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A jam submission

Doom from BelowView project page

Shadowdark 8-bit Game Jam submission
Submitted by huesitos — 48 minutes, 41 seconds before the deadline
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Doom from Below's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Usability#133.5693.727
Inspiration#243.6563.818
Overall#263.4243.576
Vibes#413.0463.182

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted

I really like the cover art! That's one freaky crab. The maps are easy to read and I like your traps.  The light bridge challenge with the hint was cool!

Developer

Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted

nice work! A really solid and well fleshed out adventure. Great work on the monsters too. My eyes would appreciate a larger font size, but I understand you wanted to get as much content in as possible :)

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback!

I admit I did make it smaller to fit more stuff into each page. I will redo the layout now that the jam is over to make it more readable.

Submitted

Really good! I especially like how you managed to weave together the 3 disparate inspirations into a single, cohesive whole that feels natural. To me, that's the gold standard in the Inspiration criterion. Very well-written adventure overall.

Submitted

Clean layout, good variety of encounters, and good use of inspiration! I love it and would absolutely play this. The vibes aren't exactly 8bit, though the art is very nice. Great work on this.

Submitted

This seems like a very fun adventure! The crab knights are pretty cool.

I have one critique, but before I offer it, I want to acknowledge that maybe I'm a little over-sensitive because I'm a PhD candidate and my dissertation research analyzes both monks and Indian religion. Kali is a goddess for millions of real world human beings today. The movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom handled that aspect of its story less than ideally. When I saw your otherwise neat adventure mention Kali, it was jarring. I think the text here largely does a good job avoiding the ways that Temple of Doom dehumanizes people by painting their religion as monstrous and inscrutable, but there were still little things that made me wince. For example, I know it's pedantic, but there's nothing in Hinduism that's exactly analogous to the dead "monks" that litter the dungeon. That was just one of several points in the adventure where I wondered why you wouldn't just make up a different god or goddess of "destruction, time, and transformation", or use one of the ones from Shadowdark. Some of my closest and most avid TTRPG playing friends have South Asian heritage, and I wouldn't want to run this adventure at the table for them without changing it. I easily could change the name from Kali to something else, it's just frustrating that the default either requires that work or at best draws eye-rolls and at worst potentially excludes people I respect and value. 

I hope that's not too harsh, and to be clear, I'm not accusing anyone of anything (except maybe Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas of lazy sensationalizing). Maybe it's not my place to say here, because I'm white, but it bugs me when people use figures from my cultural-religious background in off-piste ways. I'd want knowledgeable sources to say something if they saw that happening, and I'm trying to follow the golden rule. 

I know nuance can get lost in online comments so I've tried to be careful and precise with what I want to point out, which is simply that IN MY OPINION, this adventure's temple should not be dedicated to Kali.

Let me know if you want me to clarify or explain anything about this comment, and let me reiterate, it's a fun dungeon that I think would be a hoot to run if it weren't for that one issue.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback! No offense taken, you given me good insight. I was a bit lazy with the goddess and monk references (which I used as a fantasy-prop without much consideration).

I plan to rework parts of the adventure now that the Jam's over, so I'll definitely work on the issues you mentioned.

Submitted

I really like it!  Especially cool how all the games had a major influence.  Has a lot of 8bit game vibes (the platform puzzle especially)  I think missed the where L2 is (and maybe page numbers would be awesome, oh and also maybe switch the order of "background" and "hooks", since I did not quite get what everything is reading the hooks. But awesome overall! (cool crab aliens might be everyones cup of tea but I think they're great!)