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How does the game fit the theme?
Julius Caesar is probably the most famous example of someone who shouldn't have trusted anyone and was quite literally stabbed in the back.
This game plays off that with Caesar avoiding getting stabbed by dancing to a groovy disco beat.
What code and assets did you not make from scratch during the jam (if any)?
All code, music, and art was created from scratch by hand. We are two brothers who are making their first game ever. We both are professional developers, and one of us is an accomplished musician/producer and the other has some art skills from when he worked in marketing. All assets were created for this jam.
How many people worked on the game?2
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Comments
I saw your page and I have to say, it looks beautiful. Was the dagger design intentionally made to look like the handle is a microphone? Such a cool detail!
I agree, it’s a difficult game. My locomotory system was not equipped to process what was happening. 😂 I really liked the character design and the music!
I agree with others that the gameplay loop is pretty hard to process at the speed you need to, but also not something I've seen before, so points for originality! And it was doable enough on Easy, the tutorial was actually harder than the game itself. Regardless, this is probably the funniest and most stylish game I've played so far in the game jam, you immediately had me laughing out loud and I kept laughing the whole time. Looked and sounded great too. Fine work!
I found that having to control both the arms and legs and making them go to different spots was really difficult. Cool game though for sure! Really nice art style. Also I love your description for why it fits the theme haha. Funny game too. Well done!
PHENOMENAL! I love Grovius Caeser he feels like a character that can be made into a plushie or an action figure. Really has branding potential. Oh, and the game is super fun and polished too!
what a brilliant and unique game. The music is a banger and the gameplay is incredible. And the game is forgiving enough that even my stupid monkey brain could do it (even with docent stepping wounds :D).
Impressive game 10/10
Incredible game in pretty much every category. Once I got the hang of the controls + mechanics it was super fun to play. Had me sweating trying to coordinate the wasd + arrow keys. The freestyle section was much appreciated afterwards.
Oh wow. What a fantastic take on the theme. And the visuals, audio and writting are perfect. This may be my favorite game from the jam so far.
It seems like the difficulty is tuned for you, who spent a week mastering these control scheme that most people are not familiar with, but I'm sure it must be very satisfying to play this well.
thank you so much! Your comment made my morning <3
My brother and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a new control scheme for a dancing rhythm game. Something beyond just pressing the arrow at the right time and would give the player the ability to "make" poses. Definitely an experiment and will get tweaked if we do something with the game after the jam. It definitely takes a bit of playing around with to get the hang of, but I remember that similar fun-stration when learning to play DDR as a kid.
I loved the visuals, story and gameplay too if only I wasn't so bad at it. Great job!
Super fun and very hard, i love the mechanics
Nice artstyle and funny concept!
I struggled because of my keyboard layout (AZERTY), I think Godot handles this automatically for inputs.
Well done on the game!
Thanks so much!
Ah we were thinking about adding key mapping but didn't have time, were you still able to play with your keyboard?
Yes it worked but the keys placement were the equivalent of QZSD for a qwerty keyboard, so kinda weird hand/finger placement haha.
But the game was fun nonetheless, gg!
Visuals and music were seriously awesome, but I'm not sure if I just suck at it or if the controls have issues haha - I still really liked the concept and visual execution though
thank you for the feedback! We spent the better part of today fixing a bug in the controls and making the tutorial clearer. if you wouldn't mind trying it again we would be very appreciative!
i loved grooving when I could but sadly my keys didn't communicate that thought most of the time
we are actively working on a fix for that!
Thank you so much for playing and leaving us this feedback! We spent the day fixing a bug related to the input timing and made the tutorial a lot clearer. If you have time we'd love for you to play it again and let us know what you think!
I think this game is a banger. funny dialog, easy to play, and fun. some ideas:
* visual cue for the beat (I didn't realize you had to time it, maybe i'm dumb), or missing said beat
* forgiveness for hitting q,e keys
appreciate all the feedback, and thank you again for reaching out with ideas! We are working on implementing these now, added a small note to the game's page to let people know and I'm hoping we'll have something ready later tonight.
The key hitting issue is a great idea to implement, joys of making your first game you don't quite think of these types of issues and in a game jam there is definitely not enough time to QA everything.
Ha ha, the game is really very funny and great fun to play well done !
glad you enjoyed it!
controls didn't work for me either, and i was really ready to groove! please notify me if you find a fix, though i'll make sure to come back and check it out either way. i do hope you can fix it cause it seems like a really fun game.
the visuals are amazing, though, that much i can tell you. it looks like a professionally-made adult cartoon (in the best possible way)
music's absolutely fire, one of the main reasons i was so disappointed i couldn't play. animations are wild too.
i did complete the game in no death mode, just out of curiosity, and it's absolutely fantastic. i'd just love to be able to play normally.
even if you don't find a fix, i'll probably rate it, but i'd prefer it if i could play normally first.
more details (in case they can help you)
This is incredibly helpful and gives us a solid clue as to what is happening.
