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A jam submission

Battle for the Golden SkullView game page

Fight Pirates for the Golden Skull!
Submitted by Cotton621, pk_master310, ryanbsonic — 5 hours, 53 minutes before the deadline
Rated by 24 people so far
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How does your game meet GBJam's theme
FOR RESOLUTION ISSUES SEE LINK ON GAME PAGE

Fight for an ancient relic that turns ships to gold! Fight through Goldbeard's armada to earn the relic for yourself.

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Comments

Viewing comments 21 to 2 of 21 · Next page · Last page
Submitted

Exactly the sort of game that's in my wheelhouse.  Give me that Final Fantasy Tactics or Shining Force goodness any day.   The game does feel slow, and I ran into an error before I could finish it:

Other than that, I was enthralled, and plan to play it again. :D


Developer

So sorry you experienced that kind of error! I thought we had worked out the vast majority of bugs. Do you remember what happened right before it? I think I can see what the issue is, I think if an ally ship were to sink by moving into the rocks on one health, it will crash the game. Again very sorry!

Submitted

I *think* it happened on the enemy's turn, but I don't remember exactly what was happening at the time, sorry.

Submitted (1 edit)

.... oh, wait, I don't have to *remember* what I was doing, I have a *video* :D  And, yeah, that's exactly what happened.  I moved a sloop with only 1 HP across some rocks, and the game crashed right as I hit the rocks.

Submitted

Excellent entry, very truthful to the original hardware even in ways that may be detrimental to the overall experience. Your dedication to the craft is remarkable.

Also, always a pleasure to see a fellow Gamemaker user, it's a powerhouse when it comes to making tactical games very quickly. 

Flawless presentation, good look, good sound, very gameboy-y all around. The palette problem when trying to identify enemy ships show exactly why lesser men were so hesitant to make tactical games for the original game boy. Your slow, letter by letter, tutorial really brought me back to a time when I would follow dialogues religiously on my small dark screen, trying to understand what I was supposed to be doing. I really hope your get first place for "Gameboy soul".

Gameplay is very nice, but it has some strange quirks. Cycling through weapons and ability with select was a bit weird and would feel even clunkier on an actual game boy. Getting sent back to the level selection screen everytime I pressed start without any confirmation prompt was also a bit annoying.

All around marvellous work. Nicely done.

Developer

Thank you very much! We tried to stay as authentic as we could. The palette issue for enemies gets really hard, especially on later levels where all the ships might end clustered. I tried to differentiate ally ships and enemies with a small circle or cross in the top right of the tile the ship is on, but even that might just be too small of a detail to notice. Thank you very much for playing!

Submitted

I love your art style, it looks great, especially the shopkeeper! The gameplay is cool too; it gives me a tabletop game vibe. Watching the enemies take their turns step by step is cool. The only thing I would to say is that the gameplay is slow. But honestly, slower pacing is just a hallmark of older games. Good work.

Developer

The game being a bit slow has been the most consistent criticism, thank you very much for the rating!

Submitted

This game was probably one of the most entertaining and well implemented entries for this game jam so far. The game play is very engaging, and I love how the opponents do not play around. The visuals are really good. It really gives that gameboy vibe with the music as well. I had a lot of fun playing the game, the only thing that could improve is that the enemy turn will take a lot of time, especially at the later levels because they have a lot of ships. Fantastic Job 

Developer

Thank you so much! And yes  if I could turn back time I think I'd make the enemy turns go a bit faster.

Submitted

Overall this game was a lot of fun once I got started! I wish there was less text to read at the beginning since it took so long that it started to getting boring.  Maybe finding a way to minimize it or space it out more would be helpful! However, once I got through it and figured out how everything works it was a lot of fun trying to figure out where I should place my ships to attack but minimize the risk to my own.

Developer(+1)

It is a lot of frontloaded info, but thanks for sitting through it and trying our game out!

Submitted (1 edit)

what an awesome game! The sprites and tiles are great... and of course I love the shopkeeper. she's very good.

The only downside to the graphics is that there's no alternate palette to the enemy ships and while I didn't find this a problem for the first half of the game, the last three maps in particular often had my formation mixed up with the enemy's  

Anyways there's really quite a lot packed into the maps that are here. I had to pause the game & pick it back up the next day because it was too much to get through in one sitting. That's a good thing!

The final stage was really quite difficult. In a game where I felt like accuracy had basically not been a factor up to that point, I felt like inaccuracy was really tanking some of my attempts. In particular, I felt like it would have been great to be able to rely on fire bombs to help clear out the brigs, but at 60% base accuracy it became too risky to attempt. I'm not really sure why a weapon that deals damage so slowly has such a low accuracy (I don't imagine fire stacks with itself? although I didn't have the chance to try) when Naval Ram hits most of the time. In addition, I felt like it was really not worth using most of the Abilities besides healing on most maps. I think I got one good use out of the Frigate's Second Wind and in one or two instances the Brig ability to block a naval ram was great.

