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You Are the End's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Art / Graphics | #48 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Controls / UI | #56 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Sound/Music | #61 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Overall Fun | #119 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Genre
Action
Shooter | Platformer | Slasher | Beat em Up | Base Defense | Survival | Racing
Strategy
Turn-based | Card Games | RTS | 4X
Rating
Family Friendly
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Comments
As this is in it's current form I can't say I enjoyed much aside from some of the graphics and the title's music choice.
Thanks for the feedback! Itās as you said it is pretty barebones with a lacking gameplay.
For the music, I was kind of mixing between two different tracks for the both the sides on top of the base track (itās more noticeable when wearing headphones). Watching video, I guess I failed miserably at conveying that along with layering the audios together, haha.
Apart from that, I do agree that the game needs a lot more variety in audio along with SFX, which is severely limited as of now.
Same for the GUI, itās pretty much a work in progress with only partial controller support as you said.
For the gameplay, I do get your frustration from the video. It was my first attempt at TD, a pretty bad one at that. I do need to learn a lot from the genre if I wish to continue on this game.
I totally agree on the rest of your points on the unitsā balance and broken game design as well. Itās painfully clear that I need to go back to the drawing board with this.
I have noted the rest of your suggestions and will definitely keep in mind if/when I take this game idea ahead, in a new and better way. Thanks a LOT! The feedback was something I needed to get out of the rut with the future of this game. :)
>> For some reason I thought itād be a good idea, that you could spawn knights behind the enemies, thus encircling them on both sides, lol.
Idea is fine, execution is not. It should be relegated to some sort of spell or ability.
That makes sense, as there are no spawn indicators RN.
Hello!
Firstly I want to compliment the art and animations, that is a tonne of work! The UI too was very well put together and clear. I thought the music was good if a bit monotonous after some time, perhaps some sections that varied it up a bit could help.
Gameplay-wise I had fun though I didn't feel like there was much in the way of tactics or meaningful choices I was making. Maybe I am missing something but I felt like the best option was basically just to flood units in as soon as I could. I liked that I had to change up the composition a bit to deal with the new enemy types that come but timing and running low on population didn't seem to be punished. Maybe with that kind of mechanic a sort of 'upkeep' based on the amount of population you have in reserve slowly replenishing your population with more reserves and replenishing more quickly, could give some more meaningful player skill expression? I unlocked all of the upgrades in the order that seemed reasonable and then that whole system ends which I thought was a bit disappointing as I liked the idea of the give-and-take of progressing through the options when there were negative effects as well as positive ones. If the game was expanded upon that I think would be a good design element to explore more, maybe try and at least make a set of options with negative and positive effects for each track that loops back onto itself so you cycle through them? I did like the idea of the king unit adding an active element to the combat space. Maybe if you wanted to lean into your narrative of sacrifice and loss of humanity the ability to press a button to kill one of your own units to heal the king could be interesting? These are all just suggestions if you intend to take any of these design concepts further in future. Overall though for the scope of this build I did have a fun time with it. Good Job!
Our team have submitted a runner that combines Tetris and precision platforming if you'd like to check it out (Link below). We always really appreciate feedback :)
I wish you the best with your projects!
/jam/feedback-quest-8-indiegames-x-indie-streamers/rate/3773442
Hi! Thanks so much for playing and for the thoughtful feedback!
While I canāt take credit for the character and BG art (I used free assets for the jam), Iām glad you enjoyed the overall feel and the UI.
I was actually planning to rework the game so havenāt worked on the sound parts a lot. I do agree that the same track does get monotonous and with lack of much SFX.
On the gameplay side, your comments do make sense as well. I havenāt paid enough attention to the game design.
I love the idea of introducing an upkeep/reserve-based population system that could create a stronger push-pull and make spending decisions feel more impactful. Same goes for reinforcing the tactical layer when choosing when and how to deploy units. The point about the upgrade system ending too soon is also fair. It being a rogue-like, having a ton of variations should be standard with more branching or looping paths, as you suggested.
Also, the idea of sacrificing your own units to heal the king? Thatās interesting, and fits the theme perfectly. Might steal that one down the line xD
Thanks again for sharing some really solid design ideas. Iām definitely planning to take this further, just taking my time to soak in the feedback and see which way to go forward with.
