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Magical Girl Game Jam #12

Hosted by Ran d'Reille · #MGGJ12
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A jam submission

Gae BolgView game page

Submitted by gaelian2 — 1 hour, 45 minutes before the deadline
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Gae Bolg's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Presentation (Aesthetics, Audio, etc.)#84.0074.250
Engagement/Fun#103.4183.625
Originality/Creativity#113.7714.000
Overall#113.4963.708
Theme Interpretation#123.6533.875
Magical Girl Concept#163.4183.625
Gameplay Polish#192.7112.875

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?
The main playable character has magical abilities (such as being able to fly, telekinesis).

Which theme(s) do you pick?
Sons(Children) of Liberty. Guns of the Patriots. Phantom Pain.

How does your game fit those theme(s)?
The loosest fit/most derivative was me just incorporating guns into the playable magical girl character rather than traditional magic projectiles(I just took "guns" from Guns of the Patriots). Phantom Pain was interpreted as physical manifestations of pain/grief and was incorporated gratuitously into a lot of the enemy and boss designs(especially in later stages). Sons(Children) of Liberty was interpreted in tandem with the manifestation angle to incorporate a lot of elements of birth, motherhood, etc. into the themes and story of the game.

If you follow any of the optional challenges, elaborate as you like.
.

Were the assets for your game made during the jam? Elaborate as you see fit.
Yep. Flying floating things means one frame of drawn animation mostly so I got away with spending lots of time on painting enemy/boss designs. I had to cut a lot to make the deadline (and compose a lot of basic dance music loops).

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Comments

GreyManedLizardSubmitted337 days ago(+1)

I read mention that the character movement speed was deliberate, in which case I would request instead that you consider extending the telegraphs for the falling sword and jumping mantas (?) a small amount. I was never able to dodge them, instead memorizing when they were due to appear and strafing the rest of the battle. This may just be my bad reflexes, though. All other projectiles and mobs moved at proportional speeds.

I liked the ending.

Submitted
Longing
Reply
gaelian2Developer337 days ago

Thank you

You might be right about the ray thing; I only briefly tested that you can dodge them on reaction(well that I can react to them & I'm pretty slow too I feel), but to dodge them I really had to be focusing on the bottom of the screen and watching for the shadow(and I also might have already had the character moving before hand to skip the acceleration part of the movement). 

I kind of purposely made a lot of things distract focus(especially on the big sword and the ray); like I remember purposely tuning the rays spawn timing to shock me while fighting other rays or being distracted looking elsewhere on the screen etc. so that stands out to me as something that might be causing it(though I'm sure you know if that applies or not & yes it might just be impossible if you're not already moving if it doesn't). The sword guy has a similar concept with the fact he moves(drawing you eye with aiming) and he kind of locks you into dodging(drawing your eye into the characters body for dodging)

With the sword I also tuned a lot of the timing when staying at nearer to the bottom of the screen; if it's not that(and you weren't at the top or in the middle or something) then I guess it might also be me skipping the acceleration again but I'm not sure

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GreyManedLizardSubmitted331 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

It was a fairly small issue and -eventually- simple to counter. So it could be a complete non-issue. It just stands out in being the only part that felt unfair in an otherwise well-balanced game that even leaned on the side of being easy/gentle.

acceleration part of the movement
skipping the acceleration again

This might be the key? There were moments of distraction that worked to ambush me as you designed, those are all good. But after dying to them consecutively I was actively looking for them, and still moved too slow to completely evade, getting clipped on the side. Plus, per your words, both our dodge efforts only/mostly worked when we were already moving.

Though again, mostly a non-issue, even I eventually formed a simple strategy within the game’s mechanics to get through it unharmed.

Weighing in on the other matter you mentioned if only to expand your data pool: I had no issues with the character’s hitbox. But I rarely play games in this genre, so maybe there are some conventions that I am blind to.

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gaelian2Developer331 days ago

"leaned on the side of being easy/gentle."

Yeah at one point during the time I first released the game I kind of panic nerfed a lot of health values; I actually went back and rebalanced the values again just now when doing a couple of test playthroughs(the new patch is patch 1.1.3) since really it was just (initially) that big soul edge/crusher guy on the first stage and now obviously the ray/sword attack reactability being divisive

I actually went back and tested dodging the ray and sword on reaction again before the recent patch because I was going to fix it if it was too egregious; I actually did manage to successfuly dodge them from a stand-still purely from zoning out and using visual cues once they showed up, again I don't have the fastest reaction speed so I can only imagine it might be some other factor I'm not catching up on. I might do some tests later on to see if there's any significant input lag in the browser version of the game vs the compiled pc version I'm testing on for example so I can figure this out (I'm assuming you're playing on web)

On the characters hitbox: I feel it's a 50/50 on whether people tend to think that the hitbox is closer to the character's vitals(in the middle of her chest, where the hitbox actually is) or on the center/origin point of the character(near where she's sitting on the broom); I think both make sense just in different ways - obviously the "vitals" one is more logical but a lot of games tend to do the other one too so depending on what they've played it might set the precedence (as is always the case with games)

Thanks for the extended input and feedback btw, you're right on the more data-points and conversation being really helpful for figuring out what's going on. I also noticed you have the highest "karma" value on this game-jam meaning you've voted and engaged with other entries the most out of all the participants, so thank you for that too 😇

Reply
GreyManedLizardSubmitted330 days ago(+1)

I beat v1.1.3 today, and could not really notice a difference in difficulty. The witch has a glowing medallion now, is all I could tell.

