Anyone enter the Dungeon Crawler Jam on itch.io? I was gonna but I misremembered the end date as the start date so there are only ~3 days left.
https://itch.io/jam/dcjam2024
Entered and submitted mine today. Went for a very streamlined, arcade-like approach inspired by Mordor: Depths of Dejenol -- something one would play for 20 minutes when they are tired as fuck but still want a dungeon crawling fix.
https://surt-r.itch.io/dragon-ruins
Played your game for 40 minutes, I enjoyed it. Would have played for longer and tried to finish it but when I launched it again looks like there's no saving of progress. Don't have an itch account so I'll give some feedback here, take it with a grain of salt as always (and understandably some of these points won't really apply well because it's a short jam game) but:
Things I didn't like:
- No saves, if there was a way to save progress I would have played longer.
- Progression feels too grindy when compared against health as a resource and exploration depth. For most of the map I explored, there were a few bottleneck points where getting to the last point I finished exploring from drained me of enough health that I had to turn back after an additional room or two, but didn't have enough gold to level or upgrade equipment, meaning I had to make several long trips back and forth just to get one room deeper each time. Maybe no gold for levels, just equipment would have made this feel better?
Things I liked:
- Your aesthetics/eye for visual, audio, etc. design is on point. Good filter, great art, sounds go well with it, it's simple but solid
- The autobattler idea works really well for the arcade like approach you were going for. I could see it working well even in a more full, fleshed out game.
- How refreshing it felt to just jump into a quick drpg that felt like you could play it for 10-15 minutes at a time
I'm just a sample size of one but honestly, if that was a full game, with more fleshed out mechanics (too simple as it is at the moment) I would most likely buy it and play it on and off for quite a while. Something more roguelite oriented, where you have a stable of characters like the Wiz games you can pick in town, no indepth character/equipment customization but maybe creating your characters/party off a handful of different classes/archetypes, and being able to choose something like feats every few level ups for that characters, and some prestige class options when they're higher levels, procgen maps, some kind of modifiers. The autobattling is really novel to me but a little bit more depth to it would have been perfect. Maybe being able to buy or find some one use consumable/magic items you can put on a "belt" slot next to each portrait and click to use during combat (potions, wands, etc.), or even some special class skills on cooldown buttons. Overall good entry and I hope you win.
), it's exactly how you want to do it so that you can't shoot and walk back and prevent melee enemies from ever playing (you could at first in my game when the monsters played when all your characters played).
