Balance of both parts is quite good too. I like that mines kill you in one hit (or maybe they don't but deal a ton of damage, it's the same) and a big bunch of ships can really take you by surprise, I like how they deploy. The first time I entered a ship with chickens (super cool chickens by the way) I wasn't equipped well enough to deal with them, it was cool.
Finally I thought it took me the time I wanted to spend on the game to complete it, I really like this kind of goal where you spend the exact same resource you use to upgrade to also win the game by the way.
Great game!
I am happy you liked it and that the bugs didn't ruin your experience!
Yeah, I should've added mousebuttons to shoot. That makes a lot of sense considering one use the mouse a lot in this game.
Thank you for playing it all the way to the end and for all the kind words! I really appreciate that :)
Wooo! I am having a blast with this one. There are little things that I can nitpick but what is the point? I’m certain this will be one of my favorite entries this year :D
You can rewatch my playthrough here: https://youtu.be/yEZHSwQSLeI?si=inT9hMEhYCOS1Jy9&t=8815
Thank you for that and thank you for playing it on stream :)
You had lots of good input, as did the chat, so thanks for that!
Dan, what a fantastic game!
Starting with the visuals, everything looks amazing and, most importantly, cohesive. This looks so polished, it’s astounding that you did this on such a short timeline. It even had voice acting.
Both the shmup section and the dungeon crawling section were… stellar :D
Navigating the ship felt good. The tank-controls make sense considering what you’re piloting, though I kept trying to use “absolute” directions. The only thing I found myself wanting to do was use the mouse to rotate the ship, making combat a bit snappier. I died a lot, but that’s a skill issues on my part :D Once I upgraded my ship’s cannons to the Triple Blue Rings of Death(tm), I was clearing out whole areas infested with baddies with no problems. It actually gave me a “OH SNAP” moment going from the initial cannons to the ultimate ones.
One thing I’d suggest you experiment with is using twin-stick controls for the ship. I… may… have bound my gamepad to keyboard inputs and I felt so much more control over the ship navigation.
The crawling portion was very solid. The character controlled really well, and once again, it looked stunning. Really good ambiance altogether. Having heard that you forgot to put spinners in lulled me into a false sense of security, and I didn’t realize that there were invisible walls until I noticed I could buy a module to detect them. Sneaky!
Actually, what I really liked is that different players want different crawling experiences, and you turned getting those luxuries into a part of gameplay. Don’t like automap? Don’t get it! Want a compass? Make one! I like that approach as it lets you customize your run.
I don’t have large constructive criticism, because the game is so solid. All I have are suggestions for polish. A few things would be:
Anyway, these are all nitpicks, I really think you should consider extending it and putting it on Steam or something. You have a really good idea here.
Thank you so much for your kind words!
I’m so glad you liked the visuals and the gameplay. I tried to make everything feel cohesive with a simple but unified appearance. Some might say it's too green and needs more colors, but I wanted that monochrome sci-fi console vibe. I'm happy how it turned out and because I made custom controls in that style, it was super fast to create new screens and dialogs. Nice of you to point out the voice acting, because I feel that sells the vibe nicely on the main menu. Simple and fast to make of with todays tools of course but effective :)
Your comments about the ship controls are super helpful. I wanted to make something that felt like Asteroids but with sideways and reverse thrusters. That combined with intertia makes it very difficult to control, but you do get used to it. It gets easer after you install the Inertia Dampener Module :) In hindsight I should probably made it more arcade-style and also supported twin-sticks. Aim with the mouse (1st stick), control ship with keyboard (2nd stick).
Haha, I love it when people have "oh snap!" moments :D I think I made the game way too easy, but I was worried that it would be too hard and since it's a jam I wanted people to be able to progress and fix the jump drive in a reasonable time. The star map have 2000 locations but I think you'll only need a handful to complete the game :P
I didn't actually forget to put spinners in but couldn't figure out how to add them in a good way with procgen.
I thought giving people the choice to which augments to make and install was a nice way to let players control the experience more. I'm glad you noticed and liked that part!
