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Maze of Misfortune's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #13 | 4.474 | 4.474 |
| Secondary Theme Interpretation | #14 | 3.921 | 3.921 |
| Overall | #16 | 3.895 | 3.895 |
| Gameplay | #25 | 3.737 | 3.737 |
| Gameboy Soul | #36 | 3.947 | 3.947 |
| Quirkiness | #37 | 3.684 | 3.684 |
| Soundtrack/SFX | #41 | 3.605 | 3.605 |
Ranked from 38 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game meet GBJam's theme?
Maze of Misfortune centers nearly every mechanic around a Luck stat, which starts in the negative and can only be increased by finding Lucky Charms. Most outcomes for actions like shooting, screaming and praying, as well as the quantity of any loot are determined by dice rolls, but your Luck score is added to almost all of them and will drastically affect what happens.
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Comments
really cool, was hard but I enjoyed the fighting, just wish I had figured it out better before dying at the end.
Banger, hits on a lot of fronts for me - I like the shooting/luck based battle elements, the vibe of all the monster names and text is great, especially the little quips popping up from my character as I'm exploring. Love the bass tones you're using on the OST too, sounds in general are :chefs kiss:. Graphically too I'm impressed that you got something so readable and clean and at least made it look like it kinda was within the game boy limitations if you know what I mean. The purple color scheme feels very appropriate too. I will say tho I had a little trouble reading the map but that's a pretty minor gripe.
Very polished entry! This has the most visible graphics out of all the 3d entries I have seen.
I really liked the use of luck in this game. It had me on my toes during combat, not knowing what the outcome would be. The overall feel is arcade-like and addicting.
I found the maze to be disorienting and basically had to completely rely on the map to figure out where I was. Not sure if that was intentional or not - I could see it being either way. It felt very game boy in that way. I never ended up using the fairies when they spawned, but later in my run I found myself with just 2 health and was willing to sacrifice some luck to grab a bit of health. The fairies were gone... I think it could encourage the player to make decisions (sacrifice luck) or backtrack if they stuck around. But I could also see memorizing where they are and taking the chance before a hard section on repeat playthroughs as good design. It all depends on the goal - is the goal to keep players coming with repeat playthroughs? Or should they have a decent chance at beating the game the first time? The former is much more of a gameboy era design philosophy, where the latter is more in line with what players expect today.
I think the fact that I'm pondering these design questions speaks to the polish of this entry. Very engaging and polished entry, nice job!
Thanks for playing and for the kind words! We were definitely going for an old school repeat playthrough to learn the game approach. We figured a smaller amount of content that took a few attempts was a more economical design for a jam. And that extra level of semi-punishing randomness keeping you on edge during combat was our main objective for the player's emotional state. Very glad that it worked for you!
Fairies don't (or at least shouldn't) de-spawn though. They remain even after you heal with them and as far as I'm aware there's nothing in the code that can remove a fairy from a room, so either you backtracked to the wrong place, or you encountered an as-of-yet undiscovered bug (not impossible, we've been relatively bug free so I've been waiting for a big one to appear). Having to choose between luck and HP, and deciding whether to backtrack to one or not was our core idea for them, so if they are de-spawning that's a big problem!
The game is great, and even though it has a 3D look, you can totally imagine it on the Game Boy. Really well done and I had a lot of fun!
Really enjoyed the vibe of the game. The art is really nice and the sound is fitting to the GB !
I got too unlucky in my runs and it was sometimes a bit frustrating but overall it's a pretty solid game !
I liked the graphics and the combat system was unique. Im not sure if there is anyway to strategize since its very luck based but still managed to pray a couple bullets into existence and then got killed by the cthulu looking creature.
Thanks for playing! There's some strategies to be found. If you scream at a Slugg a few times to lower its Luck you can Prayer-farm it for health and bullets, but aside from that the game requires a little bit of trial and error, learning where enemies and items are, but it is for sure pretty luck based overall. You could plan a perfect run and still lose because you cant land a shot.
That was a fun game!
I ended up out of ammo against the mindflayer at the very end, so spending a few turns praying against him was weirdly a pretty funny situation.
My only nitpick would be that I would have liked to see the currently-faced direction on the map, but that was just a QoL issue, so not too problematic.
Good job overall :)
Hi! glad you liked it! The map was a last minute addition, it could definitely be improved. I think using an arrow sprite for the player rather than a square would be better, but we also found it confusing not knowing what direction we were facing, so we added the compass to the map screen. I think having the compass + an arrow sprite would be the best solution going forward. We can look at adding that to a follow up build after the jam! Thanks for the feedback!