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Haventown's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #22 | 3.864 | 3.864 |
| Art | #48 | 4.227 | 4.227 |
| Audio | #130 | 3.136 | 3.136 |
| Overall | #137 | 3.129 | 3.129 |
| Polish | #148 | 2.955 | 2.955 |
| Limitation | #241 | 2.136 | 2.136 |
| Theme | #269 | 2.455 | 2.455 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Fun game!
The marble game was more engaging than I thought it would. It feels pretty good to play, even if sometimes it feels a little frustrating when you’re almost there and you knock a black marble outside haha. I also like it when a marble is almost out and you can roll one outside of the ring to knock it out without shooting. It would have also been a nice QoL feature if you can cancel the shoot. So many times I had the wrong direction locked in and I know I’m doomed lol.
Could have been nice to have some more sounds as well, like when you switch marbles. Music is cute.
Art is also pretty nice, but I thought the trees and the lampposts looking more like top-down perspective while the rest of the game is isometric feels somewhat mismatched.
Overall it’s a very fun little game. Great job!
thank you so much for playing my game lestavol!! we are so glad you enjoyed it and i'm ecstatic i literally loved your entry so much and getting your advice is awesome!!!
i have to agree on the black marble being a little frustrating, i think it would be more fun if it only appeared sometimes as was the original plan. if other types of obstacle marbles are used by various characters i think each character having their own unique annoying marble would make each battle more interesting to try and work around rather than just getting more and more annoying to deal with as you play against the same obstacle again and again.
Yeah I was hoping I made the right call by keeping that bug in the game. I think the silly level of extra control you feel when a marble is just barely outside of the circle and you can interact with it is weirdly nice. it was a pretty simple fix but i thought it was fun and a little tricky so i left it in!
I think a better fix to that frustration would be to make it so that you can actually fully control aiming with your keyboard inputs rather than just pressing space to stop at a certain moment, i want to update it later so that suzy's personal marble is fully controllable and then other marbles have various difficulties for aiming. does that sound like a good solution or am i crazy?
This is true, i had a lot more sounds to work with that i didn't include in time, Chromalyne did incredible work on the sfx and i also want to update it to include more of their stuff. I'm glad you liked the music tho! I'm working on extending the loops.
Thats strange, the lamppost and tress are following the same grid perspective as the rest of the objects, you might be seeing the slight change in coloration between the lampposts/trees and the flooring because to me that still feels jarring but i didnt have time to make them match.
Anyways, thank you so much for the advice!!! also good luck in the community vote, im rooting for you!
Thank you very much for the well wishes!
Yeah I think the idea of having unique marbles are really cool. There are all kinds of abilities/effects you can have like bounciness, unmoving wall, or maybe a ticking time bomb that explode after a number of hits XD? Haha, just some off the top of my head. These kinds of games definitely have a lot of room to experiment with, but you don’t always get all the time you need for implementation in a jam. I think you could find a lot of inspirations from the modern block breaker genre (games like Ball x Pit).
I think having slightly different controls based on abilities/characteristics of each marble is also not a bad idea, as long as the core control scheme is the same. I wouldn’t make one marble controlled by the keyboard and the other one by pressing the Spacebar for example. But I think an even better solution may be to be additive, rather than subtractive. Discovering new things to play with rather than having new restrictions always feel more fun for players (although some players definitely enjoy a challenge as well).
What I meant by perspective is that in this screenshot for example, you can see the top and the bottom of the lamp post and the shading follow horizontal lines, but the rest of the ground are diagonal lines, so to me it looks off. But maybe other players don’t mind it as much (seeing it’s a jam game and all). I may sound nitpicky sometimes haha, but often I just want to point things out as stuffs that could be improved post-jam, not necessarily things I take points off for the jam rating.
Heard! ill be taking this reply to heart theres a lot of great stuff here! thank you so much for taking the time to reply again as well.
you literally just named the three next marbles i wanted to add thats crazy lol, i wanted to have a pinball tower that immediately launched anything that touched it (i.e. bounciness), a dumbell/weight that was basically completely immovable, and a bomb that triggered automatically (tho i really like the idea now of giving it a countdown based on how many times its hit so ill be taking that tyvm <3)
I have to agree about the fact that players prefer additive stuff, ill definitely have to think about ways to make that happen...
ooooh ok i see what you mean with the lamppost, thats a great point!
and dont worry i didnt think you were being nitpicky! like i said i really appreciate the notes!
Really fun game and loved the art and dialogue!!! Im so bad at the marble game but it was fun! I didnt seem to get any of the bugs people mentioned either!
I'm so glad you liked it and that your experience went smoothly!!!! yay!!!!
p.s. yeah ngl i suck at the marble game too... i hope its not crazy difficult tho, it was hard to gauge cuz im a pretty bad gamer :-;
Playing marbles in afterlife feels so cozy and fun~ The low-res pixel art and characters are really cute!
It has some noticeable bugs though, for example when switching marbles it can sometimes switch to empty ball and soft lock the game... (sadly there is no restart button too)
Thank you so much!! We are thrilled that you enjoyed the game even despite such a major bug.
thats awful though, i thought i fixed that bug with the last update but i must have never actually addressed the underlying issue. thank you for bringing this to our attention! ill look into why that could be happening. also a restart button is an excellent idea!
Glad i bumped into this one. Looks beautiful! I found the marble minigame a little hard, but keep in mind that I'm a pretty bad gamer so that's probably on me :D
Were so glad you liked it! yeah sorry about the marble minigame, i had a feeling the difficulty curve was a little steep but also wanted to try and change the gameplay up a little over time even though i didnt have time to add more unique marbles. hopefully in the future it will be more balanced and player friendly <3 Tysm for the feedback!
I love the atmosphere this game has, it had me immersed really quickly and the writing was really good too. You guys did really really good.
I came across a bug though I thought I should mention, which resulted in me losing the marbles minigame which was you can play the game while the instructions were up, I was trying to click random stuff to get the instructions down (didn't see the click to exit button) and ended up losing without getting to try.
We're so glad you liked it!
also, thank you for bringing this bug to our attention. I started to make a system to close the tutorial when you are about to shoot for the first time so it may be time to finish that up!
Anyways, thank you so much for playing! your comment means a lot <3
Oh cool, I've genuinely never seen marbles implemented in video game form before. Cool idea. Too bad about the end of the world, but c'est la mort. Charming art style too, I like your unique pixel style. Nice work!
Omg thank you so much your too kind <3
Good art style and loved the mini games!
Good job!
Yay! I'm so glad you liked it <3
The art style was so unique and the marble game was really fun!
Tysm!
This looks really ambitious for a gamejam, but the environment definitely felts like a retro adventure game, quite cool. It may be just me, but when walking around, only the first character pops up and has dialogue, and I don't really know how to start the minigame. Is it possible to have a massive flashing UI interact button for this?
May be a bug with having updated the file, but i can also add a bit of ui to let the player know when/how to interact, thanks for bringing this to my attention!
The art is great! I like the idea of the marble minigame, I was just very bad at it XD I wasn't able to finish the game but what I saw was good! I would like to see the environment more fleshed out, it felt very empty (but game jam time limits am I right?)
Yay! So glad you liked it!
Also noted. Will be working on getting that environment a little more filled in.
Hello! Overall, the I really liked the game. But there are some areas for improvement. (I understand that the game is not finished, however we still have to rate the games we get)
First, I want to start with the good stuff
1. The artstyle. I loved it so much it can't be expressed with words. The artstyle is extremely good. The characters are really cool, the marbles look tasty, it all just works really well. Nevertheless, more details in the open world would be nice.
2. I really liked the marbles minigame. Its satisfying to play. And the fact that marbles placements are randomized makes the game fun. (Because you feel like you are always on different levels, which makes the game less repetitive)
Now with some areas of improvement
1. The music is too short for a proper loop. It feels repetitive really fast. But the music itself is pretty good and atmospheric. Just wish there was more.
2. If the marbles minigame is the only minigame that will be in this game, I would like to see different marbles with different abilities to make it less repetitive.
And some bugs that I encountered
1. One time when talking to the dog npc for the second time, I got an Index out of range error. Sadly I did not screenshoot it.
2. During the dialogue with the lemon, the lemon used the sprite of the main character. But, maybe that is intended, since they were talking about feeling "at ease".
Overall, the game is pretty good, even while being unfinished! I would love to see the full product in the future
Wonderful job!
Heyo! No worries! Rate this project as you see fit, We're actively working to solve these problems and really glad to have the feedback!
I'm so glad you like the artstyle and the minigame!
Yeah I fear the music is pretty annoying at the moment although I think it sounds good on its own and fits the vibe. its just the combination of it being 1 bar right now and having that quirky high pitched sound that makes it a little difficult to sit through :-; noted!
We have a couple ideas for marbles that would be pretty easy to add... i.e. (marbles that have different aiming difficulty levels, ones that dont move at all) and some that are a little more difficult to implement (marbles that explode on impact, marbles that split into smaller marbles on impact). So look out for that!
For the bugs thats actually interesting, most of the dialogue bugs I thought were because I didn't have time to input everything in correctly, but these sound like issues with the actual system, I'll look into these!
The Game was fun but some of the dialogue is switched(when i talk to the guy the dog dialogue appear etc ) and i dont know if its just me but i defeated all the opponent but i when i interacted with the reaper still said the same thing about ingredients
Oh that's terrible! I thought I got that last dialogue with the reaper working.. I will add this to the list of bugs to work on, thank you so much for playing! I'm glad you had fun!
Hey! Nice game!
It took me a while to understand how to play the marbles game, but once I did, I had a ton of fun! I'll write down my best understanding of the rules here in case anyone else is confused:
I'm sure I've probably misrepresented the rules in more than one place (And feel free to correct any of my mistakes). Though I really liked the mechanics, it felt new and innovative. And that crunchy pixel art looked fabulous. I liked the shadows on the marbles as well.
I was a bit confused by the first dialogue, since I didn't understand why the car was there. Once I talked to the grim reaper, I think I understood. The music sounded a bit on the redundant side, and the high-pitched voices were slightly hard on the ear. Though I did like the SFX in the minigame. The win fanfare and pling of flicking marbles out of the ring was so satisfying.
Bugs:
All-in-all, I'm glad I played this game! Thanks for sharing it and great job!
Thank you so much for the input! We're really glad you liked it!
This list is super helpful and will definitely be referenced as a fix all of the unfinished bits going forward.
I'm just so happy you liked the marble game even though I wasn't able to include a tutorial in time! that was the area I worked the hardest on over the past to weeks and this comment makes me feel as though it was all worth it!