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Astarte's Wake's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Art / Graphics | #153 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Controls / UI | #164 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
| Overall Fun | #168 | 2.833 | 2.833 |
| Sound/Music | #210 | 2.167 | 2.167 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Ai Usage
Human made
Genre
Action
Shooter | Platformer | Slasher | Beat em Up | Base Defense | Survival | Racing
RPG
JRPG | CRPG | MMO| RPG
Strategy
Turn-based | Card Games | RTS | 4X
Rating
For 13+
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Comments
Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 9! I'm Hythrain, one of the hosts for this event! While I'm a bit behind with getting my VODs out, I played your game on stream and wanted to send you the VOD. I make the effort to express all of my thoughts for feedback in the VOD, so I hope it's useful to you! Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TeQ9lHyIrI
My game is still in early development and the builds are only available here on itch.io?
I'm confused. Was there something I said in the VOD about getting the build from somewhere else?
My mistake.
I was on my phone and the itch.io UI is unintuitive, and I thought I pressed reply under some comment that claimed to have played my game on steam.
Sorry about that.
Ah, okie doke. No worries then. :)
I feel like it's going to be a cool game further down the line. I'm going list down the thoughts I had throughout:
1. Character Customization was really cool. Spent a good amount of time on it. lol
When changing the eyes, having them dart around made it hard for me to see what I wanted. Perhaps having them follow mouse cursor when on eye-mode? Might remedy that because I have control to freeze it, or move it to see angles (I get too throughough with char-creation).
2. Idk if nose did anything, or was too invisible for my eyes to see.
3. Hair "accessory" was strangely difficult to have same color with rest of hair, but still possible I think, I just gave it a darker tone for gradient-effect in the end.
4. Ears, and more body stuff (chest, legs, etc) for future would be good. Also choice for male-body so not female-locked (unless that is tied to world-lore).
5. Personality-Thing would be cool, choose what animation we'd have for an action is what I mean. Choise of voice would be good with it as well, if going route of us having dialog, some boxes we can fill out so we can watch our char use our own sentences as they fight, find stuff, injured, etc (mix it with some pre-written dialog).
6. The hair-physics were really cool, I really like hair-designing. And this game had some pretty good/satisfactory ones I could make.
--
Combat is interesting, sequence building and then watching it play out can be fun. Some anim variety would add to it, thought I had was when it's time to choose cards, for the world to be in a "mostly frozen" state. So it feels like the world paused for us to pick our actions, and then world unpauses and plays out those actions. It would be a lot of work though...
I only did start world, and less than 5 others, so I didn't do too much. I think that is everything, might have forgotten something.
Thank you for the detailed feedback, that is always appreciated (helps look beyond one's own bubble when developing).
I'm glad you enjoyed the current iteration of the Character Customization! It's a good idea to deactivate the eye darting during the eye customization; will be added to backlog.
Noses does something, but it's tricky, very nuanced because of my current shader. The shader is still a work in progress, but I'm already quite happy with it.
Likely the developer bubble syndrome. Will collect more feedback to figure out how to better streamline/make more intuitive; adding to research task.
This is already in backlog. Body types and sex options are planned and will be added in future iterations. This is proving to be a bit of a hassle regarding the current process of garment implementation, but has gained a higher priority over the last few days.
There will definitely be a massive animation update eventually. This is however a quite time-intensive process and other things have priority beforehand.
Thank you!
Combat animations will of course be added and iterated on more after some other basics have been improved first. You likely haven't seen a lot of other animations, combos, jump attacks etc. as you are still very early in the game.
Thank you very much for your review of development build Version 0.28!
Absolute Cosplay
How to make a Fire Mage?
Cosplay?
As in you enjoyed the current character creator feature?
I was able to recreate My Girl (Rin Haru from "Ayre Battles")! Despite the eye color cannot be dark enough.
Also, something wrong with lighting and shadows. The skin looks brighter in Character Creation but darker in Character View.
Heyo! This game certainly seems like it'll be fun, but I wasn't able to get it running properly on my computer. The character select screen was where I first encountered issues (although there was a sizable loading screen before that point too), and it simply wouldn't display the character model at all. After that point, it seems all the 2D graphics simply stamp onto the screen and I actually didn't realize that I was supposed to be looking at something at this point until the first fight ended and I realized I was probably actually supposed to be seeing these actions in progress. Below is a somewhat extreme example of how this looks on my computer.
I'm not sure if this is a matter of PC specs or something else, I played on medium-low settings. My PC is a Surface Book 3 running Windows 11, it's got 16gb of RAM and the graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. I did use my Windows settings to manually enable this graphics card as well, but that didn't resolve the problem.
Aside from that, I wasn't sure how to quit the game aside from forced methods such as Alt +F4. I expected the ESC key may do something along those lines, opening some sort of menu for config and game quit, but that wasn't available. It's possible it's present in the Options button you can click on during some points of gameplay though.
