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A jam submission

BABYLON BEGONEView game page

as it sinks beneath the drunken waves
Submitted by HANNAHP0CALYPSE (@HANNAHP0CALYPSE) — 1 hour, 51 minutes before the deadline
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BABYLON BEGONE's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Sensory#34.2274.227
Relevance to the theme#194.0004.000
Overall#333.3363.336
Metroidvania#553.2273.227
Execution#622.7272.727
Enjoyment#792.5002.500

Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Theme interpretation and application
Taking inspiration from minimalist sculpture art & the 3D art style of games like Old School Runescape, the game's visuals focus on vertex colours over textures and completely eschews lighting, normal mapping, and PBR. The game also uses a single palette texture for almost all of its vertex colouring, creating a "limited palette" style in 3D. Platforming is also focused on a fixed-length jump with very minimal control, and a one-hit combat system.

Team/Developer
Hannahpocalypse

Reference info
hannahpocalypse on bsky & discord

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Comments

Submitted

I couldn´t made it to the endd!!!!

Got really frustrated at one of the courses, the bell was just there and I fell...and it kicked me back a BUNCH of rooms haha.

That´s my main feedback lol, just to be more forgiving with checkpoints, and also the priestess attacks which also hit and send you back to the last checkpoint just like falling. I feel that these attacks should just take life from you instead of resetting to the last checkpoint.

The artstyle, & Heavy MC are amazing...

The jumping main mechanic, I think it's an interesting premise that managed to hook me for quite a while, the attack takes quite a while to charge up just like the jump but I think that also adds to the positioning and strategy of the game. (& only found the attack ability, and I think the shield one too).

Submitted

There are two wolves inside of me:

One half delights in the cathartic relief of a challenge mastered, entranced by the slickness of visuals and presentation, determined to reap what one has sown. The battle scars fuel their desire to carge toward a resolution most benign, overcoming the weight their actions carry;
The other weeps and winces at the botched execution, begging for mercy and salvation. They see the cracks behind the canvas of art, the grueling display of mechanics unpatched, bells of hope placed most cruel, an ending unsatisfactory, an antique world unfit for the task.

They look at each other, tucked in their corner. After a while, they smile.
In a warm embrace, they howl in unison: "Yeah this game fuckin rules."

I love games that are bold. I have no words left to describe what others have already pointed out before, especially in terms of grievances, but I need to point out that I adore the visual craft - the sounds hit just right, North looks badass, the 4:3 letterbox makes me nostalgic. I am in the firm belief that this has slick style, and serves as a template to something greater.

Please nourish your desire to create. I'd love to see more.

(And bonus points for cute furry with a big polearm solidarity, too!)

Submitted

The title screen and opening text rocks, as does the general vibe! North's design and animation rules and the sound design is quite nice. We stan a fixed jump arc and the slow movement isn't the worst ( and is interesting! ), but I'll echo the sentiment that one false move is quite punishing. And I'm not sure what function the health provides when everything send you back to the bell anyway. 

Some potential ideas: North is a sturdy friend and moves as such, but when it lands it slides a bit, often into the water. Just sticking the landing would really help, it sometimes feels like you successfully judged the fixed jump arc, but then you slide into a reset. I feel like enemy projectiles should just chip away at you, and this would give you more opportunities to get good at blocking. Dealing with the failure of missing a jump is a little more tricky, I don't necessarily have a great solution. Maybe just speeding up the overall player movement would be enough. 

I got the attack upgrade and explored quite a bit, but it's late for me and I need a pause. Will revisit tomorrow. But I really hope you continue working on this project, I think it has a ton of potential, cheers!

Submitted

The art is impeccable. However, I only managed to play a little after jumping out of the first window because several things send you back to the beginning of the game. The slower movement is fun, but having to redo the whole path becomes frustrating.

HostSubmitted

I'll start by saying I love the aesthetic and by extension the theme interpretation.

Now, everyone's told you about the movement already and I sort of don't want to just copy and paste what the others said. Slow paced games are not my cup of tea and I'm aware of it, HOWEVER I think I can cheer for what you have going on here with adjustments. The jump actually doesn't feel that bad, at some point you get used to the distance it covers horizontally and vertically and it gets easier to properly time them. But wow, starting all the way back when making a single mistake is a killer. The "floatiness", especially towards the end of the jump, can ruin your whole movement. Overall I like the idea, but the execution needs more polish.

With this movement speed I'd cheer for a sheep clad in armor.

Submitted

Enjoyment 3.5/5 rounded down to 3 - I felt pretty lost in a bad way and there was a lot of inadvertent frustration platforming. If sheepgirl falls off the platform she just landed on ONE MORE TIME I will:

buy her flowers to make her feel better because that's no fun

Execution 4/5 - For all that I was at least able to judge the basics of where a jump should land, most of the time. Which is pretty neat in a platformer like this! The fact that it didn't land where it felt it should so much reflects in category 1.

Sensory 4/5 Not much sound to speak of but those visuals push it UP!

Metroidvania 4.5/5 rounded up to 5 - 'not getting hurt in the water' did not feel like a substantial first upgrade, but I'm trusting the other two would at least get it to 4.5 by jam standards. I didn't play enough to know if the attack or the spring was a utility-key but from the context I can guess it would be.

Minimalist 5/5 Well done on the minimalist interpretation overall, TBH.

Submitted(+1)

I love what you were aiming for with this game! The slow and methodical movement with the jump being so interesting is a really big shake up of the platforming formula in a way I can get behind. However, there are some design choices that I think make this formula super frustrating at times. As much as I enjoyed it, near the end I was having to take some quick breaks. 