The Sloop's evasion just seemed really bad for the cost. If I compare it to other strategy games, for example SRW gives your squishy units Focus which is +30 ACC & EVA and can typically be used 3-5 times starting from the start of the map. Obviously that's a long series with its own approach to balance...... but I couldn't help but think of it when I was staring at the ability screen

Unfortunately I don't think I have the patience to push thru the final battle. The ability for the enemy team to gang up on one of my units with 10+ damage plus a stun on top of a 1/5 chance of any of my attacks missing (with the exception of my own MOWs) made it feel like the action economy was heavily in their favor. I had had a lot of success with "let them approach" strategies up until that map, but on a map with only the strongest ship types I couldn't see a way to remove their units fast enough to not get overwhelmed. The closest fight I had was one where I sank The Avarice before it could fire the stun shot but it left me without enough resources to finish the fight... that was a slightly bitter feeling, especially since in games like Fire Emblem "kill the boss" is a map clear condition, haha. After all that I'm curious what the recommended loadout is - I had Frig/Sloop/Brig/MOWx3. The Sloop was useless but I wasn't sure how best to replace it. Swap to Frigx2/Brigx2/MOWx2? argh! at least I can tell it's a good game because I'm still thinking about the problem after closing it.

All-in-all, I think it was the perfect length to be memorable and explore all the content that was available in the game. Making a SRPG for a jam seems kind of crazy. It's awesome!! Nice work!

Developer(+1)

Yes the limited palette was very challenging in differentiating friend from foe. There's a little dot or x in the top right of a ship tile to help out, but I don't think that was communicated in the tutorial and its a very small detail so it doesn't help too much. On the fire barrel, its mostly meant to be used on high health targets like the Avarice, the brigs, and man of wars. A single hit on them could easily do 4-6 damage over the course of the battle so 60% was where we settled on accuracy.  I've seen multiple line ups get brought to the final battle and win, which is great cause that means more strategies can work! My personal line up was the starting frigate, two man o Wars, and three brigs. I have seen the 3 Man o War line up you got work as well. I agree that you might not need most of the abilities for a lot of the earlier levels, but on that boss they are essential. Abilities is the advantage the player has over the ai. The Man o War and Brig abilities in particular are very powerful. Thank you so much for the in depth review!

Submitted

This feels like a finished game. When I was staring at the game's page, I knew it looked familiar, it turns out, I had already watched an entire gameplay of the game prior to playing it myself.

While I didn't reach the end, I enjoyed the game loop, and I'm genuinely surprised on how much time of gameplay there is in the package. I also loved the inclusion of a tutorial in the first fight of the game, I know the genre can be confusing at first.

Submitted

Really neat!  I managed to get all the way through, with some scraping by to save up for a big ship, and a final battle which mostly involved a lone sloop running around while the enemies burnt to death.  I loved it!  I wish the movement was a bit more ship-y - it felt like any positioning I did didn't matter, even if I lined up to broadside them in the back, they could just turn and shoot me back, which meant the tactics were mostly just about keeping them at range and not about clever positioning (which, to be fair, is par for the course for Fire Emblem, et al).  I really enjoyed the different ships and their capabilities, it was a lot of fun when I got my first Man o' War.  Graphics were great, sound tied it together nicely and the music didn't get on my nerves.  Well done!

Submitted

This was a really solid entry, and the opening crawl was really well done and got me excited for the game as a whole! The game itself reminded me a bit of the board game Plunder, as well as Advance Wars. 

I think being able to move after attacking might add some complexity- because you can only move before attacking, I ended up falling into the general strategy of mostly waiting around the starting area and having opponents come towards me, and once they were in range, I didn't find much incentive to move around much, instead just attacking. When I did try to go on the offensive, I ended up losing a significant amount of health, but that's maybe a skill issue resulting from how I chose to compose my fleet? That said, I don't know if allowing post-attack movement would ruin the game's balance!

 Also, I think a tile that acts as a wall that blocks attacks could be good- I didn't make it to the last couple of levels, so maybe that is a mechanic that I didn't encounter. Another smaller suggestion is that having the 'water' tiles animate with moving waves would add some visual interest and increase the presentation of the levels.

I know this sounds critical and I'm just spitballing here, but I had a really good time with this, and I could tell that a lot of love and care was taken in making it. The music and presentation were very well done, I liked the shop, and including an in-game tutorial was very appreciated. Good job all around!