P.S. Iāll give your game a try as well. The idea definitely looks interesting, combining platformer with tetris style gameplay. Thank you, and good luck to you as well!
You are very welcome! As I said the foundations are very strong as a starting point, just needs a bit more meat on the bone for the systems to really shine. I look forward to seeing where you get to with it!
If you do check out our game be warned, it is quite challenging! We are trying our best to put together some better on-boarding tools but haven't quite got them together for this build. Might require a bit of practice... Hope you have fun! :)
Yeah, Iām taking notes of all the changes mentioned, and now have a pretty good grasp of where I need to go ahead with this game. Thanks!
P.S. Yeah, the combination of platformer with tetris puzzle elements do look daunting. Letās see how Iāll fare with it xD
Hey, nice graphics, nice concept, but there is no real choice or tactic involved in the gameplay. Looking forward to see where you are going with this. I can just say what hythrain wrote is fitting.
Thanks a lot for playing and for the feedback! I totally agree with you. Hythrainās feedback hit it home hard, and after giving a replay, that totally made sense.
Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
So... I didn't really get the narrative behind this. Even when I got to the end and had the full prophecy, I didn't get it. Like, what is the prophecy supposed to be saying? I'm so confused by it. Even the name and the tagline don't make sense to me. I feel like there's a lot missing here.
As for the gameplay, there's a core problem to it: the player doesn't have to do anything and they will eventually end up with the conditions to win. I decided to take 20 minutes to test it, doing multiple runs where I did absolutely nothing but let the enemies run. After each stage, regardless of your actions, you'd get a power up. There was basically nothing to make me engage with the game, and thus I could just sit back and wait until I had the blood knights, the king, and various power-ups for improving player population and decreasing enemy population before I lifted a finger. To not have to engage with the game's primary game loop and still "beat" the game is a huge oversight.
This is also before I get into how the first unit is basically worthless. If you start the game and spend every point of population on those units, you won't even get to see the second enemy type because they'll be overwhelmed. Once you unlock the knight, there's never a reason to summon the first unit. Similarly, once you get the blood knight there's never a reason to summon the knight. If you were to go by their population cost, one would expect the knight to be 2.5x stronger than the first unit, and for the blood knight to be 4.5x stronger. In reality, the knight is something like 5x stronger and the blood knight is well over 10x stronger, both in damage done and in health. So even if you DO engage with the game loop (which, again, you don't have to until you have all of the power-ups), there's never a reason to use anything but your most expensive unit. This is just dull and boring. The game is listed as "strategy" but it took no strategy at all to win.
And I've not even mentioned the smaller issues like how you can hear two songs playing (the stage music and the end-of-stage music) when your run ends, or how there's just no sound effects, or how some enemies will just ignore the king and run through, or how you have the game set up where the bad guys can run all the way into the castle to damage your population but you can't swarm the summoning thing to do the same to them.
There is potential with this, but it needs a lot of work on it at this stage.
Hi hythrain! Thanks so much for taking the time to play and review the game in such detail! Iād love to see the VOD of your playthrough, please share the link when itās live!!
On the narrative side, the prophecy and tagline were more of a reflection of your moral choice, as different playstyles will give different prophecy. Like if you choose to help your units by saving your population or use them as meat shields while attacking from behind. But I guess I made that too cryptic while aiming for a medieval feel, and is something I definitely need to revisit so it makes more sense.
I canāt believe I missed such a major issue related to the gameplay loop!! Thatās straight up broken and kills any little strategy elements that the game had. Thanks for discovering that!
I do need to optimize the unit balance as well. I was aiming for something like, say youāve unlocked the knight (which is slow but a tank), you can then drop scouts after he engages in battle to do quick attacks, as they are fairly cheap but weak. I calculated the DPS after seeing your comment and as you said, they are actually high (1x, ~3x, ~7x). TD is hard and it was my first time building such a game, guess thereās a LOT I need to learn about the genre and game balancing.
I completely agree on the smaller points you mentioned as well. I havenāt worked on the game a lot after the jam, apart a few builds fixing the issues mentioned during that time. I submitted this game to get these brutally honest feedbacks as I was not sure in which direction to take this ahead. Iām a tad less confused now, but yeah it does need a TON of work.
Again, a massive thanks for all the feedback and sorry for the late reply. I look forward to the playthrough once itās live. Thank you :)
"On the narrative side, the prophecy and tagline were more of a reflection of your moral choice, as different playstyles will give different prophecy. Like if you choose to help your units by saving your population or use them as meat shields while attacking from behind. But I guess I made that too cryptic while aiming for a medieval feel, and is something I definitely need to revisit so it makes more sense."
I wanted to respond to this because there's a bit of an issue here I feel: until you unlock the king, there's no difference in play style. You're just making units to try and defend against the inevitable.
With that in mind, I can now see how to correct this problem. First, make the king playable from the start but weaker than what the king ends up being later on. Second, make it that all units are available from the start. Now, shift the upgrades from being static and always available to being more random and based on how many enemies the player defeats (Not enough kills? No upgrade for you). Now you shift these upgrades into three categories: the People, the Enemy and the King. Upgrades about the People will do things like improve your population and reduce the cost for units (doesn't need to be just this). Upgrades about the Enemy will do things like reduce their population per wave and make them weaker. Finally, upgrades about the King will do things like make the King stronger or give and upgrade abilities that affect either the soldiers or the enemy. From here, you can now more clearly define playstyles using the various upgrades.
Another thing I'd suggest as part of this would be to change how waves work. Instead of each wave just coming, make it that a wave has to be completely cleared out before the next can begin. Also make it that the damage enemies do to population if they get all the way to the end is percentage based and that each wave will always have more than enough population to win in a single wave, even if you get all the Enemy category upgrades.
These should help make the playstyle thing work and help shape the narrative stuff better.
That actually makes a lot of sense. So the units/characters will have EXP in way and only give upgrades once youāve collected enough. So the users will also have the choice of how to use each unit and have their own unique ābuildā of the army.
I actually really like this idea! It kind of gives the card system a meaning, instead of just being there as another system in the game. Itāll also fix a lot of the other gameplay issues like you mentioned.
I was actually thinking from a while to split the zones into different parts. An idea I had was to show multiple layers of the castle walls, each showing a layer of the society - king, ministers, knights, general population, slums. Each of this zones will have their own playable unit unlocked from the start. The units can explore the ruins outside of the castle walls during the day to find ways to defeat enemies, hunt for resources, progress the story, etc and then switch to a TD during the night to fend off waves of enemies. But again, Iāll have to do the balance between them right so it doesnāt feel like two games forcefully joined together.
Again, a massive thank you for taking the time and effort to playtest in depth, along with giving such helpful feedback, which is impossible to get during a normal jam. Really appreciate it :D
"The deeper you go, the more of yourself you lose."
Now that is good marketing copy right there. I knew I had to try this game when I saw that.
I liked watching the little guys run around on their own, and unlocking the king and realizing I could join the fight was a thrilling moment.
The concept is strange. Getting rewarded for "failure" isn't something I've seen in a lot of games. Roguelites do use this structure, where the game gets easier every time you lose a run as you unlock better stuff, but this is the only game I've played where you can't just beat it on your first try if you're good enough---you MUST fail before you can win.
I was spamming my unit buttons to make sure that my max soldier number was always topped off. Not sure if that was intended, but I felt it was the optimal strategy :p
Overall, an interesting twist on tower defense, with a lot of care and detail put in. I didn't even realize until I read the page description that my prophecy was personalized. Nice touch!
Thanks a ton for the detailed review! I really like the marketing slogan as well, itās catchy and intriguing!
Iām still figuring out where to take the game next, so hearing what parts you enjoyed is super helpful. The failure as progress idea came naturally, since Iām planning to expand it into a larger rogue-lite with varying outcomes depending on your playstyle.
That said, Iāll need to see how the balance works in a TD style setup, especially so players with different skill levels can achieve different outcomes.
Glad you liked the personalized prophecy as well, thatās one of my favourite parts in the game! And haha, the unit button spamming is definitely a fair strategy XD
Nice game!
Unlocking new characters is satisfying and being able to control the king is fun.
Arts and controls are good. Maybe more sounds and visual fx would make damages/hits more impactful.
Is there an end to the game? After winning a run with the king it seems to loop on the same run... or did I quit too early? XD
Thanks for the feedback! Also, Iām glad the rogue-lite progression felt satisfying.
As of right now, there is no real ending to this game. The main ending would be when you unlock the whole prophecy, but the game is still playable afterwards in its current form. I do plan to fix that in the future.