Play game
Bone Wars!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Quirkiness | #41 | 4.077 | 4.077 |
| Overall | #53 | 3.859 | 3.859 |
| Graphics | #71 | 4.231 | 4.231 |
| Secondary Theme Interpretation | #78 | 3.615 | 3.615 |
| Soundtrack/SFX | #105 | 3.692 | 3.692 |
| Gameboy Soul | #113 | 3.923 | 3.923 |
| Gameplay | #116 | 3.615 | 3.615 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game meet GBJam's theme
Dinosaur bone discoveries are old gold. Literally ancient and worth as much as gold in money and reputation
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
I like this strategy game, tho i didn't get very far. THe visuals are nice tho! Great entry!
Very nice entry. A basic concept with an excellent execution.
I can't compliment your palette and its usage enough. Camp ownership is always crystal clear, the same goes for digs. I especially appreciate that you've added exclamation marks to indicate which digs would be more important to bomb.
The entire UX is pretty much flawless, nice focus on your part since the entire game rests on its shoulders. also love your two portraits, very characterful.
The game itself plays very well but is a bit too simple for my taste. Since income and damage are fairly random there's less strategy involved than one would initially think. Winning consistently is fairly trivial but doesn't feel as good as I think it could.
Having a limited number of action each turn (so that we're forced to choose between placing more camp, more digs or more bombs) may be the way to go to make decision making more satisfying.
I would have also loved an option to just pass my entire turn, as having to pass the turn of each camp individually gets pretty tedious. Is there an option I missed ?
If I had to nitpick one last time, I was a bit disapointed when the game asked to "press space to restart". It threw me out of the gameboy feel (which you had nailed down until then).
Still, great entry all around, nice job. Definitely in my personal top 10.
Thank you so much for the detailed review! Quite a lot got left on the cutting room floor or nixed for the sake of timing - first game jam, and first time using Godot. I fully agree with the critiques. I would actually ideally add both a pass all remaining button (mapped to start/space), and potentially even pass any camps without a legal action at the start of the turn.
Having a maximum number of moves would definitely help the game flow, especially as camps get boxed in and unable to do anything anyway as the game goes on. Might add that to the backlog for Theoretical V1.1. I also think better map generation and better enemy AI would help a lot with the overall playability of the game.
Thanks for the critique. Your game is phenomenal, by the way!
Thanks a lot for the kind word ! I'll be looking forward for any future version of the game, hope to see you guys again in a future jam
Thank you for the thorough review!
We're keen on expanding this a bit after the ratings period, so as Saffles said we might have a V1.1 at some point. Definitely would have a skip all option.
Our original idea included a couple more layers of complexity, but due to time constraints we pared things down a lot. eg. Instead of directly getting reputation from bones, needing to research them to create skeletons. More time researching = higher REP, but more chances for your researching camp to be sabotaged. I like the limited moves/turn idea, it would make each decision much more impactful.
I did the design of the camps and worked out a lot of the rest of the palette usage from there. We looked at basically all the existing GB top-down strategy games for inspiration on how to create clarity in a limited palette - there's not very many, and most struggle with clarity. Super Robot Taisen has to get a shoutout for the idea of using inverted colours to show range though. I tried to use both shape and colour to make a very bomb-proof (har) design for each tile, where even if I blurred my eyes a bit I could understand the game state.
The restart button was very last-minute so "spacebar" was certainly an oversight!
Super robot war, of course ! Amazing reference.
got confused at the beginning but learned quick. Surprisingly fun! Really good music.
Got confused at first but had a ton of fun balancing the placement + positioning of my camps/diggers. Would love to have some environmental hazards if you were to continue working on this. Digging in the wrong spots and such. Great job, really liked the song choice!
Isaac really did an amazing job on the composition.
I really like the idea of environmental hazards, thanks!
Gameplay was good and the soundtrack was chill! The graphics were amazing and very clear! I also love the theme of competing archeologists! Great work!
It's unfair that this game have so few ratings, very nice idea, I love tacticals of this nature. Good job!
Thanks for the lovely comments! Hopefully once we put up some more reviews ourselves we'll get some more eyes on it, regardless we're pretty proud of our entry.
Super fun gameplay! It's super impressive you got the enemy ai to work in only 10 days. The tactical loop is very satisfying and has me wanting even harder challenges haha.
Thanks! Yeah, it was a pretty ambitious choice for a first project in Godot, but hey, we made it work somehow 😅
Very beautiful game! Very fun soundtrack, and the concept is very solid, I loved it!
I'd say the game seemed pretty easy and unbalanced, at least in my run, all I had to do was dig up some bones, and wait for my enemy to sabotage themselves by bombing up bones until they sink their own reputation. It felt more like my enemy losing than me winning x)
But apart from that, the experience is very clean! Congrats!
Thank you for the feedback! You're very right, it's easy once you know the rules as we only had time to put in a very basic AI. Would love to add tougher enemies in the future :)
Totally agreed - less exploitable enemy behaviour and better map generation are the top priorities for me for a theoretical update to the game.
A nice brainy submission! Love the music jam. Felt right for the tactical pace.
Thanks! We actually brought in our composer Isaac part way through the jam when we realised none of us had time to learn how to make music (lol), he really came through for us.
Likewise, the composer on our team worked magic I would be lost at.
Very nice game! I loved a tactical-based entry, with a peculiar but fascinating theme! :)
Thanks! We went into the jam wanting to make a tactics game because we (as a group) have been on a Fire Emblem kick lately, this ended up being quite different from those games, but I think it is for the best.
Very fun game! It looks amazingly pretty, controls really well, has great music and since I'm a dummy I didn't read the explanation for the game but I still could gather what was going on in the screen. My only complaint was that text progressed too fast but that's alright! I can see a child version of me getting lost in this game whenever I'd get bored. Great job!!!
Thanks! I am glad that it was still somewhat comprehensable without reading the instructions. The complaint on the text is totally fair, we didnt get time to have people outside of the team testing it so I think we got used to the quick text because we already were familiar with it. The concept that a younger version of you would have enjoyed the game is so lovely, thankyou.
Cheers! If we update this in future I'd definitely want to make some of the text pass only on a button press rather than time out :)
Quick to know the controls, fun turn based mechanics but would like a more challenge haha. Also missing Pass all button. Visually it was impressive, love the character portraits.
Thanks for the feedback, totally agree on the criticisms, both were things we discussed but just didn't have time to work on. We are hoping to make a patch some time in the future that will improve these issues (and others) but we were happy getting a working game out in time lol.
Cheers! If we update this in future those are both high on the list, more challenging AI/maps would definitely be cool.