Developer

We originally had it so you could move after attacking, but found that it made the Sloops pretty unkillable since they had the highest base movement. It's definitely something I want to look into more. Thank you very much for the review!

Submitted

i used to play thracia 776 and thi games is too unbeateable, please fix it

Developer(+1)

Sorry for the difficulties! We had three people in testing play through the entire campaign. Did you visit the shop inbetween battles to buy/sell your ships?

Submitted (1 edit)

yeah i did

Submitted

Oh, nice art and music. Love tactics, it's quite challenging with stock ship. I really see myself playing such kind of games. Good job!

Developer

Thank you very much

Submitted

Sweet game! I see the resemblance to Fire Emblem (and a little Advance Wars too) You could 100% pull some mechanics from both of those games for even more strategy options and horizontal decision making no problem.

A couple recommendations if you are so inclined! Perhaps a reminder to the Player that there’s a Shop they should be visiting regularly? (I thought the “S” just meant Start for a bit) Also a way to skip the tutorial would be super handy (booted up game again, but had to go thru it once more)

Regardless, thanks for making a cool little strategy game, and great job!

Developer(+1)

Thank you very much for the review! We were going to make a save and load system so you could skip the tutorial but that got scope creeped out. We mention the shop in the tutorial but to your point, I think a lot of players didn't realize you could sell your ships and so we need to communicate that a bit better.

Submitted

The GBJAM scroll reminded me of the Nintendo logo when you boot up a Game Boy, and the music and text sounds felt very of the era. It was an immediate nostalgia kick. Top points for Game Boy Soul.

The graphics are great, cutscenes and gameplay. I found the game soothing and had a lot of tactical depth. If I could get this running on an actual Gameboy I would play this to wind down at the end of a day. (and probably stay up later than I should with a one more turn situation). Really awesome entry, and I think it deserves a lot more attention and reviews than it's had so far. If it was hosted in browser I think there'd be a lot of engagement with it.

Developer

This is the nicest comment we've gotten, thank you very much :)!

Developer

FOR THOSE THAT HAD OR HAVE RESOLUTION ISSUES, A LINK TO WHAT WE BELIEVE TO BE A FIX IS LINKED ON THE GAME PAGE. The game may look a little small but at least it won't be cut off.

Submitted

Very cool and polished! I appreciate you can "see" the enemy take their turn and that both positioning and direction matter. While the music is good it does kind of wear me down after awhile, I think giving the bass line a reprieve every so often would go a long way. Excellent job!

Submitted

Wish I could see more of the screen :o The screenshots look very promising. Awesome style but the screen was cut off unfortunately

Developer

Sorry for that! Other people have been experiencing that as well. Could I ask if you use an ultrawide monitor or otherwise don't have a more standard 1920x1080 monitor? Unfortunately we won't be able to fix the problem until after the jam but our team all have the same monitor dimensions/specs so I suspect something went awry in our coding for resolutions.

Submitted

I have a couple of different screens, one of them 1080p but I could'nt move the window either. But it opened on my 4K monitor.

Developer

If you have the time or desire to give our game a second shot, a link to what I believe will be a 'fixed' version for the non 1080p folks is now linked on the game page. No pressure though, there are a lot of games to rate!

Submitted

Nicely done! I played the fixed version. Loved the art as expected :> The strategy gameplay was well executed. The music had a nice vibe as well!

Submitted

the game is very well made and technically impressive, but gameplay is slow and a bit confusing at first, no forfeit button for when you realize you lost is a bit unfortunate 
also minor issue, ive noticed some screen tearing at parts, most noticeable in the map

Developer

Thank you for playing! Pressing the space button will return you to the map from a battle if you press it at any point. Sorry you experienced some graphical errors

Submitted

Absolutely amazing! The mechanics are super fun once you get the hang of them and really well polished too. I do wish the first area wouldn't repeat the unskippable tutorial, since I ended up accidently returning to the map trying to remember the controls.

Submitted

I had a little bit of trouble playing this one, the window was a fixed size with the game screen offset partially outside the window bounds. Regardless, the graphics are incredible, and I absolutely love the entire concept for the game! The control scheme is a little awkward to me, but this definitely has that core Fire Emblem feel, and yet puts a unique spin on it with boat mechanics. I really love how that's communicated through mechanics, like how you have to mind your ship's direction to use certain weapons. I had a lot of fun playing it, and I hope to see it expanded more!

Developer

I'm so sorry that the game window didn't work out properly for you. Its supposed to set the window and gamescreen size on start up based on your monitor up to 1920x1080. There must have been some issues with different monitor sizes that our team didn't encounter. But thank you very much for playing our game!

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