1) Lets get it out of the way because everyone has said it, its the checkpoints. The slow and methodical game play is genuinely fun and interesting, but when you make us redo the same section from the start because I couldn't nail the unique jumps... well its an awful feeling. I'm sure it will be hard but you almost need to design a system that returns you to the last platform North was on when they jumped in order for this frustration to go away. And please don't reset us when we take damage from enemies. They have homing orbs! 

2) At the end of the jump there is a little slide: remove this pleaseeeeeeeee. Tons of problems will go away if North stops right where they land initially. 

3) While the slow walking speed is clearly deliberate there needs to be something to help speed things up. Especially for those sections where there isn't much to do except walk. Yes, I do know about the charge ability, but that's not what I mean. You could increase the speed just a little, add a small "dash" like thing to the attack, or you could make it so that there is a "sprint" where you power walk. There are tons of sections where I was just jumping around like a frog in order to get a move on. 

4) And lastly, while I enjoyed the abilities that are in the game I think you should experiment with some way of utilizing them together. Like if you attack while charging its a cool dash you could use to get across gaps. Or maybe attacking right as you land makes you do an additional jump attack for flair and style. Idk just something to make them feel less separated is all. 


These criticisms come from how much I enjoyed playing your game, not from a place of dislike. I think you chose a very difficult path to take with a game jam game and I appreciate that. With your talented art direction you could have done something very basic and boring and would have been praised for it. I can't wait to see how this game ends up if you decide to continue working on it!
 

Submitted

I actually really like the idea of the slow and methodical movement this game has. It's very unique and it can potentially work. However, the rough checkpoint spacing of this game means it becomes frustrating quickly. I ended up making it to the attack upgrade, but not further.

The audiovisual presentation is fantastic though ! 

Submitted

I wasn't able to get very far, but here's what I have to say:

- The sound design was incredible, though the landing sound effect could use some variation to avoid fatigue. It gets old fast.
- The visuals are absolutely insane. Genuinely amazing.
- I like the idea of the slow, methodical moveset in theory, but in practice, it felt clunky. This would have been salvageable if not for the fact that you teleport to your last checkpoint every time you fail a jump, which, when combined with the slow movement, made it extremely difficult to reach any kind of flow state.

Overall, awesome idea, looks and sounds great, but the execution needs work.

Submitted

I absolutely love the aesthetics of this game. The art is incredible and it all moves and sounds great.

The deliberate "slow and heavy" moveset is interesting but I don't think it works as is. The slow movement discourages the exploration that is core to a metroidvania, though the presence of a sprint upgrade later on probably mitigates that (I didn't reach this part). My biggest issue was the fixed-length jump. I'm not against the idea in theory but I think the metrics should be stricter for it to work, almost built on a grid. Like in the room where you get the attack upgrade, if you stand in the middle of one platform before jumping, you will miss the next one. At first the jump seems to connect but then your character keeps sliding somewhat and fall off the platform, which is incredibly frustrating. There's many such occurrences where it feels like the environment wasn't really made to accommodate the jump length.

And the final issue is the lack of checkpoints. If the platforming is going to be like a puzzle to solve, then almost every platform should be a checkpoint. Being sent back to the attack upgrade room every time I missed a jump in my way back to the main building was discouraging. This checkpointing would have worked in a game with fast movement, but here the slowness makes it very tedious and punishing.

But fix those two issues and I believe you will have a very interesting and fantastic-looking game. Good luck! ;)

Submitted

I got really into the movement itself, and tried a few times but consistently got into a bug where a could not play the game anymore, and just started floating around the map without being able to do anything. Reloading fixed the problem, but it was pretty frustrating having to reload almost every time. One way i found it to happen was to stop the charge ability in air.

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

The slow methodical movement here is really cool, but I gave up very quickly after getting the attack ability solely due to the platforming following it having no respawn points in it and constantly sending me all the way back to the bell to do the by then trivial but still tediously slow walk back to the actual challenge. Learning the right positioning to get through a sequence the first time is fun, going through the same motions again and again quickly turns it into a painful slog that I'm not willing to push through, and it seems like there's no way to get back out of that area without successfully completing that platforming, so I'm kind of forced to leave it there.

The game does look and sound really good, and again I do really like the core mechanics of this game, its just the levels need to be chopped up a little smaller to be palatable I think.

Developer

Yeahhhh, if there's one thing I'm taking from this it's that I need to be way less stingy with the checkpoints lmao. Definitely my number one priority in the next patch. Thank you for playing, and thank you for the feedback!

Submitted(+1)

This game wasn’t really for me, personally. I completely see what it’s going for with the slower, more precise movement, and I believe it's a very novel idea that could work, but I just found it to be clunky to work with. What didn’t help with this feeling was what felt like too few respawn or save points around the map, which led to runbacks that only exacerbated my grievances with the movement.

While I did end up collecting all three abilities, there were two specific points where I was about to give up. The first was after about 20 minutes of wandering without finding anything – I had missed a pathway that led to the attack ability, and only found it after deciding to start a new game and go a different way. The second was with the string of moving platforms near where the water immunity ability was, where some platforms were so small that I kept sliding off of them after jumping. 

That being said, this game absolutely oozes style. The colors and character models all look great, and despite being built from mostly flat-textured primitive shapes, the water-ruined cityscape’s view is beautiful. North’s animations have so much weight to them, it perfectly complements the core idea of the movement (even if I didn’t personally jive with it). And the sound adds so much to the ambience, movement, and even the menus. I just really wish I had enjoyed the actual gameplay more, because I cannot overstate how incredible the presentation actually is.

Developer(+1)

I really appreciate the frankness here, genuinely - I'm gonna keep the distribution of checkpoints in mind for the future (as well as maybe the entire system of losing health when you fall in the water, lmao) and I'm already reworking the feel of Landing a jump, which seems to be a big stickler. Thank you so much for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the style of it - hopefully after some revisions it can be substance AND style both for you :>