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Eternal Echoes's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Metroidvania | #16 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #20 | 2.904 | 2.904 |
| Sensory | #20 | 3.077 | 3.077 |
| Execution | #20 | 2.846 | 2.846 |
| Enjoyment | #21 | 2.692 | 2.692 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Godot
Team/Developer
dragonforge-development
External assets
Craftpix and Kenney for graphics, Ovani Sound and ELV Games for music and sound effects, Suno for main menu song.
Prizes eligibility
No idea
Comments on the jam
Stressful but fun
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Comments
Heya! Thanks for the game! Unfortunately when I got to the boss I got soft-locked because the boss hid themselves in the top corner besides the door.
This was an interesting concept for a game, the musics were nice, although I don't know if they fit well with the game's idea. It's hard to fight the enemies without getting hurt because the hero has very tiny arms :( one way to do hitboxes for such a small character like this is the way they do it in Hollow Knight, just make the slash animation no need to animate the weapon or the arms moving and we can already tell clearly, the hitbox and what not!
There were a lot of items out of reach for some reason, either there was something with the controls I couldnt figure out (played on Xbox controller) or there was some kind of double jump ability that I couldnt find.
I don't have much to say other than this, but good job on making a game!
Unfortunately I didn't have much time to fine-tune the boss or test its jumping. I'll see what I can do to fix that in the future. I think the issue may be that he needs to chase the player too if he can't get a clear shot. But he was implemented on the last day. He was horribly lethal at first, so I was focusing on bringing his lethality down. I suspect if you'd jumped right under him where he was stuck, he would've jumped to a new lower position. But he should be fixed so you don't need to do that. The AI looks for a dozen jump points on the map, sees which ones are visible to it, and then jumps towards one at random. He may have just randomly kept selecting the same one - or it may have been the only one he could see and that's something I need to check. Ultimately, I think a more open design with ledges only on the wall might've worked better.
I'm curious how you felt the music didn't fit. That's the first time I've gotten that comment, but I wondered about different music in the mine. I went through three different songs before settling on that one.
The characters are a little on the small side. That's a good point about the attack animations. I'm doing another game jam now with the same characters, and I'm using Godot's 2D skeleton and parts of the characters instead of frames of animation. So it's easier to play with the size of different parts.
Yeah the double jump comes after the boss., and there were shrink slide and colossal kick abilities that didn't get implemented that would've gotten you under ledges, through rock walls, and opened the large and small doors.
Thanks! And thanks for the feedback.
Nice work! It’s crazy how much time/work everything takes! Echoing others, voice acting and cute scenes is wild to see in jam, impressive! For the gameplay, it felt like simplifying the colliders and/or taking advantage of layers would have helped, ex having large simple shapes for the environment and characters that collide but weapons and bodies on a different layer to the daggers always hit in good spots. I also really struggled with the enemies, it was really rough only being able to move slightly faster than the zombies, and their attack range was much larger than the visuals suggest, I really wanted some dodge/dash. And sometimes they took a loooot of hits, most of the time it was a few but there was one I think I hit over 20 times before it died. It was also confusing to have broken locks to get into places then have to break the lock again to leave.
I just skimmed through your post mortem, thank you for sharing! I always write these for myself, probably should clean them up and post them too. A few suggestions: it’s ONLY the game files themselves that are locked, screenshots, cover art, all the text can be changed throughout the jam (literally just added them a few minutes ago). My process for template updates is actually changing them in game and back-porting to the template, and only doing this for the first part of the jam. I find this helps with yagni and not go ivory-tower mode. When the jam ends, I then test the template and back-port anything else I noted along the way.
Again, great job, looking forward to more!
Thanks! Yeah it is crazy and I need to make sure it stays sane. :)
I'd be interested to hear more about large simple shapes. In this jam I was using a couple packs from Craftpix just so I could focus on other aspects, and I just used what I had. But I'm still interested in more details on those thoughts.
I did think about having the characters collide, even tried it out, but I didn't like it gameplay-wise. If I had more time for tweaking, I might have changed that. I actually split the characters' collision shapes into a rectangle bottom and an oval top because I had a single oval and the character was getting stuck under ledges when sliding. Also doing that did serve double-duty by making the daggers sink deeper into the characters.
You actually can outrun the zombies if you slide. Your slide is a dash, I just didn't explain it. I wanted them to attack fast and annoyingly. That's why I had them drop potions, because I couldn't myself avoid at least one hit from them. I realize now I should have implemented knockback with the hammer. That would've solved the damage problem.
The zombie's attack collision was a rectangle, but it was pixel accurate to the weapon. However, I agree it should've been smaller, and something I was thinking about doing on the last day, but I forgot to write it down and well. . . With their speed, they didn't need the same attack range as the player. (I used the same shape.)
