Play game
Random Rain - MV - Edition's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Execution | #43 | 3.038 | 3.038 |
| Enjoyment | #45 | 3.038 | 3.038 |
| Sensory | #50 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #72 | 2.754 | 2.754 |
| Relevance to the theme | #84 | 2.577 | 2.577 |
| Metroidvania | #98 | 2.115 | 2.115 |
Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme interpretation and application
The player can technically only carry objects. This makes the controlls minimalistic.
Team/Developer
Zerschnetzloar
Reference info
Discord: Zerschnetzloar
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Very fun little survival/tower defense/Zelda/shoot’ em up-vania! I loved the graphics and overall tone a lot, especially the ruined city backgrounds - I always enjoy a little cozy apocalypse. The different ingredients were adorable, and I loved the idea of taking little blob guys and improving them in various ways.
All the different mechanics were quite intuitive and blended together surprisingly well. Being able to carry and place your own defenses was a lot of fun, and I particularly enjoyed making my own army of followers with the table recipe. That said, I had trouble figuring out what some of the items did, like the angel or the devil, and overall I felt like there wasn’t much reason to craft anything else besides the turret guys.
The RNG of obtaining ingredients felt a bit restrictive at times, and it was annoying to leave an ingredient behind only for it to be nowhere to be seen later, whether due to despawning or wandering off. Some way to store ingredients for later could definitely be a big help there. The slow walking while carrying an ingredient also felt a bit too punishing, considering the player wasn’t even very fast to begin with.
The Chungus™ was a cool way to combine crafting and a defensive objective, though I feel like the “defense” part never really came into play much - my character ended up getting swarmed and dying long before the enemies were able to even take a sliver off of the Chungus’s health bar. I think perhaps getting rid of the “tower defense” altogether and focusing on protecting your character could help the game flow a bit better.
Another thing that might improve replayability and help alleviate the bitterness of defeat is if all the recipes were “active” from the beginning, rather than needing to be found every time before the Chungus will allow you to craft them. I just think it’d be a cool way to "sequence break" subsequent playthroughs and reward the player for actually remembering them.
Sadly, I didn’t quite manage to get to the end due to being overwhelmed by a procession of unkillable enemies following me. However, it was fun crafting and exploring around while it lasted, the presentation was amazing, and I think this combination of mechanics has a lot of potential for a bigger game!
First of all: thank you very much for playing my game and the critique. Yeah: the unkillilable enemies are a very annoying (and as I found out dumb) bug. Sorry for that.
With future updates I definitely plan on making the apocalypse a bit more cryptic and cozy. For the buffs: they are worth it for the boss, but I do an exceptionally bad job at explaining them: Angle = Movespeed Buff, Flexing Muscle Thing = Attack Damage Buff, Lightning thing: Attack Speed buff.
In future projects I would like to explore the idea of the Chungus starting as a small Baby-Chungy which grows as being fed, unlocking new abilities. Maybe there are even more of them to find in the game world? We will see.
Reading through all the comments I do get: carrying items must be fun in a future iteration: some how.
Thanks for playing. It always makes me happy, reading that people think my game(s) is/are fun.
Enjoyment 3.5 rounded up to 4: I move. So. Slow. And there is so much nonsense so quickly.
Execution 4/5: Everything seems solid enough. I think there are some questionable design decisions about movement speed and upgrade availability. And at risk of decreasing the fulfillment of your interpretation of minimalism, I think a button to close the popups might have been good. Awkward to pull out the mouse for just that part.
Sensory 3.5/5 rounded down to 3: Serviceable music and sound all around and the pixel art was charming as it goes! Music wasn't my thing as much.
Metroidvania 1.5/5 rounded up to 2: There is a bare minimum of utility gating and exploration. This isn't really in the genre criteria for this jam, to me, as big-tent as it normally is in these ways.
Minimalism 3/5: The theme interpretation is met, and the controls are minimalistic but that is ...not really doing it for me in terms of theming vibes. The game doesn't feel minimalistic for all that. Sorry!
All that said, I have followed you so I can see your future rogue-lite endeavors.I do think you have some good potential in the 'defend your base' or Vampire Survivors or similar top-down action-roguelike or rogue-lite space and would like to see more of your work in that space.
Gameplay video below (I made one run at feeding/defending the chungus.)
Thank you very much (for the feedback, following and gameplay). I will watch the gameplay and analyze it. I respect the critic on Metroid-vania-ness: I think I could have done more stuff like placing blocks which can only be destroyed with the "shotgun-frog" and similar stuff.
As of now I am definitely planning on further developing the game, but make a small pause during the holidays to get a more "neutral" view onto what I am doing.