Thank you for the constructive critique. I've noted it down for a possible post-jam update. We'll see.
I was disappointed in myself that I didn't make the floor flip when moving/turning. That's such a rookie mistake.
Thanks again for your super kind words and stellar review :D
I seriously doubt I will make a full version. It's hard to pick up and continue a jam game.
As a host you're excluded from winning the jam right? right?? :D
The fake 3d tiles really look like just a 3d scene (I only know it's not due to discord), do you happen to have this project on git for people to poke at?
HAH! Yes, I'm excluded :) I'm happy you like it so much that you even ask that :D
I did release the source code for my last jam game, but I'm not sure I want to do it this time. At least not the complete thing. I don't think anyone have value in that. I could extract the dungeon crawling part and make it a public github repository. I probably should do that.
This game is no joke! Very impressive amount of (workable!!) features for a jam game and they all work very very well. Took a few runs to get me going, but I got better every time. There's a bit too many resources to realistically keep track of, but I approached the game by just scavenging everything (space and stations) and building things as they became available.
I really enjoyed playing this entry. A post jam update would be cool where some of the destinations are hand curated and perhaps the resources and their predictability in obtaining them are a bit more streamlined (an upgrade that could regulate what materials you get would be cool. Or an upgrade that would point you in the direction of a resource you want to obtain.)
Amazing entry!
Thank you so much for playing it and on top of that; enjoying it! :)
Great suggestions there. I take not of it and if I will do a post-jam update I'll consider them.
The initial plan was to have 10 hand-crafted locations (the final one at the brink of the galaxy) which was the main storyline. Each location more difficult than the previous, and you would need to grind and upgrade to be able to take on next story location. Unfortunately that was cut early because I saw how much time that would take.
That game has a scope! I think I’ve spent over 2 hours playing it.
It was very hard in the beginning, and I totally missed that you can (and should) save often and just explore the game systems via experimentation. But with that feature comes an interesting bug: each time you load (I presume) game spawns enemies from the save file and from the map again, or that’s how it looks like. Leading to crazy situations with tens of enemy ships, tens of mines stacked on top of each other, and generally providing (sometimes) an unfair advantage when you actually start looting the whole battlefield after wiping several times. Here’s the video of such a moment: https://youtu.be/h5jjyL5Pd2s
I appreciate the amount of systems you’ve built for this game. Fabrication was a bit obscure at first, as I had to go through all the items to figure out what is what and prioritize crafting what is needed first. Probably somehow marking what item is for the ship and what item is for R.O.D. would’ve helped a lot with the initial confusion.
Augments which modifies your view (anomaly detector, radar) was a really nice touch, expanding dungeon crawling part of the game significantly.
One thing I would’ve loved to see in the dungeon crawler part is the way to distinguish different wall tiles from each other. That would’ve helped a lot in navigating derelicts, as you don’t have feedback on camera rotation, especially when you’re in the room behind the illusionary wall.
Regarding the space part I felt disoriented at times, probably because the camera is not oriented with the ship and sometimes up/down and left/right shifts places and I cannot just keep it up some times :)
But overall, the game is really solid, both space and dungeon parts are done really well and everything looks and feels consistent. I’ve enjoyed completing the game, though I felt frustrated at times by how easily you can die in the space :)
Thank you so much for taking the time to play it! It really means a lot to hear that you spent a couple of hours in the game - that's the best compliment I could ask for.
I appreciate you pointing out areas where things could be improved. The save/load bug you found seems to be a real bug even though I never experienced it. It's best to restart game and hit "continue". I’ll definitely be looking into that.
Fabrication items for the ship vs R.O.D. are marked but could maybe be even more clear.
I've taken a note of all your valid comments and suggestions. I might do a post-jam update with improvements.
Thanks again for not only playing but for writing such a long and informative comment - the good, the bad, and the bugged! :)
Space is a dangerous place :D
(Re: the video. That might not be a bug. Some locations are high level and spawn much more and are more difficult than others. It depends on the procgen)