The lots of hits things sound like a bug I saw occasionally but couldn't pin down that sometimes it took me an extra hit to kill the zombies. I will look into that for the next jam. I think it's my state machine doing something I'm not expecting.
Yeah someone else commented on the locks. It was an homage to Metroid and how you have to shoot the doors every damn time. But I get it was weird. Good feedback. Homage not worth it.
I wrote the post mortems for myself, but I just do them as consumable blog posts because it's a convenient place to store them for me, and a friend suggested that people like to read them, so it's also a way to build up a presence as I move towards publishing a game on Steam.
Ok, I wasn't sure. My internet connection goes from great to wonky and I didn't know if it was me or the game jam that was preventing me from updating the page for the info about the locks.
Good call on the template. I do tend to be ivory tower with my coding. But that's only because I plan on using it again, and I don't want to spend time refactoring. However, you're right some of that is going to happen. I don't even remember if I went through all the stuff I had to do with my sound system. I'd cleverly made the SFX system polyphonice and thrown away my system for spawning AudioStreamPlayer nodes to keep the memory down - only to find out that you can't push polyphonic streams through buses. Probably a bug, but still really annoying.
Oh and the nest game jam starts tonight and will be over in 7 days. Ha!
When things really get me thinking, I tend to fail to respond in a timely fashion, but it just sits in my brain nagging me, nearly 6 months, later, finally, here is some follow up I started and should have sent at the time in case anyone else bizarrely stumbles on this:
Regarding character collision, I didn’t mean to collide with the characters, but to utilize the different collision layers.
For example, I might have my layers like this:
ground player_body player_weapon player_hitbox enemy_body enemy_weapon enemy_hitbox
The CharacterBody2D’s will go on player_body/enemy_body and mask with ground, generally having simple shapes. Then, sensibly, the player’s weapon goes on player_weapon masking with enemy_hitbox. This way the terrain collision stays sane and isn’t affected strangely by animation but I’m free to do more complex damage shapes.
With it explained, the metroid door homage is cool but I think needs different packaging. Something like an evil eye and the door, or a creature like a spider drops in front of it.
This game was REALLY ambitious and really cool. Having a cutscene with voice acting in a gamejam game is something i haven't seen before, and it being actually good is even more shocking.
The music was also really good, but i would have liked some smoother transitions, when i entered the boss before double jump powerup i almost got jump scared by the music change. I sadly couldn't complete the game because my save just got stuck loading infinitely.
Overall it was incredibly cool and ambitious game but with that also came a lot of bugs, im for example still not sure how the boss i killed died, when he died i dont think i was even attacking him. But scope is something that you get better at with time (im still rather shit at scoping my game, just look at my earlier games). But for just a months worth of work this was super cool, keep it up.
Thanks. I appreciate that you thought the cutscene was good. I spent a lot of time on that.
That's a good note about the music transitions. There was actually supposed to be a cutscene before you encounter the boss, where the necromancer comes out for the first time, warns you away, and then raises the zombie, who is supposed to be your character's father. I actually coded into my music manager the ability to just have a song fade in. I didn't set it.
That's frustrating about the save not loading. Were you using the Web version or one of the download executable versions?
That's weird about the boss death being unlcear. I think fixing his movement might help. I suspect what happened is you hit him as he was mid-jump, and the death state queued behind the jump, causing him to die later. Alternately, it's possible he ran into a dagger stuck into the wall because I don't turn off their collision detection when they hit.
Yeah I learned a lot about scoping. I'm working on a postmortem devlog blog post. I learned a lot about what NOT to do. I also spent a lot of time debugging because for the first time ever, stuff wasn't appearing in the exported version for the game. Luckily, I did my first export with a week left. Unluckily, I ate up a lot of time debugging that was supposed to be devoted to level building.
Ye the boss did die mid jump, so was most likely one of those. I was using the webbuild when i played so probably som issue with that (i have had other issues with web version of other godot games this jam to). Looking forward to seeing the postmortem devlog, i really like seeing the behind the scenes stuff.
Just finished the Devlog: https://dragonforge-development.itch.io/eternal-echoes/devlog/968561/post-mortem... Wanted to get it done before my next jam starts, which is just under 11 hours.
Damn another jam so soon, best of luck there. And thank you for updating me, ill go ahead and read through it :D
Was not expecting voice acting in a jam game! Very cool. I like the visual style though I had lots of things popping in and out in the background.
I got completely stuck at the start, had to look at other comments to learn about throwing the dagger at the lock. Its a bit annoying to have to do this repeatedly on the same doors, and in both directions.
