Hi! First off I must say I am sorry I did not get to play your game during the rating period, but I am here nevertheless to offer my feedback :) Your combat system is very detailed and has a lot of tools! But I don't feel like there was ever much of an excuse to use those tools. Only the fireballs were really useful, and even my regular attacks felt like they were too short so I barely swung my sword at all. The levels were very flat and open, so all the combat kind of felt the same. You've done a really great job on this first game, with things like a system for earning xp and levelling up, feedback to the player about getting damaged, a boss fight (so cool!), all the movement mechanics are not easy to get right either! That's a lot of systems working together in a short amount of time, which is really impressive. I think I'd like you to consider whether or not you really need all those systems, and figure out what purpose each one will have in the game. Do you really need an up dash if the player already has a great double jump? Maybe try taking one out and seeing if it makes the gameplay better or worse. Thanks for posting, and congrats on your first game jam!

I really like the variety of magic spells ! I don't know if the controls are the best though, I thought about having like HJKL - to spells and attacks, this way the player can execute combos with the spells. The movement feels good, and the tutorial is nice too ! One last thing, I prefer larger attack hitboxes - you give more control to the player to attack while keeping its distance - think about it in terms of the character size, you want to hit a little farther than 1 character length usually. You can see Hollow knight for ref for example. Anyway, congrats on your first jam !!! =)

This is usually a small thing but I honestly loved how clear the tutorial was and made sure to teach all of the different ways to use all of the mechanics! Often overlooked but done super well in your game, and really enjoyed how certain enemies made it make sense to use different attacks. 

Overall enjoyed the game! Could use a little more polish on some of the movement/attacks to make it feel a bit smoother and I could see it being a really cool game once it's cleaned up a bit! Great work!

Good  job, I liked the movement and the dash generally. I will say, the dash is pretty floaty when you use it to go up in the air, and spamming upward-diagonal dashes to move around seems to maybe be the best way; I just skipped most enemies like that haha

I see you've gotten a lot of great, actionable feedback from others already. I didn't dig too much, but also don't wanna repeat too much yet again haha. I didn't see any mention of the boss you implemented, and I think the animations and art are awesome but the fight itself could use some tweaking. The boss runs very slowly, but it's still quite hard to beat because it seems to have a lot of health (cannot tell due to the web build issue you mentioned in the game page). Also, the animations are maybe a bit confusing, oftentimes I would get the boss locked into his attack animation one way, jump around him, but then he is hitting me while I'm behind him. Since I couldn't see his health and I felt like I had hit him quite a few times, I ended up giving up on that section actually, I hope I didn't miss too much of the game

Overall it's a good start with some potential for improvement, great job on your first ever game jam submission!

Hey there!

I think many people already mentioned a lot of points - so I won't go into much detail - if theres on point you want more detail on, feel free to ask.

I like the base design and premise of the game. The art assets were nicely chosen and fitting to the world building.

I think as a new jammer (and maybe even new game dev?) you had lots of good ideas, and were able to get them all in but in return had less time for polishing which was needed. 

For example - you have player getting hit feedback with i-frames and animations - yet the visualization of it is missing or you added a healthbar to the hud and werent able to connect it to the actual health.

Another example is flying spikes without underground to hold those spikes - this maybe desired but makes me lose my immersion.

Another thing was the background, it seems you were attempting to get a dynamic background / use parallax movement - which would be great if implemented correctly (btw. we stumpled in our game here aswell) - but instead theres a static background and moments later a different static background. Here I'd probably stick to the static background at all.

Nevertheless - its your first game jam and its definitely a complete game - great job submitting!

Love to see more from you in the future!

Here’s some detailed feedback

What stood out in a good way:

+I really loved the variety of enemies, each type introduced felt distinct in behavior

+The progressive introduction of mechanics like double jump, spellcasting, dash, and switching spells was well paced and wasn’t overwhelming

+The background music fits the mood nicely it was subtle enough not to distract, and adds to the atmosphere

+The movement was responsive and each attack/casting had a nice animation

Where I think there’s room to improve:

The upgrade/leveling system is promising, but it’s currently unclear how the upgrades actually affect gameplay -> For example, does “damage” affect all types of damage (melee and magic), or just melee? Does “spell” mean I deal more spell damage, or gain more mana? Clarifying this in the UI or with tooltips would make upgrade choices more meaningful and strategic.