In terms of actual game design, while I obviously didn't get to play much of this, I enjoyed what I saw! I think the concept of a card battler with this "timeline" mechanic allowing you to deflect and interrupt attacks is very very neat. I can't speak on balance or depth since I didn't get very far, but I am compelled by the few mechanics that were presented to me. Character customization is always welcome as well, and I'm at least curious where the few snippets of story were headed, although that alone wasn't quite enough to string me along for the whole experience.
If time allows, I might try this again on a more powerful device. I do most of my playtesting on this Surface as I feel that a powerful gaming PC won't always provide the most useful feedback about performance, and given this game's very broad and generous graphical settings, I assume it isn't intended to be played exclusively on a powerful device either. I don't know what caused this particular rendering issue, but hopefully there's some sort of fix!
Hello there!
Thank you for taking the time to play the game and for writing such a detailed and very useful review!
I found the rendering issue and fixed it:
https://spite-games.itch.io/astartes-wake/devlog/1650740/build-028
Build 0.28 is now online, and you can test it again if you'd like ^^
PS: via the Option button you can access all settings such as exiting game.
I'm back now that the jam has started and I gave it a proper shot!
So, I think the rendering fix worked, but my computer ended up freezing while I was trying to open the config menu to edit my graphics settings and at that point I gave up playing it on my laptop.
From here on, my notes are gonna be in the context of playing it on a higher-end gaming PC (I don't know the exact specs right now, but it's comparable to a PS5 so it's very high end). On this device, obviously I had zero performance issues and the graphics look fine. At the very least you can rest assured the game works on higher end computers, but I don't have anything in between my cheap laptop and my gaming PC so I don't actually know where the line is before the game stops working correctly.
Now, graphically, the game looks very good for its budget, but it's obviously pretty rough around the edges. The shading looks a bit smudgy and the models are a little low-poly but that's totally acceptable for a game of this scope. I do however have a greater critique when it comes to the characters themselves.
The character creation options were super robust, there was so much to mess around with, especially with the hair styles, which is appreciated. That said, it's a bit weird having what is effectively only one single body type used across every character in the game (even something as simple as a height slider would have been appropriate, but if you wanted to go above and beyond, other sliders to affect things like wideness could help a lot. Considering the game is a little bit on the ecchi side, even some bust or butt sliders could be appropriate). While I don't necessarily think the lack of customization in body type is a big problem for the player, I do feel it is a bigger problem for the other NPCs because they're all randomly generated off this same character creator. Every character looks uncannily similar especially during combat when it's too zoomed out to appreciate the facial differences.
What I find stranger than the lack of body customization however is the lack of clothes, like, anywhere. I can understand spawning the player in with the half-naked underwear that she starts off in, but none of the NPCs wear any clothes and there's seemingly no way to acquire clothes of your own either. If this has to be the case, I think I would much rather the player wear something a little more interesting and maybe a bit less uncomfortable to look at, maybe even just a skin-tight body suit. As it is right now, it feels really weird playing the game where all interactions occur exclusively between two women wearing the exact same strips of fabric to cover their bits, and I was frequently worried my roommate would come in at any given time and see me playing a game that looks like this. I do understand that this is a scope matter, and honestly I assume this is probably a placeholder that will get filled out as time goes on, but I figured it would be important to emphasize that this is definitely a weird look.
Now, the gameplay is where I was really interested, and it did not disappoint! The combat is really fun, it's got a lot of room for strategy. The resource mechanic works pretty well and the blocking and dodging feel very fair to use. I played for about an hour and never found any new cards to place in my deck so I didn't get to mess with the deckbuilding mechanics much which was disappointing, but I really enjoyed fighting enemies. My only complaint, and it's a very small nitpick, is that interacting with cards requires dragging the cards around for seemingly no reason. It would be really nice if I could play this game using a keyboard or controller as well as with my mouse. That said, playing with the mouse feels fine and it was fun to explore around and collect treasure.
Overall, I really enjoyed this! It's obviously a work in progress and as you develop it more I think it'll become much more polished, but I think the core mechanics work really well.
Thank you so much for this detailed review!
This kind of detailed and valuable feedback is rare!
For context, this is still a very early build. I’m essentially sharing the development process publicly as a way to hold myself accountable and stay consistent.
Regarding clothing:
I have a disclaimer on the game page stating that clothing is still in development and has not yet been implemented. I also have a devlog explaining the process of adding clothing.
However, the clothing feature is now quite close to being ready.
Regarding body types:
This is closely linked to animation syncing. I’m adding some more complex animation behaviors, and body-type changes need to adapt to them dynamically. In terms of priorities, I’ll first finish a stable development version—approximately v0.5—before adding a male-coded body type and sliders. This is also because those features greatly affect the clothing system.
Regarding cards:
I’m quite surprised by this. You can buy cards, obtain them during certain events, or find plenty of them in treasure chests. The same applies to weapons and items.
I guess this is a game-design issue that I need to iterate on and communicate more clearly.
Thank you again for the review!