In terms of minimalism: the idea was that the player has no ability and sort of "gets" abilities by carrying item. But that clearly has the downside of the player being difficult to balance. Next I want to add a feature for "throwing" items to make carrying stuff more fun.
I am excited myself to see where the project is going, since I have many ideas which need to be sorted. If you have any ideas for interesting features: please let me know!
Interesting genre combination. Nice visuals. Pretty cryptic at the beginning, I needed a couple of restarts to understand what's what.
- Is wave intensity dictated by opened doors, unlocked recipes, or something completely different? I gathered the turret recipe and nothing else, after which I just spent time gathering resources and building defenses uninterrupted.
-Died a couple of times while checking the recipe menu — maybe add a pause to it?
- Are some enemies supposed to be invincible? I encountered some flying and basic slime enemies, and nothing worked on them; they just drew turret fire onto themselves. (Oh, okay — I checked the game description.)
Overall, nice game once you get the hang of it.
Thank you for playing my game and especially for the feedback. First of all: I should have added a pause screen to the recipes. I was clearly biased as a Dev, knowing the recipes already, towards thinking that not pausing the game is fine. For the invincible enemies: yes that is a bug. There is a script attached to them which is supposed to enable some scripts while they are visible and disable the same scripts when being not-visible. For whatever reason this script can break. The fix was to disable the "disabling-mechanic" so that once you see an enemy they will just follow you. However: I sadly cannot patch the game right now.
Finally: clever observation. The difficulty is bound to opening locks. I did not want to make this public inside of the game, so that the player has the opportunity of discovering it. But it seems like it is more frustrating than interesting!? Maybe a warning would have been useful like: "Do you want to increase the difficulty?". Under the hood there is a "world-tier"-system which controls which events are spawned from the clouds populating the game world. Depending on the current world-tier the chance that more challenging enemies occur gets increased. More or less you had the optimal experience of figuring out that you can start by building some towers, to get a "stable" defense and then discover the world to get enough buffs and weapons to defeat the boss.
Once again: I appreciate the feedback. If there is anything confusing, please let me know.
It took a few tries to get the hang of it but it was fun once I did. I think my biggest issues is I didn’t remember the formulas (plus the invincible enemy bug) and I never really got time to rest and and think. I didn’t really feel the metroidvania-ness, but maybe it’s because I couldn’t make it very far, but I 100% love it as a tower-defense game and definitely would play more.
I don’t think you intended it, but gamepad mostly worked, I just couldn’t use it to close the forumula.
Well: yeah the formula menu was a "last development sprint" edition to the game, which is why there is no gamepad controls. Although retrospectively this is a bad excuse, since it should not take too much effort to implement it. Although I must admit that I have no experience on how to make Unity-UI work with gamepads.
Also: it depends on how you define Metroidvania as a term: so going with the Jam-definition it is: items/abilities hidden behind or in locked areas. But I do understand that the player itself doesn't really get more powerful directly, but implicitly.
Still: thank you very much for playing my game and the feedback! If you have any idea on how to make it more metrodvania-ish please let me know! :)
This is certainly a unique game. I enjoyed the addition of the walking table guys, but found that they often got in my way while I was trying to feed the big mouth, which ended up getting me killed. They probably should get lower target priority. Very novel and interesting take on a Metroidvania.
Thank you very much for the feedback. I also feel that without slowing down the player, the "Carry-Helpers", how I called them, would feel less rewarding, but carrying items without any obstacles is a quite boring thing to do across long distances. Meanwhile finding the right balance wrt. which target to prioritize upon dropping items is a difficult decision to make. Since the code grew dynamically, like a living entity, over time, I was sadly unable to refactor everything in the end. Therefore the "dropping" of items ended up being that rough. So do I understand you correctly that the priorities should be: locks > the Chungus (the big mouth) > carry helpers upon dropping items?
In the next iteration of the game I might add more infrastructure into the game (for carrying items and building pipelines) and might also add a throwing mechanic to the game.
Thanks, for playing my game!
This is great! Really interesting way of combining a sort of tower defense system with a metroidvania structure. Gaining ne recipes is a very satisfying way of "levelling up" as well!
Thank you very much for playing my game and those kind words! I was thinking about expanding this game in the future. There I might add features were the Chungus is actually growing and leveling up, similar to a pet.
a very good game, well polished, i played it for while, but i did not get if there is a button to attack or not.
Thank you for playing my game! Well, there is no button for attacking an enemy, but you can essentially carry items, like turrets, which are attacking stuff. So implicitely your carry-button is your attack-button.
i got it, it is more enjoyable now, but it really was already.
That really means a lot to me! I think that this could be made more clear from my side, by adding stuff like a sword or something similar first.