-Spikes vary a lot in size, and some of the smaller ones are hard to spot. If the visual inconsistency is intentional, maybe consider adding a glow or outline to make them stand out more

-The enemy hitboxes feel quite large, especially compared to the player’s own attack range, I mostly used spells trought the gameplay

-When multiple enemies attack at once, it seems like the stun is skipped, which makes it easy to get overwhelmed without any clear feedback or chance to recover. Maybe extending immunty frames and also adding an audible hurt effect would help with this.

-Enemy deaths feel a little flat there’s not much visual or audio feedback that makes defeating them feel satisfying. Even a small particle burst, sound effect, or animation tweak could add some sense of accomplishment after defeating them

I very much like what's here and the ambition behind it all. And for a first submission in 10 days this is not too bad at all. Admittedly though, it does have some rough edges, but I'm hoping my feedback is taken to try to smooth them out.

To start, I think the item drops are a bit too big, and I can also push them into oblivion it seems. If I also jump on an enemy drop when it spawns, I can push it into the ground and into the void. Then the enemy slimes movement seems a bit rough and can sometimes get stuck into infinitely flipping.  I would also like there to be a way to see what level my character is and perhaps as well where the total damage/magic I've accumulated are. Likewise, a pause menu for the magic to change between would also be nice, but not necessary. The portals to the prior level I think are better if you make them interactable with because sometimes when I've tried to destroy the crates in front of them, I'll accidentally push myself into that portal and then back to the start of the previous level which is relatively rough. Though the same I wouldn't say for the end of level portals since some you need to dash through and dont really have a good opportunity to interact with them mid-dash. I'd like to see more aerial combat options for dealing with the bats a bit easier. The fourth level also spawns with you having no platform and spikes that are floating without a platform. Not sure if that's intentional, but I'll note that if it isn't. The final boss I was also able to beat by just spamming the downwards slash and repeatedly jumping of their head till their eventual demise but I won't fault for that since boss design takes a very long time to get right and I doubt many in this game jam even have bosses in their game. Beyond that there's some visual inconsistencies I've noticed between the spikes and the environment (which could be intentional to point them out to players better but it does seem a bit jarring with how some of them are sized). The background as well I've noticed has a bit of a jarring transition through the levels, which I feel like parallaxing can solve (InboundShovel has a short covering the topic). 

That all said, I don't say that all to harp on you at all. I very much like what you've got here. From the movement options to the downwards mid-air slice + jump, it comes together quite nicely. Given time and some fine-tuning and I truly believe you'll have a great game on your hands. I do believe in the potential you've got here, and that's why I tried to be as detailed as I was with this feedback, and if you do continue to work on this game post jam, I wish you the best of luck in that regard. There's a lot of potential here and I do hope you'll be able to see it through if that's what you choose to do, and if it is, do let me know how it goes

Fun: great work, the platforming, fighting, abilities, slight lagging though

Presentation: really like the art style, especially the background, sound effects are a bit laggy though, and some assets don't fit, but it's a game jam, it's hard to find perfect assets in a short time 

creativity: really nice, the fighting and the abilities, and it fits the theme well 

The movement feels great on this. I especially loved discovering that you can dash in any direction. Combining that with the down attack makes for some really satisfying combat. I also like how the mechanics are slowly introduced to the player. 

I would say, the hurtbox on the enemies feels double the size of what they should be, which lead to frustration. And while I do like the boss fight, I feel like it ended a bit too quickly, I wish they had some more health. I'd also recommend changing the keybinds for attack and spell to the mouse or the right side of the keyboard (HJKL...). It's not that much of an issue here since the combat is slow enough, but I think it'll still play smoother to separate the movement and attack keys to different hands for these games.

All that aside, this is a very solid entry, especially for your first jam. It's enjoyable and the movement and combat is really fun to master. Great job on this! :)

great movement, definitely nailed the feel.  It’s good enough that i started my own speed runs. I really enjoyed this . Great job.

Heres ours if you haven’t came across it yet.

/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3738248

I liked the game. I think there where some isues with the collisions (as I hit several things when I was close, but not touching them. If you fix that, you have an overall great game.

Very good first game with amazing animations and number of mechanics, There was a bit of input lag and few bugs as other have mentioned it, but once fixed it will be a flawless amazing game :D

Good job Soham bhai :)