Not the kind of game I was expecting from the thumbnail lol. I had a lot of fun though! My favorite parts of the game were definitely the art and the gameplay. The enemies and bosses all had unique designs and fun attacks, and so fighting them never felt stale.
As for things I think could be improved:
- The card inventory felt annoying to go through sometimes. It would be great to be able to sort for attack, shoot, rate, etc. I think it'd also be nice to have the top, middle, and bottom card separated by columns.
- A small bar filling up to indicate when you're able to dash would be a bit more intuitive, though I don't really mind the way it is right now.
- It would also be nice to have a 'resume' button on the menu to have that as an option instead of repressing 'm'
- The dialogue sometimes felt a bit repetitive and had quite a few grammatical errors. If possible, I would highly recommend having a few people proofread it, as the game does focus heavily on it.
- Boss 3 is able to spawn on you during its teleportation attack. Either giving a safe distance around you where it can't teleport, or have an indicator for where it's about to teleport would be nice to not have this happen.
A few other minor things would be to show green, red, and white on stats when creating cards to show which stats are increasing/decreasing or staying the same upon new card creation. It would also be nice to have the ability to create a new card without unequipping a card you currently have when your slots are all being used. I felt like the first enemy room encounter was a bit longer than it needed to be, but that problem got resolved quickly once I started getting card upgrades, so I don't think this is something I'd put too much focus on.
Aside from all that, the game was really enjoyable, and it's great that the cards you get are considerably stronger as you progress. It gives a lot more incentive to farm cards to max out your stats. The various facial expressions drawn for the dialogue were all really nice and fitting. The music and SFX were well done. The difficulty balance also felt fair, and did get progressively harder as the game went on, so I think you did a great job on that. Congrats on your submission!
Viewing post in Alice's Job jam comments
Haha, now I’m curious what kind of game you thought it was going to be? I know it isn’t very descriptive of what to expect, but since introducing Alice is my objective with this game, I put her in front :)
- I agree about the card menu, it’s annoying to navigate and it’s missing stuff like filters and other basic operations, so when I work again on this I’ll try to make sure it will be easy to use. For this reason I made the game beatable without any cards and that was my way to balance the game in a quick way
- About the Dash indicator, I wanted to make the word to be filled with time but the lack of time and energy didn’t let me do that, but maybe a bar would be nice, I’ll think about that
- About the 3rd boss, it’s something I experienced when I was testing, it can be unfair that it can spawn on the same location as you are, but I just made a quick “balance” by making its movement slower and less chaotic because I was close to the deadline I had, next time it will have proper warning where it will spawn
- And about the dialogue, I made it simple and didn’t make the usual checks because I gave it very little time, also my mind was dry after writing 16 pages of dialogue and more pages in other stuff for my first idea that ended up dumping because the scope was too big xD. Next time will be better written :)
Thanks for your suggestion on the “Resume” button and the small observations on minor things, I’ll take that into consideration!
Happy to read you had fun, thanks for your long feedback and thanks for playing! ^^
I was expecting something more cheery going off the cover alone, instead of fighting monsters in the dark lmao. As for your other notes, I think the way you wanted to indicate the dash sounds good. It would also be nice for it to have a pop or flash animation when it's available for use. It also totally makes sense that time was a big issue for the balancing and the dialogue. I definitely would not have managed writing that much myself haha.