Found the combat a bit frustrating, but very nice level of polish overall.
Thanks! Yeah a friend brought over a mic and helped me record the intro, so that's my voice. I learned a lot about sound this jam.
Yeah I couldn't figure out how to request from the game jam organizer how to upload a fix to the blacksmith dialogue after I got the initial comments. Sorry to hear about the annoyance. It was supposed to be an homage to Metroid, how you have to shoot the doors open every time. In testing I got really used to jumping and shooting the lock. I made sure that the next doors (which I didn't implement the skulls for) could be hit anywhere. I could have had the locks not reappear, I just didn't think of it because persistence was literally one of the last things I coded in on the last day so that the pickups wouldn't re-appear.
I'd love to hear what you found frustrating about the combat. This is only the second game jam where I've had enemies. Personally, I thought that the zombies were attacking a bit too soon, and perhaps should have had a slightly smaller hitbox so the player could time a strike first, instead of simultaneous.
I wanted to refine the jumping zombie boss too so that he had a more consistent pattern, but he was second-to-last day and I decided to say good enough and move on. He had about a dozen points on the map he could jump to and picks one at random that is visible to him and jumps whenever damaged or the player gets in his personal space. Maybe I just needed better level design.
If you're interested, I just put up a very comprehensive devlog: https://dragonforge-development.itch.io/eternal-echoes/devlog/968561/post-mortem...
Got into the mine via thrown daggar in the lock. I did have trouble sliding through the crawl spaces. Overall had a good time playing the game. Thanks for all your hard work.
Thanks!
Yeah so the crawl spaces were actually not supposed to be slidable - yet. After you get double jump, the next level I built was a mini-boss fight where you learned the tactics needed to fight the next level baddies - charging minotaurs and priests that threw magic skulls that shrunk you. Defeating them would get you the shrink skull, which could be used to shrink large opponents (like the minotaurs) and give you the Shrink Slide ability, allowing you to get under those. They also allow you to shrink down the big doors, leading to the next level.
Then the next boss could only be hurt when you shrunk them, and defeating that boss got you a skull that allowed you to enlarge things, and gave you Colossal Kick which made you huge as you kicked, and you can take down certain walls. The next set of enemies was going to include something that was small and could only be hit by your hammer when you made them big, and dagger passed over their heads.
I designed the stuff in the levels to allow for the implementation of these things, hoping that I'd get to them and the levels would already be designed and built. Alas, I ran out of time. I'm working on a (very long) post-mortem devlog post about it.
If you're interested, I just put up a very comprehensive devlog: https://dragonforge-development.itch.io/eternal-echoes/devlog/968561/post-mortem...
This is a great looking game and and I love the music, it was really giving Dragon Age: Origins and Baldur's Gate 3.
However, and this may be because I'm dumb, I could not get past the starting area. I tried absolutely everything to get onto the ledge on the far left and to get through the gap on the right of the mine entrance, but nothing worked. I also couldn't get into the mine itself, but I imagine that's because you find a key or another entrance further into the game. It's a real shame because I love the vibe this sets up.
Oh shit! I meant to explain that in game dialogue and ran out of time. Throw a dagger at the gold lock on the mine entrance.
If you're interested, I just put up a very comprehensive devlog: https://dragonforge-development.itch.io/eternal-echoes/devlog/968561/post-mortem...
Nice job pushing your tech forward! I hope you learned something and that it helps your next iterations even better. Alas, I got stuck on the mine entrance and couldn't figure out what to do. My dreams of becoming the ultimate necromancer killing machine will have to go unanswered for now.
My bad there was supposed to be something to help you figure that out. Throw a dagger at the lock.
Got it! You could maybe also outline the dagger sprite in white in an image tool like a cave drawing and paste those a few near the lock. That might work, too.
This time I got to the edgelord boss but when he reaches the door up top, it seemed outside my jump height. Curse you edgelord! Using physics to my downfall...
I added dialogue from the Blacksmith spelling it out, just too late to push it.
Yeah that's intended. If you load up the game again, it should have saved right outside his entrance. I only had a little while to create and tweak his jumping AI. That was done second-to-last day. To get out you have to defeat him, which opens up an area of the map the camera won't reveal until his death. But once you get the jump boots to get out of there, that's really as far as I got in the level building. Though you can collect a few more hearts.
Dang deadlines.
Great job getting that much done as a team of one!
Thank you very much. As disappointed as I am that I didn't get farther, I am happy that I got as far as I did this jam.
If you're interested, I just put up a very comprehensive devlog: https://dragonforge-development.itch.io/eternal-echoes/devlog/968561/post-mortem...