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Monchums: Exact Zero's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Artwork | #251 | 4.473 | 4.473 |
| Enjoyment | #1327 | 3.676 | 3.676 |
| Creativity | #1928 | 3.811 | 3.811 |
| Narrative | #2530 | 2.905 | 2.905 |
| Audio | #6792 | 2.284 | 2.284 |
Ranked from 74 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?
Exact Zero is entirely about counting down to zero — literally. Every enemy's HP is a countdown you control with math: your monchums' attack counts grow by their function each turn (add, subtract, multiply, divide), and the goal is to land the killing hit at EXACTLY 0. Count down past zero and the overkill damage recoils into your own attacker — so the whole game is steering a countdown to hit its mark perfectly, not just fast.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
See description for full credits :)
(Optional) What would you like to be called if GMTK features your game?
Jared Von Nickerl
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Comments
Fantastic polish for your game! Just the Itch Page alone looks fantastic, and even has a nice blend from the background colour to the background side image. Extremely impressive output for four days. Great work!
Could use some music. Felt quite odd with just SFX.
I am not sure if it was a bug, but my guy just wouldn't use his attack and do damage for some reason. Also you can cheese the enemies to have no damage, which may not be the case for later fights.
Huge scope, crazy you made all this! The creature designs are really lovely and distinct and I do love me some STS style pathing. Super big potential for some extremely broken stuff here with the cards, too, upon some balance. As for critique, the cards text cuts off and the cards themselves were quite small (maybe have it rise a little further/get larger on mouseover) and there could definitely be a little more attack responsiveness (stronger SFX, more movement from the attackers, etc.) but what a crazy strong foundation for something really fantastic.
This is really ambitious for a 4 day project, and somehow you (mostly) pulled it off! (My main complaints are the visual bugs that sometimes show incorrect information and a lack of card variety) The application of the jam's theme to the mechanics makes it feel unique, and the art is particularly well made. I appreciate the automatic indicators for what will happen before you take actions: the game is obviously playable before that feature is added, but it's soo important for quickly teaching how the combat system works.
Thanks! Really appreciate the comment, and I agree that the game itself was very ambitious. I have a serious problem with scope creep – and yet somehow I never learn my lesson – and to be honest I don’t intend to learn any time soon xD
I appreciate your listing the few big issues you had as well! We’ll be looking into those asap – in particular the visual bugs with the card text and inaccurate text are now fixed on the current “post-jam” build, which we’ll update as soon as the jam is over. But it’s also valuable to know right off the bat that you felt like the card variety is lacking. We’ll definitely be adding in more as soon as possible.
Glad you appreciated the “preview indicator stuff” that’s honestly where I spent most of my time polishing since I was really worried about all the complexity not reading properly. As is there’s still a lot to improve, but I’m glad that you were able to get the basics from it.
Thanks so much for your feedback and nice comment.
The art work is very impressive, the SFX are good...left the soundtrack! But I think is out of topic, or I miss something?
Hi, thanks for the kind words!! And that’s a fair read – I can explain where the idea came from, even if we missed the mark on staying literal.
The theme sparked the initial idea: each unit (monchum) has a count over its head that’s constantly changing, and originally every count was meant to diminish each turn (the way the Subtractive type still works). From there I thought a cool use of the count would be forcing enemy HP to count down to EXACTLY zero – very much inspired by darts, where there’s a penalty for missing the number you’re counting down to. So in my weird brain logic, “count down” meant landing the count on zero.
It carried into the lore too: a mysterious cosmic countdown is the reason everything is happening – equilibrium and peace only arrive when the count reaches exact zero. The whole game is chaos (+, −, ×, ÷) trying to settle into equilibrium (≡ 0).
So the theme lives mostly in the ideation and the lore rather than the literal mechanics – you’re fair to call that a stretch! But hopefully that explains the intention. Thanks for playing!
It's a good idea and fit with the topic of the jam 😊
Wow. Incredible entry to the jam.
Extremely well polished for the time frame, beautiful graphics, exciting character designs, fun gameplay with cool mechanics. I particularly enjoyed being able to get an enemy's attack into negative numbers and then multiply it to make them do all the work.
Made it right to the end boss then lost unfortunately but an awesome game with a lot of potential for further development. Would love to hear some more sfx and some music
much love <3
Wow, really kind comment! Thank you! I’m glad it hit home for you.
Also cool you found the “exploit” of cranking an enemy’s attack negative as a viable win condition – you’re the second person to mention it. It might see some future balancing, but honestly it’s a fun find, especially because it wasn’t something we consciously intended. The math just allows it, and I kind of love those happy accidents
More SFX and actual music are 100% high on the post-jam list (we’ve decided to keep developing the game, so there’s a lot coming).
Thanks again for taking the time to play. <3
Can't wait to see what you do with it next ;)
Followed <3
I'm really impressed by the character designs!