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X-Calibre's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Art Style / Visuals | #19 | 2.867 | 2.867 |
| Theme | #20 | 2.800 | 2.800 |
| Overall | #24 | 2.533 | 2.533 |
| Audio / Sound Design | #27 | 2.267 | 2.267 |
| Boss Battle | #27 | 2.200 | 2.200 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the Theme & Boss Battle Edition?
This game is a power fantasy, where you effectively play as the terminator in a medieval setting. While you're not explicitly the 'boss', I'd say the horsemen definitely aren't prepared for your flying artillery.
Game Engine?
Self-made & used stuff?
Have you joined a game jam before?
Roughly how much time did you spend developing? (in hours)
Maybe around 35 hours? if not longer, although a large chunk was spent working on VFX, and I tended to lose track of time when working on this project
Anything else you'd like to share about your game or development process?
I always really enjoyed more nuanced movement mechanics in First-person shooters, (surfing in CSGO, rocket jumping in TF2, skating in Tribes : Ascend), so I hoped to evict a bit of that fun with an absurd power fantasy game.
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Comments
I absolutely LOVE dark aesthetics, especially high-contrast visuals and black-and-white graphics, so you can probably imagine that your game's visual style won my admiration right from the start, haha.
The grayscale filter creates a dense, eerie, and somewhat unsettling atmosphere that fits the game really well. I genuinely enjoyed the feeling of playing it. It was also a smart artistic choice because this kind of visual approach reduces a lot of the manual work that would normally go into harmonizing colors throughout the environment. Of course, even with a grayscale palette, value composition still matters, and I think your game handles that very well.
The gameplay itself is quite interesting, although I have to admit I was a little confused at the beginning. Most of that came from not knowing what I was supposed to do. Perhaps a smoother introduction would be to start the player outside the large pit, allowing them to complete a small objective first, and only afterward fall into it and discover that shooting the ground can be used to perform a super jump.
Since the controls are relatively simple, I think it could also be helpful to display them directly in the user interface. There are only a few buttons to remember, so it would be unlikely to clutter the screen while still making the game more accessible to new players.
Hunting down the enemies was a lot of fun, and my final time ended up being over 100 seconds, haha. I couldn't do much better than that because I sometimes struggled to spot enemies quickly enough. The lack of a crosshair also caused me to miss quite a few shots, even when I had a rough idea of where the enemies were heading.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience. This is definitely the kind of game that has a lot of potential for future additions and new mechanics. Keep up the great work!
I also want to thank you for providing a Windows version. The web version gave me some performance issues that made it difficult to play properly, haha.
Congratulations on the game, and I wish you the best of luck in the jam!
Wow, thanks for playing and the detailed feedback! I'm also a mega fan of dark aesthetics, and with very mild colorblindness, I often find that value comes a lot more naturally to my eyes, and it certainly saves a lot of work/preparation in terms of choosing a palette as you mentioned.
I also think you're not alone in your initial confusion 😅 a tutorial is definitely something I'll put some time into in my next jam (or at least a helpful guide of some sort), and I think your suggestion for adding the few buttons to the screen definitely would've made an easy addition for this entry, but was something I overlooked before submission.
The crosshair as well is something I think would be another easy add if I had some extra time, and I've really enjoyed hearing reviewers say there's future potential, so I may even look into building this into a more complete game.
Thanks again for the review, and best of luck to you too! (and sorry it took a while to get back to you, been a busy week haha)
Hi, i really enjoyed shooting around, the weapons work well and the controls are well-done! My only critique is that i dont see the castle boss, but maybe its just a bug :)) Keep it up!
Haha yeah there isn't really a map of any sort in the game to lead you there, but the castle boss was just on top of the central hill ;)
I'm glad you enjoyed the weapons feel, I put a fair amount of time into making sure they felt (especially the VFX) good, so I'm glad that paid off.
Hi nice idea,
I found it a bit difficult to understand what's going on! maybe the gray filter is a bit too aggressive, also enemies didn't shoot at me and i couldn't get out of the starting hole.
Onto the positives though, the game has an interesting premise, with further work i could see this as a small polished experience, audio is good, maybe a volume slider is needed
Overall, nice job! 👍👍
Thanks for playing !! The grayscale filter was a bit aggressive, and while part of it was optimsiation for web (3D games don't run nearly as well in the browser haha), some more tuning could have found a slightly better balance.
I appreciate that you can see some promise in the premise, and thanks for taking the time to leave your feedback! :)
Wow, the style is super cool!
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it :)
It is a nice game, I really loved the art style.
The soundtrack and sfx match perfectly in atmosphere of this game
Loved the gameplay also, you should keep working on with this to put more content, and dark fantasy lore would be awesome here.
Congrats
The weapon animations and controls feel super smooth and really satisfying. The super-jump mechanic with the weapon is a very good idea. It took me a while to understand what I was supposed to do until I read the comments, but once I did, the game became much more interesting. I think the premise is really interesting. Great work!
Thanks for the feedback! And yep I can totally see why shooting yourself isn't the first thing people try, but I'm glad you were able to figure out the core movement mechanic. Thanks again for playing!
its a pretty interesting concept and i really love the art style u chose its remind me of the old ps2 type games. the things that i want you to improve will be "optimization" its unplayable on the web. i know since it was a game jam and there were time limit, i found it interesting after i have know the mechanics of the game having a tutorial will improve the appeal.
Overall i liked your game you have done this in 20 hours is impressive to me i would not be able to create something like this in this much amount of time.
Thanks for playing and leaving some feedback! I'm glad you liked the art style 😄 Optimisation could likely use some improvement, but did you have 'hardware acceleration' enabled for your browser, it might lag but it should be playable in browser on average-good hardware. Otherwise there is also a windows build provided that I highly recommend for improved performance.
It's a pretty nice game! I like the monochromatic aesthetics and the movement especially with the gun felt super nice to play around with. The SFX was also pretty well designed.
Here are some points of improvements I thought would benefit your game:
- A crosshair. I think for an FPS game it's almost needed to have a crosshair so that I can aim. Because I was missing half my shots cause I didn't know which way the bullet would go😅. So a crosshair would really help your game a lot.
- A tutorial. I think tutorials are super important because at first I didn't even know you could get out of that pit and I just randomly thought of shooting the floor which launched me up. Teaching that mechanic somehow would've been great! Because the gun movement felt really good to play around with.
- I think if I shoot the ground for long enough I get launched up way high into the sky? Don't know if this is a bug or intentional though.
But yeah, after I figured out the mechanics it was a really fun game to play around. I was able to kill 50 of the enemies before dying to a crossbow😅. But overall great game jam entry :D
Thanks for rating and leaving a reply! I'm glad you liked the aesthetic and the movement, but I can totally understand the desire for a crosshair, I think I initially undervalued it because the minigun was projectile-based, but given more time it wouldve been a top priority.
Tutorials are also something I could invest some more work towards 😆 I find that I'd rather try to make the gameplay more intuitive than build the overhead of a tutorial, but I think given your feedback I will have to rethink that next time.
The flying is also a bit of a 'feature not a bug', but perhaps I could've lowered the invisible roof to avoid players flying TOO far away hahaha.
Overall I'm glad you had fun after you figured out the mechanics !! and thanks again for your feedback :))