By “balanced leaning on the side of easy/gentle” I meant things like the safe zones are clearly noticeable and numerous, the enemy shots come at a reasonable speed (even a little on the slow side, but fitting for our own acceleration), we’re not ambushed from off-screen (we get telegraphs for anything incoming), our weapons are effective. We can win on first tries, without having to die 10 times over to learn attack patterns. That sort of balance.
A larger hp pool on bosses still maintains all of that, so it didn’t feel like it changed.  This is all praise, by the way, not some complaint that it wasn’t made hard enough.

Rays still got me twice, on the windows build. (I know it wasn’t modified, and I’ve let the matter go, just reporting). I suppose I am simply old.

Reply
gaelian2Developer337 days ago

Oh I forgot to mention but yeah I'm going to test based on this feedback and I'll probably do another patch with this change and the one that shows the character's "bullet hell" hitbox more clearly

Reply
Team Y2KSubmitted339 days ago(+1)

Really good! I liked the music a lot. I couldn't get past the spear-looking enemy that emits a ton of bullets - it was hard to tell what my hitbox was so I kept hitting bullets. The art was really cool too. I think it would look even better with parallax backgrounds done in the style of the game's painted art. The character designs are really neat. By the way, do you think ginger and cinnamon go together? Like as flavors?

Submitted
Magical Girl ~ Patriot Gunner!
Reply
gaelian2Developer338 days ago

Thank you :-]

I originally planned on doing hand painted backgrounds but did the 3D ones kind of preemptively to save time (and it's very lucky I did since I had to cut a ton of stuff to hit the deadline either way)

I thought of having the "bullethell" hitbox a bit more intuitive but never ended up implementing it; I could have + should have definitely just had a little glowing circle on the character showing where it is ( I'd patch it in but it's probably a bit late now)

I don't know if the ginger/cinnamon thing is some kind of trick question or personality test but I guess me thinking that might be helpful insight either way. I thought ginger and cinnamon going together was like a bread & butter type thing but I am very basic when it comes to cooking & eating Team Y2K

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J-MarcosSubmitted350 days ago

I really liked it. My only issue is that I got stuck on the boss at the end. I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but I just kept shooting at it for a long while, and it just didn't die XD. But other than that, it was very fun.

Submitted
Datenshi
Reply
gaelian2Developer350 days ago

Do you mean the soul edge looking dude? Because that's like 10% of the game lol, I think I might have overtuned the fella (I'll have a patch up in a bit, sorry!!!)

Reply
J-MarcosSubmitted350 days ago

No problem. I'm looking forward to trying it again after it's patched. As for the boss itself (just to make sure we're talking about the same enemy), it's the one that looks like a giant head that attacks you with a giant sword.

Reply
gaelian2Developer350 days ago(+1)

Aye that guy's the first boss of the game(and the end boss of the first stage), there's 4 bosses in total and two of them have stages. You might have been shooting his teeth(which I gave a seperate hitbox that did 0 x damage), your comment made me make all the "deflect" areas at least do a bit of damage(like 0.5x) at least and I changed the health values of the tougher enemies slightly just incase it was that instead. The deflect areas did have a "tell" but it was pretty inconsistent and a drip in a puddle so to speak with everything going on in the screen, sorry about that.

 ( I definitely neglected giving this game to other people for testing as being part of the development process 😵‍💫, thanks for the feedback so far man. The patch is up if you wanted to give it a go)

Reply
Was A HorseSubmitted351 days ago

Love the art style for the game! Not what I expected at all from a magical girl game haha! The big pushing enemy needs a bit of work though. You can actually be right up against it and your shots wont hit it and will pass right through! Would be nice if the main character was a bit more agile too!  Good effort :)  

Submitted
Magical Gear Nezumi
Reply
gaelian2Developer350 days ago(+1)

Yeah it seems like someone else was having a tough time with that enemy too

I wanted you to get almost squished and kinda be able to just panic kill it but I must have been aiming up knowing where the hitboxes were without thinking about it. oops, thanks for the feedback(I might actually patch this quick).

I agree the character is a tad sluggish, I wanted to capture some more "horror" aspects of slow positioning and timing w/ the reloading etc. but it might have been a bit much

Thanks for trying it out man

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