We actually designed it so that a "move" requires both a hand AND foot input (WASD and arrows). Pressing only one won't trigger a move. Your description makes us realize the tutorial doesn't communicate that, especially when it transitions out of freestyle mode.
We also noticed that when people are playing they are pressing the keys immediately when they see where the daggers will land, as opposed to timing it with the beat, which we didn't fully account for. We have a "Perfect" and "Okay", but we may need to add a "early" as well AND also update the tutorial to make it clearer.
We are working on cleaning this up so it's more clear, hopefully that is in lines with the 48 hour "bug fix" section as it isn't really "new" content.
If you wouldn't mind testing this one more time, could you try pressing a hand input (WASD) and a foot input (arrows) on the beat and see if that fixes it? We've been pulling our hair out trying to find this bug and we think it's a tutorial issue and maybe making the margins sooo tight it feels like it's broken.
Thank you so much for taking the time to give us this feedback, and thank you in advance if you are able to try it again!
PS - your game was great! Anyone reading this comments that hasn't played it go do that now but don't read the comments first!
i think you are totally right. it's a beat thing.
with that in mind i was now even able to complete the tutorial and do a couple perfect moves while actually playing.
that being said, the window to time the movements right is either too narrow, or there's some kind of desync issue happening, cause even knowing how the game works it's still way too difficult to get your moves right.
you could try increasing the margin, like you said, also maybe take into account that i'm using cheap earphones that maybe have a bit of a latency issue?
oh, in case you are using godot, and i think you are, i've had issues with godot web builds' audio in the past. last time i had to go and manually change my AudioStreamPlayer node "Playback Type" parameter to "Stream" manually, to fix some weird sync issue that was happening with a game of mine. maybe try tinkering with that, and with the file format of the audio file of your music, i'd recommend maybe using .wav
you could also try creating a desktop build
we've gotten enough feedback about this I doubt it's a headphone latency issue. Hoping to have a fix up for it later tonight that expands the input buffer, adds an "early" sign (like the perfect, miss, and okay) so you still see your input even if it's a early, and going to update the tutorial
We ARE using Godot and had an early issue with the AudioStreamPlayer not starting the music correctly at the start of the game. Works fine when running locally, but as soon as you build for web and play it there everything was off by about half a second. The key to knowing if it's not synced is the daggers should "hit" on the beat.
Again, THANK YOU so much for your feedback on this!
no problem, and good luck with the fixes. you can hit me up when you update it and i'll try it as soon as i'm able to
Well it took the better part of the day but the bug has been squashed and the tutorial is now A LOT clearer we think. Would love to get your thoughts if you have time to revisit our game. Thank you again for the very helpful feedback!
fantastic! it took a bit of work but i was able to beat the game in easy mode now! and i could consistently beat the first section in normal mode too. it feels so good when you actually start getting the hang of it! i like the game even more now.
that being said, not being able to win in normal mode is totally a skill issue and i'm sure if i put a couple hours into the game i'd be able to do it just fine 'cause in this last run i almost went through the first section without making any errors, which is something i would have deemed impossible before.
not sure if there are any other dancing games like this one, but i think this is an idea worth pursuing. congratulations!
That is a really good score, I haven't done that well myself but my brother has. We have ideas for continuing this game so we'll see where we wind up after the jam! Thank you again for coming back and playing, we really appreciate and glad that you enjoyed it!
Very funny idea! The controls very a bit weird for me as well though, sometimes it just didn't do the position.
looking into this, thank you so much for the feedback!
There was definitely a bug that made the controls feel weird, it took a while to track down and fix, but we're there now! Also updated the tutorial to make it a bit clearer. We would greatly appreciate it if you checked it out again and let us know what you think!
Great! It feels much more responsive now. I still didn't get a very high score in the few tries I did but that's probably just cause I suck at rythm games :D
this is incredible! every piece of the game works great together, and it's a clever and funny use of the theme
Thank you!
Liked the idea, its a really fun concept. But the controls didnt really worked when the rehearsal was over? Like he did not change positions anymore...
interesting, looking into this. Any information on your setup? We haven't been able to recreate this
Hey, thank you for being the first to respond to the game and let us know the controls had an issue. We spent a ton of time today tracking down a bug related to the input timing, and we also updated the tutorial to make the controls a little more clear. If you have time we'd love for you to try the game again! Thank you in advance <3
Hey, I did play again and it went much smoother :) Still was a little hard sometimes to time it right and get upper and lower input at the same time, but I guess thats absolutely fine and the challenge of the game. Had a lot of fun now, graphics are nice and the music is